No one is required to buy your PR

Everybody has stories they tell themselves about the world, and everybody has stories they tell the world about themselves.

There’s this thing I keep seeing coming up in discussions about the Sad Puppies and Gamergate, where a defender of one group or the other will respond to people talking about the actions of the group with, “So you think you know what they’re about better than they do?”

They’ll link to a post where someone has laid out the glorious purpose of their group as being about things no one could argue with (“ETHICS!” say the Gators, “DEMOCRACY!” say the Puppies), and try to insist that we engage with that and only that, taking into account nothing but the story they tell about themselves.

I could point out the hypocrisy involved as neither Gators nor Puppies are fond of taking their perceived enemies at their word, but the fact is that no matter who you are or on what perceived side of any conflict—as the subject heading of this post declares—no one is required to buy your PR.

People will judge your actions. People will judge the things you say when you’re not taking the time to lay out your case the way you want it to be seen, the way you want to see it. People will judge you by who you stand with, and no, this isn’t guilt by association. If your house is infested with fleas and bedbugs, people don’t have to stoop to the level of accusing you of being vermin yourself to have a good reason to decline an invitation.

Vox Day’s PR says that he believes every human being is equally entitled to life and dignity. That’s the story he tells the world about himself. When we look at how he speaks of and to his fellow human beings, though, we are not required to take that story into account over our own judgment and the evidence of our senses.

Gamergate’s PR says that they are anti-censorship and pro-freedom of speech. When they label opinions that they disagree with as lies and try to run anybody who spreads such opinions out of the marketplace of ideas, though, we are not required to take their stated stance into account.

The Sad Puppies’ PR says that they are for a democratic and transparent Hugo selection process and that they just want more people involved to break the power of any cliques.

When they demonize Mary Robinette Kowal for funding 100 new voting memberships to be assigned randomly to any takers, we are not required to believe their PR.

When they select their slates in secret, using unspecified criteria and offering no explanation for where some of the final selections came from or why certain suggestions were rejected in favor of these undemocratic selections, we’re not required to believe their PR.

When we can look at their blogs and the comments by their supporters and see the way they talk about past winners and nominees, we don’t have to believe the story they tell us that they are here because other people have been snobbishly acting to stop the “wrong” authors from winning.

I’m not against the Sad Puppies because I think it would be the end of the world if Larry Correia or Brad Torgersen or one of their hand-picked favorites won an award.

I’m against the Sad Puppies because—no matter what stories they tell the world about themselves—they have demonstrated that they consider the marginal success or recognition of work they disapprove of as sufficient provocation to turn over the apple cart.

You can link me to any number of posts where they explain what they think they’re doing, in the terms they want us to view it. But if the story they tell is out of whack with what else I can see, it’s not likely to make me think more highly of them.

 

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

Sad Puppies Review Books: MADELINE

MADELINE

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

Let me cut right to the chase: Madeline is some straight-up misandrist Feminazi SJW bullshit.

It starts off right away talking about twelve little girls in two straight lines. Seriously? Twelve characters introduced in a single page and we’re supposed to believe they all just happen to be girls? Not one of them is a boy? Last time I checked half the human race was male. So what are the odds that twelve people in a row—or two rows—will be female?

Listen, I’ve studied statistics. The odds that one character will be a female are 50%, no matter what any SJW wants to tell you. Science doesn’t come any harder than numbers. That’s why SJWs hate dealing with them. Numbers are not susceptible to feelings. You cannot “transgenderqueer” a number away just because you don’t like it.

50% is not very high, but high enough that if there’s occasionally a female character somewhere we can allow that it’s still a bit realistic. Take Black Widow in the Avengers movies. There are six main characters, so if you want to say that okay, well, there’s a 50% chance that one of them will be a female, so we can go ahead and make one of them a female to placate the SJWs, that’s fine. Not that they’ll actually be placated. To hear them go on, it seems they won’t be satisfied until half the characters on the screen are females!

So if the author wanted to make one of those twelve characters a girl, so be it. But two in a row? The odds drop to 25%. Three? 12.5%. Four? 6.25%. Five? 3.125%. Six? 1.5625%. By the time we get to the second line of girls, the odds of what we’re seeing have dropped to less than one percent.

You know what the odds of all twelve being girls are? Less than one in four thousand. That’s how unlikely this little fantasy scenario the author has concocted is.

I don’t know if the SJWs really don’t understand math or just think that we don’t, but this cannot be a coincidence. The author deliberately chose to make this whole boarding school female on purpose and no one said a word. No one stood up to say it was wrong. The editor didn’t stop it. The publisher didn’t stop it. The corrupt journos who reviewed the book didn’t say boo against it. Meanwhile no one has ever published a book set at an all-boy’s school. The powers that be would never allow it. They’d call it “sexism” and “patriarchy”.

Also, SJWs are such hypocrites. If anybody outside of their little protected circle tried to write this book they would be eaten alive for saying the lines are straight and not “LGBTQ” or whatever the PC term is these days.

I’ll be honest, I had a hard time engaging with this book after the opening lines. My suspension of disbelief was shattered. There was no one for me to identify with. It was like the author had written across every page “JOHN Z. UPJOHN, THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR YOU. PEOPLE LIKE YOU DON’T GET BOOKS. PEOPLE LIKE YOU ARE THE BAD GUY, IF YOU EXIST AT ALL.”

I read books to enjoy good stories, not to be hit over the head with messages even if it is a message I agree with. I should pay my own money and spend my time reading a book that spreads a message that is against me? No, thank you!

In the interest of a fair review, I made myself flip through the rest anyway. What I picked up is that the character of Madeline is everything that Feminazis say they want in a “strong female character”, as we are told from the beginning that she’s not afraid of anything, including mice and a tiger in the zoo.

Are we supposed to impressed? Mice aren’t scary and the tiger is clearly in a cage. Does anyone think this precious little snowflake would have lasted five seconds against that tiger in a real fight? Hell no! She wouldn’t have. Not even five seconds and that’s the truth this book takes such pains to conceal from you.

SJWs want us to believe that women are just as strong as any man but then they stage this kind of ridiculous pantomime where we’re supposed to be impressed that they aren’t frightened of zoo animals. But it is the SJWs who are sexist against women by suggesting women should be afraid of caged animals and tiny rodents.

Anyway, it seems like Madeline isn’t such a “strong female character” when her appendix gets inflamed! She cries like a little girl, and guess what? That’s right, a MAN comes to her rescue. The doctor makes the diagnosis but the book still carries on like men don’t matter as he doesn’t appear once she’s at the hospital, even though two different nurses do (again, that’s only a 25% chance).

So who took out her appendix? No one important enough to mention, I guess! In the hands of a competent author, the doctor would have been the hero of this book. But I guess that would be ~*misogyny*~ and the SJWs at the American Library Association would never have made this a Caldecott Honor Book.

Caldecott Honor, what a joke! As long as the SJW clique is in charge there will be no honor in the Caldecotts.

Then ten days pass and suddenly out of nowhere Madeline has all these toys and candy. Some of it came from “Papa”. Between that and the swanky private school I think we can say that Madeline is another privileged trust fund baby typical of the SJW set. Her hair’s probably dyed, too. They all dye their hair these ridiculous sherbet colors for no reason, with no regard for how much less attractive it is to me.

She probably set up up a Patreon account for the rest of the swag we see, crying about how victimized she was by the tiger and the evil doctor man who dared to touch her. She clearly loves the attention, as the first thing she does when her friends visit is to show off her belly scar like a total tramp.

I only respect scars forged in battle. Surgical scars are like the caged tigers of battle wounds.

And what do you suppose happens in the end? Why, suddenly all her friends claim to have appendicitis, too! Why wouldn’t they when they saw all the sweet hand-outs Madeline got just for fluttering her eyelashes and shedding a lot of crocodile tears and showing off her belly?

If you ask me, the whole thing calls into question whether Madeline really needed or even had an appendectomy to begin with, or if she was just angling for some of those sweet victim bucks from the word go. Once someone starts accepting toys and candy and flowers for being sick, they have a fiduciary duty to disclose certain details to make sure things are on the level. That’s why real charities have oversight and accountability.

If I had contributed to Madeline’s hospital room, I would want to see the chart. I would be curious why we never saw her with a doctor after she arrived. I would demand an accounting of exactly what happened during the ten days that passed between when she was dropped off and when her friends visited.

This book teaches women to see themselves as victims. Even if Madeline’s so-called bravery at the beginning of the book is a hollow lie, it’s only when she starts bawling that she has anything to show for it. Nobody brings her a dollhouse for pooh-poohing a tiger. Nobody gives her candy for taking risks.

No, she plays the victim card and is rewarded and her friends all learn the lesson: here is the easy money. Be careful your kids don’t learn the same lesson. This book is basically an Alinsky-style rulebook for the rainbow-haired she-twinks of Twitter and Tumblr.

Two stars.

---

 

Editor’s Note: Madeline does not, to my knowledge, have a Patreon account, but I do: https://www.patreon.com/alexandraerin

If you’d like to support my fiction, poetry, and—yes—humor writings, please do so. As these reviews have attracted more attention, I’ve had to upgrade my webhosting.

Thank you for reading!

<3 AE

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

STATUS: Friday, May 8th

The Daily Report

So, the day before yesterday, John Scalzi tweeted a link to my first SPBR post. Yesterday, Wil Wheaton put it on his Tumblr. A number of other mid-to-high profile authors have also noticed them. It’s amazing. I am terribly grateful. I hope that the eyes being sent my way might result in more attention to my fiction writing, or more participants in the  Angels of the Meanwhile pre-order, but even if the only result is a lot more people reading my satirical reviews, that is in itself a blessing.

The unavoidable side effect of that blessing is that this blog, which I mainly meant as a place to house my personal thoughts, has been getting enough traffic to destabilize the server that also houses Tales of MU, which is the majority of my livelihood. Now, for the love of all that’s holy and a few things that aren’t, please nobody read this and then decide not to share the reviews or worse, lambaste the people who are circulating them. For an indie writer, this is a good problem to have. It is perhaps one of the best problems to have. Please, if you enjoy the reviews, share them. Tweet, tumbl, pin, digg, redd, thorbl, or skrop them to your heart’s content.

I’ve upped the resources that the host allocates for my use a couple of times, which also increases my hosting costs. To offset that, I’ve added some monetization to my site. The Amazon links in the sidebar are now affiliate links, and I’ve started linking to the books mentioned in the reviews. Yes, that “Rules For Radicals” book that right-wing reactionaries are sure we all have memorized is a real book, and it’s on Amazon.

It’s pretty subtle right now… just links, now “BUY NOW” buttons or widgets or anything like that. Things could keep snowballing from here, or they could die down. If they keep snowballing, I’ll have to make this site pay for itself… that will probably involve more explicitly tying it into my patreon more so than intrusive marketing.

The State of the Me

Doing okay. I woke up really early this morning, though.

Plans For Today

Well, the past couple days have sort of been taken up by the unexpected success of the reviews. Today I’m planning on focusing on writing fiction… or at least, less meta-textual fiction. Tales of MU will be updated today, but very possibly it will be in the wee hours again, depending on server stats.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

Steve Rogers vs. Pop Culture

There’s this moment in Daredevil where Foggy says something like, “I can call myself Captain America but it doesn’t put wings on my head.” I had a moment when we watched that episode where I thought, “…but MCU Cap doesn’t have wings on his head. They’re just painted on the cowl,” and it annoyed me because it was one of the most solid connections between the TV series and the universe of the movies and it kind of came off like it wasn’t even a movie reference at all, but one to the familiar comic book character of Captain America.

Then the moment passed, and I realized: it probably was.

Captain America went into the ice 70 years ago. Before that, he was best known from his USO tour, the staged newsreels, movie serials, and—of course—the comic books they cranked out. The secret war against Hydra didn’t seem like it was in the public eye, so who knows how much footage of him in the tactical outfit Howard Stark designed was shown to the public at the time. Enough to counter the original image of him in the colorful pajamas?

It’s something interesting to think about. Did the U.S. government and/or the fictional counterpart of Marvel/Timely Comics ever revive the character in print? Maybe in the 60s, when they thought the country needed a symbol of unity to rally around? In real life, the fictional character was revived once before his Avengers debut at the height of the Red Scare as a jingoistic reactionary figure, an embarrassing misstep that had to be retconned as a government-made stand-in when a kinder, gentler Steve Rogers made it to print.

Imagine the possible parallels if Steve returned from the ice to find out that Captain America comic books have been used to sell the message of the month for decades… I imagine Steve’s friends would have used their influence to try to keep the political slant to a dull roar, but influence does fade.

Whatever the answers to these questions are, it’s more than possible that Foggy grew up reading comics about the Hitler-punching Cap with wings on his head. As much as real world comic fans gripe about the movie counterparts’ costumes not looking right, how weird would it be to have your own comic book hero pop up in real life and his costume’s wrong?

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

Mythic Delirium Press Presents CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 5 – And You Can Help

Mythic Delirium Press is doing a Kickstarter to fund the next edition of their amazing genre-blending Clockwork Phoenix anthology series. You can help them to produce it and pay their contributors while reserving your copy and/or buying another Mythic Delirium title.

Perks at the higher levels include signed, limited edition chapbooks by a number of authors, including the wicked and wise Catherynne M. Valente, writer of most of my favorite words in most of my favorite orders. Her books that I’ve mentioned include Palimpsest, Deathless, and The Orphan’s Tales Book 1 and Book 2. She has also contributed a poem to Angels of the Meanwhile, being a friend and something of a mentor and inspiration to Lizbet, as Lizbet has been to me.

Whether you’re a fan of Cat in particular or just awesome fiction, and whether you’re interested in scoring some great ebooks on the cheap or picking up a rare keepsake of a favored author, this project is well worth your support. The chapbook perks don’t come cheap, but they include the previous perk levels plus the tangible, readable collector’s item.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.