Magical Emu

Comment Threads

• J Thomas commented on A different cluetrain
  At this point, how society is likely to crash takes at least a few thousand words to at least sketch out, and I'm not going to try here. Agreed. This is a low-bandwidth medium, it just wouldn't sustain that. And anyway it's an inherently difficult topic. If you're studying a highway, it's easier to describe how traffic flows when it does flow, than to predict the details of an accident. Each accident is the result of multiple failures that come together, and it's hard to be sure which combination of failures will happen first. I'll let anyone who's interested know...
• Heteromeles commented on A different cluetrain
  Hopefully this isn't sealioning (great word by the way, and thanks. I didn't realize that's what I occasionally did). Since you brought up Jeff Vandermeer, I've got a question: how does the lack of a Hugo nomination affect someone on the midlist? Does it make it harder for them to "level up?" in sales? Sad to say, I don't follow SFF publishing well enough to know the answer myself. The reason I'm asking is that I'm trying to figure out what kind of economic impact this latest strain of VD might have through his actions. Obviously only one person will...
• guthrie commented on A different cluetrain
  It's easy to forget that something akin to Sealioning is a potentially valid approach to dealing with a certain kind of online liar/ bully/ nasty person (note not a troll, don't mindlessly follow the brainless media appropriation of the word for something that even relative newbies to the internet like me were using properly over a decade ago). The approach is to basically copy paste a question you asked before to the bottom of any thread/ post that said liar/ nasty person has made/ started etc. These people usually run away from answering previous difficult questions (obviously you make sure...
• Heteromeles commented on A different cluetrain
  Weird, did I have two screens open? This comment was supposed to go in the discussion about the Hugo mess. Oh well. Please ignore it here. It's not germane to this discussion....
• J Thomas commented on A different cluetrain
  It's easy to forget that something akin to Sealioning is a potentially valid approach to dealing with a certain kind of online liar/ bully/ nasty person.... Tactical-thinking nasty people will use any technique that works. So if you politely ask them questions they don't want to answer, they will accuse you of sealioning. If you present a minority point of view they don't like, they will say you are trolling. If you respond to their troll by getting upset they will have a word for that, and if you don't get upset they will say that you have Asperger's or...