(1) ANOTHER FANS V. HOLLYWOOD DUSTUP. This is fascinating. Business Insider, in the process of crabbing that “The last 15 best-picture Oscar winners prove how out of touch Hollywood’s biggest night is with general audiences”, shows that the top box office picture in all but one of those years was a genre film, or else an animated movie.
We looked back at the lifetime domestic gross for the last 15 best picture Oscar winners and matched those with the lifetime gross for the movies that topped those years at the box office. And only once did they match up (2003’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King”).
In fact, most of the best picture Oscar winners didn’t crack $100 million at the box office and only two crossed the $200 million mark — and that’s counting inflation!
Nevertheless, in 2012 when genre films went head-to-head and Oscar winner Argo beat box office champ The Avengers, I was pretty happy about that result.
(2) ABOUT THE HUGO ANNOUNCEMENT. Annalee Flower Horne explores important nuances in the argument over when the Hugo finalist announcement should be scheduled. Jump on the thread here —
https://twitter.com/leeflower/status/979088043310223361
(3) NO THANKS. Wendy S. Delmater helps authors read the entrails when it comes to “What Rejection Letters Really Mean”.
Oh no. Your literary creation—poem, article, novel, or story—has been rejected. What do you do now?
One of the first questions you should ask is, was this a Form Rejection or a Personalized Rejection? When you use The Grinder (by Diabolical Plots) to keep track of your submissions, it even gives you those options on a drop down menu. And there a shades of rejection letters, something called “tiered rejections.” Every publication has different rejection letters, too. One thing you can do is to take a look at the rejection wiki to see if the market you submitted it to has sample rejection letters.
(4) EYE-OPENER. Laura Dale tells Polygon readers “Why I helped create a game about being trans,” in the article “When simply existing is dangerous, everything is a risk”. Thid video role-playing game is designed to help cis people understand what it feels like to have gender dysphoria, to be forced to live as a gender which does not match the one with which they identify.
As a trans woman, I hear stories of transgender individuals dying by murder or suicide depressingly often. At least 81 transgender people were murdered in 2015, while 41 percent try to kill themselves at some point in their lives.
I don’t always have the emotional energy to engage with the topic, but in the wake of Leelah Alcorn’s suicide, I decided to try and do something to help raise awareness of what it’s like to go through the rough early stages of gender transition.
I got together with coder Alex Roberts, artist Joanna Blackhart and writer 8BitGoggles to develop a game called Acceptance.
(5) THE RISK OF OOPS. Scientists are the only ones…. “Why Scientists Aren’t Fans Of Creating On-Demand Meteor Showers” …because, of course, nothing could possibly go wrong.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
In this video, the firm Astro Live Experiences explains how it hopes this will work. A satellite in low orbit around the Earth releases a cluster of small spheres. Those spheres fall through the atmosphere. And as they do, they burn up. Here on Earth, that translates into an artificial shooting star show.
SHAPIRO: Sounds like it could be pretty. But if the idea of manmade spheres hurtling through the atmosphere also sounds alarming, you’re not alone. Some scientists have objections. For one thing, they say we need to be able to observe objects beyond our atmosphere.
(6) PROBLEMATIC SURVEY. Lauren Orsini, in the Forbes.com column “Why Did The Flying Colors Anime Census Lose Fans’ Trust”, says anime fans were disturbed by a quiz sent out by previously-unknown Flying Colors Foundation, because the foundation didn’t explain who they were and then asked if anime fans had mental health problems, including social anxiety, body image issues, bullying, and depression.”
Why does the survey ask about mental health?
Near the end of the Anime Census, survey-takers are asked if they have ever experienced social anxiety, body image issues, drug addiction, or other “health complications.”
However, the survey website does not inform fans about how the information will be used, so it’s no wonder that some survey-takers assumed the worst.
“The intention of the mental health question is threefold,” [spokesperson Daniel] Suh told me, “To let the community know that they are not suffering alone, to prove that anime can quite literally change lives by helping fans endure and grow through difficult times, and to understand and measure the benefits of anime on mental health. We want to help prove that anime is a global medium that could be used for good. We are aware of HIPAA regulations and, although we are not a health service provider, we are complying with its strictest rules. Any responses we receive about mental health will not be shared with anyone outside of FCF.”
(7) TODAY IN HISTORY
- March 28, 1963 – Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds premiered in theaters.
(8) TRIVIAL TRIVIA. Trivial Trivia: Ray Bradbury was approached to write the original screen treatment of The Birds but declined.
Later, when he’d watch the movie at home, he’d yell at the TV, “You should have used the ending from the book!”
(9) CANCELLED. Starbase Indy, a convention that has been held for 30 years, will not be back in 2018 the chair announced on Facebook.
Like any fan-run not-for-profit, Starbase Indy relies on the community around the event for all the labor required to run it and also for all of the money that goes into the event. Taking a clear-eyed look at our financial and volunteer situation, there is no responsible way to hold an event this year.
…To bring the event back in the future, we would need to build a Board of Directors capable of guiding the event, and a convention staff excited about running the event. Currently I’m the only Board member remaining. That’s not a sustainable base from which to build any organization, especially not a volunteer organization with no paid staff.
(10) 2001 TRIBUTE. Cora Buhlert recommends “50 Jahre Kubricks ‘2001’”, a video about an exhibition in Frankfurt/Main honoring the 50th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 – A Space Odyssey. Cora explains, “The video is from a German culture program and therefore only in German, but you can see plenty of the exhibits. Not sure how long it will stay online.”
(11) PILES OF PIXELS. Furthering a trend, “The National Museum of Scotland is putting its entire collection online”.
People across the world can now view all the National Museum of Scotland has to offer without even leaving their sofas.
Using Google Arts and Culture’s museum view experience, which is similar to how Google’s Street View works, tourists can view the 20,000 objects on display at the National Museum. The virtual display also includes 1,000 pictures of objects from the Edinburgh museum’s collection.
It’s the first museum in Scotland that can be toured online, but not the first in the world. The Taj Mahal in India and the Palace of Versailles in France have also opened up their exhibit in a similar way, giving visitors from around the world a novel opportunity to explore their interior. Google Arts and Culture hopes to continue working with institutions to make cultural and historical materials across the globe more easily accessible.
(12) DOCUMENTARY WILL TRACE BRADBURY’S IMPACT. For fans who like to be heard –
Are you a fan of Ray Bradbury’s works? Have you had contact with him at some time in your life? Maybe he signed a book you still own. Or, maybe you met him in Waukegan, his hometown. You might even have a letter from him. Or, maybe his writing influenced you in a special way.
If so, we want to hear from you! We invite you to be interviewed as part of a video documentary. You will have a chance to tell about your “I Met Ray” moment in your own words.
This video documentary project is sponsored by the Ray Bradbury Museum Committee, which is working to preserve these unique Bradbury moments and memories for posterity.
For more information, please contact us at one of the following:
RBEM office
13 N. Genesee Street
Waukegan, IL 60085847-372-6183
(13) JEOPARDY! More sff on Jeopardy! The category was “Entertaining Inspirations.”
Steven H Silver says, “They got it right for $400. The previous clue was about the film Alien.”
(14) THE ANSWER IS YES. Someone asked Anna Nimmhaus if things could be verse:
If you want to be happy and go without strife,
Never make the pixel-scrolling your life.
So from my personal point of view
Get a paper book to a-muse you.(apologies to J. Soul, J. Royster, C. & F. Guida, 1963)
(15) BALLGAME OF THRONES. Sports Illustrated promises “This ‘Game of Thrones’ MLB Promo Will Get You Ready for Baseball Season”.
If you’re looking forward to the return of baseball and the return of Game of Thrones, I have good news and bad news.
The bad news is that the hit HBO series won’t be back until 2019. The good news, though, is that baseball is back this week and there’s even a Game of Thrones tie-in.
There were 19 GoT promotional nights by MLB teams last season and HBO has renewed its agreement with the league to make it happen again this year. To mark the occasion, the network produced this really cool video based on the show’s title sequence.
[Thanks to JJ, Cat Eldridge, ULTRAGOTHA, Cora Buhlert, John King Tarpinian, Steven H Silver, Rich Lynch, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, Chip Hitchcock, Daniel Dern, John Hertz, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor Kip W, who reminded me of the days when I was a fan of Everett Dirksen.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
Perhaps only semi-awake.
Oh, to be young again, for possibilities to seem endless, to expect this to be good:
Frank Miller Sets King Arthur Drama Series at Netflix: ‘Cursed’ will be based on Miller and Tom Wheeler’s upcoming book of the same name.
Was the book any good? I realized recently my remaining Daredevils stop right before his run and then realized I didn’t care that much any more.
(2) ABOUT THE HUGO ANNOUNCEMENT. Thanks; I think I really only get any Twitter reading from this blog, BTW. 😉
ETA: Okay, come to think of it, another blog or two that also quotes/links to tweets, not just here.
(5) THE RISK OF OOPS. OMG that’s a horrible idea. And really the silliest thing I’ve heard in a long time. Gah.
(13) JEOPARDY! I haven’t played the game, and I had no idea it was Ringworld-esque. Groovy!
(14) THE ANSWER IS YES. Hehehe, that’s great!
@John A Arkansawyer: I know nothing about it, but I recognized Wheeler’s name; he wrote a book called The Arcanum which eons ago sounded interesting to me. (I don’t believe I ever got around to picking it up, though.) /ramble, sorry.
/Half-second-fifth!
It hasn’t come out yet.
His DD run, on the other hand, is very good. Both of his runs.
2) I do not get SFF-news from ordinary mainstream media and never have. I get them from blogs, dedicated newspages and from newsletters. I read more of them when I have more time to read. Which is on weekends. So I do not find this a convincing argument.
(1) ANOTHER FANS V. HOLLYWOOD DUSTUP
My opinion on all of this sort of comparison – the Puppies tried to use a similar tactic a few times – is that “best” and “most popular” are different things, and it’s perfectly fine for an award to aim to reward excellence rather than just looking for whoever earned the biggest sack of money.
As far as genre goes, quite a lot of genre films, especially the ones that make sacks of money, are popcorn movies. I love popcorn movies but I don’t usually point to them when I’m choosing examples of what I think the best films are, and that’s fine, because they’re not trying to be that kind of film.
(2) ABOUT THE HUGO ANNOUNCEMENT
She isn’t wrong about fandom, in a general sense, but the Hugo’s are something that belongs specifically to congoing fandom. Fandom is huge and varied! I’m from a different part of fandom! But congoing fandom is allowed to celebrate its stuff in-house.
Before the argument that the Hugo’s are Worldcon’s awards rather than congoing fandom’s awards: My understanding is that Worldcon draws heavily on the concoms and attendees of local conventions to staff its own concoms and volunteer pool, as it is a traveling convention. It makes a lot of sense to me to foster connections wherever possible.
(I won’t be upset if the announcement does get divorced from the Easter weekend conventions. I don’t go to the relevant conventions so it wouldn’t affect me in the slightest. But I’m concerned that in the rush to try and be inclusive we’re suggesting taking away a fun thing that a minority enjoy and not really replacing it with anything. Maybe that’s the right thing to do anyway! For a number of reasons! But I’m sympathetic to everyone who wants to keep their fun thing.)
(4) EYE-OPENER
This sounds interesting, but having watched some of the trailer I hope they’re going to get a proof-reader. (Unless that’s for effect?)
(8) TRIVIAL TRIVIA
Funny. 🙂
(11) PILES OF PIXELS
Heck yeah I hope it keeps going. More access is great! I hope people consider donating when they utilise the resource though.
—
@John A Arkansawyer
Oh noooo. 🙁
Frank Miller was good at one point, but at this point he’s a really good sign that I should stay away.
I came to the Pixels for the Scrolls
(1) As with Eric Flint’s complaints about the Hugos, it is not a problem that the biggest box-office hit in a given year doesn’t win the Oscar. There is another award for the biggest box-office hit: a dump truck full of money.
(10) Neato!
I am not the pixel scroller, I’m the pixel scroller’s son and I’m only scrolling pixels ’til the pixel scroller comes
I’d also say that an award based entirely on information that’s already publically available wouldn’t be all that interesting, it’d just be another pat on the back.
(8) re the birds. Anyone who expects films to follow the book must be living in Cloud cuckoo land.
2)Annalee does a good job navigating all the different pulls in timing the announcement.
13) I remember playing the first HALO, seeing the small ringworld that the game takes place on and going “Hunh!”
Meredith moment: Marko Kloos latest, I think latest anyhow.
99p at Amazon UK
Points of Impact
@Meredith I hope they’re going to get a proof-reader.
It looked odd to me too, but “Timmothy” is apparently a valid alternate spelling.
4) There have been a lot of small games about trans experiences over the last five or six years but I can’t think of many that are explicitly addressed to cis people. (Anna Anthropy’s “Dys4ia”, maybe?) So this sounds like a good idea, though I found the trailer painful enough that I think I won’t play it myself.
@Paul Weimer…and I remember arguing with some fannish gamers in some game store, and later on line, that HALO did not “invent” ring worlds and what is the world coming to when history is limited to yesterday and how come Niven (let alone Dyson) aren’t in the credits and really games are so far behind the curve when it comes to SF and why aren’t you reading instead of shooting aliens and Terminator was too a rip-off and….
I wasted a lot of energy, when all I had to really do was shake my stick at the clouds.
“I came to Casablanca for the pixels.”
“The pixels? What pixels?”
“I was misinscrolled.”
@Kurt Busiek: “[Miller’s] DD run, on the other hand, is very good. Both of his runs.”
I know. I can visualize pieces of it in my head. That’s part of why it’s so disturbing that I don’t care. It really was good work, but I’m not even bummed by the material loss of it.
Jay Leno speaks out for ten seconds on the corruption of the publishing industry.
Thanks, Mike! Incidentally, back in my superhero days, my cousin wrote an issue of our comic where someone impersonating our sister group (my sisters and his sister were also superheroes) murdered Everett Dirksen. I guess he got better.
Niall McAuley: I tried with that one, too, and was sad when it didn’t get used. Maybe your phrasing will click. (I based mine on the version from “Man On First Bass,” a blues album released by the first-chair bass player of the Denver Symphony Orchestra. A friend of mine had the LP, presumed lost in a fairly thorough house fire: His only surviving possessions were in one box of stuff he hadn’t cared enough about to have at his place yet. “After I got everyone else out,” he told me, “I got my brand-new color TV out and put it on the porch. The first fireman kicked it down the hill.”)
John A Arkansawyer: An art teacher once assigned us to illustrate a well-known proverb or saying. Mine showed a judge opening a book with a cover full of rainbows and peace signs and being hit with a boxing glove. Nobody got it. I even put the judge in there to help make it obvious. (More recently, I used something similar: a cartoon of somebody being shot by a gun that has popped up out of Eugenics for Dummies.)
Ya gotta get pixels if ya wanna have scrolls.
c4c
(1) I don’t know that I’d call this a “dust up.” I liked Rogue One a lot–it’s probably my favourite of the new Star Wars films, and I’ve enjoyed all of them–but the idea of it being a better film than Moonlight is ridiculous. As others have said, quality and sales don’t always go hand in hand. I saw and enjoyed *most* of the films on the “biggest box office” side of the list, but would not have chosen any of them for Best Picture (not even the one that actually won it).
(2) I knew about the Hugos as an award for *years* before I knew about Worldcon (i.e., I was aware that it was an award that existed, and more or less what it was given out for), and it took me forever to figure out that the two were linked so directly; it never even occurred to me that an award would be “owned” by congoing fans or some subset of fans, in that sense. It’s also literally never occurred to me until this very debate that cons are a place one goes to get news. I don’t have a problem w/ the idea of cons as being ground zero for an announcement; that makes sense to me, in a way. But Easter/start of Passover? That seems a remarkably foolish choice for the date if what you want is to get the word out with any sort of swiftness beyond the physical space where the announcement is made.
(15) I’ve never been crazy about baseball tie-ins. The MLB as an organization behaves like it believes it’s struggling for relevance, and the more it tries to ingratiate itself to other communities the less relevant it feels to me. I like GoT and I like baseball, but I’d rather not be pestered by one when I’m trying to enjoy the other. (By which I mean I’d rather not have Josh Donaldson show up North of the Wall, either.)
(13) There was also a clue in that category whose answer was Mystery Science Theater 3000. And the contestant got it right!
(8): Du Maurier’s The Birds is not a book, it’s a piece of short fiction (I would guess probably novella-length; it’s 40 pages in the NYRB collection of her short fiction). And the ending of the film is not that different from the original story: neither suggests the attacks have ended, the film is just a little more ambiguous about what will happen next.
Kip: I do google to see if ideas have been used before, but maybe Google doesn’t care about suggestions, only about titles actually chosen…
@Hampus Eckerman: Well, but you’re a SFF fan who is very Hugo-aware. 😉 I believe.
@John A Arkansawyer: What a weird thing for him to say.
– – – – –
In unrelated news, Kameron Hurley has a new short story at Barnes & Noble’s SFF blog. For those who weren’t aware, they started publishing an occasional short story a while back. (I believe it’s new-as-of-a-while-back, anyway.). I haven’t read this yet, but FYI, Hurley and/or short fiction fans!
@Kendall: It was part of a reasonably amusing bit about “fake proverbs”, which is not easy to tell from just clicking the link.
Also in the news (the real news, this time), Mob 1, Science 0:
(15) Speaking of mixing epic fantasy with epic baseball, I wrote this while waiting for Game 7 of the 2014 World Series to begin:
Hold your ground, hold your ground! Sons of Bochy, of AT&T Park, my brothers and sisters! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of Pence fails, when we forsake our team and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of Dodgers and shattered dreams, when the age of Giants comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Gamers of the West!
Forth, and fear no Royals! Arise! Arise, Fans of San Francisco! Balls shall be hammered, bats shall be splintered! A baseball day… an orange day… ere the sun rises! Ride now!… Ride now!… Ride! Ride to ruin and the World Series title!!
(with apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien and Peter Jackson)
The Giants won. 🙂
It’s sometimes hard to tell what Google cares about (probably money), but my framing was in a different person, and it would be pretty hard for that to turn up if you’re not looking for it. The song, as I heard it, went
and so on. And I only dragged it up because I always thought it was a good suggestion, and as I say, unlikely to have turned up Googling.
I look for that record periodically. The closest I’ve found was a YouTube video of Burrell (Burrill?) and his trio performing a short set on a Denver chat show. It was full of what I expect are standards in some circles, like “I’m a One Hour Mama (And A One Minute Papa Don’t Mean [snap!] To Me!).” I always wish I’d pulled a tape of it before it went up in smoke.
@Kip & Niall: That’s definitely not how I heard it. For me it’s the last two verses of a twelve-verse drinking game someone taught me when I was waaaaay too young to understand it. (It’s a “repeat after me” tongue-twister style of game where the phrases get increasingly complex and stack; when you fail, you drink and start again.) The two variations I encountered growing up:
I’m not a fig plucker
nor a fig plucker’s son
but I’ll pluck figs
’til the fig plucker comes.
and
I not a sheep slitter
nor a sheep slitter’s son
but I’ll slit sheep
’till the sheep slitter comes
The Birds was the first Hitchcock film I saw in a theater, and probably also the first film for adults that I saw in a theater. (On the way home from the ’87 Westercon in Oakland, I made sure to stop for lunch in Bodega Bay.)
And there really isn’t a lot of difference in the ending between the novella and the film.
@1: the article doesn’t say why the Oscars are supposed to be “[in] touch with the regular movieogoer” — or whether they want the Oscar to pick the very top grosser (the logical end of their argument — even though it would remove the point of having judgment at all) instead of picking from among the top grossers.
@2: the problem with appealing to “community” is that most congoers don’t go to most conventions; there are just too many cons to go to. So ISTM that picking a weekend when there are (probably) more than the usual weekend’s number of people at cons doesn’t buy you very much — especially not compared to announcing on a weekday shortly before, when media are alive and there’s more room to pick a day that doesn’t hit religious observances. I’m also amused that the communitarians don’t mention Minicon, which has been on Easter forever; possibly they think it’s too small, or too isolated (an image some Mpls/StPl fans encourage).
@3: I hope some would-be writers find this exegesis useful, even if only for A&A.
@5: I see that there are several treaties “in force” — but that doesn’t list who has actually signed, and I don’t speak Law well enough to figure out whether any of them could cover a private company (rather than a government) deliberately putting trash in orbit.
@Kip W: why did they bother murdering Dirksen? Granted he was a Republican — but Republicans in that time were relatively sane. (cf Agnew, who turned out to be a crook but was the alternative to a segregationist.)
Kip W on March 29, 2018 at 8:57 am said:
Back in the pre-CD days, there was an anthology album “Copulating Blues”… and a quick web search turns up bunches of LPs/CDs (and probably digital singles and videos), also try keyword copulation.
I didn’t know that the Oscars were voted on by the members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (I had to look it up), but they are, and I don’t get to vote on them, and I don’t get to demand that they turn their ceremony to a ticketed event to which I can go to.
Most UK fans do go to Eastercon.
I’m trying to work if you missed a ‘not’.
And your point is…? It’s literally one of the best-advertised and most-watched annual events in the world, and they broadcast all the lead-up information for weeks on every available distribution channel, including having special events for press to announce their nominations on days that are most effective for the news cycle to reach the greatest number of people around the world. It’s almost like they actually want as many people as possible to know.
Information appears to be hard to find, but the the SFE has Eastercon’s largest-ever attendance at 1,700 people, and Wikipedia’s spotty data is much less generous, averaging somewhere south of 1,000 people. That’s really most of the fandom in a place w/ 65 million people?
The canonical father I remember was a pheasant plucker.
That the fact that somebody doesn’t know that the Hugos are fandom’s award doesn’t make them any less fandom’s awards.
Yes. That’s why so very few people can make a living writing SF, and those that do either have a separate mainstream career or write fantasy. The number of people who actually read SF is not huge, and of those most are not involved in fandom. That’s why unlike conventions geared towards media and comics there is not a viable business model that caters to book fans.
Giving that I used to come to Eastercons when I was living in Italy, it’s not as if its existence is a well-kept secret.
Standard UK version involves…
I’m not a pheasant plucker,
I’m a pheasant plucker’s mate
And I’m only plucking pheasants
Cause the pheasant plucker’s late
Mind you don’t trip over a Spoonerism…
Apparently there are also verses and alternative choruses.
It’s literally one of the best-advertised and most-watched annual events in the world, and they broadcast all the lead-up information for weeks on every available distribution channel, including having special events for press to announce their nominations on days that are most effective for the news cycle to reach the greatest number of people around the world.
They also have a much bigger budget to work with, have a fixed location, are a couple of decades older than the Hugos, and are much better known to the general public.
I’m getting the impression that the definition here of fan is “Someone who goes to SF cons. Oh, and by the way it’s science fiction, none of that icky ‘and fantasy nonsense’…”
Which, um, doesn’t sound like what I remember of you in prior discussions, Anna. However, you seem to be channeling your most curmudgeonly self in this discussion. What about this discussion is bringing that out?
Pinky and The Brain clip seems appropriate for today’s scroll (SFW)
https://youtu.be/eIu4fP4fOHE
I don’t know. It’s a rather circular definition to say that fans are those that go to Eastercon. That all the other readers of SFF aren’t actually fans.
I remember watching Doctor Who when I was five, I read The Lord of the Rings when I was seven (don’t think I understood much of it, but…), I’d read Clarke and Heinlein and Asimov before I was at secondary school. I went to comic conventions and roleplaying conventions and edited a fanzine. But I didn’t attend an Eastercon until I was 45.
I’m sorry, what is your definition of a fan? Somebody who reads a genre book now and then? Yes, “fandom” is different than “people who happen to read genre books”. There may be people who are discussing, reviewing, writing about, and doing fanzines about genre books and don’t go to cons, but they are not the vast majority. The Hugos are awarded by the members of the World SF Society. Which are those who participate in WorldCons, not necessarily physically.
I don’t know where you get this idea that I discriminate against fantasy. The truth is fantasy is perceived as less genre and generally the few people who do make it big in the UK – Pratchett, Pullmann, Rowlings – happen to write that. As far as I’m concerned more power to them, but it is just a fact of life. Banks used to finance his career as an SF writer by the money he made as a mainstream writer.
As for how come I am so irritated: well, I have been involved in fandom for, let me see, about thirty years. I do not have the kind of mental capacity for organisation and scheduling that allows me to participate actively, but I do have a lot of respect for the people who do. They are people, most of them my friends, who labour for free often during bank holidays and in general for years to put on a convention, manage the Hugo Awards and other stuff, and allow people like me to have a good time for very little money.
Mostly these people don’t get thank yous. Mostly what they get is complaints, grumblings, and criticism. They know it and expect it, but it doesn’t make me any less incensed to witness it.
Fandom is people who do fanac of some kind above and beyond merely consuming the media, and are in some form of community with other people who do. And I don’t restrict it to book fandom — Worldcon certainly does not either and I’d be surprised if Eastercon was that strictly focused — though I do tend to differentiate between media cons (and most “Comic cons” are media cons, just to confuse the issue) and fan-run cons. I would say it’s a conservative estimate that there are at least 10 fanac fans for every congoing fan.
The fantasy thing was a bit of a misreading of your line about writers who don’t make a living writing sf. Apologies.
I’ve also been on the front lines of what happens when the people who run conventions dig in their heels and ignore criticism because it’s criticism of how things are always done, by the people who always put in the hard work, without considering whether maybe this time the complaint has merit.
It was a lot worse for fandom than getting the criticism in the first place.
The urge to defend these genuinely hardworking people doing a thankless job is strong, but it’s also not always the best way to handle people who are trying to be part of fandom when they’re commenting on a thing that makes them feel excluded.
[click]
Workin’ in a scroll mine; oops, about to tick down.
This.
Also, I haz arrived in New Zealand. Ready for Hugo Fools Day.