We Didn’t Start the Flamewar — Part Two

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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

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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:

No More Tor

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No More Tor

Update: I am aware that Tom Doherty issued a statement and that Irene Gallo (the one whose comment pushed me over the edge) has made a non-apology apology. Her doing that actually makes me angrier because she’s not sorry at all for what she said. She still thinks people like me (and John C. Wright, Jim Butcher, Sarah Hoyt, Cedar Sanderson, and Kevin Anderson) are neo-Nazis. When she can actually admit that maybe being to the right of Mao does not make you Hitler and can actually write a post that accurately describes the entire Sad Puppy phenomenon, I’ll reconsider my stance. Until then, I’m not going to contribute a wooden nickel towards her salary. Also, if Tor fires her, I will make my avoidance of their books permanent because that’s the only thing that could make me angrier — firing someone for their opinions.

I just want an honest-to-Bob real fucking apology and for her to learn to break out of her little bubble of a universe and make some truly diverse friends instead of the token-diversity she has around now.

I’ve intentionally not said anything about Sad Puppies or Hugogate or whatever it’s being called now because, honestly, I don’t pay much attention to awards these days. The Hugo winners have been books I find tedious and not worth the time for about the past ten years so I generally avoid them. I’ve started treating most “award-winning” books that way in recent years because “award-winning” is so often synonymous with “something a limousine liberal in Manhattan [who’s never come down from their fiftieth floor loft and who thinks they’re progressive because they have an Ecuadorean transgendered nanny and their dogwalker is gay] would find interesting when they try to show how avant-garde they are while drinking chai frappélattéchinos with their lily white (and the token black) quote-unquote with airquotes friends.”

And since most of them can’t read beyond a sixth grade level, what they like is going to be something I’ll find puerile — perhaps juvenile, at best — with tortured language that thinks it’s academic and intellectual when it’s really just pretentious, tendentious, and fucking poor diction and a complete abuse of esoteric terminology.

Still, though, I’m sick and tired of being compared to the guy who caused over 70 million deaths in less than seven years just because I think that openness and diversity is a good thing. I think that anyone who likes science fiction and fantasy should be considered a fan and they shouldn’t have to pass any kind of ideological test. I think that an award that touts itself as “THE sci-fi/fantasy award from all fans” should be more open to those fans participating in the nomination and voting. Otherwise, it’s just another crappy award given by another group of CHORFs. I think that the Sad Puppies have proven their point in that the Hugos are meaningless and controlled by the publishers and not the fans.

If the PuppyKickers want to throw a fit because their picks didn’t win this year, that’s fine. If they want to change the way the Hugos are decided, that’s fine. But they need to act like fucking adults instead of kindergartners. Since they can’t do that, I’m going to do the adult thing and not give them my money.

Hey, I wouldn’t give my kindergarten-aged niece a cookie if she’d spent all day acting out — I’m not going to give a company that has its senior staff call me a Nazi my money, either. However, I don’t want the authors who are locked into a shitty contract to think it’s them or their work that has caused me to make this decision. So, I’ve started contacting all Tor’s authors to let them know that it’s not them — it’s their publisher. I started today with Brandon Sanderson who could easily strike out on his own and publish independently (face it, Tor needs him far more than he needs them). The message I sent to him (or to his assistants, rather), is below.

I just wanted to apologize for this. I’ve been a fan of Mr. Sanderson’s work ever since he started writing the Wheel of Time after Mr. Jordan died. When I heard he was going to be finishing the series, I bought the Mistborn trilogy and soon had every book he’s written. However, I won’t be buying (or borrowing or pirating because that’s wrong) his books published through Tor any longer.

Mr. Sanderson hasn’t done anything wrong — I still love his books and wish I had 1/100000000000000th of his talent. He’s not offended me or anything. I just can’t support a company that thinks that my friends and I are as horrible as the man responsible for upwards of 70 million deaths (Adolph Hitler) just because we think that more than a few dozen people should be allowed to decide who wins the Hugos.

If Mr. Sanderson changes publishers or goes indie, I’ll be happy to grab his books again. I love his work. I’m just not going to keep giving money to Irene Gallo and the Neilsen-Haydens so that they can call me and people I like (such as Sarah Hoyt, Larry Corriea, Cedar Sanderson, and Brad Torgersen among others) Nazis just because we’re not to the left of Mao and Stalin politically and think that it’s more fun to read books with great characters and a good plot instead of polemics that we might agree with but that tell us we can’t agree for $stupidreasons_like_kincolor_gender_religion_beingfromtheSouth.

Thanks (and sorry because I know he’s busy and doesn’t want to get dragged in to crap like this just because his publishing house is run by idiots),

G.K. Masterson

If, like me, you’re tired of the chattering classes calling you a Nazi while taking your money and laughing at you, then feel free to stop giving them your money. If you’re planning to avoid Tor, know that they’re owned by MacMillian who owns the following publishing lines:

  • Farrar, Straus and Giroux
    • Faber & Faber
  • Henry Holt and Company
    • Holt Paperbacks
    • Metropolitan Books
    • Times Books
    • Owl Books
  • Palgrave Macmillan
  • Picador
  • Roaring Brook Press
    • Neal Porter Books
    • First Second Books
  • St. Martin’s Press
  • Tom Doherty Associates
    • Tor Books
  • Bedford, Freeman and Worth Publishing Group
    • W.H. Freeman
    • Bedford-St. Martin’s
    • Worth Publishers
  • Hayden-McNeil
  • Nature Publishing Group
    • Scientific American, Inc.

Instead, might I suggest Del Ray Books, Wizards of the Coast, Baen, or indie books? Sure, Del Ray and Baen are owned by other members of the Big Six but so far they’ve managed not to have their spokespeople and senior staff insult anyone to the right of Mao and Stalin.

Just a thought.

— G.K.

More on this:

Risen Ash Chapter Three Up!

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Risen Ash Chapter Three Up!

Happy Friday, indeed! The latest chapter of Risen Ash is now available for your reading pleasure. Our heroes finally get into Atlanta and we learn a bit more about the situation there. Also, we meet someone who will be very welcome (though a bit different from his incarnation in the show) to any Walking Dead fans out there.

Go on, get your read on! And remember, you can help support my writing habit by backing me on Patreon or getting a membership here!

— G.K.

New Chapter Up — The Masterminds!

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New Chapter Up -- The Masterminds!

The latest chapter of The Masterminds is up for your reading pleasure! Learn a bit more about Jim and the rest of the team as well as seeing a little bit more about the case itself. And, if all goes well, there will be another chapter for Search for the Seven Scepters up later today as well!

Don’t forget, you can support my writing habit over at Patreon or by purchasing a subscription here!

— G.K.

Another Chapter of Risen Ash Up!

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Another Chapter of Risen Ash Up!

So, those of you who like a good zombie apocalypse fic, there’s a new chapter of Risen Ash up for your perusal. We meet some new people in this chapter and plans get made to go to the CDC. We also find out exactly how long Josiah was out of commission and a bit more about how the world has unraveled in that time frame. Now, go, get your read on!

And, remember, if you’re loving these stories and want to support my writing habit, you can do so via PayPal or Patreon!

— G.K.

New Story Up: In the Shadow of Yggdrasil

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New Story Up: In the Shadow of Yggdrasil

I’ve been working on this one for a while — it’s one of my secret back-burner projects. I’m ridiculously proud of how it’s turning out. So, for your reading pleasure, check out the first chapter of In the Shadow of Yggdrasil!

I am a mythology nut and, yes, when I was in elementary school, I checked out Bulfinch’s Mythology every week and Hamilton’s Mythology whenever I could. I did raid the mythology section of the county library and I even did a puppet-play where I retold the story of Perseus and Medusa. I’m also an Avengers fan (though this is *not* a fanfic) and decided that if Stan Lee and Marvel could re-imagine the Nordic myths and legends, well, so could I.

As always, feedback is very muchly loved, thanks!

— G.K.

Chapter Two of The Search for the Seven Scepters Live!

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Chapter Two of The Search for the Seven Scepters Live!

So, the second chapter of The Search for the Seven Scepters is up. We get to meet Sokan’s brother in this chapter and learn a little bit more about their pasts as well as get some insight into the world from a non-bards-eye view (see what I did there?) Also, for those of you who love to hate my cliff-hangers, there’s another one for you to enjoy here!

What are you still doing reading this post? Go on, get to the story!


Goeth and readeth now

— G.K.