dexfarkin

"My gut tells me ... there are people who are upset by them and are interested in sending a message," said Jonathan Grella, spokesman for the U.S. Travel Association, which represents hotels and tourist attractions. And it can take a long time to change negative attitudes about traveling, he said.

"We had to scratch and claw to make ourselves whole after 9/11, and suffered through a lost decade," he said. "If not handled properly, we could find ourselves in a hole like that which is deeper than it needs to be."

digbysblog.blogspot.ca/2017/04/well-he-does-know-how-to-destroy-brand.html

Digby, as always, is a powerful and articulate voice on US politics. In this article, she talks about the damage that Trump is doing to tourism in the US and talks about the idea that foreign travelers are in a sense voting with their dollars to avoid the US. But I think that misses another side of the issue, which is about the systemic costing of error from the part of the company to the customer, which is what culminated in the United WWE event.

Anyone who travels knows that the vast majority of travel and hospitality corporations require either the purchase of insurance or the acceptance of significant penalties for travelers who arrive late or suffer delays. Much like the overbooking strategy, they are designed in order to offset as much liability as possible while still being able to provide tertiary discount business. With that in mind, it leads to the kind of situations in which the customer is essentially the only person who is forced to be accountable for the actions of the corporation that is providing service.

Because of this, people have changed their travel patterns and have grumbled but accepted the extra fees and charges that are imposed. But they have also become keenly aware of the long string of potential issues that can absolve the company from refunding payment as being outside of their purview. One of those are the potential of being detained at the border and/or refused entry. In many cases, when booking a vacation, people have booked time or date sensitive events, often of significant value, for which being detained or refused entry offers no way to recoup the loss.

The exodus of risk from the corporation to the consumer has forced consumers to look for certainty as a priority, especially when a vacation can quickly represent the investment of thousands of dollars. Trump's empowerment of the TSA and Border Agencies to detain and refuse entity with zero consequences for misuse has tore that certainty away. So while there is certainly a moral case to seek other options than the US, I suspect that the practical assessment of the risk is just as or more significant.

My phone blew up about 8 this morning with people texting me about the results of the Brexit referendum in the UK. Seems my friends are well aware that my free time consists largely of watching other countries political systems like it was some kind of World Cup qualifier. However, especially at it relates to a number of trends happening worldwide, I have been following it closely.

Brexit is a fairly unique situation, far more akin to politics of a hundred years ago. The drivers have nothing to do with the actual issues at hand. Much like, say, the Tea Party in the United States, the Leave supporters are predominately older, rural, and are driven by a sense of lost power which they blame immigration and multiculturalism for. It is not a political position as opposed to a populist or even tribal one. The basic arguments to leave the EU are largely fictional; that EU immigration is taking jobs from UK workers and their benefits are displacing benefits for real (white) Britons; that the UK is struggling because they are losing money net to the EU to shore up struggling east European economies; and that the EU has limited the self determination of the people of the UK.

All of these are demonstrably false. No, seriously, all of these arguments can be disproven in a handful of graphs and statements. So why have they been accepted as gospel by such a large group?

In short, it is a protest vote. It's been driven by a lot of ugly elements like racism, ignorance and envy, but at the core, there is the basic underlying understanding that multinational coalitions have been weighted to support business concerns ahead of citizens. Which is a fair point. At the bottom of most Western cultures right now, there is a simmering dissatisfaction that the last thirty years have resulted in tremendous gains for a small group and an increasingly difficult life for the majority. The trouble is that dissatisfaction can find all kinds of unrelated release valves and when pumped through existing preconceptions and prejudices, it expresses itself through the ugliest forms of populism. In many 'Leave' voting regions, it is already reporting dismay at the outcome of the vote, as voters never thought that leaving was possible, but wanted to express their anger. In a way, people assumed because the mass of business and finance wanted to remain that they could somehow rig the vote in their favour in any case. This wasn't so much a vote against the EU as it was a show of anger at the underlying inequitable systems that they represent or support. Unfortunately, the true victims of the vote will be the very supporters of it.

Here's my initial takeaways and predictions.

1. The Millennials and GenX generations of Britons just got fucked. This is the group that is widely dispersed working through the EU, who have crafted their professional lives around the access that they've always had and have been required to do so in order to deal with the mountain of debt they've been straddled with. The 'Leave' side is overwhelming 50+. I would not be surprised to see a huge backlash against the older generation, especially as formerly successful mobile workers return to an economically depressed country to fight for one of the fewer and lower paying jobs, just as the aging boom hits the NHS en masse for care. Logan's Run isn't necessarily sci-fi.

2. The days of the United Kingdom are numbered. This will trigger a second Scottish referendum, which will vote to separate in order to remain in the EU. Scotland was the most heavily 'Remain' weighted region in the UK. The dissolution of the UK badly undermines British strength in diplomacy and economic leverage, which will lead to being forced to adopt one-sided agreements just to access existing markets.

3. The sterling fell through the floor today. Full on collapse of value. In addition, London just lost its position as the financial centre of the EU. Expect a massive transfer of jobs out of the city, which will depress values heavily, and lead to more foreign investment into their real estate market as the prices drop. Normally investment is a good thing, but in this case, it will be more like a garage sale; people picking up undervalued materials to hold on to. Real estate value in a market is only positive when the investment is an active player; some one buys a house, a family moves in, they join the local economy, etc. Passive real estate investment, holding properties against future valuation can actually depress economies, taking units out of the limited ones available without the additional tertiary value of adding people.

4. Expect Greece to hold another referendum. With the UK opting out, Greece can see the mechanisms in place for themselves. Considered how disastrous the state is, their single best option is to return to the drachma, devalue the hell out of it, and restructure. They've been forced into a zero-sum game right now of being forced to sell off their economic underpinnings wholesale to foreign investment to make small single point payments which undermines any possible recovery.

5. At this moment, the UK has lost over 100B sterling in investment value. The oldest generation that voted to 'Leave' also just destroyed their savings and pension portfolios. When that sinks in, there's going to be a very ugly response.

An ugly time for the UK indeed today.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/16/censor-art-books-times-rijksmuseum

There's a back and forth in the Guardian about the desire in some quarters to update titles to remove now offensive terms which can create unnecessary discomfort as well the potential for similar corrections for books where the impact of the language is changed to the point that its impact is unnecessarily taken as intentional in the story. There's some interesting points made, although none that compel me from my basic point that in general, it's usually a unnecessary and mis-intentioned step.

One point I did like was the idea of terms creating controversy that leads to a distortion of the intending meaning of the work. One example used is a 1900 painting titled 'Young Negro Girl' switching to 'Young Girl with Fan'. Now, the change doesn't impact the work - each is a descriptive title as opposed to an evocative one as most art would adopt in the decades following. Most would argue that it is a small change that doesn't impact how I will approach it. The only issue is that art is highly contextual. Work that is admired from the past exists within its specific continuum and language is an important element through which we place our understanding of a piece. I think it is possible to understand why 'Young Negro Girl' would be an inappropriate title today without needing to change it for a modern sensibility.

In terms of the argument used with Huckleberry Finn, where in some additions, the word n***** is replaced with slave, the thrust is that slave carries the same kind of low level derision that n***** did at the time, while it carries in a modern reading a significantly different meaning. When 'Deadwood' came out, the original scripts for the show used period swearing in the first drafts. The problem was that what were incredibly offensive terms for the time have long lost any impact and even have become comedic or cartoonish phrases. So, they switched them for modern verbiage with similar impact, like 'motherfucker'.

The problem is, again, contextualization. If someone is only to read Huckleberry Finn and ignore the rest of the works of the late 19th century, they will get the same meaning. But if their reading expands, suddenly there is a different and more modern cast to the altered text and it becomes more difficult to associate it with other works of the period in understanding the material. Sanitized works are about altering the content to preserve a specific set of messages and lessons, but as literature criticism evolves and changes, those messages from the core text often do so as well. Modifying base texts muddle them and too often dilute what they mean to preserve.

If there is concern, it is better to use judgement and lessons about the time period and use of language prior to starting the work than to alter the text and hope the meaning remains as impactful.

http://journal.ijreview.com/2015/11/250238-what-defeating-isis-would-look-like/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=floating-sidebar&utm_campaign=Sharing

Kurt Schlichter, former veteran and current hack, has greased up his inner Tom Clancy and realeased a 'true' report of how President Marco Rubio and General 'Wildman' destroy Daesh completely in 2 months. You can just smell the heady scent of right-wing semen dripping, bukkake-style, from Schlichter's screen as he imagines brown people killed en mass by the American military. Just a few quotes.

The first wave of 12 B-52H’s emptied their bays of 750-pound dumb bombs directly over the heart of Raqqa, followed by a second wave, then a third. Crack Air Force ground crews were waiting back at the base in Saudi Arabia, and rearmament took less than two hours. Then they headed north again. In 24 hours, Raqqa ceased to exist.

Just to point out, Raqqa is home to over 200,000 people, making this bombing the largest mass killing of civilian targets with conventional munitions since the bombing of Dresden by a factor of ten.

The jihadis initially attempted to dig in, believing the Americans would pause to root them out of the urban areas. Instead, the Americans leveled the towns, often using the napalm that had just been reintroduced into the American arsenal, and followed up with infantry. At first, the jihadis tried to hide behind the few remaining civilians but the Americans never hesitated, and ISIS quickly learned that to try to hold ground meant a swift death.

As more of the civilian population of Iraq and Syria are wiped out indiscriminately by the American military, the rest of the Islamic world somehow is cool with it because of fear of Wildman and the belief in the basic goodness of the white man.

When the war ended after two months, the President’s popularity was 80% and the final body count was 26,763 ISIS fighters dead.

Along with millions of civilian casualties, making the war one of the deadliest attacks against non-combatants since the Chinese civil war. Comparisons to the Rape of Nanking or the Siege of Leningrad now pale compared to the savagery of the American assault, applauded by 80% of the American people.

Iran, North Korea, Russia and China all saw and understood that they would need to govern themselves accordingly in the face of a post-Obama America.

Correctly realizing that the US was now a rogue state bent on genocide, their allies fled and they found themselves under the threat of embargo. The world calls for Rubio, the greatest mass murderer since Pul Pot to face trial for war crimes. Their attacks harden Muslims, leading to a total expulsion of US influence in the Middle East, as Russia, China and India form a powerful coalition to further isolate Americans from former allies, pulling the European Union out of NATO.

Yeah, this is the right wing fantasy.

There are no words to convey this level of awesome...

http://comicsalliance.com/super-iceman-angela-lgbtq-marvel/

Quite a good article on the coming out of Bobby Drake as gay and Angela's bi-sexuality. Wheeler is very much correct that it isn't enough to simply have LGQBT characters; you have to tell their stories as part of the ongoing reality for it to matter.

I still fucking hate the choice of Bobby.

To me, Bobby's choice as coming out is a lazy one, borderline offensive in its stereotyping. Let's take the youngish, pretty quirky guy because he obviously he's got to be gay. The way it is being framed, with Bobby's relationships as a sign of his hiding from his true nature are also pretty damning, because of the X-Men, Bobby was one of the only one's that had largely healthy relationships with women who were strong individuals with their own agency. It feels like there was a mandate as opposed to a natural evolution of the character, and for me as a reader, it defeats the purpose.

The most obvious choice should have been Hank, to be honest. His unlikely football career in high school when it was clearly the sciences he was interested in, his major relationship having been the dysfunctional one with Trish Tilby for years and then a relatively new one with Abigail Brand, his guarded nature even with his oldest friends. Hank coming out, personally, would have seemed like a path that was well established for me. Also, to have a gay character who is outside of the normal stereotypes; physically powerful, academically brilliant, and the moral centre of the X-Men.

First they went after a virtually unknown cultural critique for looking for $6,000 in funding to make videos examining tropes in video games. As a result, she raised over a hundred thousand, has become a major speaker on harassment and violence in video game culture, appeared on The Colbert Report, became the front point for a $300M investment for women in tech from Intel and spoke as an authority in front of the UN.

Then they went after the ex-girlfriend of a guy who wrote a massive call for her harassment because he was a paranoid believing that she spent with multiple men for good reviews on a free to play game she created. Not only where all the claims discredited and despite her being forced out of her home, she managed to create an extremely well regarded harassment victim support service, been interviewed multiple times, been a key speaker at numerous conferences and the UN, capping it all off with a book and movie deal rumoured to have Scarlett Johansson on board as a potential actor/producer.

Give Gamergate five more years to try and destroy these women, and one will be a Senator and the other a billionaire at the rate they're going.

The number of articles talking about how Jeb! Bush should drop out for the good of the Republican Party have swelled, especially in time with the revelation that he's being forced to cut staff at his campaign. I actually agree with the idea that it would help, although I don't necessarily think it is for the good of the party but that it would allow them to open up the field past the early primaries. But, for that reason, I doubt it will happen. There's a couple of reasons why.

1. Jeb! is one of the few GOP candidates with a credible ground game in place past Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. Rubio has one that is slow building, Trump has been making investments, and most of the others at least have some kind of framework. But Jeb! is actively organizing already, and the GOTV in the primaries is the only way for an unexciting candidate like Bush to match the media-driven interest of his main opponents.

2. Republican primary support is incredibly soft. Primary votes have shown ridiculous variance, which again, means that a ground game that isn't based around media cycles has the capacity to scale up quickly in response to a gaffe and exploit it. A weird come to Jesus moment in the response to Iowa results by a candidate could erode support down the scale and quickly.

3. Jeb! is not a good campaigner, but he is an experienced one. While he's been a trainwreck during debates and interviews, it's largely because he's been unable to frame himself against Trump, which is pretty much the worst tactic he could have taken. The problem, of course, is that his handlers have let him fire back off the cuff, which plays into Trump's strengths. If he could pivot back to his policy platform and accept the fact that he's going to be the boring candidate, he'd pick up support.

In short, Jeb! still can't win the general election, but he's not going to drop out of the primaries because he thinks he's got traction to make a big upset on Super Tuesday, even if he gets hammered in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. That belief isn't entirely without credibility, as he still has structural strengths that some of the front runners don't. The popular myth is that if Bush drops out, his organization will flow most likely to Rubio, who is emerging as an institutional choice. But I don't buy that. I think if Bush drops out, his organization wouldn't move ideologically but instead strategically, which makes it even more possible that a Trump, Cruz, or Carson will be able to subsume a credible political machine into their bombastic campaigns, which would make them even more formidable.

It appears that the GOP really wants Hillary Clinton to be President. Considering that they're into hour four of a web-streamed event that has made her look poised, supremely competent and smarter than pretty much every Republican on the panel. Her response to questions aren't even slightly defensive or angry; more like a slightly weary teacher explaining things for the tenth time for a group of 8 year old who aren't very swift.

I'm almost willing to bet this gives her a modest poll jump.

EDIT: Too funny...

Today will be the first post-season game of baseball played in Canada since the Jays walked off the World Series against the Phillies in 1993. For those of you have have been following this journal's Toronto Blue Jays obsession from the beginning, expect nothing series or interesting until the end of the playoffs.

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/christian-group-says-the-world-will-be-permanently-annihilated-on-wednesday/

Whelp, guess I'm not paying my utilities this month

The Brady Campaign's list of mass shootings in America just since 2005 is 62 pages long.

For the next time an American tells me just how important 2nd Amendment Rights are to a free society. The NRA remains dollar for dollar the single most effective tool for killing Americans.

They actually believe this garbage...

Reason 1: I have survived all the fifty-eight thousand things that the summer required of me. Summer is always such a busy time and I usually enter the fall in a steep decline. That doesn't seem to be the case this year, which makes things a lot easier.

Reason 2: My new zen approach to certain activities where I am refusing to let things make me angry for more than an initial reaction is paying dividends. I'm not stressing about things and situations where before would be dominating everything that I was doing and thinking are now far less able to impact me. As a result, I'm seeing easier solutions to relieve the stress rather than having to doubledown to prove that I'm right. It's a fandom trait that I wish I'd learned a decade ago.

Reason 3: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/stewart-parnell-salmonella-sentencing 28 years in jail. Now if only the next person is a bank president...

http://pjmedia.com/diaryofamadvoter/2015/09/03/hillarys-election-civil-war/?singlepage=true

Now I realize the chances of Hillary’s nomination are decreasing on a near-daily basis, but indulge me a moment in my premise — what America would look like under an HRC presidency. She’s still leading in the polls, despite all.

Almost no one who voted against her would be giving her the benefit of the doubt. Why should they? They would be looking for ways to reject her presidency. Tax avoidance would be endemic. Why give money to a country where the president abjures the rule of law? (Yes, that’s already happened but this would, after a political campaign, be a force multiplier.) With the national treasury under threat, all sorts of results could occur — a stock market meltdown beyond what we are experiencing now, full scale depression like the 1930s, urban riots that make Baltimore and Ferguson look like Kiddyland, nonstop demonstrations of all sorts from all sides, millions of people opting out á la John Galt (most without knowing who he is), an American decline beyond recognition (if you think things are bad now, you haven’t seen anything), little border control with giant Islamic spillover from Europe, terror attacks routine, and, yes, remote a possibility as it may be, a violent civil war between between sides in a hugely split society.

Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria!

Actually, he's correct in one thing. Tax avoidance would be endemic. It currently is. Amoungst the 1%. Funny to think that ol' Rog is technically saying that the state needs to have an effective engine for collecting taxes and preventing tax avoidance.

So the Hugos have been awarded this weekend, and as predicted, the Puppies overestimated their echo chamber and were soundly trounced by the rank and file over at Worldcon. It wasn't exactly a hard outcome to see. Worldcon has always, always reacted harshly against overt attempts to game the Hugo system for someone's advantage. It didn't hurt that the people involved were not only joyously obnoxious in their success in gaming the nominations, but happily admitted that much of the work was there solely because they thought it would 'piss off the SJWs'. The level of bad faith was high and open, galvanizing many of the voters to adopt a scorched earth tactic.

GRRM hosted what was apparently a lovely Hugo losers party at a private location, giving out his own 'Alfies' - satirical awards for people who had been pushed off the nominations by the slate voting, people who had declined the tainted nominations and those who had taken much of the brunt of the Puppies ire.

This has, predictably, turned into more grist for the outrage mill as the various Puppy leaders have promised to not only double-down on the slating for 2016, but have also stated that they will not ask authors about being included in the slate. They will nominate who they choose to nominate. It's a pretty obvious gambit; some of the people who will be on the slate will be 'notorious' SJWs and the Puppies will demand that anyone who doesn't remove themselves is demanding a double standard and lacks moral authority. It's a sad ploy for sad, petty people.

How did the Puppies go down the drain so quickly and so completely? Having been following this for months, I have a few thoughts.

1. They believed Larry Correia's bullshit about a cabal controlling the nominations. Despite failing to identify works that won Hugos solely for ideological purity or that favoured TOR, the Puppies bought into the story that the nominations were fixed, had always been fixed, and that people like Correia (who writes successful and modestly entertaining fantasy) have been excluded because they hold strong right-wing political views and are Mormon/Catholic. By taking this as a fact, as opposed to looking at other factors, they immediately hamstrung themselves as a cultural reaction, as opposed to their talking points about 'good, overlooked and deserving' sci-fi. Every time they were challenged, they ran back to this faulty and easily dismissed point, ruining any chance of being looked at as a serious response to an issue.

2. They cooked their own nomination process. Torgersen claims that it was an open process, but it was admitted that all of the recommendations that they solicited were not part of the actual process of winnowing down nominees. They was done in a closed session by Correia, Torgersen, Sarah Hoyt, Jim C Wright and Theodore Beale (I refuse to use the pompous Vox Day for him). In several cases, authors were contacted as presumptive nominees without even having any specific work in mind, such as the now notorious worst nomination in Hugo history for 'Wisdom From My Internet'; a collection of crank ultra-right memes and jokes which skew heavily into racist, sexist and homophobic grounds, from Michael Z. Williamson - best known for being incapable of being caught on camera without holding a gun of some type. So many of the works ranged from mediocre to flat out bad that it was impossible for a moment to buy into the claims that they were good faith nominations and 'all about good work'.

3. They decided to start from point 1 as their justification, insulting Worldcon fandom. Torgersen's manifesto stated specifically that the Hugos had morphed into an 'affirmative action' award, insulting dozens of nominees and winners of the last decade with the implication that they owed their recognition solely to their status as women, people of colour, LGQBT, or writing diverse works focusing on such same characters. They immediately began to deny and lament that people's reaction to an ugly racist, sexist and homophobic statement was to call them racists, sexists and homophobes. Sci-fi has certainly had issues with race and gender over the years, the Imfamous RaceFail being one example. But the central value of the Hugos has been because it has been awarded so many times to work and to authors which become prominent examples of the best in sci-fi. Telling the community that awards it that they're doing it as a PC sop at the hands of a cabal is heaping insults on insults, and then wondering why no one believes they came in good faith.

4. Along this many path came their tunnel-vision of lumping everyone who is not a Puppy as an Anti-Puppy, Puppy-Kicker, or CHORF, which in my opinion stands for Torgersen can't come up with a decent insult that doesn't sound like it was dreamed up in grade school. In doing so, the wide sweeping insults caught more fans, especially those who had committed to reading the nominees with an objective eye, if possible. There were many reasons to opposed the Puppies, as individual as each fan. By ignoring that, they gave more reasons to object to them, further inflated by the fact that so many of the works in the package were considered barely publishable, much less Hugo worthy. The 'othering' is a classic GamerGate tactic, which was to create this mythical group of 'SJW's that had united against the GG crowd, and thus could be held accountable for any negative response. It's not surprising that the Puppies and GG crowds had a significant overlap in terms of people.

5. Finally, they brought in Beale. It is important to understand that Beale is, at best, a borderline sociopath. He craves chaos and anger as a way of validating himself as his skills as a writer and editor are negligible at best. He's been humiliated numerous times on-line trying to assert himself as some kind of Alpha Male symbol, closely connected with GG, MRA and PUA communities. One of only two people ever kicked out of the SWFA, he has constantly prowled around the edges of fandom with a group of willing idiots, doxxing and threatening at will. He has used family money (his father made a fortune in software before going to jail for tax evasion and later conspiracy to commit murder. It is believed that Beale lives abroad as the IRS believes he specifically helped get part of the family fortune out of the States) to fund a vanity publishing house. Tying his own Rabid Puppies slate on to the Sad Puppies, he managed to push his pet books and authors on to the slate. The difference between Beale and Correia's group is that it is doubtful Beale believes that there's a cabal. He feels the fandom itself is full of SJWs and his goal is to cause pain to them, burning down the awards if possible. He's cynically rode the Puppies, especially Jim C Wright, into increasingly extreme positions, egging them on from his perch. It is believed he even paid for Wright's flight to Worldcon, which was a humiliating experience which seems to have badly affected Wright, as well as his relationship with his publisher TOR.

In all the roundups, which on the Puppy side have been varying levels of insane wroth, self-pity, self-martyrdom and specifically in Wright's case, apparent career suicide, terms are war-like and hyperbolic. They will burn everything down. They've been persecuted because of their conservatism and are unsafe at cons (ignoring that it was a Puppy author who contacted Spokane police about the guest of honour David Gerrold), that the 'socialist-cock sucking whores' have taken over, etc. They have vowed that the fight will continue next year, in greater numbers.

It's a pretty sad spectacle. Correia and Torgersen were Campbell nominees, which is a pretty good indicator that there would have been a future nomination for their work at some point. Instead, they've made themselves toxic to a wide group of people. Correia is successful enough that he likely doesn't need to worry, but authors like Hoyt, Torgersen, and Wright are C-list; jobbing genre writers who occupy niche elements of an already niche market. All they've accomplished is to give wider fandom a reason to avoid them and that sinking in has only reinforced the need to believe that it is all a small cabal of horrible SJWs from TOR and Making Light, because if not, they have badly over-estimated their own market and under-estimated the volume of customers they have lumped into the same category with their insults.

In any case, while I expect a winter full of nasty posts, false equivalences regarding horrible SJW scandals and lots of victim claims that they were the honest, aboveboard honourable ones from the start, I can't see Sad Puppies 4 having the same impact. Beale will of course run a hard slate in 2016, no doubt believing himself to be clever by nominating a few of his mortal enemies like John Scalzi and daring him to refuse the nomination or be guilty of a double-standard. But even the Sad Puppies claim that they will nominate their choices regardless of the wishes of the author undermines them from the start, and I can see their impact strongly reduced. As for Beale, the EPH nomination changes will dilute his power to slate significantly, leaving him to decide whether investing in a single nomination in each category that will certainly finish below no award is worth it.

There was a point made at File 770 (Or as the totally not unhinged and irrational Torgersen calls it 'Pravda 770') that the basis of fandom in any place is a shared love for the material. No matter how negative and low the puppies go, the reality is that rage is not endlessly sustainable, and when it burns out, the people who are there because they love sci-fi will continue on, as will the Hugo.