Soon after the 2021 Hugo Awards finalists were announced, Chris Logan Edwards asked in comments here, “How is ‘George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun’ not a violation of the DisCon III Code of Conduct?” That eye-catching phrase is attached to a Best Related Work finalist whose complete title is “George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun, Or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition)”, Natalie Luhrs (Pretty Terrible, August 2020).
The specific issue is that DisCon III disseminated this phrase on its website, in press releases, and on YouTube – and in doing so the committee itself (not Natalie Luhrs’ blog publication) violated their own Code of Conduct.
The applicable parts of DisCon III’s Code of Conduct are —
We do not tolerate harassment of convention attendees in any form. Behavior that will be considered harassment includes, but is not limited to…
Comments directly intended to belittle, offend, or cause discomfort including telling others they are not welcome and should leave…
We require attendees to follow the CoC in online interactions with the convention (including the volunteer mailings, wiki, and other online facilities), at all convention venues and convention-related social activities.
I sent Edwards’ question to several committee members together with the request, “If your immediate thought is that the Hugo voters can trump your Code of Conduct, please explain why you think that.”
DisCon III’s decision to broadcast this phrase on their own platform means they also are committing to having it repeated over and over again in all their venues. As Elio M. García, Jr. explained in another comment here:
Websites around the world have amplified that a member of the WSFS should fuck off. Every official publication that lists the nomination is telling a member of the WSFS to fuck off. The Hugo Nominees discussion panel will have people talking about how GRRM (and Robert Silverberg) should fuck off. On the night of the ceremonies, the screen, the presenter, the sign language interpreter will be announcing to an audience of hundreds that specific members of the WSFS should fuck off.
(Garcia is webmaster of Westeros, a George R.R. Martin fan site not run by the author.)
Tonight Adam Beaton, the Worldcon’s Outreach Division Head, emailed the committee’s reply to my question:
Our response for publication is, “DisCon III does not publicly comment on potential Code of Conduct matters.”
Have a great day, Mike!
The leadership is going to find out how hard it is to administer a Code of Conduct they are unwilling to publicly account to themselves.
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
@Mike: I think that would be a very interesting discussion.
Not, as you well know, that there’s one magical formula for how to build a community. Everyone’s different, and those differences lead to the fascinating variety of communities that make up our fannish metacommunity. But it’s always interesting to get into the nitty-gritty of “I’ve noticed that if you pull this lever here then that thing over there makes a funny noise.” And seeing how differently different people perceive the same flow of interactions is fascinating.
@evilrooster
I wonder whether I’m being cast as Dr Jekyll or Mr Hyde or both in this scenario.
We do have a mute, actually: that was what that brief discussion of the “plonk file” was about. I don’t use it myself so I can’t talk anyone through the process of making it do the thing – missing comments makes me feel twitchier than just skimming them – but it exists and people use it. So far as I recall no-one’s been hassled.
I thought about the “was it nominated in good faith” issue and I decided it didn’t really matter what someone’s motivation was or why they liked the essay (although I’m always interested in why people like something) or what was truly in their heart – the action seems cruel to me whether it was intended or not. I’m not going to make assumptions about the nominators over it, although I’m not terribly happy with them either, but I don’t think there’s a justification or explanation in the world that can make me like a personal attack embedded in a thing someone loves, and that’s what this is, unintentional or otherwise.
I still don’t care about swearing.
(I’m not going to list off all of the wrong assumptions I’ve been lumped in with since the discussion began here and elsewhere.)
evilrooster: And people are put off, and decide that this place is full of flaming assholes, and the conversation loses their contributions.
The thing is, a lot of the people who came here to comment chose to deliberately misquote things people had said here. Again, and again, and again. And went over to Twitter and misquoted there what people said here (or, as in the case of one person, just blatantly, bald-faced lied about it).
So it’s very much not a one-sided problem. If someone comes over here and deliberately misquotes a comment someone made which is sitting right up there above in this thread, how do they think people are going to react to that? It’s not an attempt to engage in good faith. Why would they expect a good reception to that, and why is a poor reception to that the fault of File 770 commenters?
Liptak has now posted a piece which grossly misrepresents the bulk of the discussion here. I guess reading 9 pages of comments here and 5 pages of comments on the other post was too much to do, so he read a few comments and decided he knew what all of them said. And there are a lot of people who will read his piece and decide that they know the full story, without bothering to check for themselves. How does that help meaningful discussion?
Why is this all the fault of the File 770 commentariat? Don’t you think that there’s plenty of culpability to go around, and that some of it should be put elsewhere, where it belongs?
@meredith: the people who worry are rarely the people who should worry.
Also, note that incomers don’t have the plonk script. So they see a different F770 than those regulars who do. When you’re not even operating on the same datastream, it gets harder to find common ground.
(Also a problem on Twitter, but a known problem.)
@JJ
Each of us has at most one person whose internet behavior we can control†. The behavior of others is what it is; what we get to choose is how we react to it. What’s effective in achieving our goals? What makes the conversation better? What makes our fellow humans smarter, wiser, or more joyful?
† Even community moderators. Especially community moderators.
Just my two cents, after yes the debate has cooled down.
@Evilrooster:
File 770 is not unmoderated, only light moderated. And while thinks were hot, it is dificult to say that any post was completly over the line.
I find it normally a lot less toxic than a lot of places in the internet.
I do agree that this wasn’t the most healty discusion, but it is also not typical for here.
Another think is that the moderating voices are here, in this tread for example thanks Meredith. A lot of regulars where until the last few pages taking a hard pass.
You mentioned that you are a former moderator on Making Light a good place to discuss chances in the Hugos as the history proofs.
@Hampus, Meredith:
I hope that a short form is general considered less work and so wouldn’t have the problem that a lot of people ignore it, because it schould be possible to do it in a short time. (There is a reason that last year and this year I started with Nebula shorts and have them done quite early)
I am also an outliner, that I don’t care much for best series in the voting. It is this year above Best Video Game and best Editors for me in importance.
Edit: @Evilrooster: Most people don’t use the plonkscript that much, ecept for trolls, perhaps. (I was the one who braught it in the discusion have never used it)
So the discusion was probably the same for most people.
@evilrooster
Mm, I was answering more the idea that there’s an expectation that people should have to take their lumps because there isn’t a mute option: I’m not sure who that expectation could come from when Filers are aware of plonk files. If people are turning up with that expectation pre-programmed then… I’m not sure what to do about that.
I can’t say how different the view is since I’ve never used the plonk. I’ve generally been under the impression that few if any people have it applied to a regular who has participated in this thread, but it’s not like I’ve been going around demanding people keep me informed of the total contents of their plonk files. That’s between a Filer and their browser settings.
@StefanB
I’m more concerned about the BRW long stuff getting further shafted, really. The BRW short stuff is already doing just fine.
I think long works are struggling just at the moment, not just in the Hugos, but generally. This isn’t an “argle bargle internet young people these days” observation, but a lot of people I know have read fewer long nonfiction works over the last year. I’m hoping that post-pandemic, this will at least partly reverse itself. But there may always be a bias toward short works if the two are lumped together in a category.
@evilrooster: As variable as communities are, they seem to fall into particular patterns pretty regularly (probably something to do with human nature). “Making Light” pointed me to an analysis of a letter column community for a 19th century children’s magazine http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/001424.html – and fascinatingly, it had flame wars, polarization and all sorts of other issues that seem very familiar.
@Cora Buhlert
I appreciate your take on the harms of Ng’s speech and Luhrs’s blog post, i.e. you would’ve preferred to see more in-depth works on the ballot, named some examples and why you appreciate them, and wished the two well going forward.
@evilrooster
I’m of the opinion that the death of Google Reader vastly changed the landscape of the internet. The migration of individual websites/blog sites/etc onto social media aggregators such as Facebook/Instagram/Twitter has had had a lot of second and third order of effects. Even moving from stuff like LiveJournal and MySpace, where everyone had their individual corner that they interacted on first, and then you’d go to your feed to see what other people were up to, feels backwards from what you have now, where it’s rare to go to your own feed unlesss you’re loookinag for something you retweeted .
Oh, boy, another gross exaggeration, especially considering when asked to point to a single strawman you were unable to do so, and your inability to articulate a harm when repeatedly asked by different people. LOL.
Because
Is not an explanation for how Luhrs’s blog post is “fucking over hundreds of people”. It’s just your thoughts on the matter. Even if we were to agree that that the title is “an abusive personal attack” that DisCon III will be repeating over the next 8 months, doing so still isn’t “fucking over hundreds of people”. The fact that the title will appear on the permanent record of the Hugos isn’t “fucking over hundreds of people.” A work you think worthy being pushed off the ballot isn’t “fucking over hundreds of people.” There are plenty of Authors who will never be Hugo finalists. Do you think that they are being fucked over by every other that is? Did N.K. Jemisin fuck over hundreds of people for three consecutive years because her work pushed other works off the ballot?
You not thinking that a work deserves to be on the ballot does NOT mean that work is “fucking over hundreds of people.” For almost a week now you’ve been asked to state specific harms, and haven’t done so. You are, of course, entitled to feel that way.
But that doesn’t make your entitlement a reality.
Yeah, I think arguing about intent often gets conversations into the weeds. A lot of times intent is murky and hard to parse. It’s way easier to deal with “This thing happened, how do we react to it.”
you don’t say.
And now to the more enjoyable of the two catch up comments.
@Meredith
I have long gone past the point where I reasonably expect to read all the books I buy. Whereas I used to read every single book I bought, with the march into the digital age, I find myself buying to support friends, because it’s an author’s debut and I’d like to see them get another, it was cheap, it looked interesting, it’s Tuesday…
@Cheryl S
Nice! I hope you enjoy!
@Hampus Eckerman
I understand the burnout thing. I hope those recs help with it. I know I’ll be looking at Unbound, System Apocalypse, The First Defier, Cultivation Chat Club wanders away and returns
Uh… which Unbound? I found The Omega Trilogy which bills itself as “The Da Vinci Code meets Hunger Games meets Left Behind” , which I’m going to add to the Kindle because that sounds delightfully bad, and Arcana Unlocked by Gregory Blackburn.
Defiance of the Fall doesn’t show up on Amazon until June 8, so I hit preorder on that. Checking out that Royalroad version is up to Chapter 600, Good Holey Moley.
alexvdl:
My brief is to explain what I say and back it up with my reasons. My brief is not to convince you of anything.
I’ve listed my reasons, and I’ve pointed out some of your many strawman arguments.
The fact that you refuse to acknowledge that they are such does not change the fact that I have indeed posted them.
Regarding the File770 Plonk file, I still have the instructions up on my blog at https://realtegan.blogspot.com/p/file770-stuff.html
I haven’t checked them in ages, though. I’ve been a bit preoccupied with other issues. But in theory they should still work. I prefer “fading” people that bother me rather than completely plonking them. It’s a nice warning that I might get irritated, rather than a silencing of them.
Edit: Also, I use the highlighting method a LOT to make sure I read people whose opinion I respect or who I think are very relevant to the conversation.
Agreed.
A heated debate on Twitter is performative outrage by people who weaponize their large followings by pulling something out of context into a quote tweet so their followers will dunk on it all day long.
A heated debate on File 770 is people getting carried away with point-counterpoint mode and taking more strident positions than they took originally. There are no admirers egging you on for making a disagreement personal. There are people who start dropping hints to turn down the temperature.
One reason I’d call File 770 a healthy discussion forum is that arguments only rarely descend into a re-airing of old grievances longtime members have against each other. People argue about a subject, sometimes too strongly, and then forget the overzealous moments by the time the next brouhaha comes along.
Or they use the plonk script, though in my impression that hasn’t been used much in recent years because it wasn’t being talked about any more.
@Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag:
Hi, the scary think I remember some of the trolls on the list.
China in Space, or the try to negotiate with Vox Day (stopped by Mike in a case where I read his comment as angry) and of course Aristotele and Brians many avatars.
Well 2 of those trolls can call themselves Hugonominees now. (which not great success)
@StefanB:
I actually removed all the plonks from my file some time ago and have only been using the highlight feature. It makes it really easy for me to locate my own posts, for one! I haven’t felt the need or urge to fade anyone for a few years. But if those particular people came back, I could almost see myself using it again.
alexvdl:
I was thinking of this Unbound. And yeah, Defiance of The Fall might have 600 chapters as yet, but I clocked in 1600 for the Xianxia Way of Choices and Cultivation Chat Club is at more than 3000 in the Chinese version.
Oh. I look forward to you starting to do that.
@Hampus Eckerman
Wooof. I was way off, lol. However, yeah, I have been sticking to the KU and Mountaindale Press stuff and haven’t wander over into Royalroad yet, though I probably should.
Thanks for the links!
Alexvdl:
There are some others at Royal Road that might interest you. Ar’Kendrithyst has got an interesting pacifist hero, Ben’s Damn Adventure is hilarious at the start, Worth the Candle is very meta and philosophical, different from anything else.
I left them all after a while, but they were all entertaining at the start.
At KU, you can try Dan Sugralinovs Re-Start which is about a guy getting a game interface in ordinary life and gets quests of the type “help the lost dog” and “remember to visit your parents”. It is kind of nice.
alexvdl and JJ:
Now that you’re coming around to repeat the same action/reactions for the fourth time, I’m certainly clear on the matter of what you each are satisfied you have proved.
It would be great if you concentrated on discussing things besides each other.
I, for one, am glad that the blog post was nominated.
George R R Martin caused a lot of hurt and anger for many people of colour, myself included, so it’s nice to see that his poor behaviour has been recognised by the science-fiction community at large and that it is something which Will not be condoned or supported.
What’s more, he has such a large following and was given an incredible opportunity to celebrate and raise up the voices of people of colour and non-binary folk, and the LGBT community, and he chose not to do so, instead using his speech to focus mostly on the past sidestepping entirely the incredible diversity and talent which has been poured into the science-fiction community, and which has always been there since it’s inception.
And it’s nice to see that the concerns I and others like me have with his behaviour have not been ignored because of his status as a huge bestselling author, but rather have been acknowledged and acted upon.
I’m quite young myself so I don’t have as much inside knowledge of all the fandom drama preceding this, but this nomination gives me hope that the future of WorldCom is progressive, and one which looks towards a better future And people of colour will be there every step of the way.
Annie:
I hope you’re correct on all counts, because that’s a better world.
rcade:
re: the plonk script – While I’ve occasionally been tempted, I eventually begin to scroll past when the alternative is having my hair light on fire while reading. It does seem to get resurrected during lengthy arguments, which is probably more of a factor than how long it’s been.
I had to bail entirely during the AO3 kerfuffle and it took time to come back. I eventually did because even when I’ve strongly disagreed with someone’s position, we have enough in common in the books we read and the hopes we have around fandom that there’s common ground to be found.
Mike’s moderation helps, giving a wide but not unlimited field to the commentariat.
Most of the people who may have ever been plonk candidates have moved on. I can only remember them now in vague, shadowy terms that would involve a lot of handwaving. “You know. That guy. The one who kept saying that thing. Got into a lot of arguments.”
Though it would be interesting to look at people’s plonk files and see if any of the names were instantly recognizable.
If I am in your plonk file, please let me know. 😉
@JJ
Do you happen to have a link for that? Cause Andrew Liptak posts in so many places that I’m not sure where to look.
On looking at the 2021 Vogel awards announcement OGH just posted, I found this interesting item:
How New Zealand’s Best Fantasy and Science Fiction Authors got Shafted on a Global Stage, by Casey Lucas
Compare and contrast:
@John A Arkansawyer,
I read that when it was published last year, and was nodding vigorously throughout.
GRRM’s Hugo awards performance was very cringemaking & made me angry. The finalists & winners did not deserve this. I was at a watch party, the amount of cringing, headpalming, and eyerolling was huge, and that was just from me. But in a way, having the Julius Vogel ceremonies as a separate event had a silver lining as it didn’t end up part of the Hugo fiasco.
First point I agree with is that by admitting blog posts as “Related Works” we’ve opened a Pandora’s box (sorry, my paraphrase of the original comment), and for the category to have a long, prosperous future, it should really be retooled to focus on more substantive contributions to the genre. Since “word count” is embedded in the DNA of the Hugos I hereby propose that Best Related Work should have a reasonably lengthy minimum word count.
Second, the burden lies squarely on the Worldcon community members who made the decision to “upvote” this thing – why are you blaming the post’s author, the convention, the subject of the attack, etc.? That’s immature behaviour, and whatever we’ve been guilty of in the past in that department, today is a brand new day and we should set a better example here on the glorious internet.
(ps. I fought in the puppy wars with a single avatar.)
@cora buhlert
I think it may be at this link.
https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/hugo-awards-file-770-natalie-luhrs-george-rr-martin/
I’m trying to find another write up of this thread which was linked on Twitter but I now can’t find it again.
It was very upset about this thread but blamed the contents on the DisCon committee. Which is ironic to say the least.
Andrew Liptak’s post on his newsletter waves away all criticism of the nomination by claiming we’re acting in bad faith, because of course there’s no sincere reason someone might object to immortalizing on the Hugo ballot a call for somebody to “fuck off into the sun.”
He falsely claims this post is an attempt to get the work removed from the ballot and portrays asking questions as a “frequent tactic used by bad-faith actors,” overlooking the fact that it’s also a frequent tactic used by reporters.
He also points out that GRRM is very rich — which I guess means he bought himself immunity from human feelings — and rolls his eyes that Martin recently took DisCon off his list of upcoming convention appearances.
My favorite part is Liptak calling File 770 “aggressively confrontational” while defending a call for somebody to fuck off into the sun.
Ah, there we go, God has figured out what my punishment should be. I can unsubscribe from Liptak’s newsletter but I can’t escape having his misrepresentations and bad reporting repeatedly shoved in my face. Thank you all so much. I’ll write again later after I’m done having sex with the sun.
Perhaps it has to do with me beeing old, and for younger people that is completly normal to tell other to fuck of in the sun.
Who exactly is Liptak that I should care whar he writes?
Liptak is an SFF writer, anthologist, reviewer and Tor.com contributor.
(Transparently trying to change the subject) Today when I tried to figure out why Google Analytics reported 39 hits on a 5-year-old post — which proved to be from a user whose city is “Not Set” — I also peeked at the realtime overview and learned there is a city in New York State called Cheektowaga, and spent a moment thinking that’s got to be at least as hard as my surname is to get across to people when phoning for airline reservations. (Yes, it’s a perfectly good word in a Native American language.)
I resort to spelling my name to save time.
Camestros Felapton blogged about this discussion Friday and it’s what you would expect: aggressive reasonableness.
rcade says Liptak is an SFF writer, anthologist, reviewer and Tor.com contributor.
None of which means I should care about him. I only care about individuals whose opinions are such that I consider them worthy of being read on an ongoing basis. Liptak has ceased to be one of those as I find his opinions demeaning now.
Aggressive Reasonableness is the name of my Camestros Felapton tribute band.
@Soon Lee
I have to spell mine sometimes – there are at least four ways to spell it, and with it being hard for some people to tell “v” and “b” apart, that adds a few more.
The way a pest
Crept up the side
Of the Sunday best
That you wore with pride
Made me see
How I’d be viewed
And rescued me
From being rude.
(Companion-piece to this. Both something to consider when reading some of my posts in this thread.)
I have three very honest questions, mostly for @JJ, but I’m ok with other people chiming in.
1) Why do people believe that the nomination was made in bad faith? We know that the Puppy slate was bad faith because they told us, extensively and in public. I am not particularly plugged in, so there may well be a similar photon-trail here, but no one has mentioned it. To me, it seemed like another in a recent string of meta-nominations. The first one I was aware of was the nomination of Garica’s Hugo Acceptance Speech as “Dramatic Presentation, Short Form” which I thought an hilarious nomination, playful and meta. A lot of people were really furious about it. Laura Mixon’s report was more self-referential than meta, and it also drew a huge amount of fury, but I thought it did good work. This nomination seems to be in the same sort of spirit, a meta-textual critique. What am I missing?
2) I kinda fail to see the title as a gross personal attack. Am I being too cavalier about the price of fame? I mean, I have met GRRM a couple of times (once, before he was famous) and liked him quite a bit. I think that I think of him as a person, not a personality. At the same time, the blog post seems to be solidly a response to his celebrity and his acts as a celebrity, maybe I’m giving it too much of a pass?
3) Even if I accept that this is a personal attack, I don’t understand how this fucks over hundreds of people. I’m just not seeing it. Is this the equivalent of being present during an unpleasant or abusive confrontation? Is that what you mean? (Bystander trauma is real. I am not dismissing it.) Or is there something else going on here I’m not getting?
I continue to think that whatever else this is, it is not a Code of Conduct violation. I think that whether it is or not is a completely different kettle of fish from whether it is a worthy nomination, or if this nomination was made in good faith, and it would be helpful to disentangle the different strands of the discussion.
Lydy, I’m making a distinction between the blog title and the blog post itself.
The post itself is perfectly legitimate, and on its own unremarkable compared to all of the other rants posted at the same time. They’re all legitimate.
Several people here, and several people I have conversed with privately, as well as myself, have expressed extreme unhappiness at having a title which is an abusive personal attack be something that is repeatedly published and broadcast as a “Hugo finalist”. Every time that title shows up somewhere, a bunch of Hugo voters are cringing and feeling punched that a title which is abusive is normalized as something that Hugo voters and Worldcon endorse.
How does the fact that some Hugo voters aren’t bothered by seeing and hearing a title that is an abusive personal attack endlessly repeated, negate the feelings of those who do feel that it’s wrong for that abusive personal attack to be represented as something that Worldcon and Hugo voters endorse?
As far as intentions, all I can say is that I’ve seen several tweets which have claimed with savage glee that of course they nominated that particular piece not just because of its content but especially because of the title.
But for me, at this point, their intentions are irrelevant. It’s on the ballot because sufficient people nominated it, and I think it’s DisCon III’s responsibility to not continue repeating and publishing a title which is an abusive personal attack. It’s got a perfectly good secondary title which can be used for publication.
It doesn’t matter how famous GRRM is, it’s that either Worldcons have a Code of Conduct which means something, or they don’t. Natalie Luhrs is fairly well-known in fandom in this point. Would it be okay for the abusive title “Natalie Luhrs is a ******* *******” to be continually promoted as a Hugo finalist? (My answer to that is also “No.”) Either a CoC protects everyone according to the same standard, or it protects no one.
You don’t have to agree with me on these things, but I do believe you have to accept that it’s valid for me and other people to feel this way.
OGH: My spouse was born near Schenectady, and spent part of his childhood in Poughkeepsie, two New York state place names that a lot of people have trouble spelling and/or pronouncing. A lot of people also have trouble with “Rosenzweig,” but they can generally spell “New York City,” which is where I grew up.
I had an amusing conversation, a couple of decades ago, with Lynne Ann Morse, a US-born fan who moved to the Netherlands. She was pronouncing Dutch place names in New York (such as Spuyten Duyvil and Van Wyck) the way they would be pronounced in the Netherlands now, which is different enough from how New Yorkers pronounced them at the end of the twentieth century to lead to serious confusion.
Lydy Nickerson: Your baseline is that DisCon III broadcasting the message in the title of this finalist was not a Code of Conduct violation, and so there will be no issue when they repeat it over and over in other venues. You’ve written three paragraphs why you approve of the piece and its appearance on the final ballot. Can you unpack your conclusion about the Code of Conduct? I tried to engage with you about that before.
Lydy Nickerson:
2) I absolutely see it as a very brutal personal attack. For my perspective, “fuck off into the sun” means “go away and die somewhere else where we don’t have to care”. It is not a “do better”. It is not a “this man should not host any important fan activity”. It is “this man should go away and die with our blessing”.
I understand that others have much milder interpretations and will explain to me that off course that wasn’t meant. But when I read it, I can’t see any other interpretation that makes sense. It is not just strong words for me.
And I do not think fame suddenly alters a persons character so they don’t have human feelings anymore.
3) My answer here is a bit different from what has been said before. Before the Puppies, I had no idea what Worldcon was, but I did follow the Hugo’s and their nominations. I had no idea there was a ceremony or any party. And I don’t think it would have interested me. I was interested in SFF, not in what people were doing in any Fandom. I had several people who were into that stuff, but I wasn’t until the Puppies threatened what I really cared for, the Hugos. I wouldn’t have become a part of Fandom if it wasn’t because of the discussions about the Puppies at this site where I started to become friends with people. I’m still thinking of leaving Fandom because people are so in love with their own anger. Me too, sometimes. And I don’t like when I get angry. A few times I have left this site for some weeks to cool down and get thoughts to normal again.
I care about the Hugo’s, but I’m not in any way interested in them being a battleground for a small insular group and their infighting about parties and ceremonies. I want them to show what is great in SFF and what all SF-lovers can be interested in, part of Fandom or not.
For me, fandom stuff should be in fan categories. It should not replace what is relevant for the much larger SF community. That’s why I think Best Related Work should be for non-fiction books and documentaries. And that fan writing about fan happenings should be for fan writer or fancast. Or maybe even a new fan category. And it is a disappointment for me that the books are pushed out and I think there is a disappointment for more people than me. How many, I can’t say.
Hampus Eckerman says For me, fandom stuff should be in fan categories. It should not replace what is relevant for the much larger SF community. That’s why I think Best Related Work should be for non-fiction books and documentaries. And that fan writing about fan happenings should be for fan writer or fancast. Or maybe even a new fan category. And it is a disappointment for me that the books are pushed out and I think there is a disappointment for more people than me. How many, I can’t say.
I fully agree with you on this. We need to make this category limited to non-fiction books and documentaries, not weird stuff like this whatever it is. Call it the What Not Hugo.
Brief note re: the plonk script –
It works equally well with the Stylus extensionas with Stylish. My understanding is that there are problems with Stylish*, and that it is not so well supported anymore, and that Stylus picks up where it leaves off.
(*My personal issue with Stylish is that it stopped working with pre-quantum Firefox. Or at least my installation thereof. I’m not entirely clear on what other problems with Stylish are, but People Have Opinions out there.)
And yes, I still use the plonk script. Robustly.
@Mike Glyer
I habitually spell my name out because my accent makes it difficult to parse otherwise. Though has resulted in “What like Harry?” “More like Hairy” more than once.
I’ve als been tempted to move to Auchtermuchty or Ecclesmachen just for the amusement factor.
That’s my interpretation as well.
The work qualifies for the category and received sufficient nominations, so it should be on the ballot. It is not a Code of Conduct violation to have written it or nominated it. It is not a Code of Conduct violation for the author to refuse to retitle it.
But DisCon doesn’t need the Code of Conduct to decide how to conduct its own communications. It can choose to use the partial title “The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (RageBlog Edition)” on the grounds that the full title is profane abusive language directed at a Worldcon member.