Fandom

Stop trusting Lou Antonelli to mend his ways

Fandom
Published on 3 Comments on Stop trusting Lou Antonelli to mend his ways

Lou Antonelli is the perfect example of why you should be wary about accepting apologies from serial abusers. Because doing so enables them in their abuse.

Lou Antonelli is one of the lesser Pups, a minor science fiction writer who’s been busy cheerleading the rightwing campaign to take over the Hugo Awards. He’s also been busy harassing people who have the temerity to disagree with him or oppose him, specialising in a less direct form of swatting, by threatening to out them to their employers, or get the police involved. He’s been getting away with it for seemingly years, mainly due to SFF fandom’s well established tendency to forgive easily. this time however Antonelli was still apologising for attempting to sic the cops on David Gerrold with various people praising him for this apology when he was caught sending his fans out to harass Carrie Cuinn. A more on the nose version of the abuse-apologise-abuse cycle of professional bullies like Antonelli is hard to imagine.

What tripped up Antonelli this time is not just that he was caught trying to get David Gerrold in trouble, but that this was David Gerrold, a well respected, well established elder statesman within SFF and fandom. Usually he picks fights with much less high profile people, random fans, authors just starting out, those who can’t hurt him or his career. He only apologises when he’s forced to, when he can’t get away with it, then as here uses this apology as a whitewash as well as a weapon to attack his next victim with.

But he’s not the sole person to blame for this. If Antonelli is the abuser, fandom is his enabler. What makes Antonelli cabable of repeating this pattern again and again is that his victims, like Gerrold, are too quick to forgive and forget. This isn’t to fault him for this, it’s an inbuild instinct of civilised people who haven’t been exposed to repeat harassment, but fandom as a whole needs to learn not to do this and learn to pay attention to when Antonelli (or others like him) does it to lower profile victims.

Not a problem unique to us of course, but made worse by the fannish phobia for social exclusion. People are willing to forgive a serial harasser like Antonelli because excluding him from fandom would be a worse crime. As long as you’re part of the incrowd, you can do a whole lot of damage before you’re finally chucked out. This is incidently the real reason why Antonelli is treated differently from Benjanun Sriduangkaew/Requires Hate: she was always an outsider. Race and gender play their inevitable roles in this as well of course, but at the heart of the difference still is the simple fact that Antonelli is part of fandom and Sriduangkaew …isn’t.

We need to change this. We cannot let people like Antonelli get away with harassment over and over again just because they have the instinct to occasionally apologise in time. Just because we haven’t been harassed personally shouldn’t be a reason to not pay attention and know when to forgive and when not to.

Final Hugo Ballot 2015

Fandom, science fiction
Published on 3 Comments on Final Hugo Ballot 2015

Less then a week to go to Hugo voting closes, so here’s my final ballot. First, to recap, the categories I’ll be no awarding for Puppy-related reasons:

  • Best Novella
  • Best Novelette
  • Best Short Story
  • Best Related Work
  • Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form
  • Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form
  • Best Editor, Short Form
  • Best Editor, Long Form
  • Best Professional Artist
  • Best Fanzine
  • Best Fancast
  • Best Fan Writer
  • John W. Campbell Award (not a Hugo)

Which leaves Best Novel:

  1. The Goblin Emperor — Katherine Addison.
  2. The Three-Body Problem — Cixin Liu
  3. Ancillary Sword — Ann Leckie

Best Graphic Story:

  1. Ms. Marvel, v1 — Adrian Alphona, G. Willow Wilson
  2. Saga, v3 — Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples
  3. Sex Criminals, v1 — Matt Fraction, Chip Zdarsky
  4. Rat Queens, v1 — Kurtis J. Wiebe, Roc Upchurch

Best Semiprozine:

  1. Strange Horizons — Niall Harrison
  2. Lightspeed Magazine — John Joseph Adams, Stefan Rudnicki, Rich Horton, Wendy N. Wagner, and Christie Yant
  3. Beneath Ceaseless Skies — Scott H. Andrews

Best Fan Artist (the only category with no Puppy infestation):

  1. Ninni Aalto: cute cartooning, in a mix of Finnish and English
  2. Elizabeth Leggett: gorgeous paintings
  3. Spring Schoenhuth: also nominated last year for her jewelry, a reminder that fan art doesn’t need to be two-dimensional
  4. Steve Stiles: a regular nominee, decent enough but nothing special
  5. Brad Foster: another Fan Artist regular, with the most nominations and wins of everybody. He doesn’t need any more, does he?

And that’s the Hugo Awards dealt with for another year. Thanks to the Pups, it cost less time than last year, but I’m still filling my ballot in at the last possible moment.

Can fandom change society?

Fandom, video
Published on Leave a comment on Can fandom change society?



No. It’s just a goddamn hobby.

Well, not in the way that the title and some of the content of this high level introduction to the wonderful world of modern fandom(s) implies. Fandom in itself is not a political act, but it is a way of interacting with the media we consume in a more healthy way than just passively receiving it.

Snowcrash as written by Reddit

Fandom, science fiction
Published on 1 Comment on Snowcrash as written by Reddit

MetaFilter has fun kicking around Ernest Cline’s latest nerd pandering novel. To be fair, it does sound awful:

We’re also told the government has been tracking the habits of its elite players, and when they arrive at their virtual battle stations, they find their favorite snacks waiting for them, their favorite songs queued up to accompany their virtual space fights, not to mention a “special strain of weed that helps people focus and enhances their ability to play videogames” that’s been cultivated just for them. In one revealing moment, Zack calls his mom in midst of the alien invasion and says the words that burn in the heart of every gamer who has ever felt demeaned for the hours they lavish on their favorite hobby: “All those years I spent playing videogames weren’t wasted after all, eh?”

Ugh.

But what struck me the most was this:

Armada is a book designed entirely around getting the reference—high-fiving the readers who recognize its shoutouts while leaving everyone else trapped behind a nerd-culture velvet rope of catchphrases and codes.

Now that’s, as both the MeFi discussion and the original article acknowledge, something that’s deeply ingrained in nerd culture, but Cline’s use feels off. It’s not just that he has contemporary teenagers (or future ones, as in his first novel) obsessed with the pop culture, all the pop culture, of their fathers and grandfathers (mothers not featuring so much), it’s the way in which they do so. Cline’s protagonists are consuming pop culture, not creating it, taking pride in collecting it and showing off their skills in doing so by constant name checking and referencing it.

It’s a very pre-internet view of geekdom, from a time when such knowledge was hard to come by, when it was sometimes genuinely difficult to find a piece of pop culture ephemera if you hadn’t picked it up or seen it when it first came out. This is no longer the case and hasn’t been for at least a decade or two, so that attitude in people who supposedly grew up in the internet age jars. Not only their obsessions are too old for them, but the ways in which they express them are too. Ultimately this is what makes Cline a bad writer, this simple failure to understand that 21st century teenagers wouldn’t have the same hangups as him.

(Title courtesy of Artw.)

Cry little Puppy, cry

Fandom
Published on 1 Comment on Cry little Puppy, cry

Some little shit keen to ride a neonazi’s coattails to imagined Hugo success whinges about being called dishonest:

I did nothing dishonest. The puppies did nothing dishonest. They played by the rules. You know, I get that you object to the fact that they participated. But you have no grounds for saying that I or anyone else did anything dishonest here.

What you’re doing is ugly. It’s just plain ugly. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

For all the internet hard mannery eminating from the Pups, boy are they thin skinned. That seems to be a rightwing trait: not only wanting to win, honestly or otherwise, but wanting their enemies to admire them for doing so, rolling over on cue. But that’s something puppies do, isn’t it?