Date: Sun, 26 Jul 2015 19:01:31 -0400
From: mark <whitroth at 5-cent.us>
To: WSFA Official List <wsfa-forum at yahoogroups.com>,
 WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>,
 bsfsgeneral <bsfsgeneral at bsfs.org>,
 "gt-pfrc at ml.gt.org" <gt-pfrc at ml.gt.org>
Subject: [WSFA] The Hugos
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

I was finally casting my votes, and got down to the Campbells, which I have
yet to at least skim.

However, I've been thinking and reading a lot over the last few months, and
finally realized how I view the fsck'd puppies....

Back in the early nineties, when I was first on the 'Net, I hung out on
alt.pagan. It was a community I liked.

Then came Canter and Siegel, who "defended" themselves by claiming that there
was no such thing as a community here, it was just an advertising venue. Some
of you remember how *that* flew.

Finally, though - for several years on a.p, someone would push making a Big8
Pagan newsgroup (for those that don't know, it was said that some admins
considered the alt.* groups the scum of the 'Net; in any case, they were not
always distributed with the rest.) We, the regulars, would push back and say
no, we wanted the open community.

Finally... there was one or more (not sure) groups of assholes, it was
probably college students with too much time on their hands. The rumor was
they'd started out on alt.syntax.tactical, and jumped to alt.bigfoot. They'd
start cascades (me to\nthat's what I said\nMentos, growing to hundreds of
lines, and they'd deliberately crosspost to newsgroups that would start
flamewars (say, alt.pagan and talk.abortion and some Christian newsgroup....)

It finally got to be too much, we were getting buried in the spam, and we gave
in, and worked *very* hard to propose a Big 8 newsgroup, which proposal was
successful.  Unfortunately, this was when AOL got onto the 'Net, and the Web
was taking off, and the community fell off.

Give that one of the puppy leaders has allegedly written that he hates the
Hugos, and wants them to burn in hell, they seem to me to be exactly the same
kind of sophomoric losers who have nothing really of their own, and want to
destroy what others have.

I don't think we're going to let them. We've been here a *long* time....

mark