@poopernova@GreatestGori@MoeBritannica I guess it's a bit of a cop out but on the other hand Carmack strikes me as someone who doesn't really care about political shitflinging, and BasedCon is unabashedly "own the libs"-type juvenile shitflinging.
@pettanko@poopernova@GreatestGori@MoeBritannica Political Shitflinging is something best to be avoided especially in a convention like that. I respect someone who wishes to stay out of the shit show that is American Politics. John Carmack did like propel video games 30 years into the future with Doom and Quake. Plus he made the Doom Engine Source Code Public because he's based like that.
It is unfortunate that Rob has made BasedCon so intentionally provocative. I told him as much after the event last year – I felt a little uncomfortable. There is a demographic that welcomes the in-your-face posturing, but it drives away sympathetic people that would otherwise be happy to talk about craft, stories, and technology.
Even when someone gives you a clear signal, it is a mistake to extrapolate it to an entire constellation of beliefs and behaviors, and then to assume they are contagious by association. That shortchanges a lot of people.
I’m not a culture warrior, and I don’t want to strike blows against anyone. I don’t follow activists on either side, including Rob, because I tend to think that all the negativity and resentment is detrimental to both the author and target.
The back story:
I like hard science fiction stories with a bit of competent libertarian vibe. I have ever since Heinlein, but it isn’t a mainstream genre. People here on twitter introduced me to a few contemporary authors that scratch that itch, and I have happily read a half dozen new books in the last few years from authors I would have otherwise been unaware of. It is great to be able to get a recommendation, read a book, then drop the author a DM and say “Hey, I liked your book!”
One of those authors was Rob Kroese, who had started organizing a small gathering of authors and fans that fell a bit outside the mainstream of SF/fantasy. This is a tiny niche of a niche, but I had had Twitter conversations with three of the authors attending, and I was interested in the contrast with the big commercial SF/fantasy conventions I had attended.
I was initially going to just show up as a fan, but I wound up giving a talk about AI and sitting on panels about aerospace and fact checking novels. I met several more authors, and came back with a backpack full of new books to read. Politics didn’t come up once in my conversations.