GooberGoats

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Thad
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Re: GooberGoats

Postby Thad » Sun Aug 30, 2015 1:57 pm

Elizabeth Bear, posting on Stross's blog, has more on the Hugos and the potential for punitive slates -- that is, Vox Day's latest plan to slate-nominate people he doesn't like for next year's Hugos, so that they'll resign, or he can call them hypocrites, or whatever.

(Aside: This is pretty similar to how eloH tried to game my entry in the BioWare mod contest, except eloH has no minions to do his bidding and had to create a bunch of sock-puppet accounts pretending to be you guys.)

As I noted earlier, the new E Pluribus Hugo rules will make slate voting much more difficult (five times more difficult, to be precise), but they don't take effect until 2017, so there's one more year where partisans could potentially monkey with the nomination process.

Charlie shows up in the comments and makes a couple good observations, notably that while that's possible, he doesn't really think it's likely:

There has been much howling among confused puppies to the effect "I paid $40 for my vote and WE GOT THIS??!??!!!ELEVENTY!!!" -- they didn't seem to understand that "no award" was always an option on the Hugo ballot, or that gaming the nominations was no guarantee of success at the ballot box.

This year's crop of $40 griefers are, I think, much less likely to stump up the cash to be disappointed two years running. The puppies may have a hard core of supporters who're willing to put $40 in the slot machine repeatedly, and they may find some new recruits with money to burn, but I suspect a lot of their first-time supporters will be thinking "once burned, twice shy".


He's also got specific details on how he personally voted in the Hugos this year; tl;dr he applied tit-for-tat.

And then there's a pretty good discussion of good science fiction from the past year.

Scalzi has a postmortem too.

The Puppies continue to appear genuinely flummoxed that the Hugo voters rejected everything and everyone they slated (except Guardians of the Galaxy, which as previously noted they can hardly take credit for), arguing on one memorable occasion that if The Three Body Problem, the eventual best novel Hugo winner, had been on the slates, it would have finished below “No Award,” thus proving the bankruptcy of voting for “No Award” in the first place.

This is a bit like saying that if the person who didn’t get on the bus you then proceeded to drive off a cliff were on the bus, they would probably be dead now — it’s trivially true, but misses the point that you drove the bus off the cliff. The Puppies knew that slating was anathema to the large mass of Hugo voters — they had a dry run the year before, proffering a limited slate with Sad Puppies 2, and saw their nominees largely finish in fifth place or below “No Award” — but they did it anyway and now want to be shocked, shocked that their antics predictably resulted in their nominees doing very poorly indeed.

The going line in those quarters at the moment is that the blanket “No Award” just proves the Hugo Awards are corrupt. Well, no, that’s stupid. What the blanket “No Award” judgment shows is that the large mass of Hugo voters don’t like people trying to game the system for their own reasons that are largely independent of actual quality of work. In the Sad Puppy case the reasons were to vent anger and frustration at having not been given awards before, and for Brad Torgersen to try to boost his own profile as a tastemaker by nominating his pals (with a few human shields thrown in). In the Rabid Puppy case it was because Vox Day is an asshole who likes being an asshole to other people. And in both cases there was a thin candy shell of “Fuck the SJWs” surrounding the whole affair.

The shorter version of the above: You can’t game the system and then complain that people counteracting your gaming of the system goes to show the system is gamed. Or you can, but no one is obliged to take you seriously when you do.


I managed to get in an argument with a puppy on a Robot 6 thread last week; his logic on how all this went down was about as coherent as you would expect. ("The thing Hugo voters did after the Puppies intentionally biased the nominations proves how biased the Hugo voters are!" -- also, there's a good bit where somebody keeps ranting that the voters didn't even read the nominees -- as if the slate voters did -- and then Kurt Busiek shows up and says "Actually, I did; or at least I read far enough into them to determine that I didn't think they deserved a Hugo.")

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zaratustra
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Re: GooberGoats

Postby zaratustra » Sun Aug 30, 2015 2:44 pm

I'm actually not sure if the new Hugo voting will fix things: it's the same as old voting except you can vote five times for the same guy, right?

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Thad
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Re: GooberGoats

Postby Thad » Sun Aug 30, 2015 3:23 pm

Yes, but if you're voting five times for the same guy then you're voting zero times for anybody else, which means you're not voting for all five nominees in the category and the category will, by definition, end up with four other nominees that you didn't vote for.

If you're voting for all five nominees, then each of your votes is worth 1/5 as much as if you only vote for one. And the majority of voters will not be voting for five different works in any category, let alone in every category. So if you've got 1/5 of a vote for each of five Puppy nominees and you're running against people who are mostly assigning 1 full vote to 1 work or maybe 1/2 vote each to 2 works, clearly the puppies are at a huge numerical disadvantage; that's why it would take five times as many people to game an entire category.

Under EPH, it would be entirely possible for the Puppies, or anybody else, to push one nominee in every category, by, as you say, voting for only one thing with a full vote instead of five different things with 1/5 of a vote each. But that's not really something most people are opposed to. The problem is when every single nominee is a Puppy nominee, and your choice is between five Puppy nominees and No Award. I don't think anybody has a problem with choosing between one Puppy nominee, four non-Puppy nominees, and No Award. (See Guardians of the Galaxy, the only Puppy nominee to win a Hugo this year and, probably not coincidentally, the only Puppy nominee that was running against non-Puppy nominees.) Let the Puppies have their one nominee in each category. Just don't let them pick all five.

No voting system is immune to being gamed, and it's entirely possible that the Puppies will come up with a new way to compromise the new voting system. But so far nobody's observed any besides "find five times as many people willing to throw down $40 and vote for a slate".

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Re: GooberGoats

Postby Thad » Tue Sep 29, 2015 1:04 pm

The UN has released a report titled Cyber Violence Against Women And Girls: A World-Wide Wake-Up Call (PDF).

Ken White of Popehat has a blog post generally praising the report, expressing a few doubts but suggesting it's a fairly moderate and reasonable approach.

Ken White of Popehat has a rebuttal, after more closely examining the footnotes (the report cites a turn-of-the-century article by Michele Steinberg, associate of Lyndon Larouche, which repeatedly uses the phrase "Satanic video games" in the same way that Fredric Wertham used to use the phrase "crime comics", and describes Pokemon as "the killing game designed for toddlers") and giving some more thought to the authors' (and Anita Sarkeesian's) choice of rhetoric, which repeatedly conflates unprotected speech (threats and harassment) with protected speech (mockery, criticism, and name-calling).

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Friday
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Re: GooberGoats

Postby Friday » Tue Sep 29, 2015 1:13 pm

7. 989 Studios (Sony): Produces Everquest. (In this, followers of the god Cazic-Thule inflict “pain, misery, violence, torture, living sacrifice.”


No no no, EQ is the one who inflicts the pain, misery, violence, torture, living sacrifice, and Fansy on the player.
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Lyrai
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Re: GooberGoats

Postby Lyrai » Tue Apr 26, 2016 11:02 pm

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I encountered one.

Can't wait for DNi to show up and explain to me how it was my fault that I was in the video games section of Fry's.

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Rico
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Re: GooberGoats

Postby Rico » Wed Apr 27, 2016 12:29 am

Uuuuuggggh. And the funny (nothing is funny fuck them all) thing is that the change is actually kind of worse from a lot of angles. "Wow, this Tomahawk character art is really fucking 1940s racist, we have to fix that." "Yeah, you're right. How about just replacing it with a costume from the group who did a lot of systematic murder of that cultural group?" "Sounds like a plan!"

I was in what I thought was a good-faith discussion on a football blog on why "pussy" is worse than "dick" as an insult, but then I checked the dude's Twitter and the first two tweets involved an MRA site and #gamergate and I just deleted my posts.

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Re: GooberGoats

Postby Mazian » Wed Apr 27, 2016 1:24 am

Thad wrote:As I noted earlier, the new E Pluribus Hugo rules will make slate voting much more difficult (five times more difficult, to be precise), but they don't take effect until 2017, so there's one more year where partisans could potentially monkey with the nomination process.


That year is here, and Vox Day & co. are on the ballot all over the place, for such SF-sounding titles as "SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police". This time around they're trying to nominate some unrelated works to interfere with people who last year refused to vote for anything on their slates, which occasionally goes some weird places, in particular resulting in Chuck Tingle's first Hugo nom.

I like seeing who's been nominated for the Best New Writer award, since it's not a bad way to learn about At Least Pretty Good New Writers by trying out their recent works, but once again I see I'm going to have to toe the water carefully before diving in.

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Re: GooberGoats

Postby Lyrai » Wed Apr 27, 2016 1:40 am

Rico wrote:Uuuuuggggh. And the funny (nothing is funny fuck them all) thing is that the change is actually kind of worse from a lot of angles. "Wow, this Tomahawk character art is really fucking 1940s racist, we have to fix that." "Yeah, you're right. How about just replacing it with a costume from the group who did a lot of systematic murder of that cultural group?" "Sounds like a plan!"

I was in what I thought was a good-faith discussion on a football blog on why "pussy" is worse than "dick" as an insult, but then I checked the dude's Twitter and the first two tweets involved an MRA site and #gamergate and I just deleted my posts.


What's funny is how little was changed. It was just the outfit. All the gun skills? They were on the Tomahawk class in Japan. Because the native american stereotype over there is guns?

Like I'm with you that the change seems..rough at best, but it makes sense thematically now, at least.

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Re: GooberGoats

Postby Mongrel » Wed Apr 27, 2016 2:14 pm

Mazian wrote:resulting in Chuck Tingle's first Hugo nom.


Not only is this already amazing in and of itself, Tingle himself (herself? Who knows?) is already making the most of this. (Possible NSFW warning: link to a Chuck Tingle book on Amazon).

God damn. This really has gone balls deep into meta now. Probably literally to boot.
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Thad
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Re: GooberGoats

Postby Thad » Sun May 08, 2016 1:39 am

Chuck Tingle has announced that if he wins, Zoe Quinn will accept the award on his behalf.

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Friday
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Re: GooberGoats

Postby Friday » Sun May 08, 2016 9:58 am

Annnnnd Ken M is dethroned.

Long live the King.
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Re: GooberGoats

Postby Mothra » Sun May 08, 2016 10:35 am

Friend of mine is a finalist for Best Novelette, and she could not be more pleased to share a nomination with that guy.


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Thad
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Re: GooberGoats

Postby Thad » Sun May 08, 2016 12:25 pm

Friday wrote:Annnnnd Ken M is dethroned.

Long live the King.


Yeah, it strikes me that trying to troll the guy who wrote Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt and its sequels, Pounded in the Butt by My Book "Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt", Pounded In The Butt By My Book "Pounded In The Butt By My Book 'Pounded In The Butt By My Own Butt'", and Pounded In The Butt By My Book "Pounded In The Butt By My Book 'Pounded In The Butt By My Book "Pounded In The Butt By My Own Butt"'", is like bringing a knife to the proverbial gunfight.

(Those are all affiliate links. If you use them to buy a copy of Pounded in the Butt By My Book "Pounded in the Butt By My Book 'Pounded in the Butt By My Book "Pounded in the Butt By My Own Butt"'", then I get a small kickback. And if you don't, all I get is the knowledge that looking up a bunch of Chuck Tingle books does not appear to have any impact on what shows up on my Amazon homepage. Thanks, Amazon!)

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Re: GooberGoats

Postby Mongrel » Sun May 22, 2016 1:44 pm

It is not news to me (or, I think, anyone on the board at this point) that early-on computer programming was seen as a female trade and heavily featured women. Sure, this was for regressive reasons since it was seen as something like a step-up from stenography and the idea that it was the yin to male engineers building hardware's yang, but still.

What I did not realize is that the persistent modern stereotype of the programmer being a socially-stunted male nerd exists because the industry actively and deliberately selected for it:

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Friday
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Re: GooberGoats

Postby Friday » Sun May 22, 2016 2:33 pm

This is why history is the best subject. Except in compulsory school. In compulsory school it's dry and boring when it's not outright lies and misinformation.
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Re: GooberGoats

Postby Mongrel » Sun May 22, 2016 2:46 pm

What's really crazy is when you realize how much this has affected the basic structural foundations of the internet.

Which will of course be hugely influential in turn on everything forever. Or at least until we bomb ourselves back to the stone age and animated .gif memes have to be propagated via stacks of crude stone carvings.
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Re: GooberGoats

Postby Friday » Sun May 22, 2016 3:21 pm

hugely influential in turn on everything forever.


I personally don't ascribe to this way of thinking, because I really don't think LOL NERD is going to persist in the year 3000, and that's not even that far away. I mean, echoes of history will exist forever, but they keep getting smaller and smaller as time goes on. Unless by "everything forever" you mean the next 100-200 years. Which is what pretty much everyone actually means when they talk about "forever" in social trends.
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Re: GooberGoats

Postby Mongrel » Sun May 22, 2016 3:29 pm

Well, the internet is like any huge system in that it'll be an ever-changing thing and morph in all sorts of ways nobody ever envisioned (and a few ways we DO envision) given enough time, so yes, absolutely, founders' influence will diminish with each generation [joke about the US and election 2016 goes here].

I actually originally typed my post with a qualifier describing that, but I figured I was just really labouring the whole thing by doing so, so I just went for the cheap nuclear winter gag instead.
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Re: GooberGoats

Postby Büge » Wed Jun 22, 2016 10:57 pm



Holy crap
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