209 Comments on ““Hate Mail” Contest: Be in the Book!”

1. unofficial entry:

   Worse than Ellison.

2. Aw, geez, Scalzi. I like you too much to do something like that to you! I also fear that I might accidentally write something that would trigger one of your subterranean neuroses and then I’d have your WIFE on my back with, “Why’d you say THAT? Who TOLD YOU that was what he cries himself to sleep about at night?!!?”

   Is it all right if I do a general hateful posting or must I really get specific and actually try to maim?!

   Clarify!

3. Mike Cane:

   “Is it all right if I do a general hateful posting or must I really get specific and actually try to maim?!”

   It’s going in my book, so it has to be about me. And anyway, Krissy won’t care. She enjoyed the scathing review contest. This will just be more fun for her.

4. John Scalzi is possibly the worst example of a failed abortion. The mind boggles to think of all the opportunities the Universe has had to end this walking waste of seminal fluid and yet failed to take them. What is worse is that someone took the time to teach this clearly anencephalic abomination to string letters together in a laughable approximation of words. If Tim Berners Lee saw what hath been wrought upon the web, he would commit seppuku in shame that he made it possible. I would wish a plague upon him, but I fear the plague would be infected by him.

5. I cry like a girly-girl. I cannot do this.
   http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/06/18/i-want-this-book/

6. OK, Scalzi, that’s enough outta you. Your festering pus dripped across the page in lieu of actual cogent verbiage is far beyond all limits of what can be countenanced in society — polite or not. There is not enough contumely in the OED to respond adequately to it. In fact, although the eternal torments of hell as seen by Hieronymus Bosch on mescaline are disproportionate to any ordinary miscreant’s lifetime of malfeasance, just one of your essays seems to merit an exponential application of same.

   But I digress.

   I am actually writing out of concern for your health, and to inquire… have you managed to give up the compulsive coprophagy yet?

   Your fan,
   –David

7. Dear Scalzi,
   I hope all your fingers fall off so the world will never again be subjected to your so-called “novels.” A better descriptor for your “work” would be diarrhea-sodden pages of pestilent vomit from the mind of meth-addled gibbon. To atone for the slaughter of innocent trees, I propose the following:
   For Old Man’s War, may you be hung by your toenails and forced to fellate gas-gangrenous, hairy, unwashed, old men as you listen to Britney Spears’ latest hit single. For Agent to the Stars, may you creep naked over white-hot glass shards coated in syphilitic dog vomit. For The Ghost Brigades, may you be coated in herring sauce, and may a dozen randy dolphins have their way with you as the musical stylings of William Shatner waft overhead. For the Android’s Dream, I hope your larynx falls out so you cannot scream for mercy as you are slowly softened to death in a vat of baby lotion while all your ex-girlfriends look on, eating popcorn and discussing your sexual shortcomings. And for The Last Colony, Mr. Scalzi, no amount of slow, painful, repulsive death will ever be enough for you.
   May we never speak again because you have been tied up and eaten, one morsel at a time, by born-again-christian cannibals, you llama-taint-licking pile of dysenteric donkey excrement.
   Sincerely yours,
   S.

8. You know the old joke about first prize between a week in Ohio and second prize being two weeks? Of course you don’t, you’re from Ohio.

   What could be worse than five years of stale blog entries of Scalzi talking about himself? Well, that would be ten years of stale blog entries. When they say, “We’ll throw the book at him”, this is the book they’re talking about.

   Now Scalzi has announced a contest where the winner is included in the book. And the runner-up is included twice.

   This really is a case where every child wins a prize. Except the children scampering after an ‘honorable mention’. I feel like a winner already.

9. (Preface: you know none of this is true!)

   There comes a time in a person’s life when they absolutely must throw down the gauntlet and demand recognition of a problem, in this case, John Scalzi. One could search the animal kingdom in vain for varmints which regurgitate pap faster than his soiled fingers rattle the keys as he churns out turgid effluvium faster than a fugitive flees justice. It is not enough that his work is wholly without commercial merit. His legions of fans blindly adore his five-dimensional characters as though art and wit were sufficient justification for hours spent lost in strange worlds which exist only in his own bent noodle. Truly, there is no greater shame than one waking alone, on a park bench, covered in cookie crumbs with a tome emblazoned with the name “John Scalzi” on the cover of it lying limp upon one’s chest, for all passers-by will know exactly what transpired in that lurid scene. I, for one, cannot stomach the thought of yet another farcical excursion and implore the publishers to relent from their support of such drivel or to simply admit that they are paying John Scalzi solely for the use of his name, which Mr. Scalzi undoubtedly protects with the ferocity of a rabid weasel, and, having appeared four times herein, will surely doom this complainant to endless rounds of litigation over the fair use thereof. Indeed, it seems probable given the quality of his work, that it is solely the proceeds of such frivolous legal proceedings which keep him and his family (yes, he has procreated, no we don’t know whether drugs were involved for the poor girl) fed with whatever illicit substances they consume to fuel such feverishly bizzare plots, as I have no doubt whatsoever that there is no way he could earn a living by the sweat of his brow – or whatever place from which the sweat put into his work emanates.

10. If I was tasked to correct the infamous “John Scalvi” misspelling and my two options were changing the text or erasing your entire life and letting one John Scalvi exist instead, I would choose John Scalvi. Every time. Because anyone has to be better than you.

11. You sir must be the unintended side effect of a failed Department of Agriculture experiment to cross breed frustrated literary critics with hemorrhagic macaques then raised alone in the sewers of Bangkok where you were shunned by the other inhabitants for appearing too grotesque.
    With an ego the size of your ass and an intellect as small as your wee bit of wanky you are the perfect example of spirit manifesting in the physical. What possible purpose your head serves besides providing a handy hole for the disposal of beer, pie and burgers is completely unclear since you talk out of your ass, turn a deaf ear to reason, can’t see the writing on the wall and think with aforementioned wanky.
    Your writing skills make comments on YouTube seem positively Shakespearean by comparison; your sole source of education appears to be gained from tearing away the newspapers that cover the dead Thai whores you regularly molest in a demented Oedipal manner.
    My only solace is the hope that your continued existence is a cruel Job-like series of tests from a Lovecraftian god whose high priests are inbred descendants of the Three Stooges.

12. Old Man’s war changed my life. I used to be a fairly content and happy person then I read Old Man’s War. 320 pages later I felt different, something profound had changed in my life… I realized I just wasted the better part of 4 hours reading the most worthless piece of drivel EVER. Suddenly my perspective had changed. Life is too short to be wasted on useless things. I was faced with life’s glaring reality of fleetness. I no longer can have a real relationship because, what’s the point? My job holds no meaning for me anymore. Life is simply too short to be wasted on the ramblings of a diluted sociopath who inflicts his rare form of punishment and life stealing moments through what he calls “written word” oddly enough only two letters off from “written turd”.
    Don’t even get me started on the “http://scalzi.com/whatever” website. I would need a PowerPoint presentation to point out the flaws. Clearly Mr. Scalzi can look forward to a long and unrewarding career in sewage processing, having the required experience based on his writings.

    ok, that physically hurt me to write. Big fan and yes, I waste too much time reading your work, both books and blogs.

13. Holy crap I am dealing with feelings of guilt and regret for writing a FAKE hate mail posting.

14. You know what your problem is Mr. Scalzi? You’re a deviant!
    And I know this because I read your ‘Androids Dream. Page after page of crapulence! And all so you could trick your readers to become accepting of your lifestyle choice! But I know what you really are, you SHEEP-FUCKER!!!
    Thats right! I saw through your clever ploy! Pretending a sheep is a woman. Yeah, right!!
    I’m calling my congressman so good people like me can put a stop to filth like you!!!

15. If wit and intelligence were beautiful women, Scalzi would be the fumble-fingered frat boy struggling to open their bra-straps after accidentally killing them with an overdose of GHB, just before giving up and prematurely spooging all over them with just two tugs of his sad little wanger, leaving his split-tail DNA for the most inept cop to find.

    If everything in the universe has a purpose, Scalzi’s purpose is the same as the brown stuff that leaks from the pants legs of pedophiles executed in the electric chair– he makes terrible things worse, in an insignifigant yet still disgusting way.

    If we take it as given that there is a god, Scalzi’s writing is proof of his pettiness and general bad temper.A god that would make a Scalzi wants us to find stupidity in even the most niggling places. Scalzi is a fine mist of cracker crumbs in your bedsheets, the corpse of a gnat wedged against the back of your eyeball, the almost subaudible whine of malfunctioning electronic equipment that you can almost convince yourself you can’t hear. God, if only you COULD convince yourself.

    –monty

16. Hate mail? You want me to write hate mail about you? You have not earned hate mail from me. You fall so short of the banality of evil people who actually know you have trouble remembering the unpleasant things you’ve done. From you vileness has all the impact of down upon rock.

    Your meanness is vapid, your hatred not to be remarked upon, and your animosity of positive benefit to the target. When informed of your fell and felonious deeds nobody thinks it worth their time to forgive you. Not because your actions are too cruel to be forgiven, but because they fall short of being harmful. In the annals of evil newborn kittens do more harm.

    Shakespeare wrote more like Bullwar-Lytton by accident than you could ever hope to on purpose. Jonathan Livingston Seagull delves deeper into the nature of evil than you could ever hope to. Saints would try to tempt you into sin, then suicide from despair.

    Scalzi, you are as dynamic as tapioca, as deep as a Hallmark card, and as menacing as a toothless puppy. Heroes rescue you from the dark tower. And you want hate mail from me. If you could rise to the status of pussy I’d consider it, until then work on your simpering whine and beg forgiveness from the local chickadees.

    When you rise to the status of pathetic I’ll have vague notions about saying unkind things about you.

17. John,

    It is really nice to see that you are using that philosophy degree to your fullest potential; you worthless piece of pseudo-celebrity trash.

    I am curious. Did you roll out of bed this morning and suddenly decide to act like an over-opinionated, card-carrying member of the uniformed, neanderthal society of idiot pricks? From what I gather on a quick perusal of your overly pretentious blog, I’ve come to the very viable conclusion that this has been a misguided way of life for you for over 10 years now!

    Is it some unrealized sadomasochistic desire to writhe in your own pertinacious feces; only to pass that filth onto a loyal readership? You should be truly ashamed of your licentiousness towards your sacred public congress.

    Really, they deserve better. At this point, anything involvingBritney Spears is a substantial upgrade. When you finally decide to value sanity over vitiation, perhaps I will find it in my heart to revisit this site.

    Die in a grease fire,

    Kate

18. Scalzi, you putrefied smear of degenerate amniotic fluid. Another book. No, not even, merely a collection of transcribed hoots and shrieks of a Ebola crazed baboon, hammering away on a keyboard and lucky, I say, lucky enough to string letters together into something resembling drivel. Your inspiration, no doubt coming from the electrodes alligator clipped to your dangling testicles, which themselves are only remarkable for the fact that you manage to lick them while exploring the profound (alas, only to you) depths of your own ass.

    You are driven, no doubt, by the promise of soul-tainted lucre to warm your rancid scrap of excreted banana peel you call a heart.

    How dare you presume to put your asparagus-scented piddlings, without a doubt badly plagiarized, these puerile scratchings in the view of decent people?

    You are an embarrassment on the order of the pope ripping off a Taco Bell fueled pant flapper in the midst of a saint’s funeral, during Lent, in St Peters! You are the smell of that papal ejecta, wafting up the noses of the holiest and most sanctimonious, defiling all you touch with your unavoidable omnipresence.

    It is a smell I notice every time I am forced to place my flesh within the bounds of the rotted and decaying scoop of existence you call Ohio, yes, that is you.

    Your pitiful whinings about hate mail incensed me further for your arrogance, your unspeakable gall in presuming vast ‘experience’ by being exposed to the rantings of Cheeto-stained lunatics who aren’t even capable of adequately expressing their deepest hatred of you. Please.

    Enough, I can no longer besmirch my beautiful mind with the contemplation of your execrable insignificance. You bore me.

19. Scalzi,

    The really scary bit about your writing?

    All the blurbs and dollops of praise referencing Robert A. Heinlein. Ohhhhhh. Ahhhhhh. So, yeah, it must be great being such an original and new voice in military science fiction that you, well, become a mere simile on the radar of the market. Bestselling status? Check. Ego to match it? Check. Money pouring in from royalties? Check. John W. Campbell award winner? Check.

    But all that doesn’t matter just because you think you’re producing (f)art. Money and awards do not a writer make. Nor does living in Robert A. Heilein’s shadow. Hell, Tom Cruise lives in L. Ron Hubbard’s shadow all the time. I rest my case.

    So, OMW: you give your senior citizens a discount pass off Earth, load them with some Cialis/Viagra/Magna RX/whatever (*snicker*), give them these cutesy smart guns (as if there aren’t enough of those–God’s sake, man, it’s called a damned trope for a reason–break the hell outta it and do something new), and a BrainPal,. Well, gee, wow. Brain amplification. They fight an ensemble cast of aliens and stuff while stuck in super-cool Matrix-y bodies that are green. Oh, oh, oh, and one of the characters even sacrifices herself in combat and composes and gooseflesh-inducing jisei just like a samurai or something. Now you’re cross-pollinating and showing how really badass these old-folks-in-new-bodies are.

    Shit blows up. Negotiations with aliens fail. Battles ensue. More shit blows up. More aliens die along with some friends of the protagonist who has a lovely pity party, a bleeding-heart moment of self-loathing and what’s-it-all-for WHILE KILLING SIX INCH ALIENS IN A SHAMELESS ALLUSION TO GULLIVER’S ENCOUNTER WITH THE LILLIPUTIANS!!!

    Almost forgot about having your protagonist nickname his BrainPal Asshole. How . . . droll. How new and original. Boy, that’s gotta be the part that sent the jury for the John W. Campbell Award through the roof.

    And speaking of the protagonist. Yes, we get it. You love Journey. Now, welcome to the 21st century. Just because they found a new front man from the Philippines AND discovered him on YouTube means absolutely zilch in terms of relevancy. You, sir, at least, have a fighting chance.

    Did you come up with OMW’s plot by IMing with some Whatever sophomore fanboy or a thirtysomething trufan and say, “Yeah, thanks for the beta-reading. I’ll send you an ARC and photo of my bacon-wrapped cat”?

    But. You’re. Still. Just. “like RAH.” Not the man himself. Not some truly new and original voice. Just a cheeky wannabe. “Look at me! I’m clever! I Photoshop myself and play LOLcats all day. I’m just like you all, so read my books!“

    I don’t give a flyin’ frak’ (see, now THERE’s an allusion to some real military science fiction you could learn a thing or two from, bub).

    Here’s another simile for you: “John Scalzi, military science fiction writer, finally writes a novel where he decides to be like himself!”

    So, let’s recap. If Truman Capote were alive and asked to read your OMW novels, he’d likely say something along these lines: “That isn’t writing; it’s typing.”

    Cordially,

    Berry

    P.S.–Next time you nickname a character’s BrainPal, try calling it John Scalzi. It’d work much better than Asshole.

20. If you were freedom, even Americans would hate you.

21. Oh, merciful gods and bananas, another magnum opus from Scalzi, the man who singlehandedly settles the “evolution vs. intelligent design” controversy by proving both sides wrong. Listen, you pulsillanimous donkey-fister, I’d rather chew on someone else’s hemorrhoids than be subjected to whatever your dental work is picking up THIS week. You have the writing talent and personal hygeine habits of a smear of week-old fish slime on an anonymous street in Minsk. Your prose soars with all the grace of a bilious orangutang, and delivers biting wit to rival Perry Como. Your books–and you–should be pulped and spread on crops as an industrial weed-killer, except that it’d be against international eco-terrorism regulations, you masticating coprophage.

22. If I accuse you of working for the government, that would surely put me in the top 10, right?

23. Dear Mr. Scalzi:

    Just because you can write doesn’t mean you should.

    I say that having recently read one of your books. Now I feel like I should re-read the entire Xanth series to recapture my sense of maturity and the entire Gor series to recapture my sense of healthy human relationships. Reading your book has loosed your feckless prose in my head like a rabid, irritable, and indifferently toilet trained ferret into a chicken coop. My only hope is that your banal Heinlein-necrophile futurism will come true and I will be able to abandon this body and these memories to the sweet release of a quick death and escape into another body with a new mind that has not been tainted by the Chernobyl-level literary radioactivity that is your writing.

    You are as close to writing the great American science fiction novel as Uwe Boll is to surpassing Blade Runner.

    By the way, no matter how many Sci-Fi cons you go to, you will never realize your fond hope of no longer being the most dysfunctional, unattractive, or poorly groomed person in the room.

    Best Wishes,

    Ken

24. Mr Scalzi,

    Your writing is so astonishingly mediocre that it is barely worth commenting on. Neither entertaining in its banality nor dazzling in its wit, your books are the forty-degree-day of writing: not particularly noteworthy in any sense of the word.

    Thus, I write to you not out of anger about your work and the contents thereof (which, I must say, I can barely be bothered to remember), but rather to discuss the way in which you conduct yourself. Never have I been so embarrassed to be a member of the human race than when I first happened upon The Whatever. You bully and preach as though anybody with a single ounce of sense (common or otherwise) might care what you have to say. You have the audacity to foist upon us your outdated, outmoded, outrageous opinions, the like of which would be held in contempt by even the most vile of dictators.

    Even dogs, sir, do not like you.

    Your death would be held up as a shining example of ‘addition by subtraction,’ were someone to decide you were worth the cost of but a single bullet. Children would dance and cheer in the street, spraying each other with red colored kool-aid and calling it ‘Scalzi blood.’ Such would be the reaction to your exit from this plane of existence.

    At long last, sir, have you no shame?

    I urge you, in the name of all right-thinking people, nay, of all people, thinking or otherwise, to shuffle yourself off this mortal coil. Do one thing good with your life and end it.

    With all the loathing it is possible to have,

    Mark

25. So how does it feel to have hoodwinked your publisher into pimping yet another pile of your piss-scented pap? I must say that I am awed by the hubris that enables you to think that your wannabe fans will swallow yet another ejaculation of your feeble wit. Not satisfied with polluting the internet with Whatever you feel like spewing at the moment, you must perpetuate your failings for future generations by having them transcribed onto a longer lasting media.

    May your well-deserved reward be to edit the slashfic of the legions of Tolkien fans who were not good enough to be allowed to publish on the fanfic sites. Perhaps that will give you a better appreciation of drivel, and your own proper place in the world of the written word.

    Sincerely,
    CJ

26. You probably don’t remember me John. You’ve left so many of us behind. We met at that Young Republicans rally in school. I’ve heard you had moved on and were turning into some kind of lefty.

    Fortunately, in the years you’ve spent wasting your life writing books, I’ve moved up quite a bit in the party and in what must be divine providence you decided to live in Ohio.

    When I was going over party election correction records, er, I mean results, I noticed that you voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004. (Without our help!) It’s good to know you are still truly one of us.

27. Finally, a decent photo, Scalzi. You brushed your teeth, shaved the nose hair, and had someone airbrush out that distracting wattle.

28. Mr. Scalzi:
    Please find enclosed with this letter the remainder of your latest book, the local bookstore would not allow me to return it.

    I read your “work” and found it lacking. However I don’t like adding to our local landfill, therefore; being ecologically minded, I placed it on the pile of papers interned to be recycled (in case of emergency) in my outhouse.

    I am returning the book (minus the 1st page of chapter 1) because after attempting to use a page of your writing to remove excrement, my posterior actually became filthier. As other paper sources have proven adequate the aforementioned task, I can only conclude that your writing has the unique ability to make shit, shitier. I am hesitant to speculate as to the magnitude of depravity attached to your soul that your work is imbued with this property.

    With Warmest Regards,

    Jason Mitchell

29. If people had to pay $1 everytime they forced their ineptitude upon others George W. Bush would owe every American one million dollars; John Scalzi would owe us all two million.

30. Dear Mr. Scalzi,

    In your cloying quest for fawning internet fandom, you have become the ultimate hit generator, a numbers’ whore who insults the oldest profession by relishing each hit as if you were a pubescent peeping Tom who ejaculates at the hint of coitus. You post faster than multiplying e-coli on an ineptly wiped anus, infecting the blogosphere with pithy factoids and self-aggrandizing tedium passed off as bons mots. The bloated gas cum opinions this generates produces enough miasmic heat trapping vapors to deserve its own bumper sticker: “Go green. Shut down Scalzi.”

    AliceB

31. Dear Sir or Madam:

    I have just completed a reading The Android’s Dream</em?, the fourth book in your Old Man’s War Trilogy. First, I’d just like to point out that usually a trilogy, by definition, is complete after three books have been published, however, my own generosity of spirit dictates that I allow you a skosh of leeway here. If your muse could not be contained in three volumes, then so be it.

    Having said that, the problem I have is that in your previous attempts, you’ve been quite clear about how John Perry and friends all managed to reappear in new and improved bodies. The CDC was nicely developed. As a reader, one felt that complexities were being duly explored.

    The Android’s Dream begins with a chapter of entirely new characters doing…well, I don’t need to tell you the vile things you have them do. This seems fine at the time; you’re merely introducing a new situation for John Perry and Jane Sagan to resolve.

    Well, I was terribly disappointed to see that you’d apparently felt the need to put John and Jane into yet another set of new bodies. Clearly Harry Creek is the new version of John Perry, and presumably Robin Baker is the reconstituted Jane. You never explain, however, how the sheep genes get mixed up with Jane during the transfer. And the entire set of various Governments also seem to have done some kind of disappearing act.

    Truly, I’m sorry; I so wanted to enjoy this book as much as I had it predecessors, but it’s an absolute muddle. In fact, it misses it’s mark by such a wide margin I might have suspected it was intended as a ‘stand-alone’ story, were I not so familiar with the stories that spawned it. I would go so far as to say that a complete re-write is in order to make it conform to the Universe you have so sadly abandoned.

    Please consider my words. You are not beyond redemption. Until such time as you’ve done so, I fear I will not be able to continue to support your career.

    Yours,

    Nathan Gendzier

    P.S. Please do not take this as a threat; you have nothing to fear from me, but I can’t be held responsible for any consequences if you fail to heed this prudent advice. The Universe wants John and Jane to be…John & Jane. The Universe has its own ways of setting things right.

32. And yes, I know mine wasn’t technically Hate Mail…more like crazy person mail. That’s just the direction that popped into my head and I went with it.

33. Dear Sir:

    Exactly when and how did you decide that anyone on the planet earth gave a rat’s ass about what you taped to your cat?

    You may like to cast yourself as some sort of “devil,” but you obviously see yourself more as some sort of god, desperately seeking worshipers who will twitter and fawn over your every childish whim.

    Perhaps your ego really is god-sized. Your talents clearly are not.

    Sincerely,

34. OMG these are funny entries. I almost peed myself while reading them. I, unfortunately, am not witty enough to even attempt such magnificent writing. I’m not worthy.

35. You’re a geek. That’s pathetic enough.

36. Ah… another post from Mr. Scalzi, deputy ombudsman for the lesser gods of small ideas.

    Let’s face it, John, the universe banked a bad roll and you waded out of the gene pool. Fine… that’s our bad luck. But now the riptide’s come and you won’t be satisfied until you’ve dragged us all down with you — sputtering in your public display of devolution, swallowed by the fetid, sallow swamp of self-importance that robes your rounded shoulders — you will drain us, and drown us, and in the end you’ll still wear that smug, stupefied grin, won’t you? Of course you will.

    For shit’s sake, Scalzi, do something with your life! Honestly, is this all you’ve got? Nursing at the teat of the blogosphere’s collective attention units? A daily diary of your life’s detritus and pathetic spleen venting? Photos of Ohio? Let’s put it all on the table… the “information superhighway” doesn’t need yet another pitiable roadside attraction. Christ on a crutch, we’ve already got BoingBoing. That’s more than enough.

    Your run is over, John. You’ve served your purpose. The merest spark of your existence, your every pitiful breath, proves beyond the palest shadow of doubt that Intelligent Design is a lie.

    So, thanks very much. Good on you. Now kindly crawl back to your malodorous pool and pray the plankton will have you.

    P.S. Best to Krissy and Athena.

37. Urine belching, fan felching,
    furry loving, grandma shoving
    shares genes with Lincoln’s slayer,
    and genetically prone to lack of hair.

38. So, just how long HAVE you been driving to Columbus to attend Ron Parsley’s church? Hmmmm?

39. Words fail me in expressing how sorry I am for Krissi and Athena.

40. Scalzi,

    you cum-burbling trout fucker. I just read the latest tripe you’ve hoodwinked your imbecilic editor into publishing, and all I can say is “Jesus Christ on a Lithuanian water buffalo.” (I can only assume you have some heavy blackmailing goods on the guy. Did you by chance sneak into his office and discover the multi-gigabyte collection of German midget porn on his computer, or what?)

    And as if that pile of ebola-laden excrement you called “The Last Colony” wasn’t enough insult to sentient vertebrates everywhere (what are you trying to do, trying to convince a future civilization that we couldn’t have possibly been the species that produced Leonardo and Michelangelo?), now I have to read that you’re shitting out yet another book. And aren’t we the lucky ones! It’s a collection of your fever-induced insane blatherings from that little exercise in self-fellation you call the “Whatever”. Have you no shame at all?

    I have no intention of spending a dime on that book—hell, I’d pay a hefty amount to not have to read it, and I will, in fact, attempt to burn down the printing facility that has agreed to soil its presses with your mental diarrhea—but judging from your previous efforts at literacy, I can predict the contents already:

    Chapter 1: The Glory That Is Me
    Chapter 2: Enough About Me, Let’s Hear What Others Have to Say About My Awesomeness
    Chapter 3: Let Me Regale You With Tales of My Awesome Wife and Precocious Child, Both Of Which Are Cuter And More Intelligent Than The Lot of You Put Together
    Chapter 4: Let Me Regale You With Tales Of My Awesome Pets, All Of Which Are Cuter And More Intelligent Than The Lot Of You Put Together
    Chapter 5: Why I Make More Money Than Most Of You Just By Sitting On My Ass And Shitting On A Ream Of Printer Paper Because My Agent Has Gone Insane With Syphilis
    Chapter 6: How Awesome It Is That I Am One Of The Three Philosophy Majors In The Country Who Doesn’t Flip Burgers For A Living Because I Have My Editor’s Balls In A Vise

    I could go on, but that’s about all I can take before giving in to the urge to eat my shotgun, even though the pattern left on the wall by my brain matter would have more artistic value than all your literary efforts put together. Kindly do the world a favor and consider this a suggestion for producing your next (and final) “novel”.

    With extreme loathing,

    —Marko

41. Holy crap, I just realized what a job it’s going to be to grade all these – are you really going to do that or just pick apart the winners. Or do we call them losers? How about selected recipients :)

42. Today I read Scalzi and I kicked the walking cane of a blind guy. I think I lost that karmic battle.

43. One truth we hold self-evident is that all men are created equal. Except John Scalzi. What is with that name, anyway? Truly the Worst. Name. Ever. Sure, a rose by any other name would still smell, and so does this book. That’s the point.

    Yes, in a sick and twisted attempt to breed, John Scalzi writes books. And while they SHOULD have a version of that bumper sticker on their covers (IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU’RE TOO DARN CLOSE), sadly, they don’t. Thank GOD you’re reading this while you’re still inside the bookstore, and it’s not TOO late. (Put the book back slowly. Avoid eye contact. Act nonchalant, and just walk away.)

    Scalzi has done more damage to the English language than all the Gabor Sisters (and their hellspawn, Arianna Huffington) combined. Anyone else could excuse their offenses to civilization by proclaiming ‘I’m only human’, but with Scalzi, we want proof.

    In the Bizarro World, John Scalzi is lauded as a genius. Here on Earth, he is whatever’s left when you suck all the genius out. But there IS a use for his work, currently mouldering nicely in dark warehouses across the country. We estimate there should be just enough unsold Scalzi books to build a 15-foot-high wall along the Mexican border. No Mexican who can read will dare come near it.

44. I might come back to enter this if I can get into a sufficiently bile-spewing mood to take aim and let rip, but I had to note I found two new blogs to read from a couple of the awesome notes already.

45. Dear John,

    Pears are my favoirte fruit. They’re tasty, very wet, easy to eat, and they just slide down my throat. They’re scrumptious in short, better than apples, much easier to eat than a coconaut or a grapefruit (not that anyone likes grapefruits). I’m telling you this to explain that I fucking hate you. I look at you and all I see is pear and I want to eat you. I can’t see a picture of you without imagining you sliding down my throat into my stomach. I pray that you never meet me if you’re wearing green or other pear like colors. It goes further than that though. Whenever I see a pear, your face suddenly appears, and it starts telling jokes. Throwing joke after joke at me, every once in ahile maybe a smile or a chuckle, but mostly why, why won’t it stop, make it stop, god not everything has to be funny pear-man. So for the love of god work out your upper body until you become more apple like or eat a lot of food until you become a canteloupe or one day you might just feel something bite you. I hope you’re juicy. Bitch.

    I’ll be seeing you at the supermarket,
    Matt Stapley

46. You know, when exploring the random world of readings and blogs, there is no doubt that you encounter a lot of brilliance mixed in with the chum that is this cut-throat community. And I have to say, without a doubt, you are one of those brilliant stars that shine in the night that is inflicted with LOLcats, drivel and complete garbage.

    Like the Plague Star before you, you seem to be an inspiration with your wry wit. You lead so many people through the dark pits of the literary word, giving them hope and inspiration to commit seppaku before the diseased remains of their brains leak out and they resolve themselves to write purely commercial books with no redeeming values. No doubt, your artistic talent as saved a great deal of people from happy, meaningful lives as writers.

    Your books have really inspired me, if I bothered to read them, but frankly, the idea of letting your thoughts corrupt my own really isn’t in my best interest for mental health or even a sane view of the world, so I’ll just let the cover of your abomination give me everything I need to elevate you to the top shelf of my bookshelf, right next to the cat urine-soaked copy of Atlas Shrugged and Mein Kampf.

    So, as a writer and a reader, I have to thank you from the bottom of my heart for setting the lowest point I could ever reach in my career and giving me the hope that, no matter how badly I sell, I can always say I’m better than you.

47. O Archmagister of Cruel, Lord of the E-twitter, Eviscerator of Innocence, and Captain of Corporate Capitulation, hear my words that I may praise thee…

    The feeble, groveling masses of earth once again salute your return from your nebulous hideaway fortress in the ethereal levels of condescension and derisive epiphany. Once more our wretched folk can bathe their humble ears in the pungent ointment of your rhetoric, that they may learn to strike down their foes with glee and dance in their gory literary entrails as you have done, and vanquish the foul strands of spiritual thought that still cling to us like cobwebs of a past before you breathed the life of your cynical Uber-awareness into our collective delusion….

    Once more, our most cherished philosophies crumble in the heat of your great hog-farts of wisdom, distilled from the mighty cubic volumes of heated air at your most lordly disposal. The cherubic puckered soreness of your red asterisk is a testament to the might of the concepts that break hurricane winds through such a tight, unyielding orifice as to have fooled many into believing for years that it was in fact your wallet.

    Of course, now that your lordly bounty has been harnessed, summed and meticulously chronicled with artful glee in the seventy-seven holy volumes of the Scalzica Megalomanaica, (each of which occupies enough digital space to fill the minds of three Sentient Artificial entities and kill a fourth from sheer intellectual agony) we are all fully aware of your Byzantine connections and obscure, though apoplectic wealth, and beg you to consider spending some small percentage of said munificent bounty on anything that doesn’t have little winking LED lights on it.

    O, your generosity has been known to move hard-working nuns to tears at the hospital beds of orphans around the world, and the glory of your kindness, empathy and understanding is known by all and revered as the guiding light of an era. Truly, human kind would still be cringing in hidden caves and burrows, snacking on one another’s hair lice, and pondering the technological applications of rocks, were it not for your Continuum of meta-knowledge and the brutal articulation of your philosophy. Praise the blood of the fools that opposed you! Let them weep and thunder over the loss of innocence, for we are guided by the cyclopic spotlight of your glorious wit.

    Once more, we hope the suffering of our wretched planet will meet the gargantuan needs of your hungry ego during this stay, and as always, entreat you to remain merciful to those of its feeble denizens unfortunate enough to incur your god-thrashing fury.

    Yours in faith and lock-jawed adoration,
    An unworthy servant.

48. My Dear Mr. Scalzi,

    I will begin by stating that I am fully cognizant of the fact that writing this commentary is a complete and utter waste of time, falling as it does on ears deafened by the crap that fills them, the same crap that occupies the space that lies between them. Crap, Sir, is probably the only thing that keeps your head from caving in, as everyone knows that nature abhors a vacuum, and other than a vacuum, there couldn’t possibly be anything inside your head other than crap. I come to this considered opinion after having read your latest novel.

    Nevertheless, I feel compelled to write to you, no doubt inspired to do so by the same forces that cause dogs to return to their vomit, in the vain hope that by confronting you with the truth about your complete, total, absolute, and incontrovertible lack of talent, I can somehow convince you to take pity on the whole tradition of English literature and convince you to stop writing. Please. Just. Stop.

    Go back to the coffee shop. At least you weren’t an utter waste of space there.

    Sincerely,

    Name Withheld

49. Scalzi,

    I just tried to read Old Man’s War. Ordinarily after breaking my head against such a pisspoor book I would write to express my dissatisfaction with your half-baked attempt to rape the corpse of Bob Heinlein, but since I stole the book from some geek waiting for his bus outside the local high school, a kid who looked like he’d been kicked off the chess team for being too nerdy to fit in, I just want you to refund his parents’ money. You can’t give back that fifteen minutes of my life, but you can do the right thing by Poindexter.

    Believe me, I did the twerp a favor when I ripped the book out of his furry little hands. You can too. Give back the $2.99 his momma paid for your scribbling at the paperback exchange, so he can spend it on 20 sided dice or something that will improve his education and social standing.

    You should be ashamed for writing this stuff. You remind me of a weinerdog I once owned. He kept trying to get off on my leg. On second thought, you’re even more of a pooch. That dog didn’t know any better. He got hit by a car. So what’s your excuse?

    In closing, here’s my impression of your momma when she saw the new baby:

    “MY GOD! IT HAS A TAIL!”

50. Mr. Scalzi,

    I am absolutely aghast at your recent attempt to once again take advantage of your long-suffering readers to cover for what can only be described as your own lack of creativity or cleverness.

    Today’s “contest” shows once again, your propensity for pessimism, your antipathy toward your audience and your utter inability to create a decent piece of writing all by yourself.

    By suggesting – nay, encouraging!- the use of profanity in a vain attempt to spice up what is otherwise flat, boring prose, you are disregarding the beauty and elegance of this, our English language. Your appeal to the vile, degrading, and hateful among us highlights the nature of your own spirit, setting a prime example of “what not to do” for all the world to see. This sort of negativity not only shatters whatever minimally decent reputation you might have left, it also jeopardizes any hope we may harbor of helping the next generation of collaborative writers to improve their language, to better themselves and their communities through good communication practices, or to bring any sort of decency to an increasingly depraved world. You’re putting our youth at risk, Mr. Scalzi, and it must come to a stop.

51. You know, I used to think the lowest, most useless thing I could think of was a “suckhole”. It’s a hole. And it sucks. Could anything possibly be *less*? I didn’t think so. Then I read Scalzi…

52. Puts the anal back in banal.

53. You never stepped on the Great Seal of the U of C, did you — forever in superstitious dread of expulsion from that narrow ledge of validity over the hungry but unconscious gulf of your own worthlessness. Posing as an argumentative wit while reveling in an excess of brown-tongued reverence for authority. “I’m going to be a well-paid journalist!” Pimping the great plump excrescence of your own fat ass, you bended over for AOL and praised yourself as an exemplar of life success. “Follow me,” you call, “forget Vonnegut — real writers graduate and serve corporations.” Pathetic. Disgusting. Your overweaning pride in Mammon’s favor ruins your vision just as the gonorrhea-suppurating cunt of a court prostitute ruins that of her infant son. Your book sales mean only that we were bored and, as at a carnival freak-show, sought out evidence of a misshapen and mentally-incontinent impotent incompetent whose misery not only exceeds our own but exceeds the bounds of imagining. My brief acquaintance with your work has been like watching George Bush fail to hold the attention of kindergarten children during story-hour while one airplane after another struck the World Trade Centers. Yours is the banality labeled evil. Have you considered the possibility that the fawning hordes of talentless know-nothings who swarm your blog are that miniscule portion of the technorati that is easily swayed by the great pustules of poisonous self-importance? You beg to be insulted like the worst piss-drinking masochist, anything so that we notice you. Yes, John, we notice. Your swollen cheeks, red from begging, must ache when you hold that fake smile. Beg to be insulted and anything we say will be tolerable. Beg, and smile, and you can imagine that the bloody, aching emptiness in your guts does not mean that we hate you and you do not matter. You can imagine that you are in control, you attention-grubbing closet fantasy-fascist. The stage lights have come up and your pitiful costume is exposed for the smear of shit and semen and gold paint it has always been. The closet has faded, fetish-gear revealed. Yes, we’re laughing. The illusion that we are laughing *with* you, John — how much longer can you maintain it? The theater begins to empty. You are hiding behind the cardboard figures of heroes in the lobby — Heinlein and Dick. The other boys have been pointing in your direction and talking — are we admiring you? Now we leave, and you have nothing but the whirr of the janitor’s vaccuum-cleaner and the sweat-stained cardboard in your puerile grasp. Your breath is sour; you stink of expensive perfume applied to hide the fetid stench you harbor inside; the world outside is dark. If only you had the courage to stand on your own.

    Sincerely,
    Nathaniel White

54. Behold the glory of diarrhea of the word processor, now in book form!

55. Mr. Scalzi serves as an example to many:
    To the citizens of Ohio he is an example of what will happen if they continue to fornicate in the shallow end of the gene pool.
    To aspiring writers he is the shining example of how not to write a novel; Mr. Scalzi literally could not find a plotline even with the assistance of Harlan Ellison.
    To political pundits everywhere he is a vocal and visible example of the “lunatic fringe.”
    To those poor, tortured souls that actual read his so-called “novels,” he is an example of the many tests that Man must go through to redeem His soul.
    To John Scalvi, he is just another example of a failedand lazy identiy thief.
    And finally, after 10 years of posting his drivel on the internet, he is the prime example, above and beyond the fetish porn and photo blog sites which litter the internet, of why DARPAnet should have been kept in house.
    So I thank you Mr. Scalzi for being an example to many, and leading a life whose sole purpose is to serve as a warning to those who will follow you, attempting desperately to erase every trace of your fungus-like existence.

56. Sorry.

57. @ 52 Alternative Eric S
    You are brilliant. I bow and scrape at the feet of the most worthy master, yea, even knowing that it might put me at risk. One must applaud brilliance!

    Scalzi, take note!! That is how it is done, you limp-dicked, nematode-inhaling crease-licker you!

58. Herr Scalzi,

    You are poisoning the youth of our country. Your books should immediately be pulled from the shelves of all libraries, and library porn filters should immediately be upgraded to permanently block any access to your blog. Because, after all, we can’t have our children exposed to the ideas of polite argument, rational discourse, and logical thinking. Your ramblings continuously encourage these impressionable minds to actually think for themselves, an attribute completely at odds with a society that has embraced the Patriot Act and Homeland Security. You are a threat not just to the great, almighty Federal Government, but to the basic warp and woof of our society.

    Even worse, your scribblings are seductively couched in readable and engrossing prose, giving no warning of the extreme dangerousness of the positions you espouse. Mein Kampf at least gives warning via its turgid and murky prose – but oh, no, you can’t do that, you have to sugarcoat your ideas in pretty language and twisted humor. A devil indeed, wrapped in sheep’s clothing (that Android’s Dream book cover was no accident – at least this one has got it right!).

    I’ve already sequestered all your books in my house into a very deep, dark hole, just to make sure that my children will never be tempted by your invidious writings. Unfortunately, I have already been infected, and can’t do the really proper thing of burning them.

    I think we need to amend the First Amendment, to add the clause “except for the speech of John Scalzi” to the phrase “abridging the right of free speech”. Your ideas and converse are too dangerous to be allowed to see the light of day.

    Sincerely hoping you never graduate from minor demon to Satan’s usurper, from which we could never recover,

    Patrick Shepherd

59. John Scalzi’s fiction: Worse Than Vogon Poetry.

60. The thought of John Scalzi’s works makes reading L. Ron Hubbard palatable.

61. In conclusion: scalazi is teh suX0rz!!!!!11!1!

62. John, I’ve never been anally raped by an enraged rhinoceros while on fire, but a thoroughgoing ass reaming en flambé would be more entertaining fare than the flaccid drivel and shabby attention whoring you regularly inflict on us, your hapless readers. It’s not too late to have a respectable career as a tax accountant or chicken sexer. None of us will think any less of you if you pack it in now, because thinking less of you isn’t possible.

63. Scalzi is the love child of L. Ron Hubbard and Ayn Rand.

64. Scalzi,

    Your endless and utterly shameless self-promotion seems to be the only “art” that you’re capable of producing. Your novels are indefensible, derivative, Mary Sue blither that serves only as exhibit #118,489 in America on trial; the charges include degrading our culture to intestine-crampingly unfunny one liners, clogging the Internet with drivel, and generally being an utter bore to anybody with a fifth-grade reading level or higher.

    What is endlessly amazing is how you manage to peddle your astoundingly poor horse droppings; not by actually producing any good work, but by marketing it. Sure, you put Starship Troopers 2 : Electric Boogaloo Old Man’s War online for people to read for free – but that’s no better than a street corner meth dealer, is it? Give the morons a hit of soul destroying garbage for free, and then hit them up for money later. Some disclosure on my part here, I originally was going to call you a Godless pinko commie rat for giving things away for free, but when I learned of your insidious plan to destroy the minds of innocent readers, I saw you for what you really were; a lowly, bottom-feeding pimp.

    Your latest book is an example of how utterly foul your tactics are; not only have you been too lazy to convulse your wrists onto the keyboard long enough to finish the damn thing, you’ve also put out a plea to your idiot troglodyte readers to write it for you! Better still, you’ve stimulated demand for this awful piece of tripe by making it a limited edition just like your oh-so-smug “You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Give Goats Rimjobs At The Coffee Shop” or whatever it’s called.

    I will be amused when this over-hyped and over-priced pile of monkey dung is hurled into the faces of those who have paid for the privilege of owning it. Not only have they shelled out hard-earned dollars for blog posts they’re going to realize how badly you’ve fleeced them when a few years later you re-release these limited books to the mass market knowing that not only will you profit from doing so, but that it’s down to that or giving up the cocaine habit.

    Of course, I must address the issue of your blog itself. I suspect that the long posts themselves are in fact ghost-written by an advanced perl script that scrapes Daily Kos and other hate sites, then generates said posts with Markov chains, drool, and a special brand of idiocy that you can claim as your own. To call this blog tedious is putting it lightly. Epic tedium might describe it better. To think that this garbage has been polluting the Internet for ten years fills me with horror. I can only hope that it’s being put to good use by being read to terror suspects in Gitmo so that lives may be saved.

    The shorter posts are pointless enough that they’re almost to the level of self-parody. It is by these posts that even the word “blog” can be expanded to mean “meaningless crap that some self-indulgent twit put online.” Yet another cat photo with a “witty” comment. A photo of your filthy dog with a “snarky” subtitle. Ugh.

    You make me sick, you scum-sucking dirt merchant. I eagerly await the day that your books are burnt in the streets and no memory remains of the reams of paper so cruelly abused by putting your pen to them. May your only legacy be a photo of your gruesome visage be placed next to every foul word in the dictionary. As it stands, I already use “Scalzi” as an expletive, even worse than “Belgium.” Of course, I use this in special circumstances that call for the disgust and anguish your name evokes. The excrement of a dying man, I think, is that which suits the word “Scalzi” best.

    Grade this, you semi-literate, bowel-sucking, wart-biting pig; your efforts are offensive to every sense that we have. You books stink, they are awful to behold, touching them makes my skin crawl in disgust, and I get a bad taste in my mouth just thinking about them. I cannot imagine the horrors of an audiobook. You have even managed to offend my sixth sense that I didn’t previously know that I had; every now and then, I get this pain in my skull that tells me “John Scalzi is writing again.”

    Every time I realize that, I die a little inside. Please, for the sake of humanity as a whole, stop writing. Stop doing anything more complicated than flipping burgers.

65. Damnit! My strikethrough formatting didn’t go through :(

    And I found a few errors!

    My hate mail gets an F for sure.

66. He said He said he said he said after almost every damn piece of dialouge you write. Can’t you change this up sometimes, I mean even a he replied or gasped whispered or vomited anything just to change the monotiny of ;

    It’s over there, he said
    I see it’s over there, he said
    Well get it then, he said
    I’m going to, just give me a second, he said

    I must say by the time I finished the first book I’ve read of yours I became an expert at mentaly skipping over the He said.

67. Scalzi is your typical rightard gun nut. In his biggest book, Old Mans War, he awkwardly contrives situations where yes, guns, save the day.

    And fuck what you think about the punctuation of that sentence. I read Eats, Shoots, and Leaves and I know I can put the commas wherev,er the fuck I want.

68. The Infinite Scalzi Theorem states that John Scalzi hitting keys at random on a keyboard for an infite amount of time will almost surely produce an unreadable string of characters. Whatever is the proof of that theorem.

69. Dear Mr. Scalzi:

    While grading my hatemail please keep in mind that your opinion of my opinion of you gives me less pause than the do-not-remove-under-penalty-of-death tags on matresses. Were it not for the fact that hopefully some of the income from your trite little efforts are going to the worthy cause of sending your daughter to college, I would advocate putting your fingers through a wood chipper and sparing us future tomes of inanity.

    You are indeed the heir to Heinlein in the sense that you never let the absence of plot stop you from generating reams of paper. Unlike Grandmaster Bob, your characters and settings lack the depth to pull this off. You should praise whatever deity you acknowledge that so many science fiction fans would buy a phonebook if someone stuck a “Heinlienesque!” blurb on the cover. I must now cut this mail short so that I can go conquer the phonebook industry.

    Please consider finding honest work. You are a prime candidate for any number of jobs. Most of them involve a stick with a tool at one end and an idiot at the other. You could be on either end.

70. …and Spook@64 is clearly on the short list, warts and all.

71. Spook@64. Well done, until you went after the man’s pets. That’s a line that should just never be crossed even in jest. I hope you get lots of hate mail for it. Okay, not really. But… the irony over getting hate mail for writing a fake hate mail would be too delicious. I may have to write one to you myself just to make it happen.

    I’d report you to PETA but I’m pretty sure Scalzi is already a card carrying member. Of course, we’d be better off if it stood for People for the Ethical Treatment of Audiences, but I’m afraid such an organization would consider him a lost cause.

72. Scalzi, I just finished your latest ARC and wanted to thank you for the free toilet paper. Only one saying comes to mind “it hit me like a shit bomb.” I promptly took my dog for a walk, rubbed its steaming pile of diarrhea into my eyes, and downed a bottle of whiskey as a prayer for brain damage and any hope of cleansing that donkey spunk from my brain. What the hell was your piss dumpster of a head thinking? Had Faulkner read your so called novels, I believe he would have suggested “eat penguin shit and die.” Luckily he isn’t alive to be insulted by you, the shit stain on the literary world. I’m jealous. I’m not sure what idiot readers are keeping you in the business, but the race as a whole just moved to some sort of leprechaun-carnie level in my eyes. I offer them the following advice:

    1. make spaghetti and eat it
    2. use spaghetti fork to gouge your eyes
    3. no more Scalzi books
    4. use toothpick to clean teeth
    5. ram toothpick into ears
    6. no more Scalzi audio-books
    7. move to remote part of Canada
    8. become professional ice fisherman
    9. no more cancerous Scalzi propaganda
    10. write a sequel to Walden
    11. become rich

    For your next book just bang on the keyboard until words appear. If you finish it I promise to buy a copy. Hopefully I’ll be dead by then and not have to suffer through whatever literary clusterfuck your crack dreams produce. And speaking of produce, please don’t reproduce. Do the world a favor and keep your cesspool DNA to yourself. One lifetime of your bumblefuck writing is plenty. If you already did, now is a good time to apologize. I often wonder why you had to be Scalzi the sci-fi writer and couldn’t have chosen a more fitting path, like hermit or aborted fetus. Well, I cannot get my six hours of life back so I finish up by calling you a asshole, praying for the trees your future writing dooms, and going to make spaghetti.

73. And *you* get to make money off *my* wit? Do *I* get a piece of this as I would in an anthology?

    It’s “Soul Soup for the Chicken.”

    I wonder if my disdain is meta, too.

    How’s that?

74. Faulkner…wierd choice…I think I should have gone with Sun Tzu or something

75. Scalzi, I would rather force myself to learn Hebrew and read the insults carved by the mohel on the foreskin of an anti-Semite’s hydrocephalic son than wade through the “prose” that has somehow been suppurated through your computer and smeared across the virtual walls of your blog or the pages of your books. I would rather have my eyeballs rasped out with Ann Coulter’s tongue. I would rather have sexual congress with a rabid, meth-crazed echidna. In fact, I would rather have sexual congress with a rabid, meth-crazed Ann Coulter. And if in the course of this horrific, soul-destroying act of intercourse, my genitalia were to combust and leave me to burn over long hours into a blackened, festering stump with only a rictus and two smoking eye sockets to show that it had once been human, at least I could think, before my brain finally boiled away into a greasy pink cloud, “Oh, thank the merciful gods above that I’ll never have to read anything by John Scalzi again!”

76. So Scalzi says “nae swearin'”, except he doesn’t, quite. What he
    says instead, in that same immutable smugwit style that drivels
    out of his “novels”, is:

    “I’m John Scalzi! I’m too good to be sworn at. I am above
    such things.”

    As if.

    As if he’s John fuckin’ Wayne slapping slimy gooks in the jungle;
    or Charlton fuckin’ Heston shaking some fiery stick at the
    Romans or whoever; and not – really, Not – that scalzied wee nipfart mommy’s boy sat down the front, squeaking at Teacher
    because some “bad boys” are crossing their eyes at him?

    As if he’s big and tough like Big Dick Cheney, growling to the ladies circle that he’d love just five minutes alone in a room with Bin Laden and a baseball bat, when we all know that for John “The Big Man” Scalzi the only way he’d be “alone in a room” with Bin Laden
    is if the fucker wis trussed and bound and hanging in chains from
    the ceiling, four Marine snipers primed in the corners in case the
    fucker coughs, and a “baseball” bat that’s ten feet long and needs his little girl to hold at the heavy end for him?

    Ah’m no gonnae fuckin’ swear at ye, Scalzi, ya blouse – why would
    I waste a good swearie on a gormless wee shite like you?

    No… BOO!!

    That’s all ye’d need.

    Now away and wipe yer arse. If you can do that by yourself.

    And write yer ain fuckin’ stories.

77. “…remember that what you write does reflect on you, even if what you’re writing is fake hate mail.”

    Why would you assume it is fake?*

    Best,

    Tom Nixon

    *Yes, this is my entry. Thank you. Thank you very much. :)

78. John,

    On reading this letter you’re probably going to feel as if your opinion matters enough to people for them to want to send you hate mail. Let me disabuse you of that notion. I first came across your blog while Googling “things that aren’t worth Googling”. After reading your post “Android’s Dream Paperback, Officially Out, Plus Other Books” (and really, what subturgid demon possessed you and made you capitalise every word in that title?) I complained to Google. They have since reindexed your page so it’s now under “things that aren’t even worth indexing in Google”.

    So why am I writing this letter? Simply put, I feel sorry for you. Most people at least receive enough attention to be compared to Hitler in a two bit left-wing-pinko-forum. Your prose and blog writing is, by an impressive order of magnitude, too bad to warrant this attention. You will probably never even be called a fucker or get accidentally, and derisively, labelled as a cartoonist (though, of course, in your case you may be better of presenting your writing as a form of cartoon art than admitting that it is meant to be read).

    I wouldn’t normally bother going on about what I think of your writing but I suspect that you’re dull enough that you may not yet have figured out how I feel about you. I believe that you are scheiße. Of course, not just any scheiße but the scheiße of someone suffering from a particularly nasty case of food poisoning. You are a Scalziphilliac (and you will soon discover, you are the only Scalziphilliac around) and you are plainly a supporter of a fascist party that ran Germany during the second world war (which will remain unnamed as a test of you intelligence and you ability to use the internet…I am not optimistic that you will understand the insult).

    I would beg you to stop writing and filling the internet with your condensed faeces but no-one takes the least bit of notice of you anyway.

    With hate,

    Adam

79. Spook@64. Well done, until you went after the man’s pets. That’s a line that should just never be crossed even in jest. I hope you get lots of hate mail for it. Okay, not really. But… the irony over getting hate mail for writing a fake hate mail would be too delicious. I may have to write one to you myself just to make it happen.

    Honestly, I feel dirty enough having written that idiotic blather of mine. I should save hate mail for people who deserve it.

    And for the record, I do happen to like photos of cute animals — of which all of the ones posted qualify. I shouldn’t have included them.

    Wow, I suck at hate mail.

80. Dear Mr. Scalzi,

    I am writing to congratulate you on the publication of your new book, Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded. It comes as a great relief to me that portions of your website, now currently available for free any time I wish to read them, have now been published in book form for the same price as a month’s worth of high-speed internet service. Clearly, you are granting the human race a huge boon.

    Web pages, by their very nature, are ephemeral and insubstantial, and there are no guarantees that they will always be accessible. So it is with no small measure of relief that I can rest assured that if the data on your website is ever lost, I can always pick up your bargain priced tome and pass on your wisdom to my grandchildren. Without this book, how would they ever be enlightened by the supreme wit of bacon taped to a cat? Neither P.G. Wodehouse nor Mark Twain could possibly compare to such supreme humor.

    Yes, it certainly is a comfort to know that while my great-grandchildren are sweltering in the heat of December due to rising carbon emissions, they can entertain themselves with the dead husks of former carbon-entrapping trees, filled to the brim with poorly-Photoshopped pictures and half-formed essays on a number of topics penned by a man with expertise in none of them. As they look out onto the Atlantic Ocean from the beaches of Nashville, I am gratified to know that no harm came from the manufacturing of their entertainment.

    Congratulations, sir, on managing to convince a publisher to overlook younger, untried authors who have written actual books in favor of publishing pages upon pages of random, incoherent ramblings that are available to anyone with a computer and a local coffee shop. My compliments to you for earning royalties on a tome whose target audience consists entirely of people who will purchase your work and race eagerly home to read something that they’ve already read.

    On a late night three months ago, I woke up from a fitful sleep with a cold sweat and shouted out to the uncaring stars, “Will John Scalzi have nothing else to offer future generations but a trilogy of cheap Heinlein knock-offs and a chapter-long fart joke?!”

    The stars were silent that night.

    Today, I have heard about the publication of your new book, and I now know that the stars are smiling on me and the entire human race. I can now sleep with an easy heart, knowing that your legacy of Journey promotion, second-rate Lolcatting, and banal tales of life in rural Ohio will not perish from this Earth.

    Yours sincerely,

    J. Alexander Knapp, Esq.

81. Christ, an entire hard-copy VOLUME of regurgitated digital fanboy farts, crusted in ink across dozens of pages like stains on the soiled sheets from Scalzi’s perpetual sheep-felching sessions? I’d rather schedule a month of root canals at the Christian Szell Dental Clinic…without the clove oil. Why not just cut off our eyelids and strap us down for a few goatse-themed Ludovico treatments?

82. Who the hell do you, John Scalzi, think you are??? Another no name writer with a book that won’t see the light of a bookstore? Quit wasting trees with your nonesense. Whatever. I’m over it.

83. Dear Mr. Scalzi

    In the feeble hope that your sanity will resurface long enough for the following truths to sink in, i submit them for your consideration.

    Your pathetic attempts at stringing words together fails magnificently at achieving anything in the likeness of literature, or even coherence. Why do you insist upon exposing your failures to the world? Are you so devoid of any attention that you seek some sort of status enhancement by becoming the most ignorant voice out there in cyberspace? I am truly at my wits end trying to figure out what caused this perverse masochistic habit of publishing what you have to realize is to the written word like sea water to a man dying of thirst, or like cyanide gas to a drowning man desperate for air.

    On behalf of every literate and illiterate person in the world, please stop writing, talking or otherwise draw attention to yourself. Unless a divinity, any divinity, intervenes and provides you with a spoonful of communicative talent, i have to urge you to do this for the good of mankind. Your mere presence online and offline is in itself probably the biggest single obstacle in fighting illiteracy in the world today.

    Please grow a spine and take responsibility for your actions. We urge you to cease and desist before affirmative action will be taken.

84. Far too boring to be wasting more time than this.

85. [from a comment thread on a future sci-fi author’s blog]

    To JoeSchmoe:
    I object to your labeling of our esteemed host a “scalzi” as a narcissistic, egotistic, sycophancy-starved, pompous gas-bag. At least, have a decency to call him a “scalzi with talent”.

86. #26.

    You slay me.

    –Jenn, who is debating whether to spew the Scalzi hate

87. YOU SUCK. YOUR WEBSITE SUCKS. YOUR BOOKS SUCK. YOUR CATS ARE NOT CUTE. YOUR DOG IS NOT CUTE. YOUR WIFE IS CUTE BUT SHE IS STUPID FOR MARRYING YOU. EVERYONE WHO READS YOUR STUFF IS STUPID.

88. Two questions: Can I mention the infamous “sledgehammer” column from two decades ago or are you hunting down and killing everyone who knows about that example of your early writing? And can I use this space to complain about a biology error that you made in Old Man’s War that’s driving me nuts because I don’t know whether you did it intentionally in a subtle show that the human empire is even more evil than we think or it was just an error that happened because your mind was already on the next scene? Whatever, as the blog title goes. I was ready to join in the effort to get humanity out of space by the end of OMW. Your characters were likable for the most part, but you made the mass of humanity seem pretty disgusting.

89. There once was a ‘writer’ named Scalzi
    Whose attitude was really quite ballsy
    His career was done in
    By hate mail quoting Godwin:
    Even Hitler didn’t have this much gall, see?

90. Scalzi, you are the embodiment of that moment when a nose-flared heaving man, his pants pooled around his ankles like a Christmas tree skirt, finds his porn surfing session interrupted mid-upstroke by a power outage.

91. When I think of celebrities who demonstrate dignity, I think of Morgan Freeman, Sir Laurence Olivier, Salman Rushdie, J.D. Salinger. It isn’t their success that stands out, it is their reserved nature, their willingness to let fame approach them and shrug it off with modesty.

    Then I see Scalzi, the antithesis of the dignified public figure, a man who seemingly spends every waking hour of his life dedicated to expressing his mind-numbing worldly insights in a common blog in desperate hopes the world will knock his door down and watch him feign creativity. There is no compelling mystery about this man, no subtle charisma, no quiet charm. There is only a stupid grin, a T-shirt, and a website full on inane ramblings that exposes a child on a playground picked last for the kickball team more than promoting a wannabe SF author.

    The next logical step in this ape man’s deevolution: a book of underwear-clad blogger authorings and hate mail responses. Brilliantly dignified.

    If you weren’t so pathetically self-indulgent, I’d feel sorry for the brain-dead celebrity purgatory you are festering in where you clamor for fame to dozens of your loyal readers and, when you see them slipping away, parade cutsie pictures of your child, cats, dog, and even neighborhood pets who you probably abducted just to express a ridiculous aura of compassion.

    You are a prolific example of why geeks and fame do not mix. Please do the world a favor; go into your office, close the door, and quietly hide for thirty or forty years. If, then, you still have control of your mental and physical faculties, perhaps a “retro” reattempt at popularity might at least be novel in comparison to the shameless panhandling you are exhibiting now.

    And oh, yeah, U suk, dum a55!

92. John Scalzi? Never heard of him.

93. You are a useless dogturd on the heel of a long line of hermaphroditic shitheads. If you could stop fingerbanging Bacon Cat long enough to yank that fist out of your goatse distended ass (along with the makings of your family’s dinner salad), you might accomplish something with your life.

    As it is, the highpoint of the hideous miscarriage of Mommy-couldn’t-find-a-long-enough-coathanger that you ironically refer to as your godforsaken ‘life’ occured ten years ago, at a bar called the Brown Fist. There you sprawled, engaged in
    the world worst idea for performance art, handcuffed to the urinal in front of of a long line of piss drunk bikers. As you vomited up a flood of cold diet pop, hot urine and spent condoms drifting in the stream like expired salmon, a thought occurred to you.

    Gaping wide for the next syphilitic loser with a dollar burning a hole in his pocket, you thought to yourself, “I shall move to Ohio.”. And Ohio appreciates the tax revenue.

94. You, sir, are living in a rank gutter of your own making. You seem to have created an alley between the towers of Truth on one side and Reason on the other. In this garbage strewn hole you litter and shit and hide from the bright light of America. In this country we love God; He is what gives us strength. Yet you mock His truth, His creation. I have seen the commentary you pass of on Ken Hamm’s museum. I have noticed the profound lack of respect you show for those who lead this great nation. It reminds me of the ingrates pleading for “equality” and “fairness” while living a degenerate life.
    How you scuttle around in your little hole! How you pimp and posture! For shame, sir. The Exterminator is coming and all the self-important words you have written will be nothing. You speak of grades; just know that the one who makes the mountains like a plain is of the highest grade of goodness.
    Your vain attempts at logical thought betray how far you are from reason. In your book ‘Old Man’s War’ there was a homosexual soldier. While I am disgusted with this, we see that you are not logical! There are no gays that could be soldiers; the armed services know that this is destructive. There has never been a time when a homo soldier could serve in the military, so how could this happen in the future? You let your fey thinking influence your logic! There is no other possibility. You take your own degraded thinking and contaminate the future!
    When you take your final breath, and the stink of contaminated living is your last sensation, know that all who look down on you want you to rot in hell.

    -CAPT Paco the Droid, CHC, USN, (Ret)

95. Scalzi’s impossible hubris is based on nothing more the car-wreck mentality that daily garners the attention of hundreds of devoted, not to mention intellectually deviant and bankrupt readers. That this should *itself* sublimate into another form of attention-mongering quickly descends in to a self-metastasizing Ourobouros, endlessly both devouring its own tail, not to mention the defecation of previous iterations, steeped in their own shit and bile.

    How pedantically “meta”. And now even this author is guilty, tainted by association.

    And you’re reading it anyway. What the hell is wrong with you?

    … and why the fuck does it smell like the underside of a bridge here?

96. Oh for fuck’s sake.

    What on Earth makes you think anyone wants to read a bound book of blog comments? After ten years can you really still be that naive about the difference between old and new media? One of the major points of a blog is that it’s interactive; publish it as a book and you just have a collection of the unmemorable opinions of mediocre people. Seriously. Get a fucking clue.

    I first noticed the Whatever because of the famous cat/bacon post. I looked around a bit then and didn’t find anything remarkable. I recently started following the RSS feed because Wil Wheaton speaks so highly of you, but I’m still unimpressed. You have some occasional insight, but then you go and do something so phenomenally asinine as to try to turn your blog into a book. Dumbass.

    At least Wil had the good sense to use his own writing as the basis for a book. I haven’t read any of your novels — doubt I ever will — so maybe you’re good enough that publishing a book of things you wrote on the Whatever would be something. I still doubt you could sell more than a handful of copies, but at least it’s not a batshit crazy idea.

    But publishing comments?! And not just that but soliciting comments to publish?! You’re a hell of a lot stupider than I ever gave you credit for.

    I haven’t bothered posting before because it didn’t seem to be worth it, but this: this level of idiocy calls for some comment. My first Whatever comment and my last. Don’t bother responding; I won’t be around to read it.

    –SMQ

97. You suck.

    Postscript – since the winner will be published in your book I thought the email should be kept in line with the average attention span and intellectual capacity of your reader base.

98. Your entire life’s work is only suitable to be used as the toilet paper in my guest bathroom.

99. I don’t like you John Scalzi; you small and mean-spirited ill-begotten son of two brothers. Reading your words makes one long for the pleasures of the Chinese Water Torture, or licking sweat off the side of the scrotum of an Australian Rules football player who hasn’t washed since the Sydney Olympics. The problem with writing hatemail to you is that what would normally be considered an insult, when applied to Scalzi becomes a compliment. I could compare you to someone who receives sexual gratification from the anal insertion of frozen necrotic tissue while eating a sandwich made of rotten turnips mixed with platypus feces. However such a compliment (should you have the mental capacity to recognize it) would be likely to trigger an epileptically orgasmic fit of pleasure on your part, and so I will have to refrain from the comparison.

    Even the slime that collects in the drainage trap of nineteenth century plumbing fixtures and has festered ever since is better company and more able to hold an intelligent discussion than you are. I cannot call you scabrous, leprous, or even putrescent. You are one who would be improved by being bathed in the ejaculate of diseased sloths.

    I don’t like you John Scalzi.

100. Scalzi,

     this is IT! I am surprised that the government will allow people like you to breathe, much less voice your so-called “opinions” in public. You’re just another one of those neo-conservative concrete-assed white men who will never grow up. And obviously you do your thinking with your spine because your brain has retarded from monkey-brain to lukewarm oatmeal for lack of use. Defending marriage! To the extent that you support gay marriage!!! When every human being in his right mind can see that the only way of preserving freedom is to abolish marriage and everything else that will tie us down. Michelle Obama should be proud to be called Barack Obama’s “baby mama” because really, that’s all there is to it.
     I can only conclude that you’re not in your right mind. That is, if you ever had one. Your obsession with your wife is nothing but pathological, obviously you have never progressed past the stage where you will pee your pants and then cry out for your mother to help you. You are not fit to live in the real world where people go to work each morning and where you have to pay your own bills. Even your father was a better man than you, seeing how he had the sense of honour to cut off his own balls upon realizing what a gutless tradition-clinging abolisher of progress that he had fathered.

101. But why am I even surprised John Scalzi is now soliciting hate mail to publish?

     There was a reason why God planted the buttside of the brain on the frontal lobe of John Scalzi, and it is so He could laugh when John Scalzi spews out shit and call it creativity. The rumble of constipated flatulence you hear is the new Babel, except that it’s not a tower but a spreading curse of kudzu strength fungi called weblogs and John Scalzi is the snake Mephistopheles, tempting one and all to reside in his garden of noise, sounding off piss and drang over every single topic, urging the chatter of bytes to grow and grow until it strangles every cell of common sense, and through it all, Lord Sssssscalzi sssssniggers and sssssnorts, sssssnarling at nayssssayers with his own version of sssssnarky jusssstice. And if an intelligent dissenter does appear with a good argument or two, he silences and smites them with vapid photoshopped images of torture—taping bacon on a cat, now his signature logo—reducing all to nervous and shocked laughter and giggles, once again distracting the reality of that gluteus maximus growth on his head that people mistake for high intelligence, when, in reality, it is nothing but coarse superficial fiber that clenches to form hot air. And if all fails…IF ALL FAILS in his quest to reap every thinker of his soul…John Scalzi will just ban you, even as he keeps dribbling out his kudzu-scum of Whatever.

102. I actually felt sick after reading that. Okay, going back on the roof to yell at other men ;-).

103. Sweet Mother Hubbard. Another fucking book from Scalzi. Seriously, isn’t the world enough of an oozing, syphilitic chancre already without more pandering look-at-me, I’m-so-fucking-clever horseshit from this guy?

     I mean–what?

     It’s stuff from his Web site? Are you shitting me? And I’m supposed to pay for it?

     I would rather teabag my balls into a whirling Blendtec blender, eat the ass out of an elephant with explosive diarrhea, give myself paper cuts between all my fingers and toes, set myself on fire, slide down a razor-blade bannister into a pool of rock-salt-encrusted, festering lemon juice while listening to “Never Gonna Give You Up” on an endless loop.

     The extended remix version.

     Suck it, Scalzi.

     (with all love and respect, sir.)

104. Dude, you’re so lame that you ought to take that license plate of yours — you know the one I mean — and NAIL IT to your ASS as a warning to others.

105. Dear Mr. Scalzi,
     Having been so completely bored as to Google ‘whatever’ one day, I had the misfortune to come across your putrescent, and somewhat neaderthalic website. As a result I may be forced to sue you for medical costs (not to mention mental anguish) as my brain began to liquify and bleed out my ears from reading said drivel. All I have to say is this: This place in Ohio where you hail from must be VERY deep in dork forest for the neighbors not to have evicted you, mob style, with torches and pitchforks. If I were you I would not try to leave it.
     Thank you for your time. Please do not bother to respond, as you might set back my occupational therapy by months, and I am just able to recognize shapes and colors again.
     Anna K.

106. John Scalzi is a talentless hack whose work reveals the bland depths into which modern science fiction has sunk. The quasi-illiterate novels he churns out like autonomic clockwork are the most blatant rip-offs of his actually imaginative SF predecessors like Robert A. Heinlein and Philip K. Dick. Hell, he even cribs the titles. Indeed, the fact that he has had any success at all reveals the increasing idiocy of the common SF reader– generally a pasty, bespectacled doughboy living in his mother’s basement with dreams of mechanized machismo. After reading a single line of his “prose”, many readers yearn for the death of SF as a genre and immediately turn to reality television for a far more intellectually nutritive experience. Of course, his “career” was only vomited forth by the internet, as hapless Google geeks inadvertently stumble across his meaningless, purposefully inflammatory political rants at the waste of bandwidth named “Whatever.”

107. It pains me to write this.

     Not because you don’t deserve hate mail; oh no, no, a trillion times no. In the whole labyrinthine history of sweaty, pus-filled carbuncles, from King Sin-shar-ishkun the Unclean all the way down to Alberto Gonzales, no other multi-celled organism has more richly deserved my scorn. My pain, you see, is rather more immediate, in the sense that thinking about you causes me physically to hurt.

     It’s been manageable in the past, in the distant, hideous way that the Exxon Valdez oil spill was manageable if you tried not to think about it and also happened to live in, say, Kuala Lumpur. Each day I would come and read your blog, horrified by its infernal putrescence, yet unable to tear away my eyes from the maleficent hieroglyphs that seared themselves on my retinas. I was hypnotized, enthralled even, by the sheer scope of your fetidity. It was like a game I played, each morning convinced that today’s entry must surely, of mathematical necessity, be the worst conceivable permutation of the Roman alphabet – and each day stunned anew to find yesterday’s prediction horrifically overturned.

     To paraphrase an author whose books you have no doubt defiled with the forehead-grease that drips from your fingertips: I hated and loved you, as I hated and loved myself. Actually, that’s not quite right. I pretty much just hated you.

     That you call yourself a writer is a disgrace not only to actual writers, but to the families of those unfortunate souls whose naivete led them to read sentences, paragraphs, sometimes whole chapters of those odious “books” you excrete with such punctual regularity. Sales of your Old Man’s War – the length of which I can only assume indicates a diet high in fiber – are attributable solely to the desire of charitable organizations to get it off the shelves by any means possible. I vividly recall, having just dry-heaved my way through its CliffsNotes summary, that I tried to decide which was worse: the complete lack of anything like a plot, or the possibility that there might be a sequel. After three months of internal debate, I realized I had a problem.

     I have scars on my wrists from The Last Colony.

     Yet I chose to live. Because, although nonexistence is infinitely preferable to a universe with you in it, I realized – as the first crimson drops mixed with my tears on the half-torn cover of The Android’s Dream – that I did have something to live for. You see, Mr. Scalzi, just as your disdain for human dignity brought me to the brink of mortality, my hatred of you kept me alive. I refrained from suicide because I still have something to tell you.

     You suck.

     Don’t make the mistake of taking that figuratively. You are, in a very literal way, a drain on the resources of our planet, sucking the life-force out of each and every organism unfortunate enough to live in a three-parsec radius of your person. The shriveled-up husks of the microbes that Phoenix will find on Mars will have arranged their corpses in the shape of the words “Blame Scalzi.” You are the ecological equivalent of uveal melanoma. You are the cosmological counterbalance to the expansion of the Big Bang. I do not compare you to a black hole only because the black hole at least has the decency not to reflect light – and also because I dare not chance your reply including the phrase “naked singularity,” or a .jpg attachment.

     There are no words in English to describe the the horrors of your physical appearance. An Orwellian might describe you as “quintupleplusungood,” but that would be a disservice to his dystopia. Your absence from Circles 3-9 of Dante’s Inferno is a chronological accident. The flies that circle your corpulent exterior have developed their own super powers from prolonged exposure to your stench. Your buttock-hairs are a violation of the Eighth Amendment. The severity of your gastrointestinal malfunctions is inversely linked to the price of crude oil. I dispute your inclusion in phylum Chordata. The mold colony that grows behind your left earlobe is persona non grata in the larger community of objectionable fungus. The day you were spawned, the Pope conceded privately that there could be no God; the day you expire, your corpse will not be launched into space only for fear of igniting interstellar war with a hypothetical alien species.

     You are a bile-sucking, lichen-snorting, snail-raping, herpes-inducing, snot-curdling, porpoise-licking, fruitcake-humping, vomitous ailurophagous pool of condensed flatulence posing as a human being. I don’t hope you die, Mr. Scalzi. I hope I wake up, and learn you were never born.

     Kindly stop blogging, or I will be forced to get nasty.

108. Mr. Scalzi, as a novelist, is of considerably less interest than any of his charming pets, but especially the one with bacon on. Fortunately, he has a delightful wife and an extremely clever daughter, which somewhat offsets the endless tedium spewing forth in whatever. Inexplicably, Mr. Scalzi’s lack of talent doesn’t prevent him from recognizing talent in others, which he promotes, nor does it slow down the accretion of insightful and wise visitors to his blog.

109. Dear John:

     After I completed reading your latest novel, The Last Colony, I started to experience black outs and explosive bloody diarrhea. I immediately visited my internist.

     She found that a parasite had made it’s home in my intestines. My doctor informed me that he has never seen this type of infection in a healthy individual before, and that it is mainly seen in immuno-compromised individuals. An MRI scan of my brain also illustrated a pattern of lesions on my temporal lobes.

     Apparently the level of your writing was so putrid it opened my body up to this pestilence and damaged my brain. I am forwarding my medical bills to you. Additionally, I am asking my lawyer to sue for the inclusion of warning labels on all of your books and stories so other unsuspecting souls can avoid this horrible tragedy. Sample wording:

     WARNING: This author’s work has been shown to give readers bloody shits and cause brain damage. It is not suitable for children, pregnant women, or the elderly. Amnesty International has advised that John Scalzi’s work can be defined as torture and should therefore never be allowed to be read by incarcerated individuals.

110. Oh most infinitely revolting parasite of a thousand pus-fuilled dreams and haunted wastes, whose very gaze ignites horror and misery in all that behold it, thine works disgust me. You are a fivefold purveyor of decadently disgusting incendiary novelisation, a shining example of what should be cast into the pit and burned, and the pit abandoned forevermore, as unclean by virtue of this use. Indeed, One merely reads this most exuberantly tragic journal as a means of dieting, as the words are so catastrophically written as to render food unpalatable by virtue of association through time. Like a cockroach, if the forests were reduced to ashes, the oceans to deserts, and the land cracked and blasted by the wrath of a god, I am sure you would remain, as something so vile as thee is so blatantly unnatural.
     In fact. It would not surprise me were you the Antichrist.
     Your fondness for beasts is best left unmentioned, although one wonders why Animal welfare hasn’t come to save them from your abuse: perhaps they are too terrified that whatever disease occupies your mind is somehow infected, that by hearing your filth they will become mindless drones obedient to your depraved whims.
     You are unique, or so one hopes, in the breadth and depth of your mallignance. I pray to all the gods of Kobol you meet an end. Soon, for the good of every child on this earth.
     ————————–
     Howzat? :)

111. Dear Mr. Scalzi:

     On returning home from a hard day at work here in the UK, I was greeted by the unwelcome sight of my full recycling bin sitting at the curb. It was festooned with large yellow and black ‘Material Cannot Be Recycled!’ stickers. This surprised me, as I am normally very efficient at sorting my garbage into the proper bins. Upon opening the bin, I found that some neighborhood miscreant had placed two of your novels atop my collection of newspapers, cans, and bottles. Upon ringing the local council I was informed that excrement cannot be recycled, and that I would have to dispose of the material in the proper container. Upon inquiring when my recycle bin would be emptied, I was informed that the next scheduled pickup day is in two weeks. However, for a fee of £20 the council would have the truck make a special pickup providing the offending matter had been removed.
     Please find enclosed in this box your two items of ‘excrement’, along with a bill for £25 for reimbursement of the fee, my time, and postage.

     Sincerely yours,
     L.A.J.

112. Wow. I just read the entire thread, and I am so impressed and amazed at the low level of sexism displayed here! Generally, even in groups that know better, the easiest way to cut a man down is to imply that he isn’t a man at all, that he is somehow secretly that disgusting thing we call woman.

     But with the exception of one use of “pussy”, one bitch, and Fat Bob’s insinuations that you’re a momma’s boy and your daughter is stronger than you, this entire thread worth of commenters managed to malign you and your writing without supporting the patriarchy at the same time. Again I say, Wow.

     You, and your writing may be shite, (this is an abuse thread after all), but your commenters are Ace!

113. Once upon a time, there was a twisted, petty little man who fancied himself a writer. Relentless in his self-absorption, he did anything he could to aggrandize his “talents” and share his poisonous worldview. His efforts included blogging his every banal thought, remorselessly, for years.

     And even HE looked down, as from a very great height, on you.

114. There’s a statement Frasier Crane mades during an episode of “Cheers” well over a decade ago, which I am reminded of whenever I accidentally read something written by you, Scalzi: “Yes, there’s nothing like a good cigar…[puff]…and indeed, this is nothing like a good cigar.” Well, I’ve read your latest paraphrasing of Heinlein’s, Silverberg’s and Sturgeon’s greatest hits, and while an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters could churn out Shakespeare, I feel justified in saying one could equal or surpass your stuff with a single, not particularly gifted monkey, a large white wall and its own shit. I cannot help but wonder if the briefest of your printed works would frighten the most obsessed chronic xylophagic out of the disorder completely, or at least help them switch to a more useful psychosis like pyromania or Republicanism. In this instance, pyromania would be particularly useful and in fact encouraged. Frankly, I pine for the day when your hardcovers finally migrate to the 99 cent bargain table to serve a more appropriate fate, as their pages are favorably larger and more absorbent than my current brand of splinter-infested, government-issued toilet paper. After reviewing your interweb drivel, day in and out, my sole consolation is that, while the myth has Athena’s namesake springing fully grown and armed from the sundered head of Zeus, that lovely child is most certainly free of your inherited genes having not possibly sprung from your deficient loins. And may I add, your wife is, in any reasonable person’s mind, doubly the saint that even you suppose her to be, if only for seeing your sorry self every single day, and not gloating to your beardless face the lengths to which she clearly went to find an alternative to your own weak, diseased seed, just so you could pretend you contributed something to your legacy other than a brief diversion from Nancy Drew and watery Pocketbook rewrites of “Treasure Island” and “Ivanhoe.”

     [I kid. Even if I didn’t love your stuff, I couldn’t possibly hate someone who wrote that review of the Creationist Museum. You could pretty much get away with hitting on my wife for that, although I warn you, she may not agree with me on this.]

115. Dear John,

     Hate is a two-way street. I cannot tell you the number of times that I have come to the Whatever, read your piece, read all the comments and added my own pithy take to the queue and… Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

     Oh sure, my comment does get posted. But it sits there like a dead mackerel festering in the noontime sun. Taking up more and more empty space as some invisible stench cloud expands. Because either my brilliant comment is ignored, its vibrant pithiness sucked dry in a vacuum of No Response, or else it seems to be a comment stream killer, Gandalf-like in its feeble cry of “You shall not pass!”. My string of Last Postings to the Whatever is way out of proportion to the number of times I have commented.

     And since this applies to both you, Mr. Scalzi, and your merry band of BFFs who always win the prizes, seem to get alerts as to when to post in order to get the coveted First Posting coup and have secret personal e-mail conversations with you which they then taunt the rest of the Whatever readership with, I can ONLY conclude that you have made this a conspiracy. Damn you. Damn you, John Scalzi. Damn you Straight to Heck!

     I fully expect that this posting will be ignored by Mein Host and not one person will dare go against you and compliment me on managing to drag in a “dead mackerel festering” to the party. Which no doubt will die after I post this, unless it is merely ignored. To say it won’t win your shabby little prize goes without saying. I don’t know why I even bother trying to shake a little civility into you, John Scalzi, you’ve shown none to me.

     So if I hate you and your bilious guts and your dreary overblown self-important blog, it’s simply because I am returning the favor as you clearly hate me. In the long run, sir, your hate mail will be graded — and it will be a D-minus. Pthhhhbt!

     Have a nice rest of the day and be sure to pet the cats and tell them they’re beautiful.

     Dr. Phil

116. I’m tempted to create a spreadsheet, listing how many common references there are above to bestiality, questionable parenthood, plagiarism, scat (human and simian), and specific physical deformity and inadequacy. Although that would put my own entry into poor perspective, since I am also guilty of traveling several of these oft-beaten paths. But hey, you pick the low hanging fruit because it’s ripe, although in this case, said metaphorical fruit is on the ground, fermenting and turning to fertilizer. Which reminds me…don’t forget, kids: books make great compost!

117. Your grading of my hate mail will be graded.

118. By The Way(Oh that’s your dead blog) – Screw your rules, I’ll hate mail you as much as I want.

119. B.F. Skinner cared more for the hopes and dreams of a dung beetle than I care to read one of your “novels”. Calling them a waste of tree pulp would be a waste of free electrons.

     Having the emotional need to use vulgarity would be better spent describing a stray defecating on GWB’s Yale tie.

     “Whatever”? Yeah, I guess. Later….

120. John Scalzi. Words do not begin to describe the sheer, monolithic magnitude of this man’s masturbatory self love. I have kept silent, lurking in the foul shadow of his precariously placed gigantic head (balding though it is) for many years, but this latest affront to the common sense of man is too much. Seriously, what other man could so flagrantly display his egotism? Here in one post he flops his flaccid man-bits to us, daring us to mock him like so many smelly, drug-addled (no doubt liberal) streakers in so many city parks. Well I, for one, will not cower at the pustule-ridden vienna sausage before me! No, not this time. True evil is when good (read: Republican) men do nothing! I will not sit by! John, I have had enough. I have read your “books.” I have shuffled through your malicious attempts at science fiction. Your writing is, at best, a Melkorian mockery of sci-fi; a hackneyed mutation of more beautiful works. Unable to create anything on your own, you must instead kidnap decent, true sci-fi and let if fester in you hidden pits, cut-off from sunlight and intelligence. Starving, but never dying, the stolen sci-fi stews in the scabrous organ that is your abhorrent brain until it pulses forth from its membranous prison, malformed and retarded. Shuffling and moaning, it burrows into the pages thrust before us, violating our very thoughts. And you laugh, in glee, a gurgling, wet laugh all the way to your devil’s bank. But we’re on to you. We’re banding together. We have evidence of the demonic, carnal rituals that garnered your success. Skull-fucking the hallowed corpses of sci-fi’s Great Dead and feasting on the fetid entrails of those Great Living before your Luciferian masters. The foul man-goat spawn that result from your poisonous lies speak for you. We see them on your “series of tubes.” Your animals are with us, too, yes! We only see your “tame” abuses. But we know about the bacon tutus, the cheese lingerie, the hidden photo studio. You’re time is coming you addle-brained, boil-infested, cum-stained, donkey-humping, excrement-slurping, flaccid-membered, grab-assing, Hilary-suckling, ichor-spooging, jail-baited, knee-jerking, limp-wristed, man-whoring, numbskulled, Obama-fapping, penis-withering, queer-loving, science-mangling, truth-hating, unclean, vulva-violating, whoremongering, xenomaniacal, youth-corrupting, zoophile!

     You get nothing! You lose! Good day, sir!

121. Crap! You’re/your screw up! I fail it!

122. Scalzi,

     You pusillanimous twit.

     As a long-time Whatever reader, I am (or so I thought) inured to your everyday twaddle. I am (or so I thought) inoculated against your run-of-the mill opining on things you know precious little about. I am (or so I thought) immunized against the very worst you could bring down on your unsuspecting readers.

     You turd of an ill-bred, demented llama: Did you really imagine that anyone could possibly be interested in a “hate mail” contest? Did you fall on your head in your childhood and thereby make it of little use to you, or to anyone else?

     You, Sir, are a crime against humanity. Your mother must be weeping blood with remorse for her decision to reproduce. Please take this so-called website of yours and fold it ‘till it’s all corners.

     You know where you can stuff it.

     After, of course, you’ve taken a bath. In my dictionary, the entry for “fornicator of ducks that have recently been run over by very large trucks several days ago and thereafter farted on by a platoon of platypuses” has your picture next to it.

123. Good day, sir! I say, good day, sir!

     It won me Punch‘s nasty e-mail contest, so I figured I try it here.

124. Whew. Good to get that off my chest (or so I thought). I finally felt free to read start reading this thread — and noticed I’m not alone in utilizing Shakespeare Insult Generators. But only briefly — I mean, Scalzi is only worth so much…

125. I admit, reading this is amusing. Personally, I always feel that the finest insults are sparse with vulgarity: too much of it, and it just blends together, whereas sprinkled here and there amongst words one might hear in more polite society. they have much greater impact.
     But yes. Roll on, roll on! And Mr Scalzi: how’s it comparing so far to your /real/ hate mail?
     p.s. Love the cover. :)

126. [My daughter heard of this contest and, as a very occasional reader of this blog in its Athena-centered moments, wanted to add her entry, which I’ve transcribed verbatim.]

     “DIE.”

127. Not a hate-mail entry but an announcement of a mission of mercy: I will make a point of commenting on Dr. Phil’s comments from now on, that he may not fester in his hatred.

     ;-)

128. Dear Mr. Scalzi,

     In the event that the multiple warehouses in which the millions of your unsold books are stored was to be overrun by vast armadas of dung beetles they would certainly turn up their collective maxilla over the stench emanating from that sordid pile of effluvium.

     If there were a merciful God then the raping of one’s eyes would certainly qualify as a felony for which you, Mr. Scalzi, would be tried, convicted, hung, resuscitated, electrocuted, resuscitated and then drawn and quartered, super glued back together to be drawn and quartered again. The remains would then be tossed into a nuclear reactor until reduced to their component atoms. Any mist generated from the cremation would be stored in blocks of titanium festooned with toxic waste decals and buried 500 feet below the great salt flats so that future generations could not be accidentally infected by any surviving remnants of your hack DNA.

     Any machine ever used, nay, abused in the generation of any version of your vile screed should be immediately confiscated, ground down into a fine dust, mixed liberally with an equal volume of salt, and dredged into the sands of Bikini Atoll. Any person involved in the dredging should be immediately blanketed in waves of napalm in order to keep the resting place of your satanic machines forever secret.

     Please be placed on notice that you will be hearing from my attorneys in the matter of the recovery of costs associated with the medical treatment of the ulceration of my esophagus caused by the overflow, and subsequent disgorgement, of bile caused by catching a glimpse of what passes as your ‘work’ at a local book store.

     I’m also of the opinion that the reason that no one has ever seen you without shoes is that if they were ever removed one would find cloven hooves. You are most certainly Satan’s thalidomide riddled offspring and your very existence is an affront to nature and appalling proof that some vestige of demon-human miscegenation laws should remain on the books.

     I am now embarking on the study of theoretical physics so that I might build a time machine in order to go back in time to smash the skull of the neanderthal troglodyte that inseminated your great, great, great, great, great grandmother. Or, in the event that I could not locate that brute animal, I would, instead, go back and kill Johannes Gutenberg before he could perfect the printing press, thereby, hopefully, limiting the dissemination of your rants to a small flock of monks struck blind by schlock induced madness.

     You are a vile, disgusting, not to mention balding, excuse for a human being who should only be remembered as the reason that the word ‘writer’ was removed from common usage because it’s very meaning was perverted to that of the most foul curse due to it’s faint connection to your efforts.

     Warm Regards,
     Rhino

     P.S. Fuck you. Strong letter to follow.

129. One more …. short and sweet:

     John Scalzi … the only man that could make the Founding Fathers regret the inclusion of the first amendment in the Bill of Rights.

     Regards,
     Rhino

130. You lowest of the low! You lowest of those who are lowest of the low! You sty in the eye of a flea on the thigh of a nit on the neck of a gnat! You would need a step ladder to reach the belly of an overweight snake crawling over soft clay!

     And those are your good points.

131. You swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of filth. You are a canker. A sore that won’t go away. I would rather kiss a slug than be seen with you. You’re a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon. You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beast who sired you and then killed himself in recognition of what he had done. Your daddy was a bastard, your mamma was a whore, and you wouldn’t be here if the rubber hadn’t tore. I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a booger. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell? You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs. You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You’re a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Sheep won’t have sex with you — only trash such as yourself. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot. And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake? You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile, one-handed, slack-jawed, drooling, meatslapper. On a good day you’re a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of a used condom. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go. You smarmy lagerlout git. You bloody woofter sod. Bugger off, pillock. You grotty wanking oik artless base-court apple-john. You clouted boggish foot-licking twit. You dankish clack-dish plonker. You gormless crook-pated tosser. You churlish boil-brained clotpole ponce. You cockered bum-bailey poofter. You craven dewberry pisshead cockup pratting naff. You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You dread-bolted fobbing beef- witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill. You are a fiend and a coward, and you have toe jam. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away forever. I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid, so stupid it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I’m sorry. I can’t go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me, and I must resign from this group immediately.

132. what a fuckin stupid competition!!!

133. Hey Scalzi,

     Good news! I can’t call you ASS WIPE anymore you quivering pile of steaming weasel dung. You know why? Cause the real ass wipes called and said that they didn’t like being compared to a wall biting, booger rolling, oxygen thief like you. How sad is that? You must spend the entire day trying to pull your bottom lip over that cro-magnon, puss filled, acne bag you call a face in an attempt to swallow your own orb-like head. The problem is that if you do finally relieve the planet of that oozing, festering scab that makes up your existence by eating yourself, you’ll probably burp yourself back up and fill your mouth with the same wretched, oily, turd filled, hair ball taste that the rest of us experience each time we fortuitously read that incomprehensible wall of monkey flung scat that you disguised as a Blog. Man, it must suck to be you!

     Speaking of things that suck, I did an Internet search on “Used condos” when I accidentally typed “Used Condoms” and sure enough, that bag of flatulence filled commentary and poor excuse for a website called “Whatever” squirted across my screen. For ten years, crap has been flowing out of you as if your drinking water has been imported from Tijuana. Do you just pull down your chinos, flatten your rosy baboon butt down onto your keyboard, fart and call that a Blog post? Does two farts mean you wrote a book?

     In all fairness, although your website makes sucking noises like a cow pulling its foot out of piss saturated mud, I feel that I get to know you on a more personal basis each time you post a picture of yourself on “Whatever”, which seems like several times a day you self serving, Dungeons and Dragons playing, throws like a girl, prick. I really don’t mind that you’ve got a baboon’s ass for a face, but where the hell is your neck? You look like dejected PEZ dispenser in need of a vinegar and chlorine filled enema. Do you just lean your head back and bite size blocks of hammered cat shit come shooting out of your neck for us all to enjoy? Well guess what? Ain’t nobody buying it. The only difference between you and a bag of three-toed sloth shit is the bag. Give it up Scalzi, you jerk.

134. And may I mention that as a writer you’re a complete sadist? Virtually all your characters except the viewpoint character end up dead in some disgusting way. The viewpoint character only ends up disgustingly maimed.

135. Dear Johm (HA!!)

     stop wrinting now!!! you dont know NYTHING ABOUT REAL GOOD WRITING nd your stuff really makes me sick!!!! why dont you just marry a gay man if you like them so much AT LESAT WHEN YOU WRITE FICTION I KNOW YOU re lying!!! MY DOG IS SMARTER THAMN YOU AND DONT TYRY TO MAKE ME LOOK DUMBER THAN YOU Tht will fail horribally!!!! If I met you IRL I WOULD LIKE TOSPIT ON YOUR SHOES AND MAKE YOU LIKK THEM CLEAN!!!! YOU MAKE ME WANT TO PUKE!

     PS Ilike Starhip Troopers!

136. From Forish is one thing just totally clear, Scalzi: in your brain there are toes. Not headstuff between the Scalz-ears, no, but entire toes like little soldiers made by mummy-soldiers and daddy-soldiers, all through many years of soldier-copulation!

     Yes, Scalzi, through you this man sees like husky piss through warm snow, and into your head with the toes. Revealed you are! Stooge from Global-Corporatic-Militaric-Machine, and you can say Forish said so!

     All war-fiction is war-pornographic, not mattering the direction of leaning in the narration. From Swofford Forish was learning this, in his Jarhead, which is about marines not the crazy toe-filled inside of the Scalzi head, by the way.

     So saying this very loud: Ass you, Collaborating John! For in your secret heart which like your head has toes in it, you are the rolling loud clattering carriage of the militaric machine, juggernauting into battle all the young romantics and soldierboys without reason or remorse for gain and prophet.

     God dam false consciousness man.

     In spleen,

     Forish.

     PS you are assking for it, and Forish always delivering.

137. Sir, I have taken the liberty of printing out the entirety of your weblog, The Whatever, on the softest paper my printer would accept without jamming. I will be storing it in the smallest room to ensure it receives the attention it deserves.

     I’ve heard that you have been compared to John Scalvi. John Scalvi is a fool of almost numinous crapulence, an unidentifiable rodent of a lawyer’s clerk, a man with the morals of a sword-swallowing monkey judging the cakes at a village fete. You sir, are no John Scalvi.

138. Douglas @ 125: I tend to agree that too much vulgarity can water down a good insult for my tastes. But personally, I also find that it can be amusing if it is over the top:

     “Fuck you, Scalzi, you goddamn fucking fucker. I am fucking tired of your shitty goddamn fucking shit. May goddamn flying shit monkeys skullfuck your fucking eye sockets bloody with goddamn Dick Cheney’s shitty fucking penis. Fuck you, shitbag!”

     It reads best out loud.

     So yeah, my opinion: if you’re thinking about going there, then go big or stay home. Not my official entry, just an illustration of what I mean.

139. I’ve ordered a Bowflex and P90x. In 6 weeks and 90 days, I’m coming to kick your ass. Yours and all the other Ohio SF writers. Both of you!

140. Patrick, I think the other one moved to Florida.

141. Perfect. I live in Florida.

142. Re: Forish @136

     *applauds*

143. Mr. Scalzi,

     I did two things on the day I finished Old Man’s War. I wrote this letter. Then I burnt out my eyes with a poker heated in the flaming embers of your book.

     The embers that now remain are thus cleansed – and not merely my copy, but every copy I could lay hands upon in the brief moments of mental facility left to me after reading your novel. Rest assured, oh Puerile Purveyor, there is a paradise awaiting me in the next life, for with my dying breath I strike a blow against your infantilizing stories and the regressive, phobic agenda you so cleverly palm off in a counter-phobic lozenge. Yes, enjoy the bump in your Amazon sales rank, knowing that I am the reason why.

     With every purchase I shed a tear, yet I will have my victory, and soon my cauterized tear ducts will never feel pain again. Watch well the cess in the pools, and the creationists in the museums and the goats in the petting zoos, John Scalzi! Float on, thinking me gone, until you see the ragged corner of your book soaked in their offal one day. For the book that I revile those who follow me will appropriate against you, and shall make it known as our calling card wherever we mete out vicious, inappropriate, poorly grammatical justice upon the (lesser) vomitous filth of the literary world.

     Go ahead. Keep publishing. It will be our cause to which your work is forever tied – every book, article, post and LOLcat will be a unique snowflake to hate.

     Hugs and Kisses,
     John Scalzi (dec.)

144. Dear John Scalzi,

     I would like to tell you what I think of you, but I doubt you can understand words longer than one syllable (yes, I know. Have your wife, Lord knows why she puts up with a ramapithicus like you, put it in shorter words for you). I will try to avoid longer words, like hydrocephalic, is describing the tirades you seem to have a congenital need to share with the world at large. Let me give you a hint. Nobody but the most sycophantic coprophagus could mistake your comments for anything but the most puerile drivel. I speak for the multitude, who have notified me of your latest idiocy via e-mail, when I ask you to unplug your connection to the internet and spare the rest of us your narcissistic jactitation.

     Love, as always,

     Your mother

     P.S. Are you available for dinner on Tuesday? If not, we’d be happy (happier) with just Krissy and Athena.

145. Oh, what a treat! We get to re-read big piles of nothing that were barely worth our attention the first time around. Has it come to this?

     I see that your publisher has promised us entries in “delightfully random form — just the way it should be.” I guess it’s not a lie – random wankery is incrementally more bearable than well organized, deliberate self-love. But if “delightful” was the goal of this regrettable scraping from the bottom of the literary barrel, I suggest coming up with some take on an issue of the day that hasn’t already occurred to about 80% of the thinking pubic. Try to imagine, just for an entry or two, that you aren’t the most knowledgeable person on every subject you touch. Ponder a question that contains actual ambiguity, as opposed to pricking the thought bubbles of the obviously ill-informed. But if you were to actually take on a subject of any subtlety, then you might be forced to admit you could be wrong, and we can’t have that. No, the perennially self-satisfied John Scalzi will entertain no such notions, thank you.

     Tell me, John: is there anything you don’t know?

     So, what do we get to look forward to between these covers? Pictures of Ohio sunsets? Hilarious applications of bacon? Oh, maybe we’ll hear about your cats! Cats are so cute and funny! I’ll be pre-ordering my copy today!

     Hey, don’t get me wrong. I’m pleased as punch that you’ve managed to dupe your publishers into thinking that there’s a market for your retreads. If there’s a market for the MacGyver complete series boxed set, then all bets are off, I suppose. And it’s not that the Whatever is utterly worthless. There have been a few interesting bits here and there. Then again, it’s hard to maintain a level of unremitting banality. Just as my subliterate, alcoholic uncle says something fun once in a while, every seventh or eighth Whatever entry at least holds my interest long enough to finish it. You’d probably like my uncle, come to think of it. He likes bacon. He has a cat. And, like you, he has unwarrantedly high self esteem.

     But maybe I’m being unfair. There are scads of people who enjoy observations of family life that would be right at home in Bil Keane’s oeuvre. What will we name the new dog? Hey, I know! Let’s have a contest! What fun!

     The biggest challenge in sending you hate mail is working up enough interest in your work to bother insulting it. Truly, I don’t care what you do with your well-tended litterbox. And congratulations on convincing so many people that the nuggets within are actually ice cream.

     Whatever, indeed.

146. Dear Mr. Scalzi,
     I am writing you today in order to clear up some questions I have about your writing style/career. A (former) friend of mine said he had read one of your books, and since it was ‘mildly interesting’ if had some free time I might consider picking up a copy.
     Well, I recently took a non-stop flight from Brisbane Australia to the Falkland Islands (Via the North Pole) Since I was going to have plenty of time, I stopped and picked up one of your books.
     The clerk at the Bargain Basement Used Bookstore said he had had an influx of Scalzi flop and that I shouldn’t waste my time. Nevertheless, I bought it, and have regretted it ever since.
     Not only were they boring beyond belief, there was a hypnotic effect that prevented me from closing the book. Its was the ‘literary’ equivalent of spoiled tofu, with the train wreck effect of not being able to stop looking.
     If there were ANY other reading material I would have memorized it, but since I don’t speak Belgian, even the in flight safety card was of no relief.
     I had recently clipped my finger and toe nails, or I would have gladly clawed my own eyes out.
     HOW in the world did you get those AWFUL things published. My 5 year old autistic Cocker Spaniel has come up with better plot devices.
     Did you blackmail the publisher?
     Did you promise to divorce his sister?
     WHAT DID YOU DO?
     I CAN NOT IMAGINE how you got this far without receiving death threats from your own MOTHER!
     I fully intend to buy TOR, Subterranean Press, and every single copy available on the internet in order to once and for all RID this planet of all traces of your incompetent, whining, insulting, pathetic, nauseating, pre-schoolishly horrific ‘writing’.
     Please, Please, PLEASE!!! get a job as an urban water treatment blockage remover and improve the stench that MUST ooze from your very pores as you wrack whats left of your obviously drug addled (and not in a good way) mind to write out checks to whatever poor unfortunate psychotherapist’s couch you land on next.
     Good GOD man, just DIE!

147. KSB that was a good one.

148. Dear John “Rhymes with Scabies” Scalzi,
     I tried to read yore book, “Old Man’s War” but I had too stop because Our Lord and Savior Baby Jesus said “Thou Shalt Not Rape Donkeys or Look Upon Those Who Do” and I din’t want to go to hell. Then somebody maybe it was yore book told me that u were in my computer to so I came here too tell u that u are wrong WRONG WRONG! What kind of man “makes such heathen Garbage” like our Lord and Savior Baby Jesus would say.
     Also, I heard that u like to make grunty love sounds and wet sticky messes with Lemurs and Toads and Lots fo other Devil loving beasts. I hope u know that Our Lord and Savior Baby Jesus will strike u down, and yore famly and yore frrends and maybe the people who made yore books, and the store where I bot it. But defanitely u.
     Burn in a lake of fire with worms u horrible Lyer with Beasts!

     God Bless You,
     Jim

149. There are some deeply unfair things in the world.
     When pets die in house fires.
     When new born babes die of Dr’s incompetance.
     These are but nothing to your turkeys being published and released on an unsuspecting & undeserving world.

     Having prostituted yourself to achieve a modicum of infamy, it would seem likely that your colon could accomodate your collected works.
     Not that I care for your comfort.

     Hitler, Mao & Stalin all had redeeming qualities, compared to you.

     As a NASA scientist currently working on a shite-o-meter I’d ask that you immediately burn the remaindered copies of your worthless manuscript. It is throwing all our measurements off.

     The conspiracy nuts say that the CIA invented Ebola. I say it’s is a natural reaction any human would have to reading your crap. Note the bleeding out of the eyes bit.

     NB

150. John Scalzi and the Whatever: ten years of “Look at me! Look at me!”. Pathetic, just pathetic. Just… just… fuck.

151. Dear Mr. Scalzi,

     I hate you. I hate you with a blistering, fiery passion of the sort usually experienced only by pagan gods and people who have been cut off on the freeway. Every word I write here is an almost unbearable frustration to me, as the English language is simply structurally incapable of conveying the sheer elemental fury of my hatred for you. However, until the government makes nuclear weaponry available for purchase by the public, it will simply have to suffice.

     Mr. Scalzi, I am writing to inform you that you, without any semblance of a doubt, are by far the worst person who is presently living, has ever lived, and according to the very best statistical modeling available, will ever live upon the face of the earth.

     In case this is too vague and abstract for your diseased and mephitic mind to grasp, let me attempt to explain at a level you are capable of comprehending: you are like the feculent spawn of John Wayne Gacy and Kenneth Lay, but with worse fashion sense. You have the physical beauty of Michael Jackson, the intellect of Dan Quayle, and the raw creative talent of the Backstreet Boys.

     Now, you might perhaps complain, in your signature brain-murdering whine, that this is overly harsh. However, this, like virtually every other sentence, isolated word, and incoherent stream of disconnected syllables that spews out of your mouth, is a filthy lie. And I will prove it to you – and to the world! – with:

     10 True Scientific Facts About John Scalzi That I Did Not Make Up

     1: According to a report from the most accomplished criminal psychologists in the nation, you are the kind of person who would (and most likely already has) donate a box full of puppies to an orphanage for the sole purpose of brutally killing them in front of their owners after they have had a chance to fully bond with them. You would then take this opportunity to launch into a speech about how since their parents didn’t care enough about them to live, they simply don’t deserve even the faintest speck of happiness, and should therefore resign themselves immediately to an existence of misery, loneliness, and forced prostitution. As a closing remark, you would note that you have injected them all with tuberculosis while they were sleeping, so they really ought to get on with that quickly.

     2: If there were an antithesis of the Nobel Prize for Peace, you would have been its recipient every year consecutively since your birth. The prize associated with it would have been a drop-kick to your genitalia delivered by a 400-pound Russian construction worker with 5% body fat and steel-toed boots, in the hopes that this might prevent you from further contaminating the human gene pool with your genetic evil.

     3: The archivists at the Vatican have recently uncovered a letter from Mother Teresa expressing her profound and sincere wish that you be raped in the neck by bears carrying a heretofore unknown disease referred to only as “Bear AIDS”. As she is not known to have had any contact with or knowledge of you prior to her death, this is being considered as one of the miracles necessary to qualify her for sainthood.

     4: Your continued existence represents an existential threat to the human race, as there is at every moment an appreciable risk that the entire species will commit spontaneous suicide in order to escape a universe that has you in it. It is recognized that you and your spawnlings may subsequently be able to repopulate the globe, but the finest evolutionary biologists have concluded that since the resultant entities could not properly be considered human (or, indeed, mammalian), this would still represent an extinction event for humanity.

     5: The sound of your voice has been known to cause cancer in persons as far as 50 miles distant from where you are speaking. Locations where you have been engaged to speak at length have been rendered toxic to sentient life for decades thereafter. Your fans, naturally, are completely unaffected.

     6: The only thing of any worth and goodness that you have ever contributed to the world in your otherwise almost sublimely excrementitious life came during a medical exam several years back, when a detailed examination of your penis revolutionized the field of nanotechnology.

     7: While the precise details of your lineage have been recently classified by the government under the Lovecraft Protocol as being “too horrific for the minds of men”, surviving data tentatively suggest that rather than being born in the usual sense, you were instead genetically engineered from a melange of dictators, serial killers, and a clan of Appalachian hillbillies with a family tree more closely resembling a single long stick. This is believed to have been done in order to create a living biological weapon that, rather than only targeting the physical forms of those afflicted, would attack the very fabric of society itself. Reports that forbidden arts were employed in order to blend your genetic material with that of unknown beings of soul-shattering evil from “beyond the stars” remain uncorroborated, but compelling.

     8: It is the consensus of most theologians that despite your almost unfathomable evil, you are hated with a dark passion by Satan. They surmise that he fears you will put the Antichrist out of a job.

     9: You clothe yourself almost entirely in the furs and pelts of endangered and extinct animals. The exception, of course, is the thong you made from the skin of the orphans you murdered with tuberculosis. Apparently you wished a memento of “the really awesome meth binge” that selling their diseased organs to unsuspecting patients financed.

     10: In order to attain an erection, you must kill and eat an impoverished family’s sole provider. A donkey punch is considered an act of mercy when perpetrated by you, as it spares your partner from having to witness what you must do to have an orgasm.

     …There. No one possessed of a functioning brain can possibly deny your monstrousness now. Which, alas, means my point must necessarily be lost upon the very “man” (if he can indeed by termed so) that I am writing to. Truly, this is an irony exceeded only by the fact that you are deeply hostile to creationism – when the fact that you have somehow successfully reproduced is compelling evidence that natural selection is a lie.

     Loathingly Yours,

     John F.

152. You, sir, give pulp fiction a bad name. I read your latest attempts to string words together in a coherent manner with the same fascination as watching autopsy films or a house burn to the ground. Your editor should know how the later feels, watching their own publishing house go down in flames because of their misbegotten trust in your squirrel monkey sphincter product; the same printed mound of compost rejections that could be produced by a room of just a hundred chimpanzees at keyboards for only a year.

     Burning is too good a fate for your masquerade of macaque poo-flinging you call books. If there were a process to regenerate pulp into trees, I would lobby my senator to earmark funds to do such to the retched, fetid heap of your cannon. All that would be necessary to sell the idea is to post him a copy of Android’s Dream that hadn’t already been vomited upon (finding one would be an act of serendipity not rivaled since Clement Vallandigham defended Thomas McGehan), although the DoHS and Post Office may investigate me for sending mental anthrax through the mail.

     Your books only prove that you’re the intellectual skid mark on the tighty-whiteys of your generation. The acts of hubris against your dog that you pass off as wisdom are like bright, shiny baboon-butt nuggets of knowledge. I feel it’s my duty to play Pierre Pinoncelli to your attempts to be the Marcel Duchamp of science fiction and expose your drivel for the pussilamous, pink-porcelain pustule of reasoning yearning for the lance of real intelligence that it is.

     That your daughter has won more writing awards than you only proves that for at least one night, Krissy realized her mistake. How such a wonderful woman like her could have married you, I can only assume it had to do with over the border narcotics. Once she recovers she’ll probably replace you with an untrained howler monkey. It would certain be easier to clean up behind and would provide more entertainment and parental care for her daughter. Or maybe she’ll just get another cat. I’ll bet the cats produce more literary worthy product in their litter-box than you can with three computers. Even what the dog hocks up would be more interesting that what you’ve keyed in. Simply because you have Word on your computer and know how to touch-type does not make you a writer. Maybe if you hung out in more coffee shops you might find some role models who could show you how it’s done.

     From what I can glean from the pulped rat entrails you call a blog, the online equivalent of tinitinitis only less enjoyable, you’ve also hoodwinked the editors of a bathroom reader series to publish that scatological smear you call writing. I can only imagine that here you are rising to the fullness of your putrescent powers achieving the grand moment of your adult life by encouraging those shy people to do what needs to be done as fast as possible simply to get out of the same room your books belong in. That what you do to the printed page is the equivalent of what they do to the bowl is your major selling point, leading by example. As an added bonus they should have printed your “books” on detachable tissue paper because then the pestilence you’ve perpetrated on literature could rise to its rightful state and be useful in some fashion.

     The only reason you want Pluto to remain a planet is to make up for other inadequacies in your life for which I have one word, Enzite. With an overdose you could get up to normal. As someone who is a vocal advocate of gay marriage, casually tosses off “goatse” and “feltch,” advocates necrophilia through the twisted love story between John Perry and Jane Sagan, and elevates bestiality and furry love that begat Robin Baker, I can only surmise that you moved to rural Ohio to escape child protective services. That more righteous minds of true cultural centers drove you to a place that even the Amish are leaving demonstrates that you haven’t gone far enough a field. The only reason God hasn’t wiped you from the Earth is that Hell didn’t want to lower their property values by hosting you. You’re so densely packed with capuchin monkey crap you’d only smolder on the Lake of Fire anyway. Not even the patience of Angels would be able to weather the stench of attempting to consume your soul.

     Do humanity a favor and stop committing the proboscis monkey pimple squeezings you call writing. I would rather subject myself to a frontal lobotomy than continue to suffer from the mental stain of being inflicted with another, let’s be kind and use “book of yours,” existing in this world. EST has already proved ineffective a cure for your past insults to the brain.

     Your biggest fan,
     Steve B.

153. My hate mail is in the form of a rap.

     “Three Minute Hate”
     written and performed by J-Dee,
     produced by Kanye West,
     no samples have been cleared.

     (sound effects: an angry crowd)
     O come, O come, Emmanuel Goldstein
     Your ass can relax from our daily hating
     a new motha f(beep)a steps up to the plate
     John Scalzi, prepare for your THREE MINUTE HATE

     (rhythm track features a Gene Krupa drum solo underneath the repeating guitar riff from one-hit-wonders Ugly Kid Joe’s one hit “I Hate Everything About You”)

     Johnny come lately–(sound effect: explosion) here he is
     fresh from the sludge of the Uncle John’s series
     writes about lasers that go pew pew pew
     no big Sci Fi stylist; mother(beep)r, f(beep) you
     Won the Campbell Newbie award, oh that’s bitchin’
     up there with the Pulitzer Prize…for fiction
     Snatching a Hugo for Fanboy of State
     Pick up your award: a THREE MINUTE HATE!

     (sample: Gollum hisses, “We hates it! We hates it!”)

     John Scalzi once had an original thought
     Rip off Robert Heinlein; hope not to get caught
     R A H gives the John-boy’s plots punch
     I guess there is such a thing as free lunch!
     This affection for Bob sinks deeper than rock
     (high pitched nerdy voice: “Baby, let’s get a line marriage.”)
     That’s grave dirt on his tiny c(beep)k!
     (high pitched nerdy voice: “This nudity taboo is silly, don’t you think?”
     Past master, Grand Master, John masturs his bates
     That’s why he’s deserving a THREE MINUTE HATE.

     (sample: musical sting from the theme to Destination Moon.)
     (Sound effect:sucking air from a balloon. High pitched nerdy voice: “Helium is the universe’s second most common element. I’ll tell the Rough Guide!”)
     (Angry woman’s voice: “John! Get over here!”)

     Wife’s on the warpath, will John cringe or hug her
     Not just pu(beep)whipped, she got a (beep)syville Slugger
     She brandishes it as she walks on the lawn
     (sound effect: polaroid camera takes a picture)
     Look up the word “uxor”, there’s a picture of John
     Hen-pecked pe(beep)erwood pecks at his plate
     woman 2 wee man, THREE MINUTE HATE.

     (sample: South Park’s Eric Cartman: “Whateva! Whateva! I do what I want! I do what I want!”)

     Puts (beep) on his cat and takes hits from the blog
     what else is on his internet log?
     Ask Jeeves how to increase his Amazon ratings
     Google up crappy bands from the Eighties
     Blame Nader for Bush and Gore and Rabies
     Will the South rise again this year? Maybes!
     Tries to mitigate john scalzi-hatin’
     backed up by his peeps the P-Nielson-Haydens
     Gets tor up when finds out his deadline is past
     swallows the cyanide he saved for last
     Let’s call a quorum and end the debate
     He’s lucky it’s only a THREE MINUTE HATE.

     (adding to the Ugly Kid Joe riff, the vocals from the same song: “And I hate everything about…”)

     If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on John Scalzi’s face, forever.

     Bee-yotch!

154. As requested, my humble entry.

     To quote Scalzi, “My own personal fair use compass says to me that I should quote no more than three paragraphs out of an entire news story, and to of course, link back to the originating source.”

     Your fair use compass is fairly useless:

     1. It is doubtful that there is anyone who would WANT to copy more than three paragraphs of your work (I found even a single paragraph difficult to stand).

     2. Dude! In terms of fair play, where are YOU going to get any worthwhile content for your books and blog unless you copy more than that?

155. What kind of writer would ask for Hate Mail advising the best will get mentioned on the back of his book? Are you for real? Isn’t having forty thousand people visit your blog daily enough? You and your publisher is trying everything possible to drive the likes of myself to your site and hopefully to buy your new book. It’s ain’t gonna happen. I don’t write hate mail; I’m too nice for that, asshole.

     And that photograph of you on the cover of your new book is a cross between a vampire and teeth stained from heavy smoking. And those big eyes and flared up nostrils are enough to make me want to vomit green shit. The devil is disguise, I say!

     Don’t worry, I won’t be back, John Scalzi.

156. The irony of Herr Scalzi’s pedantic posturing about “fair use” practices seldom fails to amuse — for what fair use is possible of his works? His published works are unfit even as bog rolls, for each page is so laden with faeces that wiping one’s bum with same would only aggravate the condition.

     Many have suggested that his works be burned. I, for one, strongly urge restraint on their part — for there is no place upon this planet which is sufficiently downwind of the miasmic outfall which such conflagration would produce.

     No, the only viable solution is that we force-feed him every copy of each of his published so-called works. Just as Scalzi intends to profit by recycling his output, so too can we all profit by recycling his output — straight back to its source.

157. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
     Eat your own words, Scalzi.

     (Subsequent death could only be a bonus.)

158. Dear John,

     You ignite in me incredible passions of a strength rarely seen. They roil and boil in my head, make my heart pound, and my skin sweat. I can’t stop thinking about you, and I can’t keep it to myself – I share what I am feeling with all of my friends and even random strangers in the street. A policeman told me I was disturbing the peace, but how can there be any peace while your life, which is without me, goes on? Every minute of every day, a new thought about just who and what you are, and what you stand for, comes into my head, and sets me racing again. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, and I can’t work – all for you.

     It is unfortunate, however, that the passions you invoke are not loving and happiness, but loathing and hatred. My life is ruined, and it is entirely because of you.

     Seethingly,

     — Mark Whybird

159. Scalzi or Smegma, You make the call.

160. John Scalzi? Complete cunt.

161. Mr. Scalzi,

     As you were.

     -Sgt. Zim

162. Mr. Scalzi,

     (THROAT PUNCH)

     As you were.

     -Sgt. Zim

163. To even begin to express the depth of my hatred for you is a nothing but a Sisyphean task because that dark well is essentially infinite. However, these meager words will have to suffice.

     Your existence is absolute proof that there is no god and no devil. No god imaginable would be cruel enough to inflict his own creations with one such as you, and any devil would have already recruited you for his own designs, at least until such time as you usurped his throne and became ruler of that dark domain.

     Now I could sit here and call you a cocksucking, syphilitic necrophiliac who would think nothing of raping a steaming pile of cowshit then eating the used cowpie for dinner, but that is just too easy – Anyone that looks at you can see that. In fact, I understand that NBC report Chris Hansen saw your picture on a book jacket and immediately started working on a new episode of To Catch A Predator.

     No, you are such a black hole of asshattery that the entire state of Ohio has fallen into your event horizon and turned into the same stagnant cesspool from whence the earth ejected you like a teenager squeezing an oozing, infected blackhead.

     You claim to call yourself a writer, yet your writing is so devoid of coherency that it is suitable enough to be used against you at a compentcy hearing. Which is apparently the only way that we can legally be rid of you, unless humanity is lucky enough to have you turned into a fetid pile of human salsa by a passing tractor-trailer that was just stolen by a meth-smoking, gonorrhea-laden truckstop whore with her thighs still wet with the rancid jizz of a 5 dollar trick she just rolled (in other words, your mother).

     I must admit, however, that the barf bag industry is absolutely delighted to have you around, because their sales skyrocket the minute you board a plane. Now I consider myself an optimist, so if there is a bright side to all this, it must be that the stench of the yesterday’s dinner simultaneously evacuating from every stomach on board permeating the cabin must come as a welcome relief to the poor, unfortunate soul who lost the lottery and has to breathe the air around you for the next 5 hours.

     While I could go on for hours, I must keep this short if only to maintain my sanity in the face of a force that would even make the Great Cthulhu himself go absolutely batshit, bugfuck insane. So do humanity a favor – suck the tailpipe of a ’57 Chevy and put us ALL out of our misery.

164. Scalzi,

     Your ostentatiously unperturbed “grading” of “hate mail” sent by sycophants is just the latest in the cavalcade of fraud and cowardice that is your daily life. Clearly, it would be too much to ask for you to accept the mockery and humiliation which is your due with some attempt at dignity.

165. I recently read a book by Mr. John Scalzi (Is this his real name? One is forced to doubt such an improbable juxtaposition of vowels and consonants could actually exist in a rational world) entitled “The Ghost Brigades”.

     Every sentance–no, each and every ill-chosen word!–of Mr. Scalzi’s latest minimum opus affects one like a single stinging bite from a single genital louse. The net effect of an entire book by the man is the literary equivalent of a full-body infestation.

     The only surprise in the novel–other than its’ unrelenting, percussive awfulness–is that Mr. Scalzi has successfully bamboozled an otherwise reputable publisher to re-print it. This writer refuses to believe that anyone in the offices of said publisher actually read the magazine which provided “The Ghost Brigades” with its’ first home, the fall 2006 number of HUMONGOUS BACKSIDES QUARTERLY.

166. Dear John,

     I really enjoyed your latest novel Zoe’s Tale. The pages were soft, and didn’t chafe my arse at all. I enclosed the front and back hard covers with the hope that you might use them to bludgeon yourself to death.

     You suck in a way that is normally reserved for super-massive collapsed stars. The only reason the universe granted you such a lovely wife and daughter is to offset your suckitude enough that Ohio won’t implode into itself. To say that your writing, blogging, personality, and political views are abhorrent would be like calling the Holocaust a “bummer”. I’m dumber just for reading your work.

     It is my hope that Zoe’s Tale will be your last attempt to hump the leg of the science fiction community. Flaunting the Hugo award that was awarded to you as an obvious inside joke by the voters is getting old. I mean, even the SFWA wouldn’t elect your sorry ass. It’s one thing to be arrogant, but you’re so incredibly stupid that your brain matter would make a zombie puke.

     Do us all a favor, John. Take up chainsaw juggling as a hobby. Remember: Safety gear is for wusses.

     Sincerely,
     Shawn Powers

167. And what’s worse than someone who can’t distinguish “good” attention from “bad” attention?

     A guy who has done little that provokes rejection needing to guide any rejection to safe waters, then sell it.

     Control freak?

     Naw, he’s quite calm about it.

168. Yo mammas so fat when she dance, she make the band skip. I know this hate mail should be directed toward you, however i realise your suffering self respect, and moral delinquency is a direct result of said gluttenous and parsimonious mother. Though normally i would refrain from imbuing such truth to one so morally bankrupt, i am sure your nescient self will sleep fine, regardless.
     Simon

169. I’ve got better things to do in life than write hate mail, but when I caught what you’ve been doing on the Internet when my daughter brought it to my attention – projectile vomiting does get my attention – well, that did it.

     Let me just it put it this way, as the Croats say: yebo ti kogn krwavim kurtzem sestru na maychinom grobu.

     Of course, you Svirkadjiya, you pile of spucatum tauri, your works – if one can call your wretched, brain-damaged scribblings work – reminds, to paraphrase Balzac, of an orang-utan playing the violin. Crude, immoral, vulgar and senseless are not merely the best that can be said of these ramblings of a deluded psychotic, it is the only thing that can be said of it. Well, not entirely: there are two ways of disliking science fiction. One is to dislike it, the other is to read the works of John Scalzi. He is as gifted with the command of the English language as a wallowing fevered hog is with mathematics.

     It is extremely embarrassing to find, after perusing your sticky stains on the Internet, that we are fellow countrymen: for this I shall relinquish my citizenship, so as to avoid even the remotest connection to this vain, silly, childishly perverted shambling semblance of American vulgarity, wallowing happily in a blocked sewer like a rhinoceros in a water hole and yet somehow detracting from it.

     I must ask your wife the question that Oscar Wilde once asked: When you are at home, alone, with John, does he take off his mask? Undertakers dealing with abandoned corpses in the middle of a Los Angeles summer would blanch at the prospect of merely seeing his true face, let alone dealing with the smell, that curious mixture of gangrene, farts and the sickly smell of rotting teeth. To see him fumbling with you is liking seeing is like seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee. I wonder at what horrible deed that you have done, what terrible mortal sin you committed to be condemned to live with such an ashen-faced, gaunt parody. How do you clean the track of slime that he leaves behind?

     I could go on, but fundamentally it’s a waste of my time.

     And I can tell you this, you utterly contemptible little shit. On every morning that you wake up for the rest of your life you will be ashamed of who you are.

170. Dear Mr Scalzi,

     Could you please send another stack of large promotional photos of yourself. We wore out the last batch. Please ensure they’re:

     • Matte not glossy – It’s easier to mark on the devil horns, and swastikas. The monkey dung also adheres better.

     • Thick– We wear out less dartboards that way. (How thick? Look in the mirror and then divide that by the thinness of your characters.)

     • Full body portraits, including the crotch – Our aim has so improved we need a challenge.

     • Recent and accurate – Nobody’s impressed by your photo-shopping “skilz”. I.e. Digitially hijacking Wil Wheaton’s body and Neil Gaiman’s hair. It’s a sickness.

     • Sealed in an envelope – The postman refuses to deliver “those satanic images”. We’re also worried about the effect on passing children, the epileptic & people with heart conditions.

     • Not nude – Please. Ever again. I don’t need another near death experience. The brain surgery was expensive.

     Your thankfully,
     – Chris Green

     P.S. Do you donate your novels to charity? Local stocks are low, and the orphans need their winter fuel. And a good laugh.

171. Not nude – Please. Ever again. I don’t need another near death experience. The brain surgery was expensive.

     Eh, who are you trying to kid. I’m not saying that Scalzi naked is a pretty sight or anything, but it’s hardly THAT impressive.

172. John F. Takes On John Scalzi: Profanity Edition

     John Scalzi, you are the lowest goatfucking son of a syphilis-raddled twenty-five cent whore that this earth has ever, and, if there is a merciful God, will ever see. You dropped out of your mother’s noxious cunt like the failed abortion of a crack baby you are. Tragically, the drop to the pavement was insufficient to extinguish your miserable, verminous life. Instead, it merely added further lopsided deformation and a few additional scars (to go with the ones from your mother’s coathanger) to the vile Lovecraftian horror that serves you in place of a face.

     John Scalzi, you are a cockstrangling cumgobbler of the first degree. Everything you lay your fetid, shitstained paws upon is tainted forever. The fact that you have a child is proof positive that immaculate conception is a reality, because a woman wouldn’t let you touch her if it was to pull her out of a tub of flesh-eating bacteria.

     John Scalzi, you began your writing career by puking onto a sheet of paper so that the used condoms, dog turds, and decaying animal testicles that you stole from the dumpster outside the vet’s office contained therein formed patterns vaguely resembling words, and have continued it in a similar vein ever since. Some have suggested that your Hugo was simply a hideous kind of joke. I see it as further evidence that you are a plague visited upon humanity by a vengeful God who will not rest until every last one of us has been exposed to your contagion.

     John Scalzi, go fuck a powerdrill, and don’t stop if you hit bone. I hope you die screaming, while everyone you’ve ever known points and laughs at your agony. Look for me to be in the front row eating popcorn.

     Most Sincerely Yours, You Anthill-humping Semen-spotted Ape-fellating Cow-rimjobbing Dirt-fucking Shit-licking Dolphin-raping Son of a Festering Bitch Whore, You,

     John F.

     [Secret P.S. Message, OMG: After reading the both of them, I think I’d rather this count as my official entry, if that’s alright. I like a lot of the individual bits in the other, but it feels a bit rambly to me overall.

     I mean, unless the other one would’ve done better. Then that’s the official one. Yes.

     Now, for something that is totally not meant to distract you from blatant shiftiness above! Namely, BONUS DELETED PARAGRAPH, WOO:

     John Scalzi, when you had your first checkup, the doctor was initially convinced that you were a eunuch (your astonishing quantities of back and facial hair – assuming nose and ear hair is counted as facial – kept you from being mistaken for female). You had to be transported to MIT and examined under an electron microscope before it was finally accepted that you did, in fact, have a penis. The technician who spotted it is still in therapy to cope with the sheer mindfucking repulsiveness of what he saw.

     Just didn’t feel it was quite as punchy as the others, y’know? Ah well.]

173. Dear John,

     Hah, “Dear John.” How apropos. For this is indeed a breakup. A dissolution, if you will, between me and the entire human race, that sordid legion of ambitious slime molds with opposable thumbs that gave rise to the keyboard-fixated trifle that is you. To know that evolution spit you forth, I turn my back on it. Had I the wherewithal, I would ferry myself across the ages to the edge of that primordial sea where our aquatic ancestors blew bubble poems and with their golden eyes flecked green with algae blinked at a world still smoldering with creation, and there I would unfurl myself and piss a virulent stream with vigor and glee, hoping beyond hope that it would end all possibility of you.

     Truly, I can no longer stand the sight of other men, because there can be no knowing to what extent your mazy chromosomes are shared. Your mitochondrial malaise is deleterious, to say the least! And what is that perverse desire to snap photos of mangy pets as though you were the spastic love child of Anne Geddes and Steve Irwin and then post them online for all the world to see? Oh, and the sunsets! The fucking glorious sunsets and fields of fucking grain! Enough.

     The whole affair is, ah, crepestulantific! Yes, a neologism is required to contain my ire. I must create whole languages to curse you, vile Scalzi. Entire new tongues with which to slur your name. Would that I had two mouths so that I could vomit and speak your name in tandem.

     Best regards,
     Rob

174. Mr. Scalzi’s most cherished beliefs include that Journey is a great rock band and Coke Zero is the ultimate beverage. What a deep and original thinker! Instead of titling his blog “Whatever,” I suggest that Mr Scalzi switch to “Why Bother” and whenever the itch to share his pablum with the public grows to strong for him to resist – which seems to happen approximately every seventeen minutes – he should go outside instead and accomplish something constructive like mowing his lawn.

175. Mr. Scalzi,

     I see you’re again repackaging your blog posts as a book, like a crank putting copies of his letters to the editor in a scrapbook. Your choice of which opinions to publish shows what I’ve long known: you are a doughy, jowly sack filled with ego and bile. Lacking intelligence and grace, you’ve cobbled together something that in dim light and among sycophants could be mistaken for wit, much as Velveeta might be mistaken for Gruyère by the drunk. You’re the kind of man who will undoubtedly describe your book as “leveraging a built-in audience by repurposing prior product” and mean every word.

     You may be as proud of your arguments as a toddler is of the first time he shits in a toilet, but logicians scare their children with stories of your reasoning. Your political opinions are especially terrible. You choose your position and charge like a bull maddened by both red and blue. Your uninformed bellowing has made you the first bipartisan hack.

     As a writer you’re a second-rate Heinlein and a twelfth-rate Hiaasen. Whatever minor success you’ve had is a powerful argument against Intelligent Design. Your one true skill is self-promotion, a skill you exercise so often and so ham-handedly that you make Donald Trump blush with shame. You are an embarrassment, a walking, blogging example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Eskimo may not have more than fifty words for snow, but they do have two for moron: John Scalzi.

176. Dear John Scalzi,
     Your name drives a stab of fear into the hearts of all those who care about good literature or our nation’s future, not to mention anyone who cares about the welfare of ducks. When you’re not touching children you were hired to read to in the bad places, you’re dreaming up more of his filthy, unpatriotic, terrorist-loving lies. I recently made the unpleasant discover that your last “book” (and I use the word loosely) The Last Colony, contained coded instructions to various terrorist groups on how to bring down 10 select cities in the U.S. (just look at the first sentence of each letter in Chapters 4 and 5.)
     Why, John Scalzi? Why do you persist? Tens of thousands–nay, hundreds of thousands–would cheer if you could only find the courage to stab flaming salt-covered kebabs into your eyelids, thus blinding yourself so you couldn’t see your computer screen any more! The stock market would skyrocket. Old men, enemies for years, would embrace in the streets. I imagine the Times headline would read “Scalzi stabs self, world holiday declared.” And then, unable to type properly, you’d garble out gibberish like “o jsyr ,u ;ogr” (incidentally, that’s “I hate my life,” if you hit all the keys one letter over.) Sure, it’d be gibberish, but wouldn’t that be an improvement on Agent to the Stars, for God’s sake?
     I am reminded of Joseph Welch’s famous words, to Joe McCarthy, a man whom you make look like a friendly Wisconsin saint: “Have you no decency? Have you, at long last, simply no decency?” If I though you knew what ‘decency’ meant–you seem to be only semi-literate–there might be some hope to reach you. But no, you plow along in your troglodytic existence, content to spew your foul manure to the far reaches of the planet.
     I weep for your wife and daughter, sir. May they some day have sweet release from your wretched, wretched existence.
     And, for the love of God and all that is holy, just stop already with the ducks. It’s beyond sick.

     Hatefully yours,

     Greg Machlin

177. Hello, John? John? It’s Meeka here. Hi. How are you? Listen, do you have a minute? Yeah, I know, it’s been awhile. John, there’s something I want to talk with you about. Yes, I heard about the reviews of Zoe’s Tale. I’m so pleased for you. I really….yes, Athena really is amazing. Quite capable of independent thought. I hoped that we could discuss….oh, the bacon’s done. Yes, I can wait a minute. Is this bacon to eat or to tape on the cat? You have no idea how much productivity was lost on that one! At any rate….yes, yes, Krissy looks quite stunning in the latest photo. I….yes, the seasonal photos were good too. And I like the sunsets. John….well, maybe. There *are* a lot of photos of your pets. I know, people do seem to enjoy them. But John….John?….what? Deadline? You have to go? Well, it’s been nice talking to you too. *sigh*

178. Btw, John, in order to write that last one, I had to pretend you were a cross between a far inferior writer and two prominent politicians from the political party I oppose. Reading backwards, 77-156, some jump out:

     Tom’s @77, for having the nifty effect of making all the others seem real,

     Paco the droid’s, for being a frighteningly realistic pastiche of a loony right-winger,

     Djscman’s is my personal favorite outside of my own.

179. And from the first 77:
     Nicole The Wonder Nerd’s @ 21 was very good, particularly the opening line.

     Kevin A. Smith @ 29 for brevity.

     The win, however, has to go to Matt Stapley@45. It’s the one that begins “Pears are my favorite fruit.” Funniest thing I’ve read all week.

180. Mr. Scalzi,

     I must thank you for once again infecting the world with that vile abomination that you refer to as writing, so that you could show me that the written word is dead and that you, sir, are fucking it’s cold, rigid corpse.

181. John–I’d like to change my official entry to this one, if that’s all right. My other one’s too similar to some of the other entries.

     Dear John,
     This is a true story.
     In October of 2006, I submitted two monologues I’d written to a theatre publisher
     In March of 2007, I was delighted to learn that the monologues had been accepted for publication. I’ve had several plays produced, but this was the first time I’d been published. The book was scheduled to be published some time in the unspecified future. I would be paid $20 for each monologue, or $40.
     I emailed the editor before Christmas to find out if the book would be published. I did not hear back.
     I emailed the editor again in January. He emailed me to say the book was “out” (it wasn’t, but it would come out Jan. 31) and that checks were being prepared.
     The book came out Jan. 31. I did not recieve the check.
     On February 14, I called the Smith & Kraus phone number on the website (I had never been given a contact number). I was informed it was only a distribution center, but I was given another number to call. I called this person, who shall remain nameless. She apologized, and said she would make sure a check got to me within two weeks.
     Four weeks later (mid-March), I called my Smith & Kraus contact, and left a polite message on the phone inquiring about the check.
     I did not hear back.
     I made another phone call in April. I did not hear back. (this was going on while two of my plays were in production, so I didn’t really have time to obsess)
     In May, I made another phone call telling my contact she had 24 hours before I reported Smith & Kraus to the Dramatist’s Guild Business Affairs office. That one got a response. She agreed to finally send the check. She agreed things were “really disorganized” over at Smith & Kraus.
     The next day, I received three emails (one polite, from my contact, two aggrieved, from the editor and publishers), claiming they had sent not one but two checks, the 2nd in late April (this was the first I’d heard of it). They had my address correct, probably because I had foolishly given my contact my correct address the day before. I say foolishly, because the *best* possible interpretation is that they sent my money to the wrong address. They could just be total lying frauds. They say they’re not going to pay me now because they “don’t feel comfortable” sending out the “third” check (assuming they sent the first two, which is, honestly, a bit of a stretch.) They suggested I check my mail or a roommate’s or find out if the post office had mysteriously decided not to deliver my check. I live alone, and my mailbox has a key. The post office delivered my tax refund check–for considerably more money than $40–just fine.

     Smith & Kraus have now
     A) Failed to pay me the money they agreed to pay me, thus violating my copyright by publishing my work, making them liable for a fine of between $250 and $750
     B) made me pay for copies of an anthology I was published in, a practice which would shame all but PublishAmerica, except for the fact that Smith & Kraus is seen as a LEGITIMATE THEATRE PUBLISHER by most theatre people (they publish some fairly major playwrights)
     C) Accused me of attempting to defraud them for the princely sum of $40–particularly galling because–
     D) They claim “their records” show they sent me two checks, despite the fact that they did not use either delivery confirmation or certified mail. Thus said records do not exist. Liars.
     E) Ruined my first experience being published.
     If I think about these people for too long, I am filled with rage. They are cheap, rotten, blackhearted skinflints. They are crooks and liars and cheats and miserable, miserable people. I want them to burn in fires of Hell. I want them infected with diseases so horrible they haven’t even been invented. I want them to suffer a fate worse than Dick Cheney will suffer when he dies and God demonstrates that he is indeed not a Republican.

     John:
     I hate you more than I hate Smith & Kraus.

     Sincerely,

     Greg Machlin

     (Note: If this entry does make finalist status, you can substitute [INSERT PROMINENT THEATRE PUBLISHER HERE] for legal reasons, because they probably would sue, the fucking bastards, but I swear on my life and will swear in open court every word of this damn thing is true, except for the sentence directed at you.)

182. Mr. Scalzi:
     Sir, you have outdone yourself this time, but if you are looking for sympathy, please go to the dictionary. You will find it between shit and syphilis which is exactly where you belong since it is difficult to determine which you are.
     Kerry

183. No, Scalzi, I will not rise to the challenge with obscenity-laden invectives. No, I will just use the depressing truth. After giving you good review in the pages of Some Fantastic and The New York Review of Science Fiction, you went postal on me when I placed my short, but good, review of The Last Colony on my personal blog because I wanted to try to highlight other upcoming writers on the pages of Some Fantastic. You showed an amazing lack of grace, made comments about how I was threatening your livelihood by not placing the good review in a more prominent venue and then you demanded I bring you a cold beverage (which I dutifully did at a book signing in DC in the hopes that I would never be at the receiving end of such a barrage again). You humiliated me, and for that I will never forgive you.

     You an are evil, egotistical man who clearly cares only about furthering your own career and filling the coffers of your daughter’s college fund — which makes me feel all the more self-loathing about having a man-crush on you.

184. Given your scrofulous countenance, it’s no surprise that your characters embody definite Hoffer-esque tendencies. If only reading you in Braille were a safe alternative.

185. Mr Scalzi
     It has come to my attention that you are seeking negative commentary or so-called “hate mail” from your current readers and fan base. It is clear that this is a transparent attempt to disguise any real literary analysis of your work with which you disagree. Mine, for instance.

     You, sir, mistake the mere mechanical ability to wield grammar for true talent. Your alleged “characters” have fewer dimensions than a single point in time and space. Your laughable universe is as paltry as the fuzz covering both the inside and outside of your skull. The font selections of your publishers reveal personality traits normally of interest only to certain specialist units of the FBI. Your gratuitous use of non-standard characters in your titles indicates a lack of respect for the decent standard-English-keyboard-wielding peoples of the Earth that borders on malicious evil. DEMON! DEMON!!

     And you smell funny.

     Warm Regards etc

186. If Vince Foster had a gun, John Scalzi would be dead today. When the GOP has finally wrested control over all three branches of government from the hands of your liberal paymasters, your day will come my friend.

     Yours in Christ,

     Sir Isaac Lime

187. Having read the malodorous drivel which it pleases you to call “Old Man’s War,” may I say how groin-grabbingly wretched the whole affair was. How I read every squalid page of this tome in two days without succumbing to spastic colon of the sensitivities is beyond me. What do you plan for your next outing, “re-imagining” the Lord of the Rings, but with a sword-swinging albino and a leper in existential crisis as the protagonists/lovers?

     The pall of dread you cast over me made my Siamese go insane and murder his erstwhile best friends, the wild gerbils which live on our adjoining downs. In what unspeakable manner he rendered them unto his new god, the Crawling Chaos, I will not utter here.

     This book defenestrates the soul.

     ‘Nuff said, yes?

     Mr. V. Meldrew, Esq.

188. Dear derivative hack:

     I downloaded “Old Man’s Bore” from Tor books some time ago and was quickly and forcibly reminded of the luck that runs though my life:. Luck in never having run across your scratchings before, luck in not having to pay for that bit of tripe, luck in not having to physically touch this thing and luck in being able to easily expunge my life of its existence. Actual books are a difficult thing for me to part with, even horrendous ones. Electronic files, on the other hand, can be deleted with nary a thought. *click!* No more piece of shit masquerading as the written word. My Palm even smelled better after I ditched it.

     I see you’re publishing portions of your blog in a printed volume. May I presume that your publisher has developed some sort of aroma-absorbent paper to print this on? If not, I would hate to be the poor pressman in their printing plant. Having to work in that environment while wearing a gas mask would be oppressive to say the least: pouring a mixture of feces and vomit on to defenseless paper would raise a horrifyingly toxic stench. Not to mention the psychological damage that will result from being involved with foisting yet another of your tomes on to the unsuspecting public. Cripes.

     After all of this, do you know what the crowing outrage of your existence is? I have wasted a perfectly good lunch hour to write a missive to you. Can you even read this? It’s difficult to ascertain from the offal that is your life’s work.

     Disgustedly,

189. Scalzi is the Italian dimunitive for what remains of a lady-boy’s scrotal parts, right?

     You can tell me. I am broad minded.

     Good day.

     Malcom O’Chio

     PS: Please don’t publish again, ever, in any way, shape or form. I was going to say “please don’t write,” but you haven’t actually accomplished that yet, have you?

190. Sorry, I did not read the rules thoroughly–so eager was I to let all the hate come boiling out. Upon reflection, I think the Vince Foster entry is the closest to actually being witty, so make my first comment (186?) the official entry.

     Thanks for the opportunity, you slug-bag. You can go straight to hell after you publish my superior work.

     Yours fondly,
     Nate (but not the person who signs as Nate here.)

191. Among the great legal minds in U.S. history have been John Marshall, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Billings Learned Hand, Felix Frankfurter, and Willaim Howard Taft. Their decisions have been sound; their contemplation of legal points has been thorough; their love of the Constitution and the U.S. form of government has been complete; their writing brilliant and erudite.

     None of that may be said of you, sir. You warp and bend the facts and the truth until your colleagues, your critics, and every legal scholar in this nation finds themselves bemused, wondering how this “reality” could have made its ponderous way from your rectal orifice.

     Your decisions are a partisan mess, with holdings that damage our legal system and show your preference for expediency markedly outshines your belief that you and your colleagues are supposed to be the *defenders* of the Constitution — its last line of defense.

     Of writing brilliant and erudite you have none, save when you wish to twist the arguments and evidence so that they may serve, in their deterioration, some purpose of your own (or of those who, like you, would prefer might to right). Your opinions are dreck, and it would not astound me in the least to discover that they were written by clerks who spent much more time with Second Life than the First Amendment.

     In short, sir, I find your presence on the bench and as a member of the Court to be completely repugnant — you provide fodder for the judicial valetudinarian who has convinced self and others that our judicial system shall surely perish within our lifetimes.

     And this, Mr. Scalia, is my epideictic essay on your career and its damage to the…

     Urm?

     Oh.

     Scalzi, you say? Not Scalia?

     Oh.

     Nevermind.

192. Robert Heinlein had pulmonary tuberculosis and carotid artery disease. And you compare yourself to him!

193. Despite his (probably exaggerated) readership, I cannot imagine a worse writer than John Scalzi. His vapid stories and ludicrously simple characters are an abomination and an insult to the English language. He himself is a moron of the worst kind, a sycophant of better science fiction writers but without a thousandth of one percent of their talent or intelligence.

     Now here he is, crafting his psychotic and yet surprisingly inane blog into a book. If his novels were his attempts at coherent and interesting writing I can’t imagine the sort of disaster that adapting the various caustic screeches and malodorous crap of his hastily thrown together blog posts would be.

     Seriously, this book is a prime example of the recent failure of the publishing industry to be gatekeepers of language and intellectualism. If they’re willing to print this then they must also be willing to print anything for profit.

     Scalzi is both an embarrassment to writers and to humanity. If the world was just he would have died screaming and alone a dozen years ago, but it is not and he clogs the bookstores with shelves of literary cholesterol. He is a disease on contemporary thought.

     If you hold out any hope for the future of humanity put this book back on the shelf, convince your friends not to read it, and refuse to discuss it. Only through ignoring him can we try to combat his deleterious effect on our culture.

194. Mr. Scalzi

     It was one of those nights. The kind when you stay up too late eating far too many slices of Buffalo Chicken pizza with too much spicy sauce topped off with a liter of root beer. As I lay in bed, my stomach churning and boiling with the toxic sludge I had forced down my gut, a bubble of acid and bile worked it’s way up my asophogus toward my mouth. It erupted on the back of my tongue like a putrid geyser and filled my sinuses with a thick stinging cloud.

     Try as I might, I couldn’t rid myself of that taste. I worked through half a bottle of Listerine and several mouthfuls of Colgate; chased those with copious amounts of Altoids to no avail. That pungent burning taste of acid lingered on the back of my mouth even after breakfast the next day.

     That, Mr. Scalzi, is precisely what you offer your readers. Regurgitated bile that just doesn’t go away. If there is anything that rivals the sheer volume of detritus you inflict upon your readers it is the magnitude of your ginormous ego. It would seem that you could bloviate about yourself for decades, oh wait. You already have.

     Your writing is the over-ripe pimple on my thigh; your opinions a festering pustule under my toenail; your words a rotting tonsollith stuck in my teeth. Everything about you triggers an uncontrollable urge to vomit.

     Regards,
     Josh Ferrin

195. Hello, Scalzi-pot! It’s kettle, and you’re black! I’ve known this for a long time, ever since you claimed George Lucas was masturbating to a picture of Joseph Campbell when he created his Star Wars movies. Seeing this from the arrogant nematode who jerks off to Heinlein when he isn’t chasing Dick’s electric sheep adds a new energy level to the definition of hypocrisy, but your latest slam on Jar Jar was the last straw. He’s there for the children, asking the child in all of us to smile at his innocence, not to be hated because we’re too smart for his antics. Or is this another display of hypocrisy to cover up your pedophilic urges? Don’t cover your ears when you tell me, you might go deaf from the echo. Maybe you’ll feel better if all your books ever make as much as Phantom Menace did; it’s not Lucas’ fault that he’s a better storyteller than you! Peace out and may the Force be with you.

196. From: Christian
     Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2008 5:65 PM
     To: Scalzi [mailto:Scalzi_blows@catcocks]
     Subject: WTF With All The Cats?
     .
     Hey Champ –
     .
     What’s with all of the fucking cats? I know we all get lazy from time to time – but when you get lazy, all we get are CATS! I’m sick of arriving on your site to find cat pictures, the site smells like cat shit, and there’s fucking cat hair stuck to everything.
     .
     You are like one of those fat homely girls that I dated (ok, fucked and abandoned) in my 20’s. They always had cats, LOTS of cats, and they want to tell you CAT STORIES. Please stop with the fucking cats, or just get it out of your system and find 2 gay cats – marry the fucking gay cats, then post the entire cock gobbling nightmare on your site: “I MARRIED THE TWO FUCKING GAY CATS”. Make sure you post PICTURES too – god knows we couldn’t live without some cat pictures and ANOTHER FUCKING CAT STORY.
     .
     All Best!
     .

197. Mr. Scalzi, your books suck. The flat characters, cliché plots and asinine dialogue make me want to tear out my eyes rather than finish reading the pernicious prose you call ‘writing’. Quite frankly, your books are a waste of pulp, making you guilty of not only stupefying storytelling, but also harming the environment. I don’t even want to think about how many innocent trees have perished so that your worthless writing can plague mankind. The only practical application for your brainless books is burning. However, I am hesitant to do so because I am certain that your infernal interlocution would produce toxic fumes that would kill thousands and cause a global environmental crisis. Even if you were to perish at this very moment in some sort of happy accident, the damage you’ve done to mankind can never be repaired. I don’t know how you sleep at night, but I hope the painful screams of the thousands you’ve terrorized haunt your endless nightmares.

198. John Scalzi. What an amazing name. In three syllables it promises and threatens the reader. An astute reader will be forewarned by the name on the cover: do not touch this book, for the contents are so execrable that the publishers have printed the cover using a skin-contact narcotic to lull the unwary into purchasing the thing. Nothing else explains the general addiction exibited by his drugged adherents.
     Which book am I speaking of? It doesn’t matter which of the malevolent tomes bearing that name… any of them is the same inside.

     For should you be so unfortunate as to be paid to read and review any of them, and having taken precautions against the stealthy delivery of poisons to your system, you will discover a pastiche of cliche’s and stolen tropes, outright lifts of story and dialogue, and incomprehensible non-sequiturs combined with blatant contradiction.
     Beware lest you try to make them appear to be storylines. The Scalzi novel is actually created by populating the phrase stack of the old Eliza “psychologist” program with blocks of text lifted from Heinlein, Farmer, Robinson, Rand, Stross, both Bears, and Hubbard, which he then fills with Mary-Sue-by-proxy of his wife, daughter, and pets, possibly in the false belief that this will make them love him, or at least appease their wrath.
     Once the Mary-Sue-age has been inserted and he has grovelled for far too long to be believed, he sends it to a blind mailbox in Cardiff, where it is ghost-edited by Lionel Fanthorpe for 2 cents a page, and then trimmed to fit the word count requirements.

     The resulting prose is the equivalent of the poetry of Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England. Hearing it read aloud will not damage your ears, because that would be too merciful. It may make you sterile, it may give you brain cancer, it may just make you join the Republican Party so that you can join the Log Cabin Club (whether or not you are a gay male.)

     Well, now you can’t say you weren’t warned.

199. I put a good deal of time into this. Hopefully it shows. It was fun either way.

     Dear Polyamorous lemur-esque fucknugget of pus,

     I should begin by saying that your work makes me want to bash my head into an HIV-contaminated cement block wall covered in hookworm-infected excrement.

     The sheer stupidity of your inane ramblings drives me to drinking, in the hope that I might escape your drivel through fatal alcohol poisoning. My liver relishes the chance of being the vehicle by whose failure I might avoid your sickly mucous-filled viscous diarrhea spewing mouth.

     Your “science fiction” if it can be called that, more closely resembles an ode to the sort of extra terrestrial anal probing all you gelatinous alien-loving geeks wish you could receive, if only you had the courage to drop trow when the time came. Your work shows little daring in any way, choosing to stick to such trite characterization that your characters look less like people, and more like grotesque herpes-pustule covered fan service centerfolds.

     In summary, your work is of the sort that I would rather be lobotomized by a nymphomaniacal squirrel while I receive a rotten apple sauce colonic by way of a naked George Costanza singing about Hillary Duff’s unwashed, hairy, and pimple-covered anal region, than ever have to read anything you have written ever again.

     I’ll have my HIV-contaminated and hookworm-infected wall, bottle of 151 and trained lobotomy technician fuck-loving squirrel ready for your reply, though I’m still in talks with Jason Alexander’s people about the rotten applesauce enema and song. I hope you understand that I want to do this right, it’s just hard for me arrange such a disgusting display. That itself should give you an idea of how amazingly horrible you truly are.

     Please die an amazingly excruciating and humiliating death, or help me get in contact with Jason Alexander. I must escape your horrible shit-cunt excretion work one way or another.

200. If Forish @136 isn’t in the running, then there is no justice in this world. Not even Great Justice.

201. I’m sorry, but Forish just plain confused me. I got the war pornographic bit… But the toes? What the hell?

     If wining is based on a visual that makes me question the sanity of the author, I agree. But honestly, I might need to go off into a corner and consider that post for a bit before I could ever possibly understand the toes bits.

     What if my head were full of toes? Would I be more mobile than the average person? Would I get toe jam in my head? How would I clip their nails? Or would those nails simply grow out of my head? What does it MEAN Forish?!? What does it MEAN?!?

     …I should stop commenting. There is a reason I don’t usually post… This comment is that reason.

202. Dear Mr. Scalzi-

     Back when I was in college, I went on a date with Marjorie Derkins. Tall, willowy and with a figure that could drive the flameiest of Fire Island regulars to his knees in a sudden flare-up of heterosexual lust, Marjorie was the girl that every man in my class dreamed of, masturbated to and then denied said masturbation even if caught in the act while screaming her name. We’re talking a hotness of Biblical proportions.

     And brilliant? She majored in Japanese, Theoretical Chemistry and Modern Dance and made Dean’s List every semester. She translated for exchange students with an accent that made them feel right at home. Her research papers used to leave her professors in tears, not only for their sheer brilliance, but because her professors realized they would never find another bright light of scholarship like her and that the remainder of their careers would be one long, disappointing slide towards mediocrity into oblivion. Her solo recitals were so stunning, a mixture of Gene Kelly energy and Martha Graham grace, that the theater critic from the Times actually quit and moved to a hut in the woods because, as he said in his resignation letter, “No other art will top what I saw, so I might as well skin weasels for the rest of my life.”

     And do I need to mention her volunteer work at the local soup kitchen? Or the way small children and dogs trusted her? Or that despite her seeming perfection she was humble and charming and didn’t have an enemy in the world? No gossip chased her, no rumors dogged her. She was like some ethereal being from on high that had come down to earth to give us mere mortals proof that, yes, there is a God, and He loves us because He made someone like Marjorie Derkins.

     I was the exact opposite of her in every way. She was gorgeous; I was a pizza-faced wreck. She was smart and charming; I constantly failed classes and snarled at little old ladies. I used to pass her in the quad, and whenever she said, “Good morning,” I’d tell her to go fuck herself, just for the sheer, hateful spite of it. Because, see, I was just as in love with her as everyone else at my school, and knew deep down in my gut that she’d have nothing to do with a loser asshole like me, so what was the point of pretending to be nice?

     And one freezing cold day, when I was hungover and bundled up and so not in the mood for her sunshine and cheer, Marjorie Derkins approached me in the quad and, before I could give her my usual surly greeting, said, “I’m going to a play tonight. Would you like to come with me?”

     She completely short-circuited me. Her face was scrubbed and clean and smelled like freshly baked cinnamon buns. Her eyes were dewy green, her smile so generous, her entire being so pure that I couldn’t do anything but say “yes” and scurry back to my room to hide. Jesus Christ, what had I done? I contemplated suicide, then realized that would give my worthless roommate an automatic 4.0. Instead, I spent the day nursing my hangover and pondering what had just happened. Marjorie Derkins and me? There had to be some kind of angle. It was a dare or a school project or a charity project, because the alternative, her asking me because she wanted to be with me, was just too unlikely. But the more I thought it over, the more I realized, hell, that had to be it. Marjorie Derkins dug me!

     When she showed up at my door around five, my hangover was gone, my hair was combed for the first time in years, and I actually felt happy. Scared shitless, but happy. She was all smiles, talking about the play and how interesting it was going to be (“It’s German” she said, “really powerful.”), and off we went.

     I was a little nervous when we arrived at the theater and were met by a sea of staring, angry faces. It took me a moment to realize everyone was wearing clothes that were clean, pressed and didn’t say things like “Itty Bitty Titty Committee Member” (that was my cleanest shirt. The one I’d been wearing that morning said, “Mustache Rides: Carpool Lane Only,” but I figured the vomit stains on the front just wouldn’t do). I was completely out of my league, and everyone there knew it. I gave them an equally angry stare as I led us to the back of the theater (hey, I’ll go to a play, but I’ll be damned if I couldn’t have my back to the wall) and sat down while Marjorie put a program in my hand. The lights went down, the crowd settled, and I felt a hand on my crotch.

     I jumped a little, because the seat to my left was empty and the one to my right was occupied by Marjorie, and there was no way in hell that was her hand. But as the stage lights came up, I could see, no, that was Marjorie’s hand resting on my junk. Not just resting: moving. Massaging. And she kept looking at the stage, this tiny, tiny smile on her perfect face.

     Well.

     Marjorie leaned over and whispered, “I like it a little nasty, don’t you?” And then she nibbled on my ear as she increased the tempo. Suddenly, it all made sense: of course she was a freak. How else could someone that perfect get through live without going completely insane? That didn’t stop me from enjoying the first act, of course.

     Just as the scene ended she whispered, “How would you like a little more?” I nodded, dumbfounded, as the lights went down. I readjusted my now raging boner and sat back. Whatever was going to happen next was going to be the kind of thing that only happens in Penthouse Forum and the fevered dreams of adolescents. True, she was probably just using me because she got off on degrading behavior, but you know what? In college, you learn to lower your standards.

     I was thoroughly enjoying the hand-to-pants action, so you could imagine my surprise when something slithered up my leg. Something cold. Something slimy. Something that crawled all the way up my pant leg and wrapped itself around my cock and balls. Did I say wrapped? More like enveloped, the way a Venus flytrap consumes its food.

     Before I could scream, something curled around my neck and half-choked me. Something that tasted like a bottle of pickle brine mixed with rotting garbage stuffed itself into my mouth.

     When the stage lights came up, I could see, out of the corner of my eye, Marjorie still smiling that little smile, but as she tilted her head toward me, the light caught her eyes and reflected back the kind of color that you only see in a nightmare, a greenish-black that accompanies gangrene and leprosy. She leaned toward me again and said, “I lied earlier. I like it a lot nastier.” And then she opened her mouth, and a whole host of tongues, all of them covered in boils and suckers and squirming like a ball of diseased worms, tumbled out as she unzipped my pants.

     Now, I bring all this up because, having just read your latest prose, I am reminded that, despite the sheer horror of that evening, I enjoyed it far more than your work. Eat shit and die.

     Yours,
     Adam Rakunas

203. Hey you,

     Here’s a “story” for ya: they led me into one of the examining rooms of the ER and told me that a doctor would be in to see me shortly. I sat there for a while in a personal darkness, my eyes bandaged heavily. When the doctor came in he asked me what had happened, but didn’t wait for an answer before he continued: “Let’s see what those eyes look like.”

     Mind you, I was blind, so my other senses were elevated. I could feel the blood pour out of my ears when the last bandage came off and the doctor screamed, the sound like a meteor piercing the atmosphere.

     “I GOTTA MY WIFE! I GOTTA CALL MY WIFE!” I grabbed what I thought was the doctor and slapped an IV bag instead of his face.

     “Why are you screaming?”

     “Because it’s finally happened! Nuclear war!”

     “What?”

     “Your eyes! They…they melted! You’ve obviously looked directly at a nuclear blast!”

     I slapped the IV bag again. “No, no Doc. Calm down. There’s been no blast.”

     “But only one thing could have done that. What do you remember last?”

     “Reading the first sentence of “Old Man’s War.”

     “Oh. Well there you go.”

     So, Scalz, I’m blind. Forever. I’m doomed to Braille for the rest of my days. Of course, should I accidentally run my fingertips over one of your books they’ll dissolve as if I’ve dunked them in acid; audio books are out too, obviously.

     Certain things have a measure of “suckitude:” The Los Angeles Clippers; ice milk; O’Hare Airport; Henceforth these things shall instead have a measure of “Scalzitude.”

     Yes, Scalz, you suck. Everything about you sucks. Nature abhors a vacuum. If nature got its hands on you, it would disembowel you with a pair of tweezers, scrape out your eyes with a dental pick, and drag you by your nipples behind the Midnight Zephyr.

     Maybe I’m over-reacting. I’m looking forward to everything smelling like a dog’s ass. It’ll be fun when people who I think love me put clumps of used cat litter on a bun and tell me that it’s a hamburger. I always thought sunsets were over-rated anyway.

     Since you did blind me, perhaps you could do me a favor. Maybe you could go for a drive on a lonely country road just after a herd of cows have crossed, and your car could hydroplane on a stream of bovine menstral blood, causing you to skid upside down on the pavement just long enough for your skull to erode and your brain to fall out onto your lap. Then when the car comes to a stop, you can shove the brain up your rectum, thereby achieving anatomical symbiosis.

     Yeah, we’d be cool after that.

     James “Vision Quest” McCarthy

204. Damn clever Mr. Rakunas, damn clever.

205. Once upon a time I was in love with Truth and Beauty.

     That’s right. I used the caps.

     Once upon a time I saw Wonderment at every turn, the bewildering diversity of an infinite Cosmos was my playing field, at least in my mind’s eye.

     Then Fate bitch-slapped me with an errant search engine screw-up and I was doused with the most wasteful use of modern information technology officiated by none other than one John Scalzi.

     That’s you, Scalzi, you fugly little turd.

     As if you don’t see your name in print enough. Do you even recognize it anymore? It’s like saying a word over and over and over again and the brain refuses to associate with anything.

     Put the game controller down, splunk-nugget. I’m talking to you.

     Attention obtained?

     Good.

     Feel like I wasted some precious time?

     Fantastic.

     The feeling’s mutual.

206. Meh. Whatever.

207. *Looks at time*

     Aaaaw crap.

208. Fake duck contest making evil do’er… wooh that took alot of rage!

209. Being a completely lazy Linux system administrator, I no longer write hate mail. I wrote a program (based on “the ultimate flame”) to do it for me. So here’s my entry:

     http://geekbiker.net/flame-o-matic.php

     It’s completely random each time, so hit refresh for additional insults.