Camestros Felapton

FELAPTONL

Pure Scuttlebutt

Feel free to ignore the following as it involves Twitter and two people who are not known for accurate recall of past events and who most readers here have issues with. Specifically, it is a Twitter thread involving Larry Correia and Jon Del Arroz. As it is likely to disappear at some point other, it is being preserved below for the sake of Puppyology.

On Twitter Larry Correia posted a lengthy comment about one of his pet peeves: big right wing pundits complain about supposed left wing control of popular culture but never (or rarely) promote right wing creators like Larry. That bit isn’t very interesting. Brad Torgersen replies to Larry basically agreeing. Jon Del Arroz then replies to Brad… https://twitter.com/monsterhunter45/status/1706321425865359533

Larry Correia @monsterhunter45
Read this. He is absolutely right. This is something I’ve been talking about for years.
I’ve done what I can to promote a lot of other other-than-lefty authors but my reach is nothing compared to the big RW pundits. There’s a couple of great exceptions, but most of the RW… Show more

Brad R. Torgersen @BradRTorgersen
Outrage farming. Blackpill farming. Redpill farming.I think most of them start out on the right path, but the inexorable “gravitational pull” of clicks, likes, and shares, drags them into the dark.

Jon Del Arroz @jondelarroz
I know it. I remember when you got dragged into the dark by being “faux” outraged at me when the corporate cancel brigade came for me too. Nevertheless, I persisted and won without the approval of big publishing.

A different person asks for the backstory on what JDA is saying. This spawns two different threads: one from Larry and one from Jon. They both pay for Twitter, so their comments are not the normal pithy style of Twitter.


Larry Correia @monsterhunter45
Jon is a sociopathic grifter who goes through life trying to insert himself into other peoples’ troubles to try and score clout for himself. He starts shit for others and then cries how he’s a victim. When you take exception to him fucking people over for clout he will say everybody but him is a secret leftist sell out and you just hate him because he’s “Christian”. Do not trust him. He’s fucking cancer.

Larry Correia @monsterhunter45
Seriously. I can’t accentuate this enough. Trust him at your own peril. That dude is the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Larry Correia@monsterhunter45
Oh I’ve been less vague before. I’ve had it out with him in public a few times before I got sick of his tired act. I rarely talk about that shithead much because it just encourages more of his endless bullshit victim act trying to milk other authors for clout. But I’m happy to go specific.

All he does is jump on band wagons looking for an angle to make it about himself. If he sees an opportunity to start trouble for other authors and stir up shit, then he’ll do it, as long as he thinks he can find some way to get more clout off of it. No matter what trouble that causes for the other author, JDA don’t care. Because he’s a grifter.

When Baen got attacked by a bunch of SJWs trying to get our website taken off the internet (which would have cost all their authors a ton of money) he inserted himself into that and tried to make it all about him. There’s a reason nobody at that publishing house can stand him, though he always tries to blame it on me “turning them against him”.

For the early part, I met JDA because when he got black balled from game writing, a friend of mine in that industry sent him my way to see if I could help him out because I’d been through all that. I did. That friend has since apologized to me a lot for this because he didn’t realize what an actual fucking psycho JDA is.

I gave him a promotional boost, as I do with a lot of people. He took that as an invitation to become a coat riding parasite on my fan pages. I rapidly got tired of his perpetual victim schtick and trying to milk other author’s fans for money and clout.

Since JDA is a profoundly disingenuous liar I’m assuming he’s already claimed I booted his parasite ass off my fan page merely because he made some innocent “pro-Larry” meme. (don’t know, I’ve got him blocked, but he works off the same perpetual victim script every time).

Full backstory, the meme was taking a picture of me grinning with my comp shotgun, superimposed over the WorldCon people, like I was about to go all school shooter on them. Now, keep in mind what I used to do for a living (and my what my non-fiction book is about) so I said, get that fucking bullshit off my page. (I didn’t care what he did elsewhere, but I’m not leaving that shit in my living room). Then JDA got all bitchy entitled, I’m the Leading Hispanic blah blah blah, everybody is out to get me, you just hate me because I’m Christian script, and I said fuck you, go annoy somebody else’s fans. Boot.

He’s been super butt hurt ever since.

He’s also got a hate boner for my publisher, because they rejected him (they reject most people). But of course in JDA’s mind that’s because of some secret plot for them to be accepted by the left… Which is just fucking idiotic to everybody who actually pays attention.

There’s plenty more, and you can get other stories from lots of other authors who’ve dealt with this vile fucker. If he’s trying to be your friend, it’s because he’s looking for an angle for himself. Beware.

Meanwhile, JDA has his own version of the conflict.

Jon Del Arroz @jondelarroz
Larry canceled me because I made a meme in 2019 which was funny (and pro-Larry) but he was scared we’d “prove the sjws we are unhinged!” Literally was just a meme in a facebook group and no one would have cared. He riled up Brad and other Baen authors to cancel me over it so they could show who the “proper conservatives” were vs. the “bad conservatives. It’s basically I’m Trump and they’re corporate-approved Jeb!

Jon Del Arroz @jondelarroz
They’ll eventually apologize as my platform keeps growing. I’ll forgive them but it sucks they acted like that.

Jon Del Arroz @jondelarroz
No, I was pro sad puppies. Baen tried to sweep it under the rug and get back in with the establishment and distance from all that and so their bigger authors tried to dial back the culture war stuff for a bit. It was really stupid. I tried to even send Larry an apology to say hey didn’t mean to upset you I thought it was just a funny meme but he went ballistic. Cost me a lot of facebook followers at the time but ended up not mattering. He’s got anger issues and the baen people all pretty much ride his coat tails so they have no followings and just do what he says when he wants a mob.

Jon Del Arroz @jondelarroz
Funny part is years later Sarah and Brad who helped with canceling me are hardly in the business anymore as Baen dropped them from novels. That clout did nothing for them.

camestrosfelapton

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138 responses to “Pure Scuttlebutt”

  2. In today’s example of “a broken clock is right twice a day”, I believe Larry’s version of events here.

    But in all of this, it’s a great example of the lesser-used aphorism: The enemy of my enemy is also terrible, so let’s let them fight each other.

    Liked by 7 people

    • Well except for the part where he claims a bunch of “SJWs” tried to get Baen’s website taken off the internet, and that JDA was “black-balled” from game writing.

      Like most of Larry’s whines on topics of that nature, his version bears no actual resemblance to reality.

      In the case of whether Larry of JDA is lying here, my guess would be that both versions are probably mostly fabrications, since lying is the MO of both of them.

      Liked by 4 people

      • Yes, one of the diseases of the internet is to suppose the truth must be somewhere in the middle, rather than completely missing from the exchange.

        Liked by 5 people

        • I’d say that Larry’s account bears at least some tangential resemblance to the truth, while Jon’s is more or less entirely fabricated.

          Liked by 3 people

          • Larry’s dates are all wrong though. JDA is saying it was something like 2018 or 19 when they fell out but Larry is saying 2015/16 which is absurd. That’s like saying the Patrick Troughton Doctor fought the Sontarans – completely wrong seasons of the show!

            Liked by 3 people

            • Dr. Who is a wonderful metaphor (for the lack of a better word) here. Everything can be retconned and so everything will be retconned if desired.

              And you’re right that Larry can’t be trusted either just because he has the ability to sound plausible.

              I too think that we can trust Larry’s description of Jon’s character and vice versa but that’s as much news as “Water remains wet.”

              Liked by 3 people

            • Emmmmm, the Second Doctor *did* fight the Sontarans, in conjunction with the Sixth, in ‘The Two Doctors’ of 1985.
              A nitpick perhaps

              Liked by 3 people

        • Larry occasionally gets things right. He called Trump “a lying huckster democrat for some magic beans” and a “shit bird” (facts that I’m sure JDA has tucked away when he needs Larry purged).

          Liked by 1 person

        • Honestly, I’d say while both are bullshitting on the events, their respective impressions on each other are dead on–Larry sees JDA as a toxic drama-seeker, JDA sees Larry as a disingenuous bastard, and both declare the other can’t be trusted.

          Liked by 5 people

          • I recently saw the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country, about the rise and fall of the Rajneeshpuram commune in Oregon. At one point there’s a major split in leadership between the guru and his long-time second-in-command; she’s had to flee after committing outlandish crimes that he may or may not have authorized. She and her followers claim that he’s a con artist who’s hanging them out to dry and will abandon everyone else too; his followers claim that she’s a power-mad dangerous authoritarian. Both sides also complain that the federal government is out to get them. All of those appear to be 100% correct, and everyone concerned is using those correct observations to completely ignore what they themselves are doing. It’s quite something.

            Liked by 2 people

  4. I hate agreeing with Larry on anything, but he’s right about JDA.

    The one time I saw him, he was acting like a complete bitch throwing a hissy fit. Like a teenage girl. I have heard the stories from people who’d interacted with him IRL, and my opinion plummeted further.

    So Larry, if you’re reading, this SJW agrees with your assessment of JDA. And you probably didn’t even have to deal with him in person.

    Would anyone be surprised if he had gotten blackballed from game writing?

    Anyway, he doesn’t have a larger platform than Larry, but he’ll be fine, he’s a trust fund baby living in a $2M house and working for a giant rentier company. But he’s still grifting. Hmmm, who does that remind me of…?

    Liked by 4 people

      • Sorry. I was one, too.

        I meant it as an insult, though, since he’s all invested in being a macho man.

        How about “like a wannabe ‘influencer’ who’s yelling DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?” That type knows no boundary of age or gender.

        Liked by 1 person

        • Yeah, I understand. I won’t read you the riot act. It’s just after 4+ years of Trump, holding teenage girls as the standard for hissy fits seems like an insult to the girls.

          Liked by 2 people

          • I shall ponder alternative ways to express that.

            But in this case, I picked the wording he’d most hate. I shall continue to use this for MAGAts and other fascist MRA types.

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      • Once upon a time in a workplace somewhere…

        Guy 1, about another man not there present: Jeez, he’s such a GIRL.

        Me, under my breath: What’s wrong with being a girl?

        Guy 2: Yeah! Calling HIM a girl is an insult to GIRLS.

        Liked by 2 people

  5. “He starts shit for others and then cries how he’s a victim. When you take exception to him fucking people over for clout he will say everybody but him is a secret leftist sell out and you just hate him because he’s ‘Christian’. Do not trust him”

    But Larry, that’s just what right-wing grievance culture is.

    Liked by 5 people

  8. JDA is the Westboro Baptist Church of right wing grievance culture, whereas Correia is the Family Research Council. That’s probably giving Correia way too much credit regarding reach and money, but JDA is definitely all about ringing up controversy and then gaining whatever legal recourse he can squeeze from the consequences. JDA is by far the more dangerous of the two, IMO. Both have knee-jerk, stupid political and cultural takes, but JDA has no ethics, morals, or conscience and his entire project is simply reaping the benefits of the discord he sows.

    Liked by 6 people

  9. Remember way back when JDA first came to folk’s attention as a massive grievance baby how he claimed he wasn’t actually a conservative author? Good times. Now he’s annoyed that other conservative authors & creators aren’t singing his praises as a fellow conservative.

    Like Beale, JDA is well off enough and isn’t that much after money but instead status & reinforcement of his sense of self. He harassed every woman author who he felt didn’t sufficiently kowtow to him and when people then didn’t want to deal with and work with him, in multiple mediums, he declared he was at war with major SFF conventions and went around making more threats. That made him a RW folk hero for half a sec, which he used to keep trying to attach himself to various SFF right wingers, in particular the Puppies.

    I guess he assumed doing that would get him in with Baen since other publishers weren’t enthusiastic and when it didn’t and the Sad Puppies rejected his attempt to declare himself part of their professional victim gang, he went to go pal around with someone more extreme — Beale — who wanted to get in on the Comicsgate fun. JDA, working on building his comics cred, tried to broker between Beale and Ethan Van Scriver, the Beale of Comicsgate grifting. But Beale tried to copyright the term Comicsgate, pissing off Van Scriver, who also wasn’t happy with JDA about it. JDA also seems to have dabbled in the You Tube ecosphere, and with MAGA figures and who knows what else.

    I hadn’t heard JDA’s name for awhile though, but very recently, he apparently made nasty jokes about & posted the photo of the women working in comics whose celebratory milkshake photo made them the targets of the original Comicsgate trolls. He was clearly trying to stir up Comicsgate attention/controversy towards himself as a Comicsgater. So presumably the battling with LC is also part of a larger attempt to put a controversy spotlight on himself and try to get himself some more status from it.

    Like Van Scriver, LC doesn’t much like someone trying to climb on his band wagon he built with his own two hands and claim to be the more justified RW grievance baby. And it gives him content to spar with JDA and air even more grievances. But it is again truly weird to hear these RW Baen authors talk about Baen like it’s their territory, their church — their website, etc. The conspiracy theories LC likes to spin are truly becoming even more tortured.

    Liked by 6 people

    • Minor note: there’s one R in “van Sciver”… I only bother mentioning this because that’s also the last name of his brother Noah, who is an excellent cartoonist and a good guy. I honestly wish Ethan would drop it and name himself something ridiculous like Beale did.

      Liked by 3 people

      • I would apologize to EVS, but I don’t care. He’s a horrible person and a raging bigot. However, I will apologize to his brother Noah for the misspelling. The brother Ethan is mostly referred to as EVS online so frankly I forgot how to spell it, lol. I usually try to check those things, but didn’t bother this time.

        Liked by 2 people

        • Not a big deal, was just for future reference. NVS is currently doing a very funny childhood memoir comic in which every teacher misspells or mispronounces his name in a different way. On a more serious note, his big dramatized-history comic book Joseph Smith and the Mormons is wonderfful.

          Liked by 1 person

    • Just wanted to leave a comment in appreciation of Kat Goodwin’s always-illuminating commentary. Even when I am so familiar with a subject that I am bone tired thinking about it, Goodwin’s comments serve as critical (as in critique) reminders.

      Liked by 7 people

      • Thank you, I’ve been trained career-wise to summarize things and keep track of details & timelines. It’s a big part of editing. But the material I get comes from people like Camestros, File 770 and people on the frontlines of these situations who do the hard documentation work. I just have to read and remember it — or look it up and double-check it if I’m not sure or don’t remember specific details. The Net is our most amazing resource if you know how to use it properly. And these autocrats in SFFH do cheese me off.

        As some of you know, in Comicsgate, a cosplaying, forensic tax accountant woman in Texas who goes by Renfamous on social media decided to help, like many others, draw troll fire away from the women in comics and others being targeted by Comicsgate harassers and direct it towards herself. She’d grown up in a conservative family and had been a bigoted Young Republican in her youth, then got into cosplay, met real gay people, etc. She’s one of the ones who got out. (Or as people like LC and JDA would say, was successfully “indoctrinated” to see other people as equal human beings.)

        So she knew exactly how to handle them as she’d been them. She became the subject of countless conspiracy theories and YouTube grifting videos in Comicsgate. It really is a social study of human behavior. And her Twitter feed offered lots of info and links. JDA and Beale were extremely late to the party, but since they got into a big feud with the original Comicsgaters who were still grifting off it, they did get some afterparty attention.

        Liked by 3 people

    • I do give Larry credit for not being a trust fund nepo baby. I mean, running his gun store was a business, and people still buy his stuff. But I doubt LC was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and got a free ride to one of the best colleges in the US.

      They both still suck, but Larry is a popular writer in his own genre for many years, with a publishing contract, whereas JDA never was and never will be.

      Liked by 2 people

    • I mean, they can easily be expelled from their territory or excommunicated by their church — look at Sarah and Bwaddles.

      LC sells enough to be guaranteed a place, but that could change on Toni’s whim in a second. She’s the dictator and they’re only the useful idiots.

      Like

  10. My one in-person sighting of del Arroz was a bit odd, in that it was literally the only time I saw any communication from him that wasn’t fantastically aggressive and grandiose. It was at FOGcon in 2018, and he’d just shown up and gotten the stink-eye from some people who had heard about his behavior at Worldcon and wanted, understandably, to know if he was going to start broadcasting video or pull some similar stunt. I had heard about that too, but when this excitable guy came up and started talking to my friend who was one of the organizers, I didn’t twig that that’s who it was… since the way the guy was describing his situation was so circuitous. But he did seem to kind of get that he might be in trouble and that it was in his interest to come across as a meek guy who never had any ill will toward anyone. My friend very, very, very, very, very calmly and politely communicated that sometimes one’s behavior, like broadcasting video of people who didn’t ask to be filmed, could cause concern in people who might not necessarily understand one’s intentions, and then when other people hear that that’s how one behaves, they may suspect that one intends to behave that way here too, so it would help if one made it very clear that one is not going to, and then we won’t have a problem. The guy reacted as if he’d just heard that everyone there loved him and it was just an innocent misunderstanding, when really he’d been told that the reaction he got was his fault and that he was on thin ice. His happiness in that moment seemed sincere and he thanked my friend and went on his way, and then I found out who he was and I was like OHHHH IT’S THAT GUY.

    The follow-up was that he wrote a long thing about how the FOGcon organizers were the only good guys who understood him, not like all those other terrible cons… which of course prompted FOGcon to issue a statement that was basically “Er, just because we didn’t kick a person out on one occasion doesn’t mean we’re endorsing them in any way or criticizing any other con’s decision to kick them out or promising never to kick them out in the future based on them starting shit somewhere else.”

    Liked by 4 people

    • The Puppies egged him on initially, then he made the public threat to secretly & illegally tape people at WorldCon in San Jose & that along with his harassment of women authors got him disinvited from WorldCon as a danger, as we know. He went to war with them & I think he thought all the RW folk were going to keep backing him up & he’d be one of their big leaders.

      Instead, he kept pissing them off, throwing fits and found that almost every other SFF convention wanted nothing to do with someone who would likely cause damage and then sue them. So likely in 2018 he was still trying to build a case that he was a reasonable lamb who had been unfairly victimized by WorldCon. Didn’t much work for him, as far as I’m aware.

      Liked by 3 people

      • Yeah— I misspoke by saying “his behavior at Worldcon”, it was about what he threatened he would do there. My point was only that even though he wanted to portray himself as a reasonable lamb, his general behavior almost all the time was wildly volatile and vindictive… whereas the brief conversation I witnessed seemed like a rare instance of him managing to really behave meekly, and he apparently managed to keep his behavior under control for however long he was there even though I’m sure he continued to get dirty looks, and then to stay cool long enough to write a relatively friendly (if still very dishonest) piece about it. I was just surprised that he was even capable of that. Of course the whole idea that that would prove something bad about Worldcon made no sense, since FOGcon only let him stay after he promised not to pull any shit like what Worldcon had reacted to. But he’s not about making sense.

        Liked by 2 people

        • When he went to picket and essentially force his way in to the San Jose WorldCon, there was another RW activist political protest going on near WorldCon. much more violent people, & JDA used that to get media attention for himself, as if it was a joint protest against what they now pretend is scary wokeness. It caused a lot of problems for WorldCon for the event, even before the lawsuit. That kind of blew his I was just joking/misunderstood/being unfairly condemned defense out of the water. He was obviously a liability for conventions.

          He pretty much seems to have just gone full radical right wing after he filed the lawsuit. All his claims got thrown out of court except the claim they’d defamed him by supposedly calling him a racist, which was allowed to go to trial. But WorldCon had already sunk a ton of legal expense money into dealing with the nuisance lawsuit and took lawyers’ advice to settle rather than pay tons more on court fees.

          By that point the majority of SFF folk wanted nothing to do with JDA, not just because of his video threat and WorldCon lawsuit but because he kept harassing prominent people in the field, especially women authors. He learned freedom of association the hard way. But there are always cracks in the rightosphere you can find in the multiple storytelling mediums. Not sure how picking another fight with LC helps him out though.

          Liked by 2 people

          • I mean, everyone, left right and center, hates JDA so continuing to be such a mega-asshole is counterproductive to him becoming “Prominent Local Author”. And, yes, I have those ribbons on my badge.

            Also I know I’ve told the story of his “leading Hispanic author” bullshit to “James SA Corey” and Ty looking rightly offended and saying “I’M Hispanic”. Methinks Ty is a tad more prominent. Both his mom and grandmother were migrant farm workers, which is about as Hispanic as you get in the US. No Cadillacs for them.

            (Both halves of “Jimmy” are cool and funny.)

            Liked by 2 people

          • Worldcon had excellent legal representation.

            When my cat needed an operation and I asked Filers to help (which they did, because F770 loves credentials), JDA had the extreme gall to send a donation, in low 3 figures.

            I rejected it and sent a note back that politely said “Fuckface, you’re suing a shitload of my long-time friends, over something illegal you threatened to do, and so doesn’t this look like bribery that your shitty lawyer ought to tell you is a bad idea?”

            My quote there is what I thought, not what I typed.

            And I fwd the exchange to the concom. JDA did not reply.

            Liked by 1 person

          • Also, Kat, correction:

            He didn’t even show up for his own damn protest. That weekend he was, as is documented by himself, sailing on a yacht.

            Yes, yacht sailing, truly the pastime of the poor and downtrodden who are discriminated against.

            The cops looked super-unthrilled to be policing the much smaller rally at the convention center. I saw one compliment a really good cosplayer, though.

            Liked by 2 people

            • Supposedly, he couldn’t attend his own protest, because his kid was sick due to wildfire smoke. Which I would have sympathy for, except that he then left his sick kid to go sailing.

              Liked by 1 person

            • As I remember it, he was going to go but then backed out. I suspect he was scared of being arrested if he tried to bust into the con. Then he had the fake excuse about his son. But he tried to tie in his situation to the RW grifters who were doing the Patriot Rally against supposed left wing pedophiles in science fiction & another RW political, non-SF protest going on in the same area. Got him some media attention when he might have otherwise been unnoticed.

              Liked by 1 person

              • It was all smack in the middle of downtown on a summer weekend — of course there would be protests of various sorts!

                We bought quite a few things from the paleteros.

                Liked by 1 person

    • IIRC, what I’ve read of JDA’s behavior is that in person he seems fairly innocuous and that his worst behavior is online.
      Oddly, much the same is said of Larry also – one more thing they have in common. Though at least Correia hasn’t strayed over the ‘legally actionable’ line.

      Liked by 1 person

  11. Hi Cam – I have a comment in the moderation queue, which I suspect might be because I wrote someone’s name out in full that you might have put on a “potential subject of iffy comments” list…

    Like

        • I thought that went without saying.

          Although many authors spend a lot of time online. They just somehow manage not to be fascist, paranoid, hateful/hating conspiracy nuts &c

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          • Hoyt being the remarkable person she is didn’t prevent her from getting the chance to have her “why hairy-legged peen-haters dislike Heinlein, the greatest author in the history of the universe” on tor dot com a decade ago.

            Liked by 2 people

            • Remember how the year she was supposed to be in charge of the Sad Pups list, all of a sudden Brad, Larry, and the rest dropped all mention of it into the memory hole?

              Which makes it even stupider than she was carrying water for them. Talk about a useful idiot. You can’t be respected even when you’re “one of the good ones” toeing the party line. They’ll always turn on you.

              (At least they didn’t kill her like Herman Cain.)

              Like

            • I like how the commentators said they’d have enjoyed having the real discussion about actual feminists, as opposed to all the imaginary straw (wo)men she mistook for real human beings.

              Plus the uncomfortable and way too extended Electra complex anecdote in her first essay on the topic. Which is All About Her, not Heinlein. Skeevy and should have been cut down to a sentence or two rather than taking up so much of that piece. Seeing her dad naked made her realize he wasn’t a god. Yeah, honey, at the same age I knew mine wasn’t, and it didn’t even take nudity.

              Also, the MIGHTY EVIL SJW TOR has left those essays up even after she lied about and slandered/libeled them. Oh, no, they didn’t send her to any camps!

              What’s she gotta do to get canceled? Other than be increasingly unpleasant and unhinged on line (thus annoying all non-paranoids). Oh, and her greatest sin, being a woman in a Puppy group.

              Tor’s canceled her infinitely less than Baen and other RWNJs have!

              PS: I don’t remember how far down the Hugo voting that bio finished, and don’t care enough to look it up.

              Liked by 1 person

      • One of his books is described like this:

        “Learn how a gaggle of Fanatics poisoned the well of discourse and imagination by turning storytelling into mechanical formulas with rules and boundaries that never existed before. Who gave them this power, and how much of their garbage still taints discourse and the industry today? In The Last Fanatics, all will be laid bare.”

        I conclude that J. D. is a firm leftist, disgusted by the Puppies and determined to expose their poor writing and rampant immorality. Good for him. With J. D. and Larry exposing Jon, and Jon and J. D. exposing Larry (and Larry and Jon exposing J. D. soon, I expect), we’ll soon see the Puppoplane (spheres are for SJWs) rolled up and thrown away.

        Liked by 1 person

      • J.D. Cowan is one ot the Pulp Revolution types. Hence Jeffro Johnson wrote a foreword for his book. Cowan writes long rambling blogposts at a place called Between the Wasteland and the Sky about how everything was better before 1997. Mostly likely, the reason for this is that Cowan was approx. 14 in 1997 and everything was fresh and new and amazing.

        Liked by 2 people

              • The odd thing is that there isn’t anyhting special about 1997. Yes, there were some good movies, TV shows and songs that year, but there were also a lot of forgettable ones. It’s not worse or better than other years with regard to culture.

                However, if you look up Brian’s or J.D.’s birth date, 1997 was probably the year when they were 12 or 14 or 15 and everything was still shiny and new and never seen before. Being permanently influenced by and attached to the pop culture of your teenage years is normal. Thinking that nothing good ever came afterwards is not normal

                Besides, the peak of western culture was obviously the period between 1983 and 1989. 😉

                Liked by 4 people

                • I had similar feelings about George RR Martin’s Armageddon Rag, a dull, protracted whine about how everything post-1960s has been the second fall of man and why does every piece of music since 1969 suck so bad?

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                    • I don’t remember that but I wound up skimming a lot of the book.
                      It was also a fantasy with almost no fantasy element and that’s guaranteed to sour me on a book.

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                  • Even the Stones are putting out an all-new album next month. The single sounds like them, but with different background, production, and the video is definitely using today’s tech.

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                  • GRRM is lightyears more talented than Brian Niemeier, though. And I grew up with a steady background drumbeat of “The 1960s were the apex of popular culture and everything since has been inferior” (many of my teachers as well as my parents and aunts, uncles, etc… were of the 1960s generation) that it didn’t bother me in Armageddon Rag.

                    Liked by 1 person

                    • It might have worked better if I read it in the early 1980s, when it came out, instead of years late (though a friend who’s more musically knowledgeable than me said he’d done that and completely disagreed with Martin’s musical assessment).
                      Then again, a lot of the book is the protagonist having an early midlife crisis and I hate midlife crisis books.

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                    • I quite like 1960s pop culture – after all, I write for Galactic Journey. That said, you should have seen the grin on my face, when I learned that almost all of the American 1960s bands didn’t actually perform their own songs – that was a group of talented studio musicians called The Wrecking Crew – and were as fake as the monkey. Because my 1968 generation teachers kept telling us that the music of the 1980s was all fake and corporate and the singers couldn’t actually sing and the musicians couldn’t actually play.

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                • The other reason they may have picked 1997 is that it is safely one year after George Martin’s A Game of Thrones was published and is the year that Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published. There is a strain of thought that isn’t even limited to right wing fans that Martin’s series was kind of the last good, big SFF series, the coda of the Silver Age of SFF for those who see the Silver Age as running into the 1990’s rather than ending in the 1980’s.

                  And while it seems weird now that we know about Rowling’s transphobia, at the beginning, the early HP novels caused a growing sensation from 1997-2000 with the publication of Goblet of Fire that helped fuel a rapid expansion of middle grade and YA fiction as readers poured into the children’s section & got a lot more media attention to YA readers. This expansion was seen as particularly catering to girls and being mainly women authors, though neither claim was true.

                  In the early oughts, there was the Perfect Storm of multiple SFFH expansions — HP movies & YA/MG expansion, LOTR movies & another expansion in sec world fantasy, a horror expansion in film and books and a paranormal romance expansion that coincided with an expansion of contemporary/urban fantasy, sometimes cross-sold with horror.

                  Because several women hit it big in YA and contemporary fantasy and because the latter was often confused with paranormal romance and thought to be mainly catering to women readers, the early oughts, when these guys might have been in college, were considered by some to be an invasion of the women. All those teenage girl protagonists in YA & superpowered women and sexy vampires, etc. And BIPOC writers bringing in more non-European mythology & non-white characters started making more headway. SF started its expansion right behind, gaining steam in the late oughts, but of course several SF hits featured things RWingers felt represented the downfall of civilization.

                  Related, the late 1990’s was also when the speculative bubble in comics collapsed & comic companies were struggling to recover, with Marvel nearly going bankrupt in 1996. They also experimented to draw in a greater number of readers, which RWing fans see as the downfall of civilization also.
                  So 1997 they might see as the pivot point between Martin and manly SFF & things like Harry Potter and girly, woke SFF of the 21st century.

                  I’m not saying that they put that much detailed thought into picking the exact year, but in terms of them seeing things as falling apart, they may feel that things went downhill when a lot of products that didn’t appeal to them started showing up and getting a lot more attention, in particular Harry Potter.

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                  • Although the Lost TV series (2004-10) never seemed that girly/woke to me, it was inclusive in cast and aggressively nonlinear in storyline. Additionally, it offered a fair amount of linked content on platforms outside of the weekly TV broadcast, something which hadn’t been common practice before then. All of this may have annoyed viewers of a more traditional mindset. By memory, its demographic skewed young.

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                    • And even us old people who aren’t idiots or assholes liked it too! I am WAY older than Brian et al and Mr. LT is even older, and we never missed it, because it was cool.

                      It did still have White Savior Man (Jack), so it’s not woke from the get-go.

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                    • I grew to hate Lost because so much of the mystery hinged on the cast standing around going “Wow, that’s weird.” and never attempting to figure things out. This may reflect that the network thought the show was doing well, why risk solving mysteries and changing the status quo, but it still sucked.

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                    • Yeah, I had the same problem. With nothing but time on their hands, it’s hard to believe that the Losties wouldn’t have investigated and solved some of the mysteries (and shared their personal stories in great detail) out of sheer boredom

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                    • Lost was a bona fide cultural phenomenon which held out great initial promise, but I felt it went downhill quickly. I gave up fairly early in the piece because the logical inconsistencies and deliberate obfuscation were becoming annoying. Lindelof and Cuse were afterwards said to be autocratic bosses in charge of a hostile work environment. They claim not to remember the specifics, but it seems as if that was the water they swam in.

                      https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/05/lost-tv-show-culture

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                    • I gave up on Lost early on, halfway through season 2, when the Losties started torturing someone, which was a dealbreaker for me.

                      Not surprised about the hostile work environment sadly. I never liked how Lost treated its characters of colour, though it had more than many other shows of that era.

                      And Jack was the least interesting person on that plane, no matter how much the producers tried to ram him down our throats.

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                    • Interestingly enough, the final episodes of Lost and the vastly underrated Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes aired on the same night and had the same ending

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                    • We tried watching Ashes to Ashes, but gave up after about 2 episodes. It just didn’t grab us like LoM. Not enough John Simm, even with The Guv. Although I think we watched the last one.

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                    • I’m not a huge fan of that twist ending (which isn’t even all that innovative nor was it when Lost and Ashes to Ashes ended), but Ashes to Ashes handled it better.

                      Regarding Ashes to Ashes, I loved the chemistry between Philip Glenister and Keeley Hawes. Though it’s funny that they just couldn’t recreate 1980s big haristyles with 200s hair styling products and by the third season just gave up trying to give Keeley Hawes a 1980s hairstyle.

                      Most 1980s set films and TV shows run into the hair problem, because 1980s hair products contained a lot of harmful subtances that have been banned and you cannot easily recreate those 1980s styles with modern products.

                      I still wonder how Mad Men achieved the even more difficult to recreate 1960s beehives, but I think they just used wigs.

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                    • Yeah, Lost was apparently a very toxic show to work on. It’s a pretty typical example of people coming up with a great premise, having a basic plan for the premise in the 1st season, casting it well, having it turn into a hit and then having no clue where to go with it from there. Lost needed to be an all planned out storyline over a number of seasons, like Babylon 5 or the first five seasons of Supernatural.

                      Instead, it was like what happened with Heroes which debuted two years later — they just kept making things up to add to Season 2, making it too complicated, contradicting stuff they did before and trapped themselves into a fantasy explanation to the premise when the majority of the fandom was looking for a SF one. They got Lost.

                      Not that plans are always good things to stick to. I loved every bit of How I Met Your Mother up until the very end when the show’s creators stuck with the “edgy” original ending they thought would be cool back in their younger post-college years. But that ending didn’t fit the show anymore, where they’d ended up and they should have rejiggered it. But because they did originally have things planned out, they could put a lot of running gags and connected clues into the show for the premise. Lost would do that too but then it went nowhere with most of those because they hadn’t figured out an ending.

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                  • It was around this time I read an argument in a science fiction anthology that fantasy was inherently girly because it’s all princesses and unicorns and soft, pastel stuff with none of that icky tech and hard science that chicks aren’t into.
                    I rolled my eyes. Then rolled them again because I remember when most fantasy was supposedly macho Conan-knockoff stuff that only appealed to insecure teenage boys.

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                  • In the US, Bill Clinton also got re-elected President in late 1996, so a lot of USians of certain political philosophies see that as a downhill point that messed things up for them despite Gingrich, Bush & Trump later on. 1996 was also when Murdoch launched Fox in the U.S. & the relentless pounding of “the U.S. has fallen apart” message kicked into overdrive. There was a lot of cultural change, gay rights campaigns, etc.

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                    • Why, we all know that the world started going downhill in 1983! That’s when *I* was 13, everything was Fresh and New, Every Girl Was So Pretty I Couldn’t Breathe, I had not yet read a Niven and Pournelle-written sex scene (Footfall was two years in the future!), and I was devouring Pern novels, McKillip and LeGuin!

                      Also, it’s when Ronald Reagan “solved” the mental health crisis by making the homeless crisis, took a chainsaw to civil rights, and blew a war-sized hole in the Federal Deficit.

                      So, nostalgia goggles aside, I suspect I can make at least a semi-plausible case for ’83.

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                  • Good point on the rise of YA SFF as a separate thing and also on the rise of urban fantasy and paranormal romance (though that came a little later, in the early 2000s) and the less than great response of the SFF community, which steadfastly pretended that those books and their readers didn’t exist or weren’t SFF. It wasn’t just rightwingers either, I remember getting into arguments about the merits of urban fantasy with leftwingers, too. And even today, large swathes of the SFF community pretend that the moment where a part of our genre gained genuine massive mainstream popularity (Charlaine Harris had nine books on the NYT bestseller list at the same time) never happened, because it was the wrong sort of books.

                    As for comics, I remember mainstream US superhero comics going steadily downhill from approx. 1992/93 on. By the late 1990s, I was so tired of waiting for the comics I used to read to get better that I first looked further afield and then gave up altogether. However, by 1997 mainstream US superhero comics were already pretty far down the drain.

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                    • Some of the earlier covers like those by Dan Dos Santos for Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson series were quite good. But then they opened the floodgates to bad imitations.

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                  • People who think sexy vampires were invented recently never saw the 1978 Dracula. Langella was pretty damn sexy in that. One of the girls in my dorm (in the 80s) had the biggest available poster taking up most of the wall in her half of the room. Her randomly-assigned roommate didn’t object, and most of us girls wandered in sometimes to get an eyeful during stressful times.

                    Plus, Bowie/Sarandon/Deneuve in The Hunger, the easy on the eyes Christopher Lee, Blacula, the guy in Moonlight, Forever Knight and all the episodes of Dark Shadows.

                    Etc, etc.

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                • To be fair, I’ve heard others cite 1997-8 as a period when music went downhill for the solidly material reason that corporations bought up a lot of radio stations and drove out more experimental work. It’s not something I’m closely familiar with, so I can’t comment on how accurate it is, but it sounds plausible.

                  1997 and thereabouts was also a transitional point in video games thanks to the rise of 3D gameplay. Extremely polished 2D games st next to primitive 3D titles that were flashy in their time but perhaps haven’t aged quite as well.

                  But the idea that films, TV and literature went downhill after 1997 specifically… yeah, I think that’s just Brian’s rose-tinting.

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                  • I think 95 as the point where Toy Story was a critical hit and also completely rendered on computer is a relevant point. And Blair Witch Project as the first film that was a hit based on web presence. So 97 as a rough point where film was ‘different’. Jackson’s Lord of the Rings is a film in a new era.

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                    • Okay, if anyone really wants go know, I dug up the post where he makes his case about 1997 as cultural ground zero:

                      https://brianniemeier.com/2018/01/ground-zero/

                      There’s a lot of cherry-picking. His section on comics describes the continuation of a bad trend in the US that’d been going on for a while prior to 1997; his section on games points to the *start* of a bad trend in Japan.

                      And his evidence that films went downhill that year is the release of the Star Wars Special Editions, which seems rather weak. Are there no comparable incidents from, say, 1992 or 2007?

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                    • I think it’s like the umpty-zillion “19XX: The Year EVERYTHING Changed” pop histories. Typically they show lots of significant things happened but that’s true of lots of years in the 1900s. I’m sure there’s no shortage of years when things went wrong, either.

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                    • U2 running out of steam is a weird thing to pick but I guess he works back from the date. Bowie fronting Tin Machine in 1988 is a better example of notable pop artist going through a dull patch. Paul McCartney’s frog themed Rupert the Bear song thing in 1984 works even better in terms of depths reached by giant pop cultural figure.

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                  • Popular music definitely went downhill around 1997, when we went from Oasis, Blur and Pulp to the Backstreet Boys and the Spice Girls. But pop music occasionally falls off a cliff. IMO 1988/89 was even worse, when pop music turned crap literally overnight. I spent the summer of 1988 with relatives in the US and when I came back to Germany, the radio only played crap and I had no udea what had happened.

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                    • For headbangers of a certain age, 1986 was a peak year for music. Slayer’s “Reign in Blood,” Metallica’s “Master of Puppets,” Kreators “Pleasure to Kill,” Sepultura’s “Morbid Vision,” Candlemass’s “Epicus Doomicus Metallicus,” Destruction’s “Eternal Devastation,” Sodom’s “Obsessed by Cruelty,” King Diamond’s “Fatal Portrait,” and the list goes on… I wasn’t aware of any of that (Aside from Metallica) for a year or two after (being 13 in ’86), but wow, what a year! Unfortunately, not that much later came the deluge of amazing death metal from Florida, Sweden, and beyond. And shortly after that – early- to mid-90s – the infamous Norwegian black metal scene blew up. Not sure where I’m going with that, except that I suspect people who mark a year when everything stopped being good were probably just reacting to their teenage zeitgeist and weren’t all that into whatever they think stopped being good in the first place.

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                    • I was friends with several metalheads at school, so I was exposed to a lot of metal. And yes, there was great metal in the late 1980s, but maybe that’s just because that was the time I was hanging out with the metalheads.

                      Interestingly enough, my metalhead friends were not at all happy when grunge blew up in the early 1990s, because they found it inferior and derivative.

                      In general, grunge never was as big in Germany as it was in the US and UK. Instead, we got insipid techno, which I hated, but which very much fit the early to mid 1990s German zeitgeist,

                      To this day, techno and hip hop are the two genres of popular music I like the least.

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                    • A friend of mine who went through a Goth phase in the 1990s said the different Goth cliques were all disapproving of each other as clearly inauthentic posers, even though they listened to the same music, went to the same club and dressed in the same styles. She’s no longer clear what, if anything, the distinctions were.

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                  • The horse trading that allowed the DMCA to pass in 1996 _also_ removed the FCC restrictions on how many broadcast stations a given corporation could own in the same market.

                    So, the “Oh wait, all pop music started to sound the same in 1997-1998” is dead on. It took about 18-24 months for the Vast Vertical Integration Digestion to happen, first with iHeartRadio, and then Innovation Media, and leading to Sinclair Broadcasting and NexStar between them having 85% of the broadcast television stations in the United States.

                    Mind, this is all a downstream consequence of the New Thinking on Anti-Trust Regulations that came out in ’83 from Reagan.

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        • Ok, so you’ve got a bunch of RW self-pub authors who LC sees as bothering his turf and/or who are trying to aggrandize themselves with RW hate-buyers by declaring LC a fake RWinger and enemy of the people, etc.

          This is a time honored tactic of autocrats — pick an autocrat higher up on the food chain & dis that person to be seen as dominating/tough.

          Liked by 3 people

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