Camestros Felapton

FELAPTONL

…and I would have got away with it too…

The movie version of Scooby Doo with Sarah Michelle Geller is not half bad. For those who have followed the Hugo Kerfuffles the ending is oddly prophetic:

Yes, this is yet another Puppy post. In the movie it turns out the zombie(ish) army has actually been recruited by the obnoxious puppy Scrappy Doo, who blames his lack of success and popularity not on his own unpleasentness but on everybody else. Once exposed, Scrappy turns into a rabid monster – only to discover he isn’t as powerful as he imagined.

As some of you may noticed there has been a recent revival of the Scrappy-Dappy-Doo approach to self-publicity by Jon Del Arroz (Tim is now advising him). JDA hasn’t made much of a secret about announcing a few days ago on “Gab” (a kind of alt-right answer to Twitter):

Steampunk Jon Del Arroz PRO · @otomo
5 days
Commence Operation: Troll The Shit Out Of SJW Sci-Fi Authors On Twitter.
If you want to participate, ping me. I’ll start a chat.

The trolling involved hassling various people including Cat Rambo and an author I’m not familiar with, Sharon Lee*:

Steampunk Jon Del Arroz PRO · @otomo
If anyone is a fan of Sharon Lee — super SJW author who hates me, getting ready to troll her by tagging on twitter/facebook with these. Would love some help. Even if not a fan, can still tag 🙂

 

Steampunk Jon Del Arroz PRO · @otomo
Want to get people posting the above picture and tagging either Sharon Lee on facebook (I think you’ll have to friend for that) or clankorval on twitter with the link http://bit.ly/forsteamandcountry. I think if enough folk do we’ll get a nice reaction. I’m blocked so someone will have to report.

People responded in ways that could be called The Velma, The Shaggy, The Daphne, The Other Guy or The Scooby. The last being my option but it looks less cute when seeing the extent to which JDA was attempting to use targetted harassment.

Mike Glyer has taken his normal approach, cover what somebody is doing with minimal editorialising. Of course no news coverage is truly neutral – by it’s very nature choosing what to highlight and what not to is a necessary task and can create its own biases. However, as with the more substantial Puppy Kerfuffle, Mike has let people’s own words speak for themselves.

Which takes us back to Scooby-Doo villains.

They are not famed for their self-reflection or capacity to take personal responsibility – particularly given how pointlessly absurd their plans are.

In the way things do, these two Scrappy-Doo threads came together in a Facebook post where JDA was complaining about his comments not appearing on File770. I won’t link to it – it isn’t interesting in its details or edifying in its content. Suffice to say Larry Correia turned up and had a massive Scrappy-Doo-as-Bad-Guy meltdown about how Mike Glyer did him wrong. Brad Torgersen and Dave Freer turned up too with the same complaint: in short that it was all Mike Glyer’s fault.

Yes, nothing people haven’t heard before but I was suprised how deeply resentful Larry Correia was of what was basically consistent reporting of what Larry was saying in public. Bitter and angry, the aftermath of the failed Sad Puppy campiagns clearly still cut deep and top of the failed puppy hate list is “And I would have got away with it too if weren’t for that meddlin’ Glyer!”

Now, I not only read most (all?) of the Sad Puppy 3 round-up posts, and followed the links to the relevant blogs, I have also, for my sins, re-read most of those Sad Puppy campaign posts by Larry multiple times. While Mike clealry picked out key paragraphs to quote (which stands to reason), the quotes were not particularly misleading and in some cases cast the linked post in a better light (e.g. the quoted part was often the more cogent and coherent argument). I think Larry and Brad et al know that. Far, far harsher and ruder things were written about the Sad Puppies by others and if anything, they got a fairer hearing in Mike’s posts than elsewhere.

So why the vitriol in particular about the Puppy Round-Up posts at File 770? Because Larry is right in so far that it was exposing their own words that undermined their case. Used to an echo chamber and pitching their arguments to self-sycophants, the Sad Puppies (as opposed to VDs Rabids – which is a whole other issue) did not know how to tailor their argument for a wider audience or how to avoid contradicting themselves and alienating potential allies in public.

I’m not arguing that “sunshine is the best disinfectant” as a general principle but in this particular case that is what worked – and the pups know it and hence why Larry C is willing to paint himself as still twisted with rage over a guy covering his public pronouncements.

We will no doubt see others try the Scrappy-Dappy-Doo arc again:

  • Confusing “annoying” with “loveable”
  • Thinking “all publicity is good publicity”
  • Seeing out bad publicity
  • Resenting it when they get it
  • Mutating into an occult rage monster
  • Disgusing themselves as Mr Bean robot

I don’t know what the appropriate response is.

*[I think Amanda S Green maybe was indirectly criticising JDA in this Mad Genius post https://madgeniusclub.com/2017/06/11/think-before-hitting-enter/

A screenshot from Gab of JDA’s comment:

delArrozTargestSharonLee]

[

 

camestrosfelapton

84 responses to “…and I would have got away with it too…”

  1. JDA is loudly whining on Twitter and Facebook that he is being “censored” because Mike has chosen not to publish any more of his falsehood-laden comments. What is it with these aspiring Puppy writers and their lack of comprehension of what words like “censorship” and “hydrophobia” actually mean?

    Liked by 3 people

    • Typically when I have a comment removed, including on File770 (today even), I recognize I crossed a line for the person who runs that space. It’s their space and as someone whose moderated before it’s annoying as hell to try to maintain so I mostly feel bad that I caused them extra work and try to respect their wishes if I want to continue to comment. Because commenting is being a guest in someone else’s space and if I crap on the carpet I can’t blame the host for deciding to revoke the guest privilege.

      You can add ‘dis-invite’ to the words misunderstood.

      I also find it amusing that many express in that thread they’re buying JDA books because they feel he’s upset other people rather than the quality of the work from a sample or from positive reviews. I don’t think I’ve ever made a book purchase because they made someone else upset or for their views alone otherwise I’d own a branch of the Chuck Tingle library.

      But as a person who liked the Monster Hunter series the nonsense and intentional spite towards other authors by LC certainly means I wont ever buy another MH book or even check it out from the library. The mountain of TBR books has too much stuff already, removing some makes it less intimidating but not by much. None of that is Glyer’s fault, or his politics, but through his own actions towards others. Even with all the other BS I’m still surprised many of these folks are grouping to support someone who thinks insults and badgering is a form of job interview/marketing practice. But I guess it’s more important that he’s making people they don’t like angry than the actual actions of the person.

      Liked by 3 people

      • They’re accusing us of buying and praising books mainly because the author has the right politics and not because of the quality of the book itself and then turn around to buy JdA’s books, because he has the right politics and pisses off the right people and not because of the quality of the books themselves (which I haven’t read and am not likely to, given the behvaiour of their author, so I can’t say anything about the quality).

        The cognitive dissonance, it burns.

        Liked by 4 people

      • I think JdA’s doing the PUA “negging” thing. Insult them till they love you. I kinda got the impression (and this just might be me reading between the lines) from people who’d had to deal with him IRL that he fancies himself a PUA type “ladies’ man”. Which is another manifestation of entitlement.

        File 770 is down right now for me, rut roh!

        I actually really enjoyed the short works BT had in the Hugo packet the year he was up for the Campbell. And I told him so in person. Seemed like a nice guy. Thought he might be worth reading in future. Just goes to show you never really know anyone. After his thin-skinned mendacious behavior, I am never ever going to buy or read anything else by him or his cohorts. Life is too short and the TBR list too long to put up with idiots.

        Matt Y: I too have moderated — two different places — so I’m amazed Mike is so lenient. I wouldn’t be in his case. 🙂

        Liked by 3 people

      • Yes, BT’s story the year he was nominated for the Campbell was pretty good. So I was willing to give him the benefit of doubt, when he was a puppy nominee in 2014 and found that I did not like those two stories at all. Then came 2015 and that nutty nuggets post and that was it.

        File 770 is down for me, too, BTW.

        Liked by 1 person

  2. Holy mackerel Larry Corrieas rant is about the most ungrounded from reality thing I’ve seen in a while. Well besides Brad Torgersen and Dave Freers comments. I think your analysis is spot on, but it’s still hard to understand how one can be so divorced from reality.

    Liked by 1 person

    • I thought LC was trying to distance himself from the whole puppy mess, since in the past few months he mainly posted about the mountain he bought, painting miniatures and other harmless subjects. But apparently, he’s in full-on rant mode again.

      Like

      • Something you didn’t have in your analysis here is how the RP hijacked the SP concept and were much more successful (for Puppy values of “success”). They don’t want to admit Teddy made them his bitch.

        Liked by 1 person

  3. Sharon Lee writes the Liaden Universe series together with her partner Steve Miller. It’s excellent space opera (published by Baen ironically) and probably lightyears ahead of anything JdA has ever written. On her own, she’s also written an urban fantasy and a mystery series set in Maine, which are also well worth reading.

    I have no idea why JdA would target her of all people, but then I have no idea why he does anything.

    Liked by 2 people

    • Yeah, I’ve no idea why he’d be targeting Sharon Lee. She’s a Baen space opera author! Possibly b/c she and hubby Steve have carried the Liaden books through 3 publishers (4 if you count themselves), 30 years, and they’re up to the 21st novel and umpty collections of shorter work. With a large and avid fanbase. So I’m guessing it’s jealousy again. I’ve never heard Sharon and Steve express an opinion more controversial than “Cats are awesome”. Maybe b/c there’s a lot of romance in between the pew-pew? And why aren’t they planning to harass Steve? Oh, he’s a guy, duh.

      Anyway, a) hope you warned Sharon and b) as usual, JdA doesn’t know what he’s up against. There are innumerable Liaden fen who are well-spoken and passionate in both proselytizing and defense. Filers are the merest gnats compared to them.

      I think you’ve really hit on something with your Scrappy-Doo analogy. May it go out far and wide. Rut-roh. Looking forward to the Mr. Bean robot stage, at least it’ll be amusing and entertaining.

      Cam, have you considered using DoNotLink or whatever it’s called for links to RP, SP, et al? They’re so jonesing for clicks; let’s not feed their self-destructive behaviors.

      Liked by 3 people

      • Who the hell knows — maybe he just imagined it, like so many other Puppy things.

        She’s done it all; major publishers (well, Baen and Ace), small publisher that went broke (Meisha Merlin), self-pub. Not someone to be insulted, but rather someone an up and coming author should look to as a role model. 30 year career! Tons of books written and sold! Lots of fans!

        Liked by 2 people

      • I did use Do Not Link for a period early on. I decided against it for various reasons and then Puppy blogs etc started *objecting* to being linked to…so don’t know if they really feel much benefit from it.
        If this was a heavier traffic blog maybe I’d rethink.
        I want to move the links in the Kerfuffle Timeline to Web Archive though at some point

        Like

      • Yes, Sharon Lee certainly seems like an odd target. Some of JdA’s other targets make more sense, since taking on them might impress his alt-right fans. But Sharon Lee is a Baen author, generally unpolitical, writes space opera and has self-published and hasn’t been involved in any fandom controversies.

        Cam may be right that JdA wanted something from her (a recommendation, a blurb) and didn’t get it. And JdA being JdA, the reason he was rebuffed had to be about his political views (which no one would even known about if he didn’t keep airing them all the time).

        Liked by 3 people

      • I’ve read almost all of the Liaden books and seen Lee and Miller on panels and I have no idea what their IRL politics are. None whatsoever. They’re in favor of cats, music, and true love, and against torture. Not really controversial. And internet fandom got them from the first 3 books to the behemoth they are today. See Wikipedia for details of how many publishers they’ve had (6, counting themselves).

        Liked by 2 people

      • Well, we’re talking about puppies here, so being in favour of cats and opposed to torture might be enough to land Lee and Miller on the list of controversial authors.

        Liked by 3 people

  4. Oh look, more fake Puppy stuff.

    If Vox Day was smart, he would stop doing Rabid Puppies and deprive you guys of the tiny bit of subject matter you still have. You and Glyer would be paying him under the table to keep it going.

    Like

  5. It strikes me that JdA is a Puppy come lately — like Scrappy. He wasn’t known to anyone when the kerpupple started, and after everything they tried to do failed miserably, he’s only now jumping on the bandwagon. I thought you were supposed to jump on bandwagons when things were going well, and jump off after they’d crashed and burned.

    Since Pups believe the author business is a zero-sum game, I doubt they’re going to be happy about him trying to horn in on their action at this late date.

    Liked by 2 people

    • Lurkertype: Since Pups believe the author business is a zero-sum game, I doubt they’re going to be happy about him trying to horn in on their action at this late date.

      Well, we saw how well that worked for Declan Finn. Bless his heart.

      Liked by 2 people

    • I really don’t get indie and small press authors like Declan Finn, Brian Niemeier, Nick Cole, JdA, DVD and others attaching themselves to the puppies for promotion and profit. I mean, what are they hoping to achieve here? A couple of sales to people who only buy their books, because they have the right politics, for the price of pissing off the rest of the SFF community. That doesn’t strike me as a smart business move. And while Finn, Niemeier and JdA were/are obscure, Nick Cole and DVD saw a decent measure of success pre-puppy alignment.

      Liked by 3 people

      • Getting noticed I guess. It is easy to think (and in some cases correct) that the author has written something as least as good as much more popular works – but the reason they aren’t making a small fortune (aside from conspiracies) is that some critical mass of people just haven’t read it. So getting ANY group to read it is a bonus.

        That doesn’t explain DVD or Cole though.

        JDA specifically can be explained by observing that last year he read Mike Cernovich’s Gorrila Mindset. The ideas from the Power of Positive Thinking is deep in the modern US right (eg check out where Trump went to church…)

        Liked by 3 people

      • Two idiots* on Larry’s blog bought Jon del Arroz’s book, one because “It’s the best F-U I can give Glyer”, how sad is that? and the other bought it even though it didn’t appeal to him, but just because Mike “doesn’t like him”.

        It’s a big internet and I think you can probably do alright targeting a small but loyal niche. Maybe? But I was curious if anything can be gleaned about Castalia’s sales volumes from DvD’s earlier comment that less than .1% of his sales come from there?

        *idiots because of their motivations, not their taste…

        Liked by 1 person

      • David said his sales are almost entirely digital, and the deal with Castalia House was only to sell printed copies of his books to the few people who actually wanted those. He got involved with them because he wanted to be in Jerry Pournelle’s anthology, and Pournelle went with Castalia because no other publisher was willing to do the paperwork of splitting royalties among the different writers of the anthology stories.

        Liked by 1 person

      • Two idiots* on Larry’s blog bought Jon del Arroz’s book, one because “It’s the best F-U I can give Glyer”

        It not just sad, it is nonsensical. Exactly how is buying a book from JDA going to affect Glyer in any way? Glyer isn’t even a competitor, as he doesn’t publish any books himself. Buying JDA’s book is about the most ineffectual “F-U” that anyone could possibly think up.

        Liked by 2 people

      • CF: “Getting Pournelle on board was a smart move by VD.”
        And Pournelle getting on board was a damn stupid move. I didn’t like Pournelle’s politics all that much but I’ve been known to read him occasionally. And I have to say it sort of shocked me to find him so White Supremacist-adjacent — though now that I think of it, it probably shouldn’t have. If those are politics he doesn’t mind being associated with he’s pretty much lost me.

        Liked by 1 person

  6. Just as a guess, I would say that if you’re an independent author, then any publicity is good publicity. It doesn’t matter if 99% of people who hear about you swear they’d never buy your work; if that other 1% gets excited and starts buying from you, then you’ve got it made. A writer with a few thousand names on his/her mailing list of people who buy two or three things a year can make a decent living.

    Like

    • That’s assuming you can get a few thousand people. The Puppy stuff showed at least that through sheer advertising of ‘sticking it to those guys’ you can get what, about 200 people at most to shell out $40 before they need to get their fresh injection of rage-a-hol before the attention span has wandered. The bad publicity might give you a short term boost but has no legs unless you’re a TV pundit. Same thing happened during Gamergate with a couple of developers trying to market to that crowd. Short term pre-order boost, sales flatline after.

      Rage Marketing doesn’t work because it’s hard to sustain and people don’t care about the product they care about feeling like they’re supporting something they think hurts their opponent. Which also means they have no loyalty to the product, if a couple dozen authors are all ‘sticking it to those guys’ when you don’t care about the product buying any one of them counts as supporting the team.

      Of course it’s difficult to assess without asking them to share sales information but I’m guessing that it’s not thousands for most employing that style but low hundreds with a quick drop off after release and failure after the original rage educing event to achieve prior numbers for subsequent books. Because if proved to be a profitable marketing tactic people would’ve been lining up to handle SP5, a Dragoncon award winner wouldn’t be asking for help to make ends meet earlier, and there’d be less bitterness about the whole thing had their sales continued a growth pattern.

      Liked by 5 people

      • Trust me, I know quite a bit about the difficulties of getting noticed as an indie author.

        However, hoping to gain sales by virtue signalling to a group which has so thoroughly pissed off 95% of the genre community that every author associated with them is automatically tainted is not a smart move. Yes, JdA might have gained three sales on that Facebook thread, but how many potential sales has he lost? To how many potential readers will he always be “that guy”? Maybe he thinks that he’d rather have a few hundred guaranteed sales from puppy supporters than an unknown number of potential sales from elsewhere. However, as Matt says, that doesn’t work either, because puppies and their hangers-on don’t buy those books because they enjoy them (they probably genuinely enjoy LC’s book, but everybody else?), but just to stick it to the other side. They don’t care about JdA or Declan Finn or Brian Niemeier and their books, but will quickly move on to the next author who whines that he’s being oppressed by the evil SJWs Sure, if you consistently virtue signal to the puppies, you might get a book bomb from LC or a review at the Castalia House blog or Superversive SF or even a Dragon Award Nomination. But 10 or 20 years from now, when the puppies and their movement are ancient fandom history, you’ll still be “that guy” nobody likes. That’s not the way to sustainable career.

        Of course, some folks on the puppy side would say that I’ve also lost sales by blogging about the puppies. And that’s probably true, e.g. I know that DVD read at least one of my books. I suspect he won’t be reading any more. But then, I’m pretty sure my stuff wouldn’t appeal to the puppies anyway.

        Regarding sales, you can infer from a book’s Amazon.com sales rank how many sales a book gets. I looked up JdA’s books and the sales rank of his first novel suggests that it hasn’t gotten any sales at Amazon.com in the past seven days or so. Of course, it might have sold elsewhere. His new steampunk novel is doing better and suggests several sales per day.

        Liked by 2 people

      • “but I’m guessing that it’s not thousands for most employing that style but low hundreds with a quick drop off after release and failure after the original rage educing event ”

        Presumably VD’s Scalzi rip-off would be a fairly representative specimen…

        Liked by 1 person

      • And not just any old Dragon winning author, but one whose publisher makes a big thing of how much better a deal writers get with him than with the old, SJW-converged publishing houses.

        Liked by 3 people

      • Inferring info from Amazon sales rank is like determining the weather from licking your finger and putting it in the air, it’ll tell you which way the wind is blowing right now but not if it was sunny the day before or if it’s going to rain later on. That said the Scalzi rip off is in the 250k overall range so potentially putting it in the 11 books a month sold area (using amazon sales rank calculator which doesn’t take into account predictive algorithms I believe). It’s sold in the range for higher KDP royalties so about $10 a week approximately. So ripping off a popular author to piggyback on potential customer confusion, articles being written on i09 and Blackgate about it, having a small rabid fanbase (pun intended) and rage marketing within a couple of months gets you a free large hand crafted coffee at Starbucks and a pastry to go with it.

        JDA shows a current sales rank of 11,500 for new book which puts him at 22 book sales a day with a month long prediction of 316 if it continues, though sales may spike the drop given that it’s the first day. That’s a good first day, if a lot of that is KDP 70% he could stand to make a couple hundred bucks as long as it maintains steam (pun intended). By comparison the book I did no pre-marketing for at all and some mostly ‘I guess I did this’ marketing after sold about 12 ebook and mid-50s paperback in the first week before mostly doing single digit months with occasional spikes and royalties from KOLL. I still get a royalty check sometimes as a reminder it exists.

        The subgenre top 50 appear to be mostly doing in the 20-30k BSR range, which if you have a couple out and can hold onto that like a couple of them likely generate good income for their authors. Many other puppy authors not LC appear in the triple numbered thousands.

        Again Amazon rankings fluctuate often and use predictive measures and number depends on how well all other books are selling or not selling so extrapolating data from it is at best a semi-educated guess.

        Liked by 1 person

      • I started writing my previous reply in the morning and this afternoon the book is actually up to 5,500 range, jumping halfway up which the calculator shows to be an average of 42 sales in one day. Should make for an interesting case study.

        Like

      • Weird and that reply never posted making above one make no sense, here’s the original:
        Inferring info from Amazon sales rank is like determining the weather from licking your finger and putting it in the air, it’ll tell you which way the wind is blowing right now but not if it was sunny the day before or if it’s going to rain later on. That said the Scalzi rip off is in the 250k overall range so potentially putting it in the 11 books a month sold area (using amazon sales rank calculator which doesn’t take into account predictive algorithms I believe). It’s sold in the range for higher KDP royalties so about $10 a week approximately. So ripping off a popular author to piggyback on potential customer confusion, articles being written on i09 and Blackgate about it, having a small rabid fanbase (pun intended) and rage marketing within a couple of months gets you a free large hand crafted coffee at Starbucks and a pastry to go with it.

        JDA shows a current sales rank of 11,500 for new book which puts him at 22 book sales a day with a month long prediction of 316 if it continues, though sales may spike the drop given that it’s the first day. That’s a good first day, if a lot of that is KDP 70% he could stand to make a couple hundred bucks as long as it maintains steam (pun intended). By comparison the book I did no pre-marketing for at all and some mostly ‘I guess I did this’ marketing after sold about 12 ebook and mid-50s paperback in the first week before mostly doing single digit months with occasional spikes and royalties from KOLL. I still get a royalty check sometimes as a reminder it exists.

        The subgenre top 50 appear to be mostly doing in the 20-30k BSR range, which if you have a couple out and can hold onto that like a couple of them likely generate good income for their authors. Many other puppy authors not LC appear in the triple numbered thousands.

        Again Amazon rankings fluctuate often and use predictive measures and number depends on how well all other books are selling or not selling so extrapolating data from it is at best a semi-educated guess.

        Liked by 3 people

        • Matt Y: JDA shows a current sales rank of 11,500 for new book which puts him at 22 book sales a day with a month long prediction of 316 if it continues, though sales may spike the drop given that it’s the first day.

          This is not surprising, given that for weeks now, on his blog, Twitter, and Facebook, he has been requesting that all of his friends wait until today to buy his book and do a release-day book bomb, so that the Amazon ranking will briefly get high enough that he can screenshot it and have something to brag about. It will be interesting to compare today’s ranking to the ranking a week from now.

          Liked by 1 person

      • A lot of sales on release day, preferably to people with similar tastes to prime the also-boughts, also push the Amazon algorithms, which in turn might persuade Amazon to recommend the book to more people. There’s also a hot new release list, which people looking for new books in subgenre X tend to browse.

        Regarding the screenshots of your book in the top ten or even at No. 1 in some subgenre bestseller list or another, I have a collection of those, too. They’re ego-boosters, but depending on the size of the subcategory, they don’t mean all that much. I was number 1 in English language epic fantasy at Amazon France for about five minutes once, all caused by a single sale.

        Liked by 1 person

  7. thephantom182: Sarah Hoyt’s blog post today is quite on point in that regard, what with her experience with MileHi con

    Oh, look. Hoyt is still raving on irrationally about the horrendous audacity of people who judge her by her actual words and deeds, instead of by what she says people should think of her. 🙄

    This seems to be a common delusion amongst Puppies, JDA being the most recent example — that they should have the ability to tell people what people should think of them, rather than judging them by their words and actions.

    Liked by 2 people

  8. JJ: People quoting the Pups’ actual views is so unfair to the Pups. At least according to the Pups. They hate being judged by their actions. And her whiny complaint amounts to “MileHi Con didn’t give me the cherry schedule I wanted to have, so I stopped going”. Such discrimination. Much bias.

    I do notice that she still sees Marxists everywhere. Under her bed, in the hall closet, lurking behind the door, hiding in the shadows of the garage. Everywhere.

    Liked by 3 people

    • Hoyt 6/11/17 ‘Humanity prospers during warm periods, dies off curing cold periods. So the left, who hates people, wants us all dead. Anyone surprised?’

      Hoyt 6/14/17 ‘You see, I don’t judge people by their politics. I CAN’T. ‘

      The cognitive dissonance is performance art.

      That said I found her write faster advice to be pretty good. I always feel like if she wasn’t making writing so political I’d like her 😉

      Like

      • Matt: The problem is, it seems that she writes so fast that she doesn’t stop to think about what she has written, or make it even close to coherent.

        Liked by 2 people

    • Puppies would be happier if they saw decent shrinks to get over their paranoid delusions, cognitive dissonance, and rage issues. Think how much more time they’d have for actual WRITING if they didn’t have to spend so much time and energy being angry and posting screeds to the internet. I see TV ads for some dial a shrink service all the time, so they wouldn’t even have to let anyone know they were going. I know asking for help isn’t Manly and all, but geez.

      Maybe they could start small, do a little meditation at home.

      I spend a fair amount of time in Berkeley, walking distance from campus, and don’t even see any Marxists. Lefties, sure, but not Marxists. Hoyt would probably get the vapors just being among the yuppies in Whole Foods there, what with half the parking lot being Priuses. Priuseseses. Prii. Toyota Hybrid cars.

      Liked by 1 person

    • The sheer entitlement of “The con didn’t give me the panels I wanted or gave me panels at inconvenient times. Wah, they hate me because of my politics” is mindboggling. And if they’re always acting that entitled, I’m not surprised that cons want nothing to do with them.

      Liked by 1 person

      • IKR? Cons aren’t going to put up with anyone who’s that entitled, regardless of their politics. But again, Puppies are incapable of taking responsibility for their own actions, so they have to look for some other factor.

        Cons don’t hate you over politics unless it’s out on the violent edge. They do hate pains in the ass. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

        Liked by 2 people

    • Mike’s had problems with his web hosting before, probably again. It’s a hassle to move a big website to new hosting, but maybe he should.

      I kinda miss the time machine date stamp changing, though. That was fun. Never seen that bug anywhere else.

      Like

  12. Hoyt 6/11/17 ‘Humanity prospers during warm periods, dies off curing cold periods

    Great Cthulhu, the cognitive dissonance.

    Does Hoyt want climate change to accelerate to the point where large stretches of the planet (such as the American Southwest, where I live) are so hot as to be uninhabitable? Humanity is sure going to “prosper” then.

    And File 770’s still down. 😦

    Liked by 1 person

    • Doesn’t she live in Colorado, which presumably would also be affected? Plus, some of her family still lives in Portugal and would therefore be at risk both of floods and extensive heat.

      But maybe she’s looking forward to Alaska prospering and Greenland to become green again.

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      • Yeah, she won’t drown, but the droughts and wildfires (with occasional flash floods) would absolutely wipe her out. Increasing heat would lead to more lightning and tornadoes. Oh, and there’ll be more diseases.

        She’s not old enough to know about how the whole area suffered heavy damage in 1965 from a big flood. I remember it; we lived on pretty high ground but our full basement was underwater — Dad didn’t get home till late because work was flooding, and work had a bunch of Army equipment. Two YEARS worth of rain fell in two days. About $600 million damage in 1965 money, which is (calculates) $46 Billion today. Yep, that benefits humanity by a lot!

        We’ll be so lucky after the surviving few of us are clustered near the poles without the infrastructure built up over past centuries! Even in the US, some of the Eastern port cities have 300-400 year old bases. Of course, most of our edible plants have evolved to grow in non-polar seasons so oops.

        But she lives in the Evangelical Mecca of the US (the one city in Colorado where pot’s still illegal), so nobody there thinks global warming is a problem. Used to be such a nice place before it went fundie. Either AGW won’t happen, or God will fix it.

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      • “About $600 million damage in 1965 money, which is (calculates) $46 Billion today. Yep, that benefits humanity by a lot!”

        But think about all the new jobs needed to fix the broken windows! /s

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      • I would be surprised if she were unaware of the 1965 flood, if it happened in the area where she lives, even if it was before her time. Local memories of natural disasters tend to be long, so even those who weren’t around to experience them first hand will be aware of what happened. Here in North Germany, the North Sea storm surges of 1953 and 1962, which both killed hundreds of people, are still lingering in local memory, as does the cyclone Quimburga in 1972. All of these events happened before I was born – my Mom was pregnant with me and home alone, when Quimburga hit – and yet I’ve heard plenty of stories and am well aware of what happened.

        It’s not just Germany either. When we spent a year on the Mississippi gulf coast, the locals were still talking about hurricane Camille which happened (I had to look that up) in 1969.

        So if Sarah Hoyt talks to her neighbours at all, she will be aware of that flood.

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      • That’s a big “if”, Cora. Especially if her neighbors are also new. And especially if she thinks “oh, that was so long ago it’ll never happen again!” (Which it did in 2013, over a slightly smaller area) or “see, it happens all the time!”

        There’s been a huge turnover of population in that area, so I’d bet a lot of people don’t know.

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      • Regarding local memories of disasters… Hurricane Hazel hit Toronto in 1954. It’s basically the ONLY hurricane to have hit Toronto in the last hundred years. It was the most lethal Canadian natural disaster in recorded history with 81 deaths, most of them along flood plains. Thousands of people lost their homes, particularly in the floodplains along the Humber River valley.

        By 1957, an agency was formed (now called the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority) with the authority to purchase and expropriate lands to prevent anybody else from rebuilding in those floodplains (which several developers had already tried to do). Much of the floodplain along the Humber is now parkland, many of the parks actually deliberately dug down to below the river banks so that if the river floods again, the parks will suck up a lot of the extra water before it hits anything else.

        Even with the high population turnover Toronto gets, this is quite well remembered.

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  13. […] to harass them, and gaslights them about it after he’s done it (even when it’s something he openly planned it on Gab, see screencaps here and here). And in his FB comments section the amateur hour was in progress, […]

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  14. I submit that JdA’s behavior the past month has vindicated Baycon for not inviting him this year. Nor any future years.

    I wonder if he was this much of a pain in the ass last year at the con? I dunno, nobody I talked to (at parties, in line for the masquerade, etc. — a good cross-section) even remembered him being at the con in 2016. At a local con where there’s a steady core of the same people attending year after year, the fact that nobody’d heard of him till he started whining on FB means he certainly didn’t make an impression one way or the other. Heck, half the people wearing ribbons had never heard about him at all! It was just a free ribbon!

    Which probably hurt his fee-fees a LOT; Puppies would rather be hated than unknown. Such fragile snowflakes. Sad!

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  15. A bit OT, but I just wandered through the comment section of Larry’s rant from a few days ago (if I read it once it’s finished then I won’t be tempted to jump in….) and I found our dear old friend Dave Freer writing “Sea-lioning: The one skill you have in which only your chum Mark exceeds you.”
    I guess it’s nice to be so memorable?

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  16. As a follow up I was interested to see the effectiveness of a marketing plan that mostly seemed to consist of saying he was going to troll people, doing so through constant messaging, misrepresenting their responses, then sulking that people were mean to him about his trolling. Does it pay off?

    Day one the ebook managed to reach a sales rank in the 2,000 with him recording a moment when it reached 2,531. That’s a pretty good first day number for an indie book! Using tkcpublishings sales rank calculator that would put the one day sales at about 85 copies. Since then the rank has trended downwards as other books sell, around midweek it was at around 15,000, then a copy must’ve sold as it went to 12k, and now rests in the twenty thousands. Other factors to take into consideration is that Steampunk is a niche genre, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O in the same genre released 3 days before by a popular author and some popular books within the genre like The Bullet Catchers Daughter and Breath of Earth appear to have dropped price to $1.99. The Kindle book appears to be selling at a significantly higher rate than the physical copy.

    To try and judge the impact I used my own experience as a baseline where I did not do any advanced marketing and mostly dropped my book out there. I like writing, and putting together the editing and cover art was a lot of work but still fun, but marketing isn’t my thing. My physical book was far higher than the digital one as it was friends, family, co-workers who wanted one of those. Digital sales were pretty good for a two days and also dropped off. Assuming the 85 number above is correct, and to be generous let’s go with 120 for additional sales since day one and physical copies together the net gain from zero marketing to alt-marketing looks like 40 books. If so and those additional 40 were all ebooks at 70% royalties the time and effort spent appears worth $140.

    Maybe it’ll have legs or some more payoff down the road like a book bomb, though it’ll be hard to tell which are rage purchases to ‘stick it to those guys’ from purchases related to the any merits of the work itself as time goes on. Which if I was the author I’d feel sort of sad about since I’d imagine if he’s proud of it would mostly want the latter and not the former.

    All in all not the most effective marketing strategy and probably not going to get a panel for Harassment and Martyrdom: Boosting Your Day One Sales.

    But looking at other books and trying to judge what they had in common leads me to believe a much more effective sales strategy is putting abs on the cover. The head or rest of the body isn’t as important, just a torso and arms with a six pack and maybe a tattoo on the shoulder superimposed over a generic background. I haven’t done enough research to fully quantify the sales effectiveness per ab or anything, but it looks like trolling for sales is not nearly as effective as doing some sit ups (or knowing someone who does or buying beefcake stock art).

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