Well, it's over guys. The Sad Puppies are dead. Put a fork in them, they're done. Thanks to the complete and utter incompetent mismanagement by certain members of the Mad Genius Club, namely Sarah Hoyt from what I can gather, it's time to retire the business entirely. Relevant context here.
In that link, you'll find discussion on a fair amount of nonsense, little of it relevant. It's an excuse-filled, poor-me rant combined with a pungently desperate grab for power and relevance. Much like the other post Hoyt made in January, it strikes me as being very close to Leigh Alexander's "I AM GAMES JOURNALISM, SILLY CHILDREN" claims during Gamergate. And we all remember how she ended up.
What Hoyt essentially admits to in that post is that she brought back the Sad Puppies this year specifically to crush Declan Finn and his hopes of contributing to a slate. They took his suggestion as assertion of dominance, refused to talk with him, and then Hoyt wrote a tear-stained rant about how the Sad Puppies were THEIRS, DAMN IT!
Okay, so the Sad Puppies are yours, damn it. It's really not worth fighting over at that stage. So I do have one question...
What did you do with them?
Oh? You...wow, nothing?
Really?
So you had six full months, even factoring in work and medical problems, after effectively pissing all over this brand to mark your territory, and you did nothing with it in all that time? Didn't even put together a tentative Sad Puppies list for the Hugos and Dragons? What about for smaller awards? Really? Nothing?
And now you're going to come back next year with a big shiny website to promote your "aesthetic" in fiction using the brand recognition of the Sad Puppies to attract people who think you're still doing this for altruistic reasons after engaging in the exact tactics that created the atmosphere the Sad Puppies were created to expose and combat?
Well polish my knob and call me Bob, that's one helluva plan there, my proto-Games Journos Pros.
And then when people in the comments section get all uppity (Translation: Try to help with advice nicely put), you're gonna act like a total shitheel to them?
You should write a book on how to keep friends. Or maybe read a book about SJW tactics and then try not employing them.
One thing I will say on this is #NotAllMadGeniuses. I'm not sure all of them were in on this corrosive behavior, and don't approve of this absolute nonsense. I don't know them, so I can't say for sure, but knowing of some of them and their behavior in the past, I don't think that all of them would go for this kind of thing.
I'll also say that if anyone who associates with me wants to continue to associate with the MGC, that's perfectly fine, and I won't jump up your ass about it. I understand not wanting to make waves, and not wanting to punch right. For myself, however, I don't know these people, and am forced to judge them by their actions and how they present themselves. In my view they're duplicitous snakes who were worried that someone might take away their main claim to fame, and as such began punching right themselves in a desperate bid for self preservation. Associate with them all you like, but I'm not going to now and in the future. This, in my opinion, is quite evidently mask-slippage. True colors have been shown, and this is how I do something about it.
I don't care if they disagree with my political opinions, or my opinions on literature, or my opinions on any topic you care to name. I was perfectly fine with letting shit lie because a motto of mine since Men In Black came out has been, "Don't start nothing, won't be nothing." But every once in a while, someone else starts it. Hoyt started it when she brought the Puppies back specifically to shit on a friend and ally of mine, and before she had her little freakout in January an ally of hers as well. I value loyalty very, very highly. We can disagree on anything and everything under the sun from major political issues to what kind of pizza we like, but if you have my back I'll have yours, and I'll even have the backs of friends of friends over a random stranger because my friend probably has a reason to hang out with that person. But when you drop an ally, hit him while he's down, and that ally also happens to be a friend of mine, well then you can't rely on mutual friends.
I don't play the disavowal game until you fuck up monstrously. For instance, I was more than happy to be on the same side as Glenn Beck... until he cucked and appeared on Samantha Bee's show trying to "build a bridge" with one of the worst, most vicious SJW's in the entertainment industry. You got in bed with the enemy, Glenn. You're fair game now.
Much in that same fashion, Hoyt and Co. have taken it upon themselves to be the arbiters of who is and isn't "in the clique", and I'm not going to sit by and ignore that. They pulled the rug out from under Declan and shat on him, and didn't even have the courage to name him and link to his blog post, let alone contact him in person beforehand like a functioning adult. He's, and I'm fucking quoting Hoyt here,
a self-proclaimed Sad Puppy leader who’d always been on the periphery, who’s barely competent to carry his own hat in a high wind, and who thinks the whole point is to back the Rabid selections.
Now Declan may be many things, but if this is the kind of behavior Sarah Hoyt exhibits over a misunderstanding that Declan worked to correct after being attacked unjustly, then in my view one of him is worth a thousand of her and I'll side with him any day of the week. Congratulations. You've lived long enough to see yourself become the villain.
In any event this coincides nicely with something I've been thinking of for a while, and that's that the Puppies campaigns have outlived their usefulness. The original point of the Puppies was to expose the corruption in the Hugo's. That was accomplished in spades. The secondary point of the Puppies was to attempt to change it. That had limited success depending on who you talk to. But the Hugo's have declined in relevance over the past few years, and have ceased to be a mark of quality and are driving more and more readers away from these books because they're shit. The Hugo's are in a death spiral, and there's no more need for an attempt to reform them.
If you want to shift the Puppies into a book recommendation service, that's fine by me. I mean we already have The Puppy of the Month Book Club but by all means go do your own thing. But that doesn't change the fact that this is an obvious power grab for the sake of brand recognition at the expense of someone who's done you, so far as I know, no wrong. And I hope it comes back to bite you in the ass, and that we're all there when it does so we can laugh.
Or at least so I can. Not everybody likes a good bit of schadenfreude as much as I do. I hope you enjoy running a once noble thing into the ground. Have fun with your Sad Puppies+.
Music is Crunk Knight by Kevin Macleod
http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1400044
Crunk Knight Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
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