(1) #NEBULAS2018. Tonight SFWA held a reception for its latest Grandmaster Peter S. Beagle.
Peter Beagle tells us a story. ???? pic.twitter.com/kOsMO9r89D
— Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (@sfwa) May 18, 2018
(2) THE SWAG IS OUT THERE. Cat Rambo reveals cool SFWA stuff.
I can finally reveal this! Blanked out the secret message. #Nebulas2018 pic.twitter.com/SSXsOZIWJh
— Cat Rambo (@Catrambo) May 16, 2018
(3) GENRE TV UPDATES. Deadline reports “‘Siren’ Renewed For Season 2 By Freeform”.
Ahead of the May 24 season 1 finale, Freeform has picked up a second season of its hit mermaid thriller Siren. The network ordered a 16-episode Season 2, up from 10 episodes this season. The renewal was announced just ahead of the network’s upfront presentation today in New York City.
Siren has been a ratings success for Freeform, debuting as the No. 1 new cable drama with young women 18-34 and 12-34.
Rev. Bob provides background:
If you’re not familiar with Siren, it’s an hour-long drama in which (a) mermaids and sirens are the same thing, (b) a fishing boat catches one in a net, and (c) the military swoops in and takes her before even the crew can get a good look, so (d) her sister comes ashore to find her and get her back. Naturally, this being a prime-time cable show, hot twenty-somethings, brooding guys, and romantic entanglements ensue. It’s actually rather well done, forgoing the usual “sanitized, waist-down” transformation for a more visceral full-body transformation more reminiscent of werewolf effects.
A commercial during tonight’s episode advertised SIREN Season 2 as “Coming 2019,” with next week’s episode as the Season 1 finale. This clears the decks for the June 7 two-hour premiere of Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger. Both shows air on Freeform (formerly known as ABC Family).
Cloak & Dagger are well-established Marvel characters. For some reason, the TV show moves them from their usual NYC to New Orleans.
“Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger” is the story of Tandy Bowen (Olivia Holt) and Tyrone Johnson (Aubrey Joseph) – two teenagers from very different backgrounds, who find themselves burdened and awakened to newly acquired superpowers which are mysteriously linked to one another. Tandy can emit light daggers and Tyrone has the ability to engulf others in darkness. They quickly learn they are better together than apart, but their feelings for each other make their already complicated world even more challenging.
(4) WORLDCON 76 PROGRESS REPORT. The San Jose Worldcon has issued Progress Report #3 [PDF file].
Hugo voting has begun, and much more stuff is on the way. Check out our latest Progress Report for stories on past Worldcon, local places to visit when you’re here, and an interview with Artist Guest of Honor John Picacio about his #Mexicanx Initiative.
(5) WORLD FANTASTY CON PR. And the 2018 World Fantasy Convention has posted its own Progress Report Three [PDF file].
(6) VORKOSIFLORIST. Lois McMaster Bujold’s novella “The Flowers of Vashnoi” is now available for purchase. There are links to various sellers in her Goodreads Post.
Still new to her duties as Lady Vorkosigan, Ekaterin is working together with expatriate scientist Enrique Borgos on a radical scheme to recover the lands of the Vashnoi exclusion zone, lingering radioactive legacy of the Cetagandan invasion of the planet Barrayar. When Enrique’s experimental bioengineered creatures go missing, the pair discover that the zone still conceals deadly old secrets.
This novella falls after Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance in the Vorkosigan series timeline, but may be read entirely independently. The Vorkosigan saga was the recipient of the first Hugo Award for best science fiction series in 2017.”
(7) KGB PHOTOS. Ellen Datlow posted photos from their latest reading — “Fantastic Fiction at KGB May 16”.
Tina Connolly and Caroline Yoachim read stories — Caroline’s was nominated for the Nebula Award. Tina’s is forthcoming in a couple of months. They were both excellent readers and left us all wanting desperately to know the ends of their stories.
Caroline Yoachim and Tina Connolly
(8) STAN’S FAVORITE AUTHOR IS SHAKESPEARE. Doctor Strangemind’s Kim Huett proves some ephemera is valuable: “So here’s an article about the surprising things one can find in a collection and the day I encountered the unexpected Stan Lee. If you thought Marvel films were the only place that Mr Lee made cameos well have I news for you” — “The Unexpected Stan Lee”.
One tip towards owning a collection.
Despite the title above this story doesn’t start with Stan Lee. Well get get to him in due course don’t worry, Stan Lee is inevitable after all, but first there needs to be some scene setting.
Like any profession the folk who deal in the buying and selling of second-hand books can recite a litany of peeves and dislikes in regards to their work. Not surprisingly most of these complaints revolve around the behaviour of the general public. Not you, I hasten to add, I’ve no doubt that if you’re reading this then you are the thoughtful and discerning type who wouldn’t dream of adding to a book dealer’s woes. Even so it’s possible for the average collector to miss a few tricks, some of which may surprise you. Consider for example the following complaint lifted from a private mailing list:
You need to add to that list the frustration of being offered a recently inherited collection only to discover that before calling the seller has thrown away everything they assumed was irrelevant rubbish. Why somebody not familiar with a collection and who usually has little or no interest in the subject the collection is built around assumes they are the best qualified person to decided what is valuable and what is not is beyond me. People don’t understand about ephemera!
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY
- May 17, 1957 — Monster From Green Hell premiered in theaters.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY COMPOSER
- Born May 17, 1961—Enya. An Academy Award nominee and a Golden Globe Award winner for “May It Be”, a song she wrote for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
(11) END OF AN ERA. Romantic Times and the related convention are going away. “’This is the last RT’ – Kathryn Falk Announces End of Romantic Times” — Smart Bitches, Trashy Books has the story.
At a breakfast this morning at the 2018 RomanticTimes BookLovers Convention, Kathryn Falk and her husband Ken Rubin announced that they are retiring, and that this year is the last year for the RT Convention. While there had been rumors before the announcement, her words, delivered at the end of a farewell speech that focused on what she would be doing next, were met with gasps and audible shock.
Shortly afterward, the following email went out to RT Subscribers and newsletter members announcing that the convention as well as the RT Magazine online and the RT VIP Lounge would all be closing effective immediately…
… No mention was made regarding the new 2019 BookLovers Convention, which will be run by current RT Convention coordinator Jo Carol Jones. BookLovers Con will be held in New Orleans, May 15-19 2019.
JJ adds, “There are lots of fond comments, but take particular note of comments # 8, 11 and 20.”
(12) MARVELOUS SURPRISE, MAYBE. CNN declares “‘Captain Marvel’ won’t be what you might expect”. (Did any of you tell CNN what you expect?)
“That’s a lot of times what a typical origin movie is structured like, but as we introduce new characters moving forward, we want to find ways to subvert that structure, so at least the experience of the film feels new to audiences,” [Marvel producer Nate] Moore added. “We’re very conscious of making sure that audiences don’t get things that feel like they’ve seen them before.”
(13) KOMINSKY-CRUMB. The New York Times profiles “The Yoko Ono of Comics, on Her Own Terms”:
Among the few women making underground comics in 1970s San Francisco, the feminist infighting was fierce. Aline Kominsky (who would soon take the name of her famous and infamous boyfriend, Robert Crumb) was berated for drawing strips that female cartoonists in her collective thought were too crude and confessional, not uplifting enough, wallowing in the depths of self-loathing — about being too fat, too sexually voracious, too loud, too neurotic. This was not the work of an “evolved feminist consciousness,” she was told.
When she broke off and started her own comic book, Twisted Sisters, the first issue’s cover made it clear just how little she cared about anyone’s judgment: It was a drawing of her sitting on the toilet, underwear around her ankles, wondering, “How many calories in a cheese enchilada?”
“She specialized in outgrossing anyone who was going to call her gross,” said Diane Noomin, Ms. Kominsky-Crumb’s co-conspirator in Twisted Sister.
She didn’t care — and hasn’t for a long time now. For over four decades, Ms. Kominsky-Crumb has been shining an unabashedly unflattering light on her own life. It’s the theme that runs through “Love That Bunch,” a new book gathering her solo comics from her mid-20s until these past few years, as she turns 70 this summer.
(14) SEVENTIES SFF. James Davis Nicoll’s series continues with the letter L: “Fighting Erasure: Women SF Writers of the 1970s, Part VI”.
J.A. Lawrence may be best known as an illustrator, but she is also an author. She is perhaps best known for “Getting Along” (featured in 1972’s Again, Dangerous Visions) as well as for the collection Star Trek 12, which was part of a long-running series adapted from scripts of the original Star Trek. While many of her works were co-authored with her then-husband, the late James Blish, 1978’s Mudd’s Angels is a solo work by Lawrence.
(15) YOUR 451 SCORE. B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog writer Jeff Somers thinks he found “10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451”. Eh. I scored 8 out of 10, and one of them I “missed” is dubious (about a “prequel”). Good post all the same. Here is the one that was news to me:
There’s a video game adaptation, and it was written by Bradbury
If you’re jonesing for a sequel, you can find the nearest approximation if you can track down a copy of the 1984 video game Bradbury developed—and an old computer to play it on. It’s a direct continuation in which you play as Guy Montag, former Fireman, now seeking to make contact with the underground resistance working to save books. An interactive text adventure with some graphics, the game relies on quotes from famous written works that Montag must collect and pass on to resistance members to memorize them for posterity.
(16) SF WHERE IT’S LEAST EXPECTED. Narrative online magazine has a reputation for being very, very literary. Bruce D. Arthurs says, “So I was quite croggled to see that their latest ‘Poem of the Week’ was titled ’Alderaan’ by Maria Hummel.”
You can only read the first half of the poem at the link. To read the last half, you have to sign up and login.
Bruce read the whole thing and his verdict is, “Not particularly impressed by the poem, myself. But seeing it appear in a high-falutin’ literary mag like Narrative was quite the surprise. Maybe science fiction really is taking over the world.”
(17) GAS HISTORY. The earliest O2: “Scientists detect oxygen legacy of first stars”.
Astronomers have made the most distant ever detection of oxygen.
They observed it in a galaxy of stars that existed just 500 million years after the Big Bang.
But what is really fascinating is that this oxygen can only have been produced in an even older group of stars that would have dispersed it when they died and blew themselves apart.
That means we could be witnessing the traces of events that occurred a mere 250 million years after the Big Bang.
(18) IT’S ABOUT TIME. Southwestern solar calendar: “Arizona’s mysertious clock of ancient times” is traceable to past tribes, not space aliens.
In 2005, Zoll, then 57 and a volunteer at the forest’s V Bar V historical ranch site, detected a pattern to the shadows cast on the park’s huge rock art panels, which are covered with more than 1,000 petroglyphs.
Could this, he wondered, be an ancient calendar?
He shared his observation with a forest service archaeologist, who wasn’t particularly impressed. Archaeo- or cultural astronomy, the study of how ancient peoples tracked the seasons and studied the cosmos, has fought for respectability. It’s hard to prove that alignment with the sun, moon or stars isn’t mere coincidence. And in the past, some advocates haven’t helped their case, suggesting that prehistoric sites could have been fashioned by space aliens.
(19) WOULDA COULDA WAKANDA. HISHE gives us “How Black Panther Should Have Ended.”
(20) COLBERT. Live For Live Music explicates a Late Show comedy bit: “Kids Pitch A New TV Show: ‘Strangest Things: The Golden Mysteries'”.
On last night’s edition of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the late-night host recruited a slew of prominent actors and entertainers to help bring the ideas of a panel of “the most influential minds in the prized 6-8-year-old demographic” to life in a hilarious sketch dubbed “Kids Pitch.”
After an exhaustive session with the kids, Colbert’s focus group came to the conclusion that the new TV show they wanted to pitch would need to feature “very famous group band,” The Beatles (one kid, a young Beatles superfan, stuck to his Revolver when challenged on what their best album was). The focus group also came up with various thematic criteria including fighting and music (which, of course, means “rap battle”) as well as creepiness, aliens, Nick Cannon and Brooke Shields, among other things.
Playing three of The Beatles are John Oliver (Paul McCartney), David Tennant (George Harrison), and Michael Shannon (Ringo Starr).
[Thanks to ULTRAGOTHA, JJ, Bruce D. Arthurs, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Kim Huett, James Davis Nicoll, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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For a long time I’ve been hearing people praise Studio Ghibli movies, but I had never seen one. Tonight I finally watched one — My Neighbor Tuturro.
It’s about a man and his two daughters who move to the country, to be near their Mom who is in the hospital. While the father is at work, the girls are watched by character actor John Tuturro. He teaches them to bowl and to drink beer. At one point they ride a bus shaped like John Goodman.
Not at all what I expected.
augh
(11) So she’s taking her ball and going home? With no notice? That is very, very bad form; if her staff was so great, I’m sure someone could have taken over the whole thing, publication, convention, and all. Maybe skip the convention for a year while the new bosses got up to speed. Not with a bang (har) but a whimper. The comments JJ highlighted were interesting.
(20) Off to the DVR!
In fannish news, I got my first set of Hugo votes in. Well, I rearranged a few categories so it’s more like my first fifth (heh) sets, but in one login session. Now to Mt. TBR to continue; I’d like to get as much as possible done before the packet arrives (oh please oh please, hurry up packet!).
(20) And John Lennon was played by Hugh Laurie.
@Lurkertype, I was just going to ask whether anyone had received the Hugo packet yet, so I appreciate you mentioning yours hasn’t arrived.
Currently making my way through Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire; it’s going slower than usual for me as my tastes tend to run more towards the fantasy side of things (though I did enjoy Lock In and Head On).
That Colbert clip was a big piece of something, but how did all those stars end up on it?
(2) Ah, decoder rings! The brain won’t let me forget that Mom had two different Orphan Annie decoder pins (1936 and one other year), and I always hoped I’d inherit them. No doubt they got tossed out somewhere between Mom losing her memories and us losing Mom.
And the Jean Shepherd line about the code translating to an Ovaltine ad was something he made up. A lot of people don’t realize that his reminiscences were fictional in nature.
(8) NOBODY expects the Unexpected Stan Lee!
Give a little pixel—and always let your blogroll be your guide!
I suspect Ferdinand Feghoot would approve of the Pixel title.
@Avilyn
You’re not alone. I’m more of a science fiction than fantasy fan and I’m still massively underwhelmed by The Collapsing Empire, even though I enjoyed Lock In and Redshirts. However, I can’t muster much interest in any of the characters and the spaceship and planet names are just irritating.
Kevin Standlee: Worldcon 76 will not hide the Hugo Voter Packet. When it’s ready, they’ll send announcements to everyone who has registered their e-mail address with the convention, and make announcements on their site/FB/Twitter. It won’t be kept secret.
I think that a lot of people aren’t realizing that 4 of the Best Novel finalists are Orbit books, which means that the packet will have at most only 2 of those finalists in their entirety.
Now the Novellas are a different thing. 5 of the 6 are not available for free, but those 5 are all from Tor.com, and given Macmillan’s lengthy history of immense generosity to the Hugo packet, they will almost certainly all be included.
And we don’t know how many of the series novels we are getting, although McGuire did announce that DAW is going to include all 6 InCryptid books (plus the short fiction which is only available as part of anthologies) in the packet. Two of the series are Macmillan, and only 5 books & 3 books, so I think it’s quite likely we’ll get all of those. I’m hoping that all of the Divine Cities will be in there, because I want other people to love that series as much as I do. Based on Bujold’s contribution last year, I’m guessing that we’ll get 1 Chalion novel and 1 Penric novella. Raksura is an unknown, as are most of the YA novels (1 is from Macmillan).
Meanwhile, all of the Novelettes and Short Stories, plus one Novella, plus one YA novel, are all available to read for free right now, so I hope that the people clamoring for the packet have gotten that reading done already.
I realize that with the wide array of SFF stocked by my city’s awesome Acquisitions Librarians and my ability to purchase anything they don’t, I am in a more fortunate position of privilege than many Hugo voters, but it’s still 10.5 weeks before the voting deadline. I’d prefer that the Hugo admins ensure that the packet is as complete and helpful as possible before releasing it. The Chicon packet was released in 4 or 5 stages in 2012, and that was a mess. I recommend that people who can easily get some of the works from their library consider doing that.
TL:DR: I know that a lot of us are anxious for the release of the Hugo Packet, but it’s a huge undertaking which requires a lot of time and effort on the part of the person(s) coordinating it (and probably no small amount of aggravation), so please try to be patient and understanding until it’s released.
(12) Translation: Doctor Strange was a lazy effort.
“Arizona’s mysertious clock of ancient times”
And the first mystery: “mysertious”?
I think all of the Orbit novels were on sale as ebooks at least once for $2.99 since they were published, so I’ve already read a couple of them. Since I’ve purchased, but never got around to reading the first 4 of the Raksura novels by Martha Wells, I’ve been reading them. Personally, it seems like their plots are a little too similar to read them straight through. They’re not bad, and I missed a meeting this morning because I stayed up too late finishing the third one, but I’ve been thinking that they might be the type of book where it’s best to wait a while before reading the next one.
Like, maybe I should stop reading #4 and switch to The Flowers of Vashnoi. I wish it was also available from Kobo, since I just about never read anything on my Nooks anymore.
Even if Orbit don’t include the others, they really should include Mu Lafferty’s Six Wakes in the packet as it is hard for none North American readers to get hold of it. Sadly I don’t think they will – which is a shame because it is a good book.
Tick
I’ll say.
First time I met Stan* was in the men’s underwear section of a now-defunct department store in Horton Plaza in San Diego. Talk about unexpected.
*not the first time I talked to him, but the first time I met him.
The first time I saw Chris Claremont he was a chair.
@Kurt Busiek That’s a great first line you have there.
@Kurt Busiek And then the weasels began?
[fourth fifth]
Scalzi’s Collapsing Empire was a big meh for me. Not a bad book or a great book. It was just there.
Or fher gb fpebyy lbhe Cvkrygvar!
Godstalk
6) Oh goody, eventually a new volume for us to tackle for Reading Rangers over at Skiffy and Fanty.
[and…click!]
@18: s/mysertious/mysterious/. Ninja’d by @Jamoche, but for once a goof in a Pixel I’ve provided wasn’t introduced by me….
Kurt Busiek on May 17, 2018 at 11:44 pm said:
Especially in light of the post-credits scene in Big Hero 6.
Inspired by his parents’ work in comedy and show business, a 17-year-old Shore made his stand-up debut at the Alley Cat Bistro in Culver City. “Everyone else in school was filling out their SAT applications, but I just passed mine back. I knew I wasn’t going to go to college.” Shore was mentored by Sam Kinison and opened several of his sets…
and then the weasels began.
Kip W, I remember my mother (now deceased; she was born in 1926) complaining about the Little Orphan Annie Decoder Ring yielding an Ovaltine ad. Unfortunately, I can no longer verify this memory with her.
Out of curiosity, when did she say it? I know they were not averse to self-promotion. The sheet music for the Radio Orphan Annie song that she gave me mentions the product.
I can’t remember now where I saw it (shades of Reagan’s 3×5 cards), but someone debunked the Shep story and said that the messages tended to be either some in-story thing, like MEET AT OLD DAM or some mild life advice like BRUSH YOUR TEETH. I suppose they could have decided that drinking Ovaltine was worth giving good advice for at least once. Put me in the agnostic camp now, as I’m not about to track down every episode and decode it (with no decoder badge, although I saw a printable kit online once where you could make your own at home in your spare time (and no, I can’t find it now)).
She said it when I was a kid, so probably in the 1970s. It was an offhand reference about toy surprises inside (if memory serves) Cracker Jack boxes or cereal boxes or some such. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least, however, to find that my memory of that conversation has been distorted by time or by other people’s subsequent anecdotes like Jean Shepherds’. My google-fu is failing me when I try to find actual messages that were actually transmitted, alas.
There are 31 episodes at archive, but without a decoder, I’m not going to try and figure them out. As I recall it, the cipher uses an out-of-order alphabet and then the whole thing is shifted by the choice of a number and letter being matched up. The messages are pretty terse, so I wouldn’t bet on a frequency table being a lot of help.
In other words, too hard for my sixth-grade codebreaking chops. I like ciphers that use the 26 letters in order, forwards or backwards, and always shift by the same amount. I could do those about half as fast as I could write. It helped that I knew the alphabet backwards—something Mom taught me when I was clearly interested in the topic of ciphers, as a matter of fact. She used the same “twinkle twinkle little star” tune for it. “Z-Y-X, W-V, U-T-S, R-Q-P. O-N-M, L-K-J, I-H-J, F, E-D-C-B-A.” (Thanks, Mom.)
Psst, Kip, there’s only one J in the alphabet 😉
@Oneiros:
Gee, I didn’t notice. 😉
Hugo-related thought: How often does one find oneself reading two books about polar bears?
Regarding the packet: It isn’t the novels (that is, the Best Novel finalists) that worry me. I have read most of them already: I guess a lot of Hugo-interested people have (to the extent, at least, that they are available in their country). But there are also the novellas, the series, the YA books, the Campbell material, and all the stuff from 1943.
Also, in some cases we could get them now, but it would be helpful to know if we will have to pay for them.
FYI, since most of us just don’t have enough to read at the moment – prices for Joanna Russ novels are dropping like flies.
kathodus on May 18, 2018 at 11:02 am said:
FYI, since most of us just don’t have enough to read at the moment – prices for Joanna Russ novels are dropping like flies.
Russ is another of those baffling cases where not everything is available as an e-book.
I snapped up what there is though, thanks.
“The” alphabet. Oh, I see. Prescriptive alphabetarianism.
WikiP “Secret decoder ring” has a link to a site that has printable secret decoders for the Orphan Annie radio show.
http://www.radioarchives.com/Little_Orphan_Annie_p/ra005.htm
You shouldn’t need an old computer to play the F451 game–emulators for just about everything capable of playing games from that era are readily available, as free/open-source cross-platform software.
The tricky part may be finding a way to read media from that era. Unless it’s on CDROM (and I doubt a text-adventure would be), you may need to track down a computer historian or something. But if you can get the raw bits onto some sort of modern medium, you can almost certainly get them to run. Somehow.
(Of course, a quick search may reveal copies available from various “abandonware” sites, but I’m not going to link to those.)
The same company seems to have also made games based on Rendezvous With Rama (with a new ending contributed by Clarke), and Nine Princes in Amber, among others. They also did a Perry Mason game, which was actually written by Earl Stanley Gardner.
I remember an old computer game (for the Commodore 64, if memory serves, which may not) that was Nine Princes In Amber. I have no recollection as to how well it played, however.
11) Interesting…. Especially the comments about the new 2019 convention.
@Cassy Oh yes, I remember that, a very basic graphical adventure game.
Telarium was the company that made those games. Later in the 80s they were marketed by Windham Classics and Spinnaker. Most ran on C64, Apple and DOS.
They worked with several authors including Michael Crichton and Alan Dean Foster in addition to those already mentioned. Apparently they also started a game with Philip Jose Farmer that never made it to production.
http://adventure.if-legends.org/Telarium_Corporation.html
Xtifr on May 18, 2018 at 12:45 pm said:
Or you can ask around and see if any of the nerds in your area have the hardware to move data from old media to newer media.
P J Evans on May 18, 2018 at 1:59 pm said:
Isn’t that what I said? 😀
Although your local nerd (aka informal computer historian) may struggle with some of the more obscure formats. 3.5″ DOS floppies should be easy. 5″ harder. 5″ Apple II or C64 disks, harder still. Nintendo cartridges–good luck! 🙂
@Xtifr
I still have a DOS machine with both 3 and 5-inch drives, because some stuff prefers DOS. Now if you have something on 8-inch, that’s more difficult. (Then I’d get hold of Frisbie….)
I’ve read all the online stuff, much of it during the nominating phase. I also managed to read all the novels before deadline. Yay me.
That still leaves Series, YA, Campbell, Best Related, Fan Writer/Zine…
And I can’t find a lot of the Retro stuff online — I really need to read a lot of that.
I like Tor/Macmillan and DAW for trusting us. It’s not like there aren’t bootleg versions of every book available anyway, and I suspect Hugo voters are much less likely to let their packets go astray.
Hachette (which incl. Orbit) annoys me with the stupid sample-only thing. We could get that from Amazon or online, ffs. And they were the ones a few years back who, when they did give the whole book, made password-protected PDFs that couldn’t be adjusted from their tiny, tiny font. Grmph. It very much did not help them in the results, either.
I would post my Hugo reading progress, but I am too ashamed.
@Kathodus —
No shame! I’ll state loud and proud that I’m not even gonna try to read any of the retro Hugo stuff, and I won’t be voting in it. I’ve got other priorities! And I probably won’t get the BDP shorts watched, and I might not read any of the related work — We Shall See.
OTOH, I’m working through rereads of all the fiction I’ve already read, and first reads of whatever I haven’t. That’s my big goal — to get all the print fiction for the 2017 categories (not retros) under my belt, including series, YA, and Campbell. Everything else is simply not that important to me, and I’ll let better-informed people worry about it.