I've been busy, insanely busy.  Work is work, I'll update another time.  We lurch, like all small businesses from crisis to crisis but, assuming we can get through the next 3 weeks, we're looking to be in amazing shape.

But that's not what I wanted to say.  On Thursday the British public are voting on whether or not to leave the European Union.  I have some thoughts.

Thought the first: This is why referedums are a bad bad bad bad idea.  It's a complicated question, the results so complex and far reaching that even the best informed can struggle to understand them, and after 40+ years of integration the divorce can't be anything but terrible.  The British people should not be settling a fight that's been going on inside the Tory Party for a generation, not for stakes like this.

Thought the second: There have been many things said about staying in or leaving, I'll come to some of them, but it's clear that the one that is hitting home is the idea of immigration and that it is too high.  As the child of an immigrant, and as a current immigrant, I have found the turn of the discussion terrifying.  Anybody who, without even thinking can say words to the effect of "I'm not a racist but..." needs to take a LONG hard look in a mirror.  And while not all the members of the Leave Campaign are racists, all the racists are members of the Leave campaign, and what this has laid bare is that the facade of British reasonableness and open mindedness is just that, a facade slapped over some nasty petty thoughts.

Thought the third: most of the things people are complaining about re: Thought the second are actually related to decisions the British have made all on our own in Westminster without any help from the EU.

So, I stand firmly in the In camp.  If you'd ask my 18 year old self the same question back in 1986, I'd probably have said, NO we're British!  But then 18 year old me was a pain, I didn't like him either.  I also did a lot of growing up and a lot of that growing up meant spending a lot of time travelling.

So here's the basics of my decision.

• There is no doubt the EU has flaws - no organization is without them.  The British government in Westminster, with it's unelected upper house and weird electoral system which centralizes all the real power has flaws too


• Much is said of the democratic 'deficit' at the heart of the EU, but a dispassionate review of the way the EU works suggests that's nonsense - not understanding how the EU works isn't a reason to leave (see point 1 above)


• Immigration is uncontrolled...  well as 2/3s of it is from outside the EU, I'm going to assume that we don't actually want to control it


• Leaving a 500m person single market is insanely stupid - we joined for a reason.  We don't make that much that people want anymore and haven't done since before I was born.  We live and die mostly on services trading and niche products.  The City will lose the option for Euro trading (honestly, it will, the Germans already tried to take it away from them and failed because of, well, the EU) and with it a huge amount of money.  I sold services in Europe before the bulk of the Maastricht Treaty came into force and trying to get people work in Europe was almost impossible, nobody wants to go back to that even if they think they do - my boss ended up pre-Lisbon dealing with the immigration service over 4 Polish software engineers coming to do a couple of weeks at a client site because the immigration officers said they were coming to work and wouldn't let them in... that's barely a decade ago


• Millions of Brits live and work in Europe and millions of them live in Britain - throwing all of those into limbo is going to be bad


• There are lots of things that have made life easier and better for everybody - roaming charges on phones, inter-bank transfer rules and restrictions on fees, rights to take holiday and so much more have come about because of the EU - if you think Michael Gove cares about such things I have a bridge for you...


• Where will borders be?  In Northern Ireland?  In France?  We simply don't know - the ironic thing, especially with the border with France is that by leaving the EU we might actually make things worse for East Kent as the French might stop policing our border for us and just let migrants through


• Finally, the economic shock will be unlike nothing we have ever experienced and I include 2008 in that

Don't do it.  Vote Remain.  I did and I stand by it.  Be proud to be British, but also be proud to be European.

http://www.scifiwright.com/2015/08/in-memoriam-of-the-hugo-awards/#more-14485

Please, pretty please.

Brad Torgersen deleted my comments.  I feel unreasonably delighted by this.

(happy dance)

I'll try and assemble my thoughts later.  A lot happened.

However, I would just like to say, Brad Torgersen has completely lost his shit :)

As I'm off to sunny Spokane tomorrow, I'm trying to get the entire week's worth of work done today.  So far so good.  I haven't got the task I set out to do done, but I've ticked off a bunch of other stuff.

Now it's last minute shopping and packing and general fiddling around with stuff ahead of Worldcon.  That said, I've still got a few conference calls next week and probably a meeting with somebody who coincidentally will also be in Spokane, which is handy as I really need to close with them next week.

In other news, I just got upgraded for the flight to Spokane, all 45 minutes off it.

I've been keeping an eye on this, as you do.  It does have that grim feeling that people may have had in 1913/14 while the wise heads agreed war was impossible, the events just kept unfurling.

As I remarked on Facebook, the problem with negiating agressively with somebody who has nothing to lose, is that they might, in fact, decide that they have nothing to lose.  It feels like we're at that point.

We could discuss that the Euro project was potentially doomed from the outset for various factors:

• currency union without political union is unstable - how do you impose rules on people who are doing stupid stuff with your largess


• Germany joined at the wrong part of it's business cycle when the value of the Mark was much lower than it had been, giving Germany a HUGE price advantage in the early stages


• expecting members of your currency to depress their economies and GDPs to avoid other members experiencing any relative inflation isn't the right way to do things

Anyway, here we are.  The Greeks have called the German bluff and stated, correctly in my opinion, that this is now a matter for their voters.  They were elected, as a government, with a mandate to do something about austerity, they have tried, they have failed - it is now up to the people of Greece as a whole if they are prepared to deal with the consequences - either live with more austerity or get out of the Euro and possibly the EU.

At the crux of this is the idea that as long as you live 'within your means' and pay down your debt, confidence and growth will return to your economy.  The problem here is when your economy is running with 25-30% of the workforce unemployed, where does all the demand come from for there to be confidence?  I got nothing - there isn't a way to do it.

It has been suggested to me that all this posturing is purely because the Germans, ECB and the Commission are ok with losing Greece, as long as it shows the Spanish, Italians and Irish that they better not think about breaking ranks.  That feels potentially true especially after the tirade from the Commission Chair today where he basically demanded to know who the fuck these voters thought they were and what gave them any say in running their country?

What indeed?

Firstly, my original methodology was a bit wonky, I was working off the published nominations that got more than about 3% of the votes cast.  Unfortunately, not very many years have published details on the number of Unique Works nominated compared to the Ballots.  I have 3 relatively easy to look at ones though.  2009, 2013 and 2014.

Tables don't seem to be easy here, so I'll do what I can:

Total Ballots cast Best Novel | Novelette | Novella | Short Story
2009 - 629 | 373 | 337 | 448
2013 - 1113 |616 | 587 | 662
2014 - 1595 | 728 | 847 | 865

Unique Works Nominated Best Novel | Novelette | Novella | Short Story
2009 - 335 | 233 | 122 | 470
2013 - 475 | 252 | 135 | 569
2014 - 648 | 290 | 206 | 578

I've already covered the works garnering about 3% of the total votes and what happened to them.

Most interesting for me: the ratio of unique works nominated to the number of ballots cast for Best Novel has stayed REALLY very consistent over this whole time.

The actual ratio of people who vote for Best Novel and then vote for a short category is also relatively consistent.  What is not consistent is effect on the works being nominated - relatively speaking fewer and fewer short stories are being nominated over time.

What is unclear to me is how many unique works are actually published in each category and how much of this is simply diminishing returns in a field that already was fairly widely read.

Either way, given these results and how often in recent years some of the short categories have struggled to get enough stories which hit 5% it's indicative of just how effective a strong 'slate' is and how little evidence there really is of much of one historically.

One of the claims the various puppies have made is they're getting more works into consideration for the Hugo Awards...  I thought this was an interesting claim, especially given the effectiveness of a strong slate, so I thought I'd look at the data.  I can only find details back to 2011, anybody who has links to the earlier nomination data, I'd quite like it.

So 2011 is a clearer pre-puppy year, back in the bad old days when either middle-aged priviliged white men, or a sekrit cabal of Social Justice Warriors ruled the Hugos - it was also a smaller con, being in Australia.

As our pre-puppy, cSWM/SJW dominated reference we had 833 Ballots Cast for Best Novel, with 23 works up for consideration.

Each year, since then, the number of ballots cast has increased - interestingly, the number of books nominated has not, in fact, in each of the following years just 16 works have been nominated... meaning that the ratio of ballots to works has gone from 36:1 in 2011, to 100:1 last year...  strike 1 for the puppies.

I next looked at the ratio of Best Novel nominations to nominations for the Short Story categories - interestingly, by and large they're relatively static - more or less half the people who nominate a book for Best Novel nominate a short.

But here's another thing, in the last Post Puppy year we had the following numbers:

Novelette: 24
Novella: 22
Short Story: 17

Let's look at the state of play post puppy?

Novelette: 17-16-15
Novella: 15-15-16
Short Story: 18-17-15

Apart from Short Story which hasn't changed, the number of individual works has actually fallen too.

One of the original puppy claims was that works were not getting onto the Hugo Ballot, this is certainly true, but the implication of the claim was they were not being nominated - the data doesn't support that.  They were being nominated, they just didn't have enough people doing so.

The drive to get more people to nominate Puppy books has actually reduced the diversity and range of options being nominated, NOT, increased it.  Which rather dismisses the idea that the puppies do not and have no voted the slate as a bloc and read their own things and made their own decisions - if they have been doing that, then actually they've been therefore reading pretty much the same stuff as the cSWM/SJW 'cabal'.

I'd be interested to look at the data going back, but on the face of it, the drive to get more people to nominate and increase numbers has actually had the reverse effect and that strong slates actually make things even worse.

EDIT 1: A puppy supporter has pointed out to me that 2012 was also pre-puppies too - I'd need somebody to check if that was around the time a lot of Book Bloggers were getting upset about cSWM domination of the event.  Either way, it's interesting that despite an increase in the numbers of nominations, the numbers of works being nominated hasn't changed a lot with or without the Puppies.  I would like pre-2011 data so we can see what the normalized ratios were pre Aussiecon.

EDIT 2: The data I'm seeing seems to cut off at about 3% of votes cast - so I don't actually have full nominations here, but the numbers making that cut off seem very very consistent year in and year out.  Having more works spread out doesn't indicate much of a conspiracy.  Just people tend to like the same things.

EDIT 3: It's really hard to pull out the numbers of unique works because they're not always given or not given in a format I can be arsed to pull out.  However, interestingly a couple of things emerge:

1. The ratio of ballots to unique works in Best Novel is constant at about 2 - you can increase the voters, they all seem to behave the same way - the number of works that make the 3% of the votes cast list that is conventionally shown dropped in 2011 and has stayed the same


2. The Short Story categories have changed - if the ratios of votes to unqiue works had stayed constant then they'd have been 300+ unique works in one of the categories last year, instead there were only 200

In short, the more people we have taking part, the easier the numbers suggest it becomes to actually log roll a category with a strong slate.  I wasn't expecting that.

There is also precious little evidence that there has really been any real concerted activity in the past to game the awards - but we knew that.

Quote of yesterday, for me, was this on File770:

“I’m not a sociopath. As it happens, I’m actually unusually empathetic. I understand your pain. That’s why I gave you the opportunity to back down.”

That's Theodore Beale that is.  I am minded of an old school TV serial killer, or TV style domestic abuse or something.  "Why are you making me hurt you?  Why don't you just do as I say?"

I have been reading all the Hugo entries, even the Puppies, both Sad and Rabid, and actually, until that and some choice stuff he's repeated today about Poll Taxes and how he gave 'us' a chance to back down, I've had to conclude I have to vote no to any fiction category that has his fingerprints on it, and I have to say sorry to Kary English if I meet her about that.  OTOH she is up the for Campbell.

My father wasn't a very nice man and this is the sort of power game crap he'd pull at home after a bad day and after he was forced to retire on health grounds, when he didn't have a department at his beck and call at the Yard.  He mellowed as he aged and our relationship was much better by the time he died, but that took many many years of him learnng to live with himself and without the power that he used to have.  Mr Beale seems to crave that power and enjoys wielding it.  Sad really.

Anyway, novel category is easy - Three Body #1, Goblin Emperor #2, Anciliary Sword #3, No Award #4.  I am sad to say, I do not have any choice but to vote No Award #1 in the 3 other fiction categories.  Only 2 of the stories felt like they should be there, and as one of them was the kind of 'message' fiction the Puppies claim to hate, I'm a bit lost over what they stand for.

Fan Writer is equally easy, anybody prepared to put their head over the parapet to take on that other blight on the face of SF&F, Requres Hate, is good with me.

Best Fanzine?  No contest really :)

I'll be voting the Movie and 'TV' categories as if there wasn't a slate as I strongly suspect the slate effect is minimal in those because they do largely represent what people liked.  I'm annoyed Predestination wasn't in the Movies - Heinlein people, your BFF?  No?  Too much icky cross-gender stuff?  Sad.

Other observations from a few days of trying to avoid writing support docs (yes, the stuff they don't tell you in CEO school)...

1. The Puppy supporters/sock puppets/sealions and so forth work from the same kind of talking points memos as does the American right.  Today's word to use is 'Poll Tax'


2. If I were Beale, and I get a lot of No Awards this year, I'll make damn sure my slate looks like a normal reading list full of the stuff he claims to hate, just to see if people will spit stuff they would otherwise like, because that way it can be about him!


3. 'Slate' is not a complicated word in this context nor is 'breaking the spirit of the law' - watching the 'wahhh, we didn't break the rules why are you being mean to us?' stuff is stomach churning


4. Having read, or tried to read, most of the short fiction - we have a SERIOUS mismatch in taste and expectation going on.  Flow? Read like a bad Dragonlance rip off of somebodies clever D&D scenario.  A couple started out well and then went down hill really fast - what happened to Hook and Back fill anyway?  Turncoat?  Less said the better.  Neal Asher and Iain Banks could teach him a thing or two about writing AI battleships.

And, finally, not all Puppies are the same, there are a few commentators on File770 who genuinely didn't realize they were being played and feel bad about it now.  To them I say this, never mind, vote for what you like, join in, and be careful of what you see promoted.

Larry Correia's thread on the Hugo withdrawals:

There's a complete gem in there from "Doug Wardell": http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/04/15/well-this-sucks-2/

Are you suggesting that you thought everyone who voted the Sad Puppies slate read every work they nominated? If so, I think you’re naive.

There's more in there too - including somebody who nominated Kloos so they could get the second book free....