Writing Scandals

We Didn’t Start the Flamewar — Part Three

by
We Didn't Start the Flamewar -- Part Three

*dons shades and sits at a table in a kitchen from the 1940s*

Larry Correia, Sarah H., Puppy Sadness, Vox Day
Social Justice, WrongFen Haters, Scalzi’s Twitter Mob

We didn’t start the flamewar
It was always burning
Since the ‘Net’s been churning
We didn’t start the flamewar
No we didn’t light it
But we’ll damned well fight it

Lyrics to be continued

So, this is the first part of the in depth history of the Sad Puppies part of this series (wow, that’s a mouthful). I spent a lot of time yesterday reading up on this. Sad Puppies has been running for three years now and was started by Larry Correia back in January 2013. That means it predates GamerGate by a fair margin (since there have been some accusations that Sad Puppies and GamerGate are the same thing or that GamerGate started the Sad Puppies. The only way that could have happened would have been for the GamerGate movement to have access to 1) a time machine, 2) a DeLorean with a Flux Capacitor and either a Mr. Fusion or Plutonium, or 3) a TARDIS. Since I’m fairly certain none of those three things are true, it’s a safe bet that GamerGate and Sad Puppies are two distinct phenomena which simply have some members in common since people who like video games also tend to enjoy reading and occasionally writing fantasy or sci-fi books).

Like many of us, Larry noticed that there had been a divergence between what was selling well and what was winning the Hugos and had been for some time. He informed his fans that all they had to do in order to nominate a work for the Hugo or the Campbell awards was to purchase a membership to WorldCon. Since the membership for WorldCon is rather small, it doesn’t take many votes to get on the ballot or to win an award. He called his effort to get his own work on the ballot “Sad Puppy” as a tongue-in-cheek commentary against the current tendency to award works that were literary-fic or message-fic instead of works that were selling or well-liked by the entire sci-fi/fantasy audience. It’s not the first time such a gag was used — after all, on various tech forums I hang around, “Think Of The Children” is used in the same sarcastic fashion.

sad-puppy
Won’t someone think of the sad puppies and the children?

In Sad Puppies 1, Larry did suggest his own works because there wasn’t any real organization back then. It was just him on his own. He was soliciting his own fans to nominate him (but he did not buy votes or memberships for anyone) and probably felt it would be a bit strange to ask them to nominate someone else. Additionally, he had a theory about the Hugos that he wanted to test — namely that they were biased, represented the preferences of only one tiny section of the sci-fi/fantasy fandom community, and that authors with the “wrong” political beliefs (meaning politically to the right of Mao and Stalin) who got on the ballot would be attacked, slandered, libeled, made the subject of whisper campaigns, harassed, have Twitter mobs set upon them, have their books given negative reviews, etc etc etc.

Sad Puppies is not about getting Larry himself the Hugo or getting any particular author the award (Sad Puppies 1 actually failed to get Larry nominated at all though it did get some of his preferences listed in other areas). It’s always been about proving that WorldCon is full of crap when they hold themselves out to represent all of fandom, about proving that there is a definite bias that has nothing to do with whether a work is good or not and everything to do with whether or not the author has the right skin color, the right genitalia, and adheres to the proper groupthink. It also has been a test as to whether or not WorldCon is really open to welcoming new members and new writers regardless of their skin’s melanin content, whether their genitals dangle or not, and what their political philosophies are. Based on the current reactions I’d have to say that Correia’s premises have been proven. WorldCon is not open to newbies of any kind who aren’t clones of their current members and the awards are biased to message-fic and it’s pretty clear that the author’s identity is far more important than whether or not their story is well-written and interesting.

So, back in 2013, Larry campaigned on his own behalf throughout January to try to get his own work on the ballot. He was almost successful (missing it by only 17 votes). Overall, there wasn’t much outcry over it and the first effort didn’t have a massive impact. Still, the idea caught on and began to generate buzz which culminated in Sad Puppies 2 which was a Much Bigger Deal and which will be the subject of the next entry in this series so stay tuned!

— G.K.

Sad Puppy image taken from Larry Correia’s site, Monster Hunter Nation

We Didn’t Start the Flamewar — Part Two

by
We Didn't Start the Flamewar -- Part Two

So, some of you might be wondering exactly how this whole thing got started. I posted a brief-ish history earlier. I’m not going to rehash all of that now. Instead, I’m going to focus on the three most recent events in this culture war. I’m not going to pretend to be completely unbiased in this but I am going to try to be fairly accurate. There is a lot of he-said-she-said to some of it so feel free to check out other summaries. Just be aware that everyone has their own agenda so take it all with a grain of salt (including this one).

The first of the three events to take place was GamerGate. Know Your Meme has a pretty thorough coverage of it so if you’ve got no clue what it is and want a play-by-play, I’d suggest checking it out. The long and short of it is that the whole thing started over a game developer (Zoe Quinn) who cheated on her boyfriend. Her boyfriend posted an expose of it showing that she’d supposedly slept around to try to get good reviews of her game. It morphed from a movement to improve ethics in gaming journalism to a big thing about feminism and gaming in general. The anti-GamerGater side (populated by Social Justice Warriors or SJWs) tends to think that gaming is sexist and that the tech sector is sexist. They think that the way women are depicted in games is sexist and that games should tell a more “socially just” message. The pro-GamerGater side thinks that games are fine and that if the antis don’t like them, they’re free to make their own games and see which sell better. The antis have, so far, managed to get some of the pro-GG groups like the HoneyBadgerBridage (a group of female gamers and game developers) thrown out of conventions because they “made the [antis] feel threatened.”

That’s the level of maturity we’re dealing with. The antis can’t actually argue anything rationally and can’t be bothered to make their own games with their own message. They want to force current gaming companies to make the games they think should be made and force the rest of us to play them whether we want to or not. And, when we say that’s stupid, we’re told we’re threatening them and harassing them and that we’re being sexist. We also get lumped in with the PUAs like Roosh (who isn’t actually a bad guy — I’ve talked with him and he’s nice in person) and some of the really crazy MRAs who do hate women which would be like us lumping the antis in with groups who want to raise all children as girls and kill or force all males to undergo sex reassignment surgery *eyeroll*

The next big event was ShirtStorm. Back in November, the European Space Agency landed the Philae lander on a comet for the first time in human history. One of the guys on the team was wearing a shirt that a female friend had made for him — the shirt was a bowling shirt that depicted comic-hero women with laser guns and tight outfits. He was interviewed briefly (he wasn’t the spokesman for the team or the team lead — the team lead was a woman, in fact). Rose Eveleth, a journalist for The Atlantic, managed to miss the big news item (the historic comet landing) and, in a stereotypically womanish manner, focus in on what the guy was wearing instead. She made a big deal about the shirt that caused the historic comet landing to be forgotten as everyone on Twitter got the vapors over the women on this guy’s shirt. She later claimed she was “doxxed” (meaning her personal information was posted and she was getting harassed at home) but there was absolutely no evidence this happened (whereas there was plenty of evidence that this happened with anti-GamerGate people). I personally spent the better part of four days checking the usual doxxing sites AND the deepnet/Tornet for any trace of it and there was nada. The only way I could dig up her info was to hit up a contact I have who can get that kind of stuff and all I asked that person was if they could get it. Unsurprisingly, the answer was “yes” but that does not mean Rose Eveleth was doxxed any more than it means that oh, say, the Governor General of Canada’s direct line (bypasses switchboard, bypasses secretary, no voicemail, rings through even if phone is turned off) was “doxxed.”*

ShirtStorm managed to die down with most of us women realizing that some women were never going to get the whole science thing because they just couldn’t be rational. I wrote my long series on ShirtStorm and Women In Science (Feminism Is Dead, Why Don’t Women Go Into Science?, Why Don’t Women Go Into Science? Part II, Women In Science Part III: Can We Force More Women to Become NTs?, Women In Science: Can We Create More Female NTs?) and things seemed to go back to their uneasy truce where the minority of us wondered just when the majority of slavering crazed fems were going to find something to go batcrap crazy over again.

The third event is HugoGate or PuppyGate or whatever you want to call it. That really deserves its own entry — which it is going to get. However, I’m going to give it a quick rundown here anyway so here goes. This year was the third year that Sad Puppies ran a list of people they thought should get nominated for the Hugos. The last two years Larry Correia ran Sad Puppies — this year it was Brad Torgersen. Larry started it because he believed that worthy folks were being ignored or left off the ballot due to the authors’ political beliefs. He said that if any right-wing author got nominated, the Powers That Be with WorldCon (the group that owns and organizes the Hugos) would throw a fit of epic proportions. Thus far, he’s been proven right. The first two years, Sad Puppies wasn’t very successful but this year it was. There’s some argument as to why that is the case and I’m still reading up on it myself. However, the end result has been that Larry and Brad (who are really nice guys and good writers) have been slandered, libeled, threatened, and harassed. A lot of other good authors have been harassed as well just because they were nominated by Sad Puppies and some even felt they had to withdraw from being nominated. The PuppyKickers are threatening to vote No Award in every category where there are Sad Puppy candidates (I think) which would prove Larry’s point completely and would prove that the Hugos are pretty much worthless. The PuppyKickers claim that the Sad Puppies are all a bunch of white, sexist men who nominated nothing but white, sexist men even though SP3 consists of women, Latinos, blacks, Asians, gays (I think?), and people of all political backgrounds and nominated writers of all colors, genders, and backgrounds. Also now, according to the PuppyKickers, those of us who are sympathetic to SP are neonazis.

So you can see why some of us are finally getting a bit fed up with this whole thing.

In the next part I’ll do a more in-depth history of Sad Puppies so stay tuned!

— G.K.

*No, it’s not the Governor General and I’m not going to reveal whether or not it’s a government agency I could get access to or who my friend is or how I know them or what but, suffice it to say that just because this person can get their hands on the information does not mean it’s in the wild. This person once had a pepperoni pizza (paid for by an anonymous BitCoin account) sent to a friend of theirs who was in Israel and that friend, to this day, still has no idea who sent them the pizza. And no, my posting this won’t give the game away because that friend has no clue who I am or that I know this mutual contact.

We Didn’t Start the Flamewar — Part One

by
We Didn't Start the Flamewar -- Part One

But it has been burning for a while. I’m going to briefly (for me) outline the history a bit before diving into the most recent battle fronts in this long-running war.

Yes, I’m talking about the current online flamewar going on in the sci-fi/fantasy world. The latest salvo has been over the Hugos with Irene Gallo calling anyone who thinks Sad Puppies has a point a neo-Nazi (thanks, hon! By the by, I was born Catholic and my grandfather was part of the D-Day invasion at Omaha Beach so I’m just thrilled to be called that) but it’s been simmering since at least the 1980s when the geeks and nerds decided to start building their own worlds and lives where they could do their thing without having to put up with the overculture’s bullshit. We went our own way, did our own thing, and left the rest of the world well enough alone.

Then, of course, the stuff we were doing started to catch attention and the rest of the world wanted in on it. We’re tolerant and magnanimous so we said “sure, c’mon. Join the Internet.” We kept doing our own thing, hanging out on our usenet groups, playing MUDs, building early websites, and just generally chilling. We avoided the screeching harpies, the Ivory Tower Intellectuals, the fashionistas, the HR drones, and the hippy-dippy crowds and kept playing video games, reading sci-fi and fantasy, writing, and just generally adopting an outlook of “let everyone do their own thing and just leave us alone.”

And that was fine for a while. We got to show off how awesome our little worlds could be with epic movies like Lord of the Ring, The Matrix and books like Harry Potter, The Wheel of Time, Mistborn, and video games like World of Warcraft, Diablo III, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Final Fantasy, Legend of Zelda, and more. Still, for the most part, we left the rest of the world alone and the rest of the world left us alone. We kept spinning great stories, kept telling them and retelling them, made awesome networks and used the tech that our fore-geeks had built into companies like Amazon to share our culture. We didn’t really care much what the rest of the world was doing because we were too busy wondering who was going to win the X-Prize, building spaceships and space-faring companies, talking about how we could make money mining Near Earth Asteroids, planning out how we’d get to Mars.

After all, the rest of the world had been telling us what we wanted wasn’t important and didn’t matter. We took them at their word and left them do their thing so long as they left us alone to think up things like how to colonize other planets, whether or not you could genetically engineer dragons so they’d be real, and when the Singularity might happen. In our world, we didn’t much care if you were male or female or some variant therein. We didn’t care if you were homo-, hetero-, bi-, or a-sexual. We didn’t care if you wore jeans, Armani suits, had tattoos and piercings, walked around in your pajamas all day, watched porn or thought that Clark was better than Heinlein. All we really cared about was “is your idea cool? Will it work? Can you prove it?”

We weren’t interested in trying to set up elaborate government programs to ensure that every company, game, book, movie, TV show, poem, or military unit was a perfect representation of the rest of the population. We thought that it was a bit silly to try to force people into jobs based on superficial (or superfluous) traits instead of whether or not they were interested, qualified, and could fit in with the rest of their team. We were willing to listen to arguments that perhaps the overculture discouraged certain people from entering our specialized realms (math, science, tech, and engineering). However, we recognized that interest and personality-type were the main drivers and the intelligence played a role in whether or not a person could get into the STEM fields. After all, if you hate math, you’re hardly going to be a great computer scientist. If physics bores you, a career at CERN is probably out. If you’d rather talk about your feelings, you’re probably not destined for the engineering world and if you think video games are for losers, I doubt you’re going to fit in well in a company like Blizzard or BioWare.

So, for the most part, we didn’t care that our subculture had more men than women. The women (like me) who were part of it had absolutely no real place in the overculture. We didn’t face a lot of sexism in the geek realms — the guys are glad to have us and appreciate the way our minds work. True, they can sometimes say something that results in them suffering a brief bit of foot-in-mouth but then, so can we. We know that guys like to look at attractive women (unless they’re gay in which case it’s attractive men).* For the most part, we don’t care. Their desktops and screensavers don’t bother us so long as the women are mostly clothed. After all, they’re not asking us to dress like that. The superficial doesn’t matter much to us — actions do.

At any rate, things were rocking along just fine until three events happened that showed us that no matter how magnanimous and forgiving we were (after all, we’d sighed and gotten over the September That Never Ended, we’d come to grips with the AOLers and Spammers, we’d learned to filter out the overculture and had even — albeit, with difficulty — forgiven them for cancelling Firefly). The first was #GamerGate. The second was #ShirtStorm. And now the last is the HugoSpat.

We didn’t start the flamewar but, bless your overbearing over-culture hearts guys, we think it’s hilarious when you try to flame people who invented fireproof armor, can calculate the burst damage for the best PVP firemage build, and build flamethrowers for fun.

You’re in our world now and here, we make the rules. That is why folks like Irene Gallo and her brethren are going to lose because — at best — we go back to ignoring you and doing our own thing. At worst, we show the rest of the marginalized in the overculture that they don’t have to put up with your shenanigans either. After all, we’ve already showed the RIAA we don’t need them to help us find great music. We showed the big TV companies that we can damned well do without them. The Big Five are learning that we don’t need them to control the book market.

Do you really want to join them on Ye Olde Dustbin of the Dinosaurs?

— G.K.

*Women aren’t as visually-oriented as men but we do like to look at good looking guys (if we’re straight) or gals (if we’re lesbians). However, rarely are we going to plaster the walls and our computers with fine specimens because we’re wired a bit differently when it comes to what we like to look at and display. *shrugs* Men and women are different and that is a Good Thing(TM).

Other posts like this:

Plagarism and the Remix Culture

by
Plagarism and the Remix Culture

Many, many years ago, when I was a young writer who was just beginning to grasp the importance of things like “letter shapes” and had a vague understanding that spelling might be important in other people being able to read what I’d written (especially since I lacked the skill to remember and translate my earliest works from “toddler-scribbling” into “American English,” thus depriving the world of many epic sagas involving me, my little brother, our dog, and the various and sundry monsters who inhabited our backyard), I was big on what we now call “the remix culture” and I, somewhat intuitively, knew not to claim someone else’s story as my own because I didn’t like it when my brother tried to say that a story I’d made up and told him was his idea.

 

Now, one would think that if a girl of seven can intuit that claiming someone else’s words/story for your own is wrong, then college students and adults would have a much better grasp on the concept of plagiarism (h/t Mad Genius Club). Apparently, it seems, I was a bit precocious in my ethics by figuring out that repeating (and claiming to have “made up”) something like The Last Unicorn was wrong but that making up a different story using the same characters was okay so long as I asked permission (which makes me wonder what Nintendo thought of Nine Year Old Me’s letter asking if they would mind if I wrote a play for the kids in my neighborhood based on The Legend of Zelda that would neatly tie together the first three games — The Legend of Zelda, The Adventure of Link, and A Link to the Past. Cut me some slack. I didn’t understand the difference between commercial and non-commercial use prior to puberty. I should at least get credit for having a vague understanding of copyright rules back then, shouldn’t I?)

 

To continue; as I got older, I continued to write for things other than school assignments. A few of my short stories were completely original. A lot were based on things my friends and I did but with the names and the setting changed (mostly to protect the guilty because none of us wanted to get busted for going to the Bat Cave* after having been told not to). And many were remixes or “in addition to” stories that took the characters and settings of another story and used them to tell a new story. By the time I was in high school, I was a fairly prolific fanfic author when it came to The Legend of Zelda, Star Trek, Star Wars, Dragonlance, and The Wheel of Time. I was also a burgeoning fantasy writer working on my first novel (which needs to be completely rewritten before I let anyone see it), a multitude of short stories, and several RPG adventures/campaigns for AD&D (2nd Edition).

 

Back then, I generally had an “extra” notebook I carried around with me that I worked on when I was finished with whatever we were doing in class. This notebook would have notes on adventures I was writing, fanfics, some of my original stuff, my attempts at poetry and epics, and also poems I was trying to memorize. Once, I left this notebook in my English class and my teacher thumbed through it to figure out whose it was so she could return it. She came upon a poem that I had half-written in there and tracked me down to ask me to finish it. The poem was not one I had created — it was one I was trying to memorize and came from the Dragonlance short story Hunting Destiny. I made sure that she understood that because she was talking about having that poem published once I finished it.

 

It makes me sad to realize that, these days, many students would claim the work as their own for the accolades they could receive (at least until it was revealed they were lying). It also makes me sad to realize that far too many of them don’t understand the difference between remixing and plagiarism. I can sympathize with those who read something and mistakenly paraphrase it without proper attribution (I did this myself a few times and was always embarrassed and quickly corrected it once it was pointed out to me) but I have no such sympathy for people who blatantly rip-off (sometimes word for word) another author and then try to pass that work off as their own after making only a few modifications to try to file the serial numbers off, as it were. I have actually caught a few people ripping off some of my old short stories and trying to claim them as their own for school assignments (and those are always fun emails to get from teachers) which is why I took them down from my website years ago.

 

However, I don’t mind when people remix my stuff. I’ve had a few emails with short stories set in the Lanarian universe. I’m flattered by those even though I won’t read them because I don’t want to be accused of ripping them off later.

 

Remixing is fine, guys. And yes, “real” writers do occasionally remix to one degree or another. Some of us even dabble in the occasional fanfic (I’ve done so with Doctor Who). Many of us fantasy writers actually got our start as fanfic writers (though that’s not what we knew to call it) in our early days. For me, my progression went from writing fanfics set in established universes to taking elements of those universes and tinkering with them to try to build a new universe to eventually developing my own universes. And, I’ve read some damned fine fanfics that beat the living tar out of some of the “official” novels (especially when it comes to TV shows, films, or video games). But every fanfic that takes place in someone else’s universe comes with a disclaimer giving credit to the original source. Even many remixes that pass muster as “original works” and not “derivatives” come with an acknowledgement of influences.

 

We authors love to give credit to the authors and works that inspired and influenced our own writing. Just as musicians will credit other acts for inspiring them to get into music or for inspiring a particular song, we give credit to the authors who came before us and inspired and influenced us. We know that “what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9) So, we give credit. And if you want to be respected as an author, you’ll need to give credit, too. That doesn’t mean citing every sentence you write. It doesn’t mean sending out a ream of letters before you publish something. It means being willing (and even proud) to say “this story was inspired by X” or “my writing is influenced by Y.” It does not mean taking what X or Y has written, changing a few words, adding a few scenes, and then slapping your name on it and calling it a “remix” when you get busted.

 

That’s enough for now. As you can tell, this is one of my hot-button issues. 🙂

 

— G.K.

 

*The Bat Cave wasn’t anything cool like from Batman. It was a long storm drain pipe that ran under a road. There were bats living in there which is why we called it “the bat cave.”