Pixel Scroll 9/19/19 The SJW Credential That Sleeps On You From Nowhere

(1) MATCHLESS PROSE, WE HOPE. Will Frank (scifantasy), Vice-Administrator of the 2016 Hugo Awards and Administrator of the 2021 Hugo Awards, who also identifies himself as a fanfiction writer on AO3 and a trademark attorney, is trying to pour some oil onto the stormy waters that separate parts of the Worldcon community from parts of the AO3 community: “HugO3”. (Please don’t strike a match.)

…If the Worldcon-running community doesn’t police use of the phrase, someone else–someone with less humorous, less celebratory, less free-spirited intent–might be able to plausibly argue that he can call his self-published book a Hugo Award Winner just because it was fanfic, or he has an AO3 account, because the term has lost all of its significance by not being protected.

Is that likely? Who the hell knows. Is it something the Worldcon-running community wants to risk, especially so soon after a concerted effort to undermine the award, not by fanfiction authors in celebration of their validation but by a group of politically-motivated writers with an axe to grind? Definitely not.

(I’ve also seen some people saying that there isn’t any prestige in a Hugo Award given some of the historical winners, and…well, get in line behind the Oscars and the Grammys and the others, I guess. The fact is that “Hugo Award” on the cover of a book does indeed help sales. It matters. There is still cachet in being a Hugo Award winner. Or even a finalist!)

So, no, the Worldcon-running community is not saying “Hey, don’t have fun.” It is saying, “please, don’t undermine our ability to stop people with malicious intent from poisoning the term Hugo Award.”

I’m not even telling you that you have to think I’m right. But at least, please know that this isn’t just a matter of “don’t have fun.” It’s a plea for your help.

(2) HEINLEIN’S OTHER VERSION. The Number of the Beast versus Pursuit of the Pankera – not the same book at all. Arc Manor would be delighted for you to put the claim to a test — http://www.arcmanor.com/as/Comparison.pdf

It is a different book. Of the 187,000 words in the new book, it shares the first 28,000. But then is totally different. The separation occurs in chapter XVIII and here is a side by side comparison of the chapters in the two books with the point of divergence clearly marked.

(3) HISTORIC CON MASQUERADE (AND OTHER) PHOTOS. At Vintage Everyday, “Wendy Pini Cosplay: 22 Rare and Amazing Photographs of Wendy Dressed as Red Sonja in the 1970s”.

Wendy Pini does it all. In the 1970s Wendy used to hit the cons dressed as Sonja. She was born in San Francisco in 1951, and from an early age demonstrated the talents later to come to fruition as a professional illustrator, and eventually as the creator of Elfquest.

(4) CHANGES AT TOR. Shelf Awareness is reporting a couple of promotions at Tom Doherty Associates:

  • Theresa DeLucci has been promoted to senior associate director of marketing of Tor Books, Forge, and Nightfire.
  • Renata Sweeney has been promoted to senior marketing manager, Tor.

(5) ELLEN VARTANOFF INTERVIEW. From Small Press Expo 2017 (but just posted on YouTube today.)

Rusty and Joe talk to Ellen Vartanoff about her decades in the comics field and the early days of comic conventions!

(6) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • September 19, 1952 — “Superman On Earth” aired as the pilot episode for The  Adventures of Superman television series starring George Reeves.
  • September 19, 1961 — On a return trip from Canada, while in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Betty and Barney Hill claimed to have been abducted by aliens.
  • September 19, 1986 — The Starman series debuted with Jeff Bridges replaced in the role of The Starman with Robert Hays. The series lasted for twenty-two episodes.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 19, 1867 Arthur Rackham. English book illustrator who is recognized as one of the leading literary figures during the Golden Age of British book illustration. His work can be seen on genre fiction ranging from Goblin Market to Rip Van Winkle and The Wind in the Willows. Derek Huson’s Arthur Rackham: His Life and Work is one of the better looks at him and his art. (Died 1939.)
  • Born September 19, 1911 William Golding. Though obviously best known for the Lord of The Flies novel, I’m more intrigued by the almost completed novel found in draft after his death, The Double Tongue which tells the story of the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo at Delphi. (Died 1993.)
  • Born September 19, 1922 Damon Knight. Author, critic, editor. He is the author of “To Serve Man”, a 1950 short story which became a The Twilight Zone episode. It won a 50-year Retro-Hugo in 2001 as the best short story of 1950. Wiki says “He ceased reviewing when Fantasy & Science Fiction refused to publish a review.” What’s the story here? (Died 2002.)
  • Born September 19, 1928 Adam West. Best known as Batman on that classic Sixty series, he also had a short role in 1964’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars as Colonel Dan McReady. The less said about his post Batman films, including a softcore porn film, the better. (Died 2017.)
  • Born September 19, 1928 Robin Scott Wilson. Founder, with Damon Knight and others, of the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop. He edited Clarion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction and Criticism from the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Clarion II and Clarion III. He wrote one genre novel, To the Sound of Freedom (with Richard W. Shryock) and a lot of short fiction. Alas, neither iBooks nor Kindle has anything by him available. (Died 2013.)
  • Born September 19, 1933 – David McCallum, 86. Gained fame as Illya Kuryakin in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and has rounded off his career playing medical examiner Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard in another TV series that is known by its initials, NCIS.
  • Born September 19, 1940 Caroline John. English actress best known for her role as scientist Elizabeth “Liz” Shaw in Doctor Who as companion to the Third Doctor. She’d repeat her role in Dimensions in Time, a charity special crossover between Doctor Who and the EastEnders that ran in 1993. Her only other genre role was playing Laura Lyons in The Hound of the Baskervilles. (Died 2012.)
  • Born September 19, 1947 Tanith Lee. I hadn’t realized that she wrote more than ninety novels and three hundred short stories in her career. And even wrote two Blake’s 7 episodes as well. I was more fond of her work for children such as The Dragon Hoard and The Unicorn Series than I was of her adult work. (Died 2015.)
  • Born September 19, 1952 Laurie R. King, 67. She’s on the Birthday Honors List for the Mary Russell series of historical mysteries, featuring Sherlock Holmes as her mentor and later partner. She’s also written at least one genre novel, Califia’s Daughters
  • Born September 19, 1972 N. K. Jemisin, 47. Her most excellent Broken Earth series has made her the only author to have won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in three consecutive years.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) UNIDENTIFIED WALKING OBJECTS. Aliens have landed at the convention hotel (a couple years early) reports the Tonopah Nevada in 2021 for Westercon 74 page – see the photographic evidence there!

Starting to see some out of this world stuff in honor of Alien Weekend… these aliens came all the way from Michigan to check out the happenings…

(10) OH NO, NOT AGAIN. “False Tsunami Warning In Hawaii Triggered By Police Exercise”.

Emergency sirens wailed on Hawaii’s Oahu and Maui islands Wednesday evening, warning of a tsunami, but the alert turned out to be a mistake, sparking anger from residents who recalled a similar false warning last year of an imminent ballistic missile attack.

Within minutes of the alarm going off shortly after 5 p.m. local time (11 p.m. ET) authorities were trying to calm the public by getting out word of the mistake.

The National Weather Service in Honolulu tweeted: “***NO TSUNAMI THREAT*** We have received phone calls about sirens going off across Oahu, but we have confirmed with the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center that there is NO TSUNAMI THREAT.”

Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell also took to Twitter. “Mahalo to everyone for taking appropriate action & tuning into local media,” he tweeted, adding that the sirens had been “inadvertently triggered” during Honolulu Police Department training.

(11) I’M MELTING! FastCompany tells everyone “Burger King is melting down plastic toys to recycle them into something actually useful”.

… Burger King has decided to remove all plastic toys from its kids’ meals. Not only that but the initiative, created by agency Jones Knowles Ritchie and starting this week in the U.K., is also calling for people to drop plastic toys from meals past in “plastic toy amnesty bins” at Burger King locations to be melted down and recycled into things that are actually useful, like play areas and surface tools, which can be recycled many times over.

People in the U.K. who bring in toys to melt down next week will get a free King Junior meal when they buy any adult meal. To promote the project, Burger King has created a cast of melted-down plastic toy characters, including Beep Beep, a jeep-driving bunny, which the brand has installed a giant melting version of on London’s South Bank to promote the project.

(12) IF YOU WERE A PTEROSAUR AS TALL AS A GIRAFFE, MY LOVE. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Inside Science reports: “Newest Pterosaur Was Likely as Tall as a Giraffe”.

Ancient flying reptile dubbed Cryodrakon boreas, the “cold dragon of the north winds,” may shed light on the evolution of these dinosaur relatives.

CBC News agrees: “Giraffe-sized flying reptiles once soared over Alberta”

Newly identified pterosaur species had a wingspan of 10 metres

Mark Whitton’s 2013 article has additional details and a great illustration: “9 things you may not know about giant azhdarchid pterosaurs”

Despite their giraffian proportions, giant azhdarchid torso were relatively tiny. Witton and Habib (2010) noted that, like many pterodactyloid pterosaurs, their torsos were probably only a third or so longer than their humeri, suggesting a shoulder-hip length of about 65-75 cm for an animal with a 10 m wingspan. That’s a torso length not much larger than your own, although they were considerably more stocky and swamped with muscle. Azhdarchid shoulders, in particular, are well endowed with attachment sites for flight muscles, as are (for pterosaurs) their pelves and hindquarters.

(13) JURASSIC SHORT. Battle at Big Rock on YouTube is an eight-minute video, set in the Jurassic World universe one year after the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom that premiered on FX last night and was put online today.

(14) BRADBURY INTERVIEW. Here’s a 9-minute video of Ray Bradbury’s 1978 appearance on the Merv Griffin Show.

The always brilliant Ray Bradbury, one of the greatest sci-fi writers in history, talks with Merv about the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, Steven Spielberg, his mission as a writer, the future of mankind, and ends by reading from his poem “If Only We Had Taller Been” from his collection “When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.”

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chip Hitchccock, JJ, Mike Kennedy, Kevin Standlee, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day JJ.]

405 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 9/19/19 The SJW Credential That Sleeps On You From Nowhere

  1. “So you’ll be lying about me.”

    Hampus Eckerman on September 17, 2019 at 7:45 pm said:
    JJ:

    When people are risking the existence of the award by trying to destroy the trademark, thinking it is a big joke and getting back, then it is just too much 4chan for me.

    I’m glad Peggy wrote her comments. Saved me the trouble of expressing the same sentiment.

    JJ, Hampus, Contrarius – and Mike: You remember that, oooh, back in 2009, a bunch of famous SFF and publishing types showed their arses in spectacular fashion during a little dustup which came to be known as Racefail? And maybe you might even know that those people cannot be named in polite company without someone saying “That person? Is dead to me for what they said during Racefail”.* I saw that just today in the year of our lord 2019, even.

    Well, consider this your Racefail. You’ve managed to make the WSFS, the Hugos, and yourselves anathemas among the kind of people paying attention to this — coincidentally, there’s a hell of a lot of overlap between them and the ones who were righteously indignant over Racefail.

    Good job!

    For dog’s sake, and for the sake of the very thing and principles you claim to love, obey the first rule of holes, get some screen free time, and pat your cats and puppies and anything else which gives you pleasure. You will look back on this and think either “wow, I wish I’d shut up” or “wow, that was all so unimportant in the scheme of things.”

    If any of you listen to what I’m advising…well, I can only hope you’re as smart as you all claim to be. I mean that. I hope you are.

    *And because at least one of you will snidely allude to something, possibly several somethings in my past which makes me persona non grata in a number of places, because we all know that invalidates anything I say, let me point out —that makes me an expert on how to become an anathema in polite circles

  2. Well, consider this your Racefail. You’ve managed to make the WSFS, the Hugos, and yourselves anathemas among the kind of people paying attention to this — coincidentally, there’s a hell of a lot of overlap between them and the ones who were righteously indignant over Racefail.

    Can we please get a sense of proportion? No amount of righteous indignation is going to make a fannish squabble about who can claim to be a Hugo winner comparable to ACTUALLY BEING PART OF A MINORITY which still carries with it all manners of disadvantages up to and including being shot dead.

    Get a fucking grip people.

  3. Peggy Saves Herself: I still think that the fact that enough of the WSFS members voted for him getting an award is a horrible indictment of the group as a whole & yes, that colors my perception.

    I’ll be honest and admit that there are a lot of older fen whose attitudes I find really awful. I generally tend to avoid them as much as possible. While I would never wish ill on anyone, I’m not sorry that the population of people who laud and defend the horrendous behavior of people like Ackerman, MZB, Breen, and Ellison is steadily decreasing with the years.

    One of the reasons I’m good friends with Mike Glyer is that, despite what some people falsely claim about him because of his age, gender, and position in fandom, he is as anti-racism, -sexism, -misogyny, -homophobia, and -transphobia as I am (in other words, pretty goddamn anti). I’ve been privy to some of the comments he’s deleted or blocked, and he really has short shrift for that sort of bullshit. He’s also someone who continually interrogates his belief systems, and is willing to change his stance on something or apologize when he’s properly called out on something. There are times when he’s hauled me up properly and I’ve changed and apologized (why just today, as a matter of fact), and times when I’ve hauled him up and he’s apologized and changed his ways (3 days ago, in fact). It grieves me when I see people posting lies about him (i.e. synecdochic’s creatively-enhanced account of their exchange).

     
    Peggy Saves Herself: I have a friend who is a frequent File770er and who swears that you’re a decent human who has seemingly lapsed into insanity.

    I’m absolutely no angel, but I’m a decent person. And I think I’m entitled to feel that 2 million people wanting to be able to officially call themselves Hugo Award Winners is not okay, without that being characterized as “insanity”.

    But yeah, seeing all of the egregious lies which have been posted on Twitter and AO3 about what I, Mike Glyer, and other File 770 commenters have supposedly said over the last week has pretty much made me incandescent with fury — which is especially understandable if you know the history of emotional abuse and gaslighting to which I was subjected for many, many years. So you know, I’m really not going to react rationally when I see people posting all these bald-faced lies.

    Also, having spent my life having to put up with a pathologically passive-aggressive parent, I have absolutely no patience for the “Oh, yeah? Well, I’ll show you, I’m going to be twice as big of a dick now!” attitude I’ve seen posted by a lot of the people from AO3 — so yeah, I’m not really going to think kindly of people who think that behaving like a passive-aggressive tool is an admirable virtue. Just because we can all channel our inner 3-year-old when we don’t like something doesn’t mean that we should.

    Thank you for your kind response.

  4. Anne Sommerville:

    Good of you to show that quote, because then you will notice that I’m in no way am comparing AO3 to 4chan and its users.

    I am speaking very specifically about a kickstarter campaign used to attack the Hugo trademark. And how the proponents of the campaign talk about the attack, risking the existence of the Hugo’s, as if it was one big joke.

    It is not about AO3. It is not about its users. It is about the actions of a small minority of the two million users. So I am happy that everyone has seen the quote now, so the lying and the rumour mill can come to a stop.

  5. I am going to throw all of my toys out of the pram if people don’t stop describing the “sides” like AO3 people and Filers (or WSFS members) are completely separate and never the twain shall meet. Literally right here, people, and hardly the only one.

    See also: Describing Filers like we’ve ever agreed on a single, solitary thing beyond: 1. Books are neat, and 2. Slating the Hugos is bad. Seriously, I have occasionally derailed fights here by prompting different fights about food. We have had tetchy discussions with each other about the published equivalent of fluffy sci fi social justice-flavoured curtain fic. We are not a hivemind. There is not one stance on the AO3’s win, here, and I would really very much appreciate it if people would start including that fact in their analysis.

    Please stop it, everyone.

    … and now I’m going to read the other half of the thread, ahem. Apologies if someone already lost their temper over those and I’m being redundant.

  6. Ann Somerville, considering your absolutely egregiously appallingly-bad behavior on numerous occasions here in the past, to which, as Anna points out, you have just added, I’m sure that you’ll understand when I tell you that you have no credibility with me whatsoever. Bless your heart.

  7. Ann Somerville: I can only hope you’re as smart as you all claim to be. I mean that. I hope you are.

    Wouldn’t that be great? If only.

  8. This has been so disappointing to read. It was frustrating to hear that other people could post whatever we liked, but Denise was the only one who got stopped. It’s frustrating to try and explain a culture issue and continually get “no, your feelings are wrong, suck it up”. The fannish culture is completely used to both the threat and the reality of C&Ds; it’s why OTW exists in the first place. When something majorly goes wrong in ways similar to this, AO3 is the reason fans aren’t as afraid anymore, but it’s an old fear that most everyone of a certain age in the fanfic community is very familiar with.

    Getting from this small portion of fandom, the “okay, Naomi’s speech was nice, but you know you don’t really get to call yourself winner/make these jokes, and if you don’t we might just have to serve some cease and desists 🙁 too bad” is a slap in the face; an insult, and one that brings up a very specific pain for fanficcers. File770 has harmed the Hugo’s this week. These commenters have harmed the legitimacy of the Hugo’s, and I’ve seen the discussion go from interest and happy curiosity about the Hugo’s to “who cares”. The people I get my SFF recommendations from are the ones now saying the Hugo’s don’t mean anything. It is so frustrating how avoidable all this was.

  9. LectionaryStan: It’s frustrating to try and explain a culture issue and continually get “no, your feelings are wrong, suck it up”.

    But that isn’t what was said, LectionaryStan, and mischaracterizing it as that does not make you look like you are posting in good faith.

    What was said (at least by me, and by some of the other people I saw) was “I understand what you are saying about AO3 culture, but you are expecting the Hugo Awards to conform to AO3 culture, instead of trying to understand the Hugo Awards culture”.

    I saw numerous people keep insisting that WSFS members obviously don’t understand that AO3 is a community and collaborative venture (because otherwise, if they did, they would change the Hugo Awards culture to conform to AO3 cultural expectations).

    The thing is, people here do understand that, and it’s possible to do so without feeling that Hugo Awards culture must change to conform to AO3 cultural expectations.

    Claiming that WSFS members did not want AO3 members to have fun (which has never been said by any WSFS member) also makes it look as though you are not posting in good faith.

    When you talk about the legitimacy of the Hugo Awards having been harmed, you might want to consider why, when a lot of the people who are saying that have behaved really badly — up to and including posting outright lies about WSFS members and File 770 commenters — such arguments might not tend to carry a lot of weight with some of the people here.

  10. arrives 15 minutes late with starbucks from the other post

    @JJ

    LectionaryStan: It’s frustrating to try and explain a culture issue and continually get “no, your feelings are wrong, suck it up”.

    But that isn’t what was said, LectionaryStan, and mischaracterizing it as that does not make you look like you are posting in good faith.

    JJ, you are doing it right here. Lectionary Stan tells you they are frustrated that you are dismising arguements. Then you dismiss their arguement by saying that you didn’t say x, and by expressing their feeling Lectionary Stan is lying. This is not the first time I have seen you do it either. Instead of staying on the feeling level and acknowledging that the party is feeling a certain way, you jump over that, say you didn’t say that – which might be true, but people are as a result feeling that way! – and turn around to use this expression against the other party.

    Meanwhile, you expect the other party to take your feelings into consideration and pattern their behaviour after it.

    Also, people are explaining and re-explaining how the Ao3 operates because while you have grasped the words they are saying, you are not paying attention to the meaning they are conveying in them. Part of that is the very strong feeling of solidarity between users (at least when we are not squabbling with each other. Which we frequently do, but if it comes from perceived outsiders, ranks get closed.)

  11. arioch: JJ, you are doing it right here. Lectionary Stan tells you they are frustrated that you are dismising arguements.

    There is a difference between an “argument” and a “falsehood”. No one has said what LectionaryStan is claiming was said. They don’t get a free pass to make that claim.

    LectionaryStan didn’t say “I feel like people are doing this”, they said “People are doing this”. There is a difference.

     
    arioch: Also, people are explaining and re-explaining how the Ao3 operates because while you have grasped the words they are saying, you are not paying attention to the meaning they are conveying in them. Part of that is the very strong feeling of solidarity between user

    No, I am indeed paying attention. The problem is that even though I have heard the words, understood them, and grasped their meaning, I am not giving the response that seems to be expected/demanded, which is “okay, sure, we’ll change the Hugo Award culture to conform to AO3 culture just because you say so”.

    Here’s what I feel like is being said:
    AO3 members to WSFS members: LOL, we don’t care about your feelings. Your feelings are irrelevant.
    Also AO3 members to WSFS members: You need to change the culture of the Hugo Awards to conform with our cultural expectations.

    Perhaps you can understand why I might have an issue with that.

  12. @JJ

    No one has said what LectionaryStan is claiming was said.

    No one has said it word for word, but I and the other non-filers have heard it being implied, loudly. The dismissing of expressed feelings is pretty clear if you keep doing it. I pointed it out because from my point of view it is unhelpful to the discussion and keeps the tone vitriolic. I am glad you switched your answering style.

    Here’s what I feel like is being said:
    AO3 members to WSFS members: LOL, we don’t care about your feelings. Your feelings are irrelevant.
    Also AO3 members to WSFS members: You need to change the culture of the Hugo Awards to conform with our cultural expectations.

    I understand this view. I feel this dismisses a lot of context and arguments from the people arguing on the AO3 side of things. Here is how I feel things went:

    AO3 new posts statement from WSFS. It ask that users do not refer themselves as Hugo Award winners personally. It does not cite the problem of trademark law and reasons that the actual winner is the entity AO3.

    AO3 users in comments are confused, because for them it is not possible to differentiate between the entity AO3 and the collective users. The post echoes gatekeeping of the past and seems hurtful when users have been celebrating. They mock and don’t stop, because Kevin, who tries to introduce the legal aspect, isn’t well versed in the culture and not generally smooth. People acknowledge that the MPC is well in its rights to tell off users for commercial use. People on the AO3 side do not think that jokes on twitter are hurting the trademark and don’t stop them, because they do push back against claims to authority without a good reason. Snarky fic is written. -> This is your first line, which compresses things quite a bit in my view.

    During that time, things on File770 also get heated. People disagree that the internet jokes are not infringement and that they indeed pull down the “exclusivity” of the Hugos. And other members of the WSFS push back against it. Basically, wank. Input from WSFS member lawyer scifantasy agrees with the points everyone agrees on, but doesn’t commit either way on the twitter jokes. People on twitter like rahaeli write counter arguments why they make a case for protected speech. File770 isn’t being a fun place, but during the argument people on the AO3 side ponder: Calling themselves Hugo Award winners started as a joke, but where is the tangible harm? Are the Hugo Awards famous enough to be diluted? And a question from the nomination process pops up: just who won, if the organisation declines to name winners?

    Ok, breaking here because those 600+ comments in the old thread are pretty convoluted. But I think that there have been good arguments in there, that run counter the assumptions in the “Also AO3 members to WSFS members: You need to change the culture of the Hugo Awards to conform with our cultural expectations.”

    WSFS members and AO3 members have a lot of crossover. It’s therefore unclear how many, but a good part of the WSFS shares the idea that AO3 = the users. Indeed people told us they voted for the AO3 because of this. And the rules about the matter are not substantial enough – they just say a work wins, not that the author wins and is therefore a winner. Hugo custom has filled in these gaps and glosses over them.

    You say 2 Million people cannot all be Hugo winners because it devalues the award. Other WSFS members feel different. I feel like this is more of an WSFS internal dispute, because people apparently had the same issues as you before, but the nomination went ahead. Because of this and because WSFS members have expressed being very much alright with it, it’s not a culture change that is pushed on the WSFS from outside, but an internal conflict about how exclusive the Award needs to be to be prestigious. You have called it meaningless otherwise, which implies worthless. Which I and others feel is gatekeeping. Several good things can exists and be honored at the same time. Individual awards will retain prestige, as they have with other awards examples cough Time Person of the Year 2006, Nobel Peace Price 2012cough.

    I also feel that it is catastrophising to call the Hugos ruined, meaningles or burned to the ground if one of them is shared by many people. In fact, I do feel insulted by how awful the related people are being implied to be.

    So I hope you can understand on my feelings, why I disagree with you.

  13. @arioch

    You say 2 Million people cannot all be Hugo winners … Other WSFS members feel different

    I am not sure that you will find many WSFS members that think all 2 million AO3 members can call themselves Hugo winners. Indeed not all 2 million AO3 members can be winners – for example people who have been inactive for years. It was an award for the year 2018 after all. Also as AO3 members have said some people have multiple accounts.

    Worldcon culture (and as such WSFS culture) is such that things do not change unless voted for at two successive business meetings. Ordinary contributors to larger projects have never ever been recognised before. We have categories which have more than a few people involved – fanzine, semi-prozine, fancast, even in best related work (books such as Queers Dig Time Lords) let alone the dramatic works. So there is (to my mind and others) prior art to say that individual contributors to a larger scale project are not recognised as Hugo Winners.

    Novel Peace Prize 2012

    Yep that went to the EU as in institution. Not to individuals. I have never heard any individual claim to be a Nobel Peace Prize winner on the back of that.

    I also feel that it is catastrophising to call the Hugos ruined, meaningles or burned to the ground if one of them is shared by many people.

    I don’t think ruined is the right term, but I do think a multitude of people calling themselves Hugo Winners when they did not actually win does harm the trademark, and does diminsh the cachet of the Hugo Award (in many people’s eyes). I think that if those actions can be minimised it is better for the Hugo Award. I also think it will be better for AO3 too. AO3 (as a community, not as individuals) should be proud of winning a Hugo. However individual members going around claiming to be Hugo Winners is going to get some people’s back up. The section of Worldcon fandom that is anoyed by that behaviour aren’t going to look on AO3 (or possibly fanfic in its entirety) very favourably because of it. This is a change from how most of them would have viewed AO3 on the night of the award.

  14. arioch, the very nature of an award which is not merely a Participation Award is that there is going to be some element of “gatekeeping” to it — not gatekeeping in the pejorative sense, but gatekeeping in the sense that if everybody can claim to be an individual winner, then it’s not an award for merit, it’s just a Participation Award in which anybody who shows up can claim to be a winner.

    That is the very nature of an awards program. What you refer to as “gatekeeping” in a pejorative sense, I refer to as “being meaningful because it is given to a limited number of people and works which have earned an award for excellence, something that not everyone in the world can claim to have earned”.

    For me this is especially an issue because the Related Work category is very specifically not for fiction, yet the contribution of the vast majority of the AO3 members is their fiction (and yes, I get that every single member is a a very important part of the community). I don’t think it’s the community which was recognized in this category, and I’m absolutely sure it’s not the fiction which was recognized. So essentially this is, to me, about giving everyone involved the ability to claim to be an official Hugo Award Winner because you don’t want to recognize the fact that some people’s contributions are a lot more significant than others. And I do get that there are very good reasons for not wanting to set some AO3 members above others.

    But to me, it just feels like this is trying to turn the Hugo Award into a Participation Award, and yes, I do feel that devalues the award to the point of meaninglessness.

    If the desire is to be able to recognize everyone involved, that can still be done as a community: All AO3 members are part of a Hugo Award-Winning Project! We’ve created something wonderful, and that’s an amazing accomplishment!

    Why people feel that it’s necessary that they be officially able to personally take credit for it as individuals is really baffling to me, when everyone keeps emphasizing that it is very much a group effort and community project.

    I feel like the people who are arguing that 1) it’s a community project, and everyone is a part of the whole wonderful thing which won the award, and 2) therefore each person should get to officially call themselves an individual Hugo Award Winner, are completely contradicting themselves. If the AO3 members earned this as a community, not as individuals, then the argument that each of the members should be able to officially call themselves an individual Hugo Award Winner completely falls apart.

    It’s “This is our Hugo Award!”, not “This is my Hugo Award!”

    Also, I feel as though there has been a whole lot of bait-and-switch going on. This all started with a bunch of AO3 members saying “Of course we know that we’re not all individually official Hugo Award Winners, we’re just joking” and now it’s a bunch of people saying “Well, actually we are all officially individual Hugo Award Winners”.

    I feel like this is a really grasping and ungracious thing to do to WSFS and the Hugo Awards.

  15. @Andy

    “I am not sure that you will find many WSFS members that think (…)”

    I don’t know if this discussion is happening elsewhere, but from the Hugo Award Winners the support has been there. I don’t know how that would shake out with numbers or percents unless you asked the WSFS, but I don’t think it’s alien to the collective in general.

    The examples you bring are different in that they are usually hierarchically organised. Meanwhile something like the AO3 has little precendent on how to be handled. But just talking about non-commercial expression on twitter, I don’t see the short hand as damaging. People don’t get sued when they joke about their pet being dramatic winning an Oscar. The joke here being that someone singlehandedly won for their explicit and/or crack fic.

    With the other categories, I don’t really see a theoretical drawback to allowing people to lay claim as well. It used to be that secretaries and graduate students did a lot of work in the academic field and the resulting paper only had the professor listed as author. Now in Stem fields you can find papers with huge author lists, because finally people are getting contributed. (and probably because there is more working on projects over different institutions) This hasn’t hurt anyone, afaik. The invisible work gets acknowledged, however.

    “I do think a multitude of people calling themselves Hugo Winners when they did not actually win does harm the trademark,”

    That is, indeed, the question. Because at least from the ao3 point of view, where ao3 is formed through its members and their interactions, there is some merit for it. YMMV, of course. It does seem like a doublestandard to go after AO3 members when other authors don’t get the grief, because they technically didn’t win as well. And the harm the trademark thing is also up for debate. It’s a bit of a guessing game depending on your investment I think.

    The section of Worldcon fandom that is anoyed by that behaviour aren’t going to look on AO3 (or possibly fanfic in its entirety) very favourably because of it. This is a change from how most of them would have viewed AO3 on the night of the award.

    I think it gets some backs up in the WSFS that were down before. But these issues about who gets to call himself what seem to, at least to my knowledge, go back to the nomination, and even all the way back to the puppies in their roots. But I also think right now AO3 on the whole is more annoyed at some claims made in the comment section of the news post and here and therefore not going to care much about how the archive is going to come out looking, as long as the other party comes out worse. We are contrary, after all.

  16. @JJ

    but gatekeeping in the sense that if everybody can claim to be an individual winner, then it’s not an award for merit, it’s just a Participation Award in which anybody who shows up can claim to be a winner.

    “being meaningful because it is given to a limited number of people and works which have earned an award for excellence, something that not everyone in the world can claim to have earned”

    Even two million people on a planet of checks seven billion are not everyone. And by the nature of the thing, each year there are going to be more Hugo Award winners, just the number is creeping up slowly most years. That only adds to the tapestry of the Award for me. But if I follow your logic, the longer the Award goes, the less meaningful it becomes (until people start dying and we reach an equilibrium). And opening up new categories would dilute the excellence pool as well.
    Overall this is… hyperbolic to claim it becomes are Participation Award that way. Excellence can exist alongside excellence and will not dim just because there are other shining lights around. That is, in essence, the difference between the two approaches. For you it becomes less through it, if I read you right. I have a hypothetical question to your approach as well: if in one year nothing is excellent, or excellent enough, is the Hugo held back? Do dips in the quality of outputs in any given year diminish Hugos awarded?

    I feel like the people who are arguing that 1) it’s a community project, and everyone is a part of the whole wonderful thing which won the award, and 2) therefore each person should get to officially call themselves an individual Hugo Award Winner, are completely contradicting themselves.

    It’s “This is our Hugo Award!”, not “This is my Hugo Award!”

    Well, you have to think of it as a quantum state… /jk

    In all seriousness, it’s easy. Members are saying “This is our Hugo!” and “I won/am a Hugo Award winner.” Multiple people winning one award are still individually winners. See all the sports examples that have been thrown around. It becomes a joke when someone attributes the lionshare of the win to themselves or a specific project. E.g. “My tentacle porn won us the Hugo.” Clearly a joke – since all the tentacles on the archive are equally award winning now.

  17. @Hampus

    Thanks, I follow her but probably missed this exchange thanks to twitter. It is, however, the first time I have seen it cited here.

  18. I honestly didn’t want to link it before, because the discussion has turned so poisonous that I didn’t want to drag her in. But as you mentioned award winners, I thought it reasonable to show there is a split there too.

  19. Thanks, arioch, I appreciate you stepping in.

    Digging in heels about “no, really, it’s just not allowed!” is the least helpful response in this situation, I’ve come to see, and part of what’s been hurting the Hugo’s here.

    There were a good few people making jokes or claims about being Hugo winners. Hugely less than 2 million people, definitely, not even close to a majority of AO3 users even said things like that. Now perhaps last month, a handful of people meant it when they said it, but I’d put money on most people simply doing it for the meme. And a happy meme in this case, which was leading to a positive reputation for the Hugo’s. Given time, the majority of people saying it would have stopped, as memes pass. Memes can take a few days to move on, sometimes they can take months, but they are always temporary.

    Now? Now it’s A Thing. No matter what side of “is this allowed or not” we come down on, now we’re all staring down the barrel of the worst version of this scenario. People who were doing it just for fun are now looking at this, like, wait, maybe I do have a good enough reason to not have to stop. If God forbid, C&Ds really do get sent out, the heightened negative publicity around this is going to lead to a higher possibility of people taking those C&Ds to the OTW lawyers and asking if there’s really justification here. If it does end up going to the courts, it will end up being a months or years long affair that is going to be an ugly, public, agonizing fight. There is a possible end to this road that ends with people being legally not allowed to make Hugo winner jokes, and there’s a possible end to this that lets every AO3 user righteously claim the title.

    But either way, the Hugo’s name will be damaged and de-legitimized. People can look and see what WSFS members are saying through all this. This has all been public. A lot of the reaction I see everywhere outside of here has been “oh, Christ, this is what Hugo voters are saying?” Associating the award with the people who voted is a clear line here. Actions and arguments trying to protect the value of the awards have been doing the opposite. The MPC can surely take what action it feels it must, certainly. But saying how catastrophically damaging the Twitter jokes are to the value of the Hugos is a baffling claim based on the current damage being done right here.

  20. @arioch

    But just talking about non-commercial expression on twitter, I don’t see the short hand as damaging. People don’t get sued when they joke about their pet being dramatic winning an Oscar.

    Because that is obviously a joke. It is an absurdist claim. Animals aren’t eligible for Oscars. A claim to have written Hugo winning fic (tentacle porn was one such claim I saw) is much more plausible than a pet winning an Oscar. Fanfic and porn (even tentacle porn) are eligible for the Hugo. It is not absurdist in the same way.

    BTW no-one has got sued. I don’t even think people have got Cease & Desist letters.

  21. Looking in from somewhat outside (I havent really followed the debate for most of the time) this is very strange. First I took the „Everyone who participated at AO3 is a winner“ as a joke, somewhat similiar with the nobel peace price for the EU. I certainly saw a lot of tweets that eere meant tongue-in-cheek. But people are serious about this? Get abreak! This is not how awards work. No awards.

    AO3 has won an Hugo. Not „the participants of AO3“, just like Spiderverse won an Hugo, not everyone who contributed to the movie. Even the best novel goes to the author and author alone -not to the person doing the artwork, not to the manager of the book company nor the printer or bookbinder or the paper factory.
    AO3 is a complete thing with a lot of contributers. It won because its more than the sum of its Parts. If you participated: Great! You can claim that you participated in a Hugo winning project. But you are not a Hugo winner. That would be AO3.

  22. @JJ

    Also AO3 members to WSFS members: You need to change the culture of the Hugo Awards to conform with our cultural expectations.

    I feel this claim needs some targeted pushback.

    AO3 users, insofar as they are a single body capable of any organized behavior, have done nothing to try to change the culture of the Hugo awards. They have not tried to change the criteria of eligibility for works (you thinking people who don’t deserve it are calling themselves winners is not an command to change your culture). They are not trying to affect the way the WSFS is organized or how it manages itself. They are not trying to change the voting process, they are not trying to change Worldcon. The vast majority of AO3 users do not know that File 770 exists and probably don’t know that WSFS even is wringing its hands over their stupid jokes at all.

    AO3 members have no designs on WSFS whatsoever. Even now, after all these hurt feelings and pages of debate, what AO3 users want out of WSFS is to be left alone.

    WSFS came into our house, and told AO3 users to change their behavior, explicitly. The original clarification was perfectly fine, but was immediately followed by people representing themselves as members of WSFS leadership telling people that they needed to change. Immediately. Yes, they invoked hurt feelings and a sense that if anyone joked about the Hugos the Hugos would become a joke, but I want it made clear on no uncertain terms that WSFS came to us, and told us to change, and any claims to the contrary are absolute nonsense. Feeling overprotective about the Hugos does not mean that you are actually under assault in any way when someone fails to treat the Hugos with the gravitas you feel it deserves.

    This whole wank has sprawled out significantly from the initial spark that started it, but I think it behooves us to remember who started issuing commands to whom.

  23. Do I need to perform it in interpretative dance to get across the message that not all Filers agree, not all Hugo voters agree, not all WSFS members agree, not all AO3 members agree, not all OTW members agree? And that those are all overlapping circles on a venn diagram? Because I had to give up dance because of disability, but by god will I painkiller myself up and give it a go if it stops the wild generalisations going on.

    That’s addressed at everyone, by the way, there is no side which has avoided doing that. Which as someone (currently un)happily resident in the middle of that overlap, not awesome. I would have to simultaneously hold at least half a dozen different viewpoints to match all the generalisations flying around.

    Also: There’s been much made of what Hugo winners think, but no-one, so far as I’ve seen, has mentioned that one of the (multi!) Hugo winners supportive of AO3 Hugo-Winner jokes the entire time was Mike Glyer, the owner of File770.

    @JJ

    The problem is, every time you say (paraphrased) “no, the AO3 won the Hugo“ everyone you’re talking to goes “…yes? that would be us?” It’s not an argument that’s going to mean much. You’re trying to persuade people of a separation that, to their (and my) mind, doesn’t exist. And in the process you’ve actually managed to convince a bunch of people that yes, they did in fact win a Hugo, which I’m fairly sure was not your aim. You may need to rethink how you’re going about this.

  24. And I think I’m entitled to feel that 2 million people wanting to be able to officially call themselves Hugo Award Winners is not okay, without that being characterized as “insanity”.

    I have no idea if there are two million people out there who want a Hugo Award at all, but I do know that it would be absurd to think that there are two million people out there who want to seriously claim one on the grounds of the AO3 Hugo Award.

    The fact that folks at File770 now have people here arguing whether it theoretically would be valid for AO3 users to make such claims seriously is testament a.) to the fact that if you get a bunch of nerds together, theoreticals will be argued to the limits, and b.) to the fact that in the process of complaining about a bunch of jokes (and one person making unauthorized merch based on those jokes) WSFS folks here and on that AO3 news post managed to kick some people in a sore spot at precisely the wrong moment, namely, right when they were finally feeling recognized and acknowledged as valuable contributors to the SF/F community they’re a part of.

    At this point there may be a dozen or more people pissed off enough to argue this to the hilt. That doesn’t mean that two million people out there are hoping to officially list the AO3 Hugo Award on their CV. I seriously doubt that even the handful of people arguing the most passionately do.

    But realistically, if two million people did want to, they’d already be doing it. Two million people aren’t reading this discussion, eagerly waiting on the final verdict. Two million people are out there already doing whatever they want to do, and mostly that seems to be continuing on blissfully unaware of any of this, or making jokes on Twitter for as long as this discussion keeps them relevant.

  25. Responding to three different only mildly related things because OGH frowns on multiple serial responses, as I recall. (And knowing that this one is going through moderation because it has Too Many Links.)

    arioch on September 21, 2019 at 6:34 am said:

    Kevin, who tries to introduce the legal aspect, isn’t well versed in the culture and not generally smooth.

    This is true, and I’ve tried to apologize for this, but because I am (for all intents, purposes, and appearances) a Straight White Cisgender Old Man, and because I didn’t realize all of the minefields upon which I was treading, apparently everything I say is deliberately malicious and hurtful.

    As it happens, I personally can see some merit in the argument that the entire membership of AO3 shares “ownership” of the Hugo Award presented to it for Best Related Work. What is an untrue, misleading, and potentially damaging claim is that anyone through the AO3 BRW win is a “Hugo Award winning fanfiction author.” But apparently nobody seems to be able to see the distinction between “contributor to a Hugo Award winning work” and “Hugo Award winning fanfiction author.”

    Andy Leighton on September 21, 2019 at 9:51 am said:

    Because that is obviously a joke. It is an absurdist claim.

    Exactly, just like this article, which is clearly satire.

    JJ on September 21, 2019 at 12:59 am said:

    The thing is, people here do understand that, and it’s possible to do so without feeling that Hugo Awards culture must change to conform to AO3 cultural expectations.

    In fact, they probably could make WSFS do so, considering how many of them there are and how many of them are already active WSFS members. Here’s what they need to do:

    Attend Worldcons and the Business Meetings held thereat.

    Elect people to the WSFS Mark Protection Committee that they think better serve their vision of how WSFS’s service marks and intellectual property should be managed

    Change the WSFS Constitution to better reflect how they think the Awards should be managed and what kinds of things should be awarded.

    Vote for Worldcon bids that pledge to do what they think Worldcons should be doing, including how they think the Awards should be administered.

    Form Worldcon bids that will do things they way they think things should be done (including how the Awards should be administered), and sell that vision to a majority of the voting membership.

    While I do have a sense of humor (despite claims of some very IMO bitter and angry people), in this case, I’m completely serious. Politics is won by those people who show up. You want to change Worldcon, the World Science Fiction Society, and the Hugo Awards? Then get more involved than banging on a keyboard. That’s what I did when I started out in 1989 by plunking down $50 to help support the San Francisco in ’93 Worldcon bid, which was the first step on a rather long (and personally expensive, sometimes maddeningly frustrating, often physically and mentally exhausting, but also personally rewarding) road.

  26. kmfilz says But realistically, if two million people did want to, they’d already be doing it. Two million people aren’t reading this discussion, eagerly waiting on the final verdict. Two million people are out there already doing whatever they want to do, and mostly that seems to be continuing on blissfully unaware of any of this, or making jokes on Twitter for as long as this discussion keeps them relevant.

    It’s worth stressing that outside of fandom, however we define it, that the Hugo Award means little or nothing. Yes we know what it is and value the existence of it but that’s not true in the larger reading community. This holds true of course for The Tiptree Award and the freshly named Astounding Award.

    Like the diehard baseball fan who knows the more arcane rules of that sport which are legion, we know the Hugo Award and what it is, the SFF reader browsing at her Books-A-Millioin most does likely does not know of the Hugo and certainly not its history.

  27. Meredith on September 21, 2019 at 12:40 pm said:

    The problem is, every time you say (paraphrased) “no, the AO3 won the Hugo“ everyone you’re talking to goes “…yes? that would be us?” It’s not an argument that’s going to mean much. You’re trying to persuade people of a separation that, to their (and my) mind, doesn’t exist. And in the process you’ve actually managed to convince a bunch of people that yes, they did in fact win a Hugo, which I’m fairly sure was not your aim. You may need to rethink how you’re going about this

    I’ve missed most of this (which was probably best for everyone) while busy with other things but is this idea really that hard? i.e. that AO3 collectively won an award and the individuals didn’t? I honestly don’t get how that isn’t obvious and I don’t mean on a ‘I know how the Hugo Awards work’ level but on a ‘what else could it possibly mean’ level.

    Putting trademarks and everything else aside there is a very hard to define the line between an individual celebrating their own contribution to a collective effort and a person taking personal credit for what was a team effort, even more so when the collective effort is huge and disparate and without central leadership. I’m not saying I could easily distinguish the two but I think there is a big moral distinction there.

  28. Camestros Felapton: Maybe you and I could do the interpretive dance, and let Meredith direct. I haven’t met you, but I can promise on my side it will look like a prancing rhinoceros.

  29. Mike Glyer on September 21, 2019 at 1:35 pm said:

    Camestros Felapton: Maybe you and I could do the interpretive dance, and let Meredith direct. I haven’t met you, but I can promise on my side it will look like a prancing rhinoceros.

    Nobody has ever praised my coordination. I suspect we would be closely matched in dancing ability. However, I can jump up and down. Having said that, my dancing may closely match Meredith’s point – not every part of a thing is necessarily under the control of some central point nor representative of any collective intent.

  30. there is a very hard to define the line between an individual celebrating their own contribution to a collective effort and a person taking personal credit for what was a team effort, even more so when the collective effort is huge and disparate and without central leadership.

    It would be like me taking full credit for the GIS database that my workgroup built. Yes, I did a bunch of things, some critical to the project, but the group as a whole gets the credit, because everyone contributed. (I know what I did, that no one else had a part in, but that’s all I’ll take credit for.)

  31. Camestros Felapton: …my dancing may closely match Meredith’s point – not every part of a thing is necessarily under the control of some central point nor representative of any collective intent.

    Yes, we could be at least certain of impressing that idea on the audience.

  32. @Cat Eldridge

    It’s worth stressing that outside of fandom, however we define it, that the Hugo Award means little or nothing. Yes we know what it is and value the existence of it but that’s not true in the larger reading community

    Disagree. There are numerous press articles about the Hugos. I have seen Hugo Award winner stickers on books. Some books may even have Hugo Award winning author on the flap copy. That is more than ‘little or nothing’. Sure the general SF reading public doesn’t know as much about the awards as fandom, or care about them as we do, but there must be some level of interest and knowledge otherwise neither of those things would happen.

  33. @kmfillz

    At this point there may be a dozen or more people pissed off enough to argue this to the hilt. That doesn’t mean that two million people out there are hoping to officially list the AO3 Hugo Award on their CV. I seriously doubt that even the handful of people arguing the most passionately do.

    Yeah, pegged that right, I admit. I had a smile at the original jokes but didn’t find them that funny that I had to make one, especially since it was done fairly quick. I will, however, be ready to argue till the cows come home for the right of others to make their jokes on it.

    @Kevin

    “This is true, and I’ve tried to apologize for this,”

    Hey Kevin, sorry if that dregged this up again. I have been the overly earnest, straight forward person Not Getting It and puttingmy foot into my mouth infront of people, so I get it. And you apologized, so I think it is more productive to leave it behind us.

    Meredith:

    The problem is, every time you say (paraphrased) “no, the AO3 won the Hugo“ everyone you’re talking to goes “…yes? that would be us?” It’s not an argument that’s going to mean much.

    Co-signing this so hard. There is no meaningful distinction for me there. Removed from the users, the AO3 is… not something I can comprehend. I seriously cannot picture what it would look like. This is why AO3 members in parts are confused. We get that we didn’t individually win, but our collective won, therefore everyone of us is a winner? Few to none are using those credentials, because I wouldn’t share it with anyone outside fandom. But AO3 = users = AO3. It’s like the particle-wave thing, it’s a particle AND a wave, at the same time, that’s the point. In some situation it makes sense just to look at one side of that, but it’s always a particle and a wave, at the same time.

  34. The inauguration of the File770 Amateur Dance Troupe..?

    @Mike, not sure if it got lost in all the aggro in the other thread, but (though I’ll be repeating myself if you did see it) I’ve seen, read and loved fanfiction that wasn’t based on a specific property, so while I don’t necessarily think all fiction written by fans is fanfiction (although I’m willing to entertain the idea), it’s certainly not limited to stuff based on things.

    @Camestros

    Essentially, for many transformative works fen, the object is inseparable from the people. So the AO3 is not just an archive, it’s an archive and the people who use the archive, and awarding the archive is awarding the people. For them, referring to the AO3-the-archive as distinct from AO3-the-community just doesn’t make any sense. For them, they’re the same entity.

    (Me, I’m not quite so all-is-one about it, but I think you could argue that the community was one of the noteworthy non-fictional aspects that was awarded, on top of the exceptional technical accomplishments, so that makes it hard to draw a bright line from my point of view, and also I have a hard time with the idea that no-one won the Best Related Work Hugo this year, which is the logical conclusion to the “only names listed on the website count” argument. I would infinitely rather two million people collectively won a single shared Hugo between them than no-one win a Hugo, philosophically speaking. But no-one’s a newly minted Hugo Winning AO3 Fanfiction Author this year, specifically, because the fanfiction isn’t non-fictional. In my not so very humble and increasingly irritated opinion.)

    PS@Everyone, my pain levels today are… pretty bad, which means my judgement is not necessarily at its best, so if I start toeing any lines you think I would not normally cross, please do feel free to tell me to step away from the keyboard. I would greatly appreciate the favour!

  35. @Meredith (This is an aside, so skip it if your brain is being awful today. hugs)

    “I’ve seen, read and loved fanfiction that wasn’t based on a specific property, so while I don’t necessarily think all fiction written by fans is fanfiction”

    This reminds me, because I was reading in it recently, of one essay in Paul Booth’s 2018 introduction to fanstudies. I don’t have the name of the person who wrote that chapter, but they detailed that they made their students read parts of Kant’s Critique of Judgement, where he is pretty much a dick about art just coming from nature and genius, while everything is just imitation. As juxtaposition they read the immortal Texts from Cephalopods. The canon is nebulous for that – I think every octopus video on the internet, right? But it so delights in borrowing and is just full of fic conventions that it still feels very much like fanfic. The usual division between fanfic and profic is one gets paid for the latter. Yet fanfic is its own genre with its own style conventions. 😀

  36. Andy Leighton says Disagree. There are numerous press articles about the Hugos. I have seen Hugo Award winner stickers on books. Some books may even have Hugo Award winning author on the flap copy. That is more than ‘little or nothing’. Sure the general SF reading public doesn’t know as much about the awards as fandom, or care about them as we do, but there must be some level of interest and knowledge otherwise neither of those things would happen.

    I said reading public, not press. And those stickers and flap copy are generated by publicists who are insiders. I’ll stick by my belief that those who read SFF have little or no awareness of what a Hugo Award is. Now that also holds true for Awards such as the Nebula or the newly renamed Astounding. Publicists love Awards but that doesn’t mean readers actually pay attention to them.

  37. Meredith on September 21, 2019 at 2:34 pm said:

    @Camestros

    Essentially, for many transformative works fen, the object is inseparable from the people. So the AO3 is not just an archive, it’s an archive and the people who use the archive, and awarding the archive is awarding the people. For them, referring to the AO3-the-archive as distinct from AO3-the-community just doesn’t make any sense. For them, they’re the same entity.

    I think that is both laudable and understandable. I think I get that idea, it was more that I think if I felt that about a thing/community then I’d feel odd saying that I achieved the accomplishment that the thing accomplished. AO3 is it’s community but any given member isn’t the community as a whole.

    Like, I think I work in a friendly workplace and that’s all part of how everybody works well together and that’s something we’ve all done but if a colleague said “I made this a friendly workplace” I’d look at them oddly (assuming there’s wasn’t more context than that).

  38. @Meredith Ugh, I’m so sorry about the pain levels today. I hope it eases soon. You didn’t show up in the previous thread before it got closed so I’ve been sitting on this since then, but I wanted to say you inspired me. 😛 I am now $75 (plus or minus exchange rate differences) poorer for the 78th Worldcon.

  39. I started to write a long reply here, and then it got longer, and eventually I just posted it at my blog. The core parts, since I don’t expect people to follow me over there:

    Hugo Awards, in general, give the award FOR a notable work in the field of Science Fiction, and TO the creator of that work. For a novel, the “creator” is the author or authors. For a fanzine or semiprozine, it’s the editors. For a movie, it’s the director and screenplay writer, and possibly the producer, possibly the author of the book on which the screenplay is based. For a nonfiction book, the award goes to the author or editors, whichever is credited as “making” the book – basically, whoever decided on the contents.

    A fanzine’s editors can generally all claim they won a Hugo.

    Inasmuch as AO3 is an anthology collection, it has a million-plus editors. A million people decide what gets published on it, how those entries are labeled, what warnings they contain, and what subsections they are grouped into.

    (…more at my blog. But those were the main points; the rest is supporting details and exposition.)

  40. Like, I think I work in a friendly workplace and that’s all part of how everybody works well together and that’s something we’ve all done but if a colleague said “I made this a friendly workplace” I’d look at them oddly (assuming there’s wasn’t more context than that).

    @Camestros This is now getting into the weeds of just different mindsets about this, but I don’t think that’s even the right comparison? I would say something more like, if a Friendly Workplace award was given out to your workplace, and in the discussion about it, words like “We all contributed to it and everyone should feel so proud!”, people saying things like “this is all of our award” would be totally normal and acceptable. If the award were passed around and spent a few days at a time going around peoples’ desks (this metaphor does works better in an office setting where there are individual spaces within the community workplace, so if you’re not at an office, I’m sorry, bear with me), that wouldn’t be seen as inappropriate.

    If someone comes up to whoever has the award at the time and goes, “Ah, you’re really friendly then, are you?” and the person laughs and goes, “Yeah, it looks like it!”, that would be appropriate. If two people who both won the award and have equal claim to it, and one says, half seriously, half jokingly, “Yeah, don’t you see? I won a Friendly Workspace award!” the other wouldn’t be offended at that person for claiming something that isn’t theirs; it’s their shared joke and their shared award. The person saying that isn’t claiming more than their share to say “it’s mine”. “It’s mine (and in equal share with you and everyone else who won this award)” was always the implicit understanding of such a claim.

    The accusation that to make such a claim/joke must mean claiming something that isn’t theirs, or being unfair to everyone else in the community, is not the common understanding of the people who’ve been actually saying it. When my friend links me their AO3 fic for something we’ve both been watching and says, “Check out my Hugo-winning fic for this”, I don’t feel like my own part of AO3 has been undermined. I understand if that’s other people’s first reaction, is that such a claim is taking away from everyone else. But that’s not how the people in on the joke ever felt.

  41. Meredith: You’re not doing anything to bother me — I’m sorry if it looks like I wasn’t taking your comment seriously. I took the comment seriously, just thought it would lighten the atmosphere to crack a joke about the dance idea. And my attempt worked about as well as every other attempt so far in this particular discussion.

  42. Elf: Inasmuch as AO3 is an anthology collection, it has a million-plus editors

    Probably not. Can a million people at AO3 reject material? Edit contributors’ text?

  43. I got very disheartened yesterday. It looked, for a moment, that people would stop re-litigating the past and try to find a way forward. And then, bam! Some new players came in and it started all up again.

  44. LectionaryStan on September 21, 2019 at 3:33 pm said:
    If someone comes up to whoever has the award at the time and goes, “Ah, you’re really friendly then, are you?” and the person laughs and goes, “Yeah, it looks like it!”, that would be appropriate. If two people who both won the award and have equal claim to it, and one says, half seriously, half jokingly, “Yeah, don’t you see? I won a Friendly Workspace award!” the other wouldn’t be offended at that person for claiming something that isn’t theirs; it’s their shared joke and their shared award. The person saying that isn’t claiming more than their share to say “it’s mine”. “It’s mine (and in equal share with you and everyone else who won this award)” was always the implicit understanding of such a claim.

    That’s pretty much what I was thinking. Knowing the context and in a friendly space somebody saying “I won the award” makes sense. Both parties know that this isn’t strictly true but also know that isn’t exactly what is being said. On the other hand, if I was in some more formal context then I’d see it differently. Let’s call them Bob and Jane as the colleagues who just had a bit of a banter about winning the friendly workplace award. It would be weird for Jane to say “You know Bob that you did not literally win the award” – we can assume Jane has misunderstood the nature of the conversation they were having. Jane would appear hostile to Bob.

    A more formal context might be this. Bob had applied for a job elsewhere and has asked Jane to be a referee. On his job application, Bob has written that he personally won the friendly workplace award. Jane says to Bob: “You know Bob that you did not literally win the award.” That’s a different situation and Jane is correctly telling Bob not to embellish his CV.

  45. @Mike Glyer

    Probably not. Can a million people at AO3 reject material? Edit contributors’ text?

    Yes, through the Report Abuse form. We can also suggest authors make edits to their work through comments, although how that is viewed varies wildly and is highly dependent on what type of edit is suggested.

  46. @Camestros Yeah, I think I agree with all of that. My only thing is that the second, formal situation hasn’t been shown to have happened, while the first situation has.

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