solarbird | since gaming the hugo awards failed, let’s try goodreads

The Puppies made another attempt to game a system last week, but it fell apart rather hilariously.

The first notice it got was a lot of very negative commentary all at once on a negative review of one of the oberpuppyführer Vox Day’s collections; Lis Carey left a note about it in File 770‘s comments section. And File 770 also found a post about it on Vox’s blog. (Linked via DoNotLink).

Well, it gets dumber from there. Sean O’Hara started poking around, and found that there was a Secret Puppy Goodreads Group*, formed with the explicit intention of gaming the site by bombing “SJW” reviewers and authors with negative reviews and ratings, and uprating all Puppy-affiliated works. The problem is, while it was a limited-access group – well, I’ll hand it to Sean:

Too bad for him the only thing keeping out the SJWs was a challenge question that could be answered with a simple Google search. By Saturday night I had access to the group. I didn’t know what to do — undermine him from the inside, play Serpico and leak screenshots on a piecemeal basis, or save them up for a big reveal. The last one seemed the best way not to get caught until I had a good collection of dirt, and I was strongly leaning in that direction.

But after reading File770’s news roundup yesterday, which included a story about someone being ganged up on by Day and his goons, I decided it might be better to give warning where I could.

Here are a collection of screenshots from that group.

And apparently, while Goodreads is a bit of a mess sometimes, that was simply too much for them, and they banned the whole lot of them, with Vox himself being singled out for permanent lockout.

Vox has, of course, claimed victory. (Also a DoNotLink link.)

It’s kind of sad at this point, really. The problem is that the crazy neighbour is only so funny, because sooner or later, they might just bring in a bunch of friends from out of state and take over a wildlife refuge centre, and then it’s not so much fun anymore.

And since we’re talking Puppies, I might as well point at this takedown by Scott Lynch of John C. Wright’s accusations against Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Worldcon, supported by all witnesses who aren’t John C. Wright. I don’t think anyone outside the reactionary rightist circle has a lot of fucks go give about Mr. Wright – remember, this is the guy who came to my blog threatening to sue me for libel after I quoted him accurately and in context. That’s the kind of reality-disassociated sad muppet he is. But I saw his new post, “Stormbunnies and Crybullies”, responding (quite negatively) to George R. R. Martin’s recent call for winding down this fanwar, and one paragraph stood out:

But I am a forgiving man, jovial and magnanimous. I make the following peace offer: Go your way. Cease to interfere with me and my livelihood, do your work, cease to libel me and meddle with my affairs, withhold your tongue from venom and your works from wickedness, and we shall all get along famously.

Emphasis added.

Don’t write what I don’t like, and we’ll get on fine.

I’m the kind of person he doesn’t want to exist. I’m several kinds of people he doesn’t want to see being written about. (You might recall John as the person who so passionately hated Korra from The Legend of Korra, explicitly and specifically because she’s bi. He’s one of those hate-the-sin love-the-sinners whose idea of “love” is making people like me illegal.)

So if we all just stop writing about uppity women and those horrible queers and faggots – all of whom, as you’ll recall, should be beaten to death with ax-handles and tire irons – we’ll get along just fine.

The only ‘peace’ these guys can imagine is complete and utter submission to them. No wonder they have such a fascination with ISIL and the like; it’s a mirror. So do everything by their rules, on their terms, all the time, and always, always give them exactly what they want and do nothing else, and we’ll be just fine.

Stalin would be proud.

I was thinking about pasting in one of the stop liking what I don’t like memes as an ending for this post, but that doesn’t really work, because that’s just about childish frustration and confusion. This, by contrast, is childish frustration and confusion pupated into man-child quasi-fascism, and I don’t have a properly-fitting caption.

But I might have a good animated gif.

Even Kylo Ren is a more complex character than any of these people.

And I just don’t know where to go with that.

*: eta: The original post is missing. I don’t know why. This was the original link: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/9683209-you-all-owe-me and here is a still-valid Google cache as of 2016/01/05 21:45 Cascadian Standard Time.

This is part of a series of posts on the Sad/Rabid Puppy candidate slate-based capture of the Hugo Awards, and resulting fallout.

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