(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.
- Candorville makes Trek and Doctor Who jokes.
(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.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
File 770:
Starts with Astounding
Then Tiptree tweeting
Fandom is on a roll
But listen to me now
AO3:
Forever and ever
File 770:
I’ve got to keep control
I remember doing kerfuffle
Fighting for my tribe
Nothing could budge me
Not cookies or green tea
All:
Lets do the scroll loop again!
Lets do the scroll loop again!
Narrator:
It’s just a repeat of what’s said
All:
And then repeat it again!
Narrator:
Nothing new to be said
All:
But we’ll fill this thread
It’s the fandom wank
That really drives you insane
Lets do the scroll loop again!
Lets do the scroll loop again!
Hampus Eckerman: That’s effin’ brilliant!
@Fade A
I know how to use Twitter, thank you very much, and I use Tweetdeck. And the tweets by people with “Hugo Award winning fanfic author” or some such thing in their bios or nicknames that I saw were retweets or tweets someone else had liked. I might even have seen most of those tweets not on Tweetdeck, but via the Twitter app on my phone.
@Bill
One of the lesser puppy hangers-on claimed to be a Nebula Award nominee on his author website, because he and two friends or so had nominated one of his stories for a Nebula, even if he never came anywhere near the ballot. I just checked his website and he no longer calls himself a Nebula nominee, though I’m not sure whether he saw the light himself or whether the SFWA told him to knock it off. And I’m pretty sure this guy wasn’t the only one. It must have happened more than once or twice, since the preferred wording is now Hugo or Nebula finalist.
And yes, the people who do this sort of thing are jerks, but a group as big as AO3 is bound to have its share of jerks. I don’t even doubt that the vast majority of AO3 members would condemn such behaviour. But it will still happen. After all, we’ve already had someone trying to sell pins on etsy and someone offering a “Hugo winner” pin as a Kickstarter reward, we’ve had a couple of Patreons claiming to be Hugo winners based on the AO3 win and someone selling t-shirts.
No matter how much you think that you’re only tweeting to your friends who understand your jokes or that no one cares because you’re using a pseudonym (and several of the accounts Bill listed seem to be using their real names), Twitter is still a public place. Ditto for Patreon, Tumblr, Facebook, etc… Plenty of people, magazines, sites, etc… who are Hugo finalists and winners have accounts on these platforms, too, and quite legitimately put “Hugo finalist/winner” in their bios. And yes, a username like “Pink_Fluffy_Unicorn” (again, apologies if this is a real account) might seem like an obvious pseudonym, but fanzines, fancasts and semiprozines also have social media accounts. And do you offhand know the title of every fanzine, fancast or semiprozine ever nominated for a Hugo and that “Pink Fluffy Unicorn” isn’t in fact one of them?
If you search for “Hugo Award finalist” or “Hugo Award winner” on Twitter, Patreon, etc…the non-serious users will show up along with individual Hugo winners. Twitter’s or Patreon’s search engine doesn’t distinguish between the hypothetical Pink Fluffy Unicorn and e.g. N.K. Jemisin or Seanan McGuire who have every right to call themselves Hugo winners.
To a casual social media user, this might be a minor annoyance. But the members of the Mark Protection Committee are obliged to regularly search the web and major social media sites for potential infringers. And even if it’s pretty obvious that the hypothetical Pink Fluffy Unicorn is clearly joking, when they call themselves 0.000001% of a Hugo winner, they still add to the noise that drowns out the signal, i.e. the infringers.
Finally, you’ll notice that the Mark Protection Committee waited for almost a month before they asked OTW to put up that not very well worded, “Please stop doing this” announcement on AO3. This suggests to me that they waited for the jokes to die down by themselves and only felt compelled to act, when they didn’t.
So today I read synecdochic’s (aka rahaeli’s) post about not just the legal viability of WSFS’s trademark claim, but also why very few of her comments have shown up here. That makes me seriously doubt the… shall I say, integrity? of this community’s willingness to actually listen to AO3 fen’s side of the argument. Especially if JJ actually is a moderator here, after being so vehement and tunnel-visioned for the last few days.
You know what, I’m gonna pull back and think about whether I actually want to engage here. Why bother putting hours into writing explanations if other fans’ painstakingly researched essays just get held in moderation or deleted? I’ll go vaccuum my cat for the evening instead.
Lis Coburn: Remarkable how social media never runs out of people who’ll go into a community and leave a skunky comment so they can report back somewhere else how unwelcome they have been made.
@Lis Coburn
I don’t think JJ is actually a moderator, but I could be wrong. And stuff does get hung up for one or another reason, without malice involved. Most of the people here aren’t arguing against AO3 (or I’d be screaming).
@Lis Coburn
JJ does some behind the scenes stuff and compiles posts for File770 like the yearly eligible series report but has never, to my knowledge, moderated comments.
Re: synecdochic’s comment, Mike Glyer has given his reasons elsewhere in the threads: It was early in the discussion, the comment was full of legal code with little context, which he felt would only add more confusion, he communicated with synecdochic to try and reach an agreement about adding that context to her comment. She refused. She was well within her rights to do so, but to act like it was some sort of conspiracy to nobble the AO3 argument when Mike Glyer’s stated position at the time and throughout was that Twitter jokes and AO3 celebrations did no harm whatsoever to the Hugos and were in fact a positive, is a bit silly, to say the least.
The conflation of the opinions of three or four File770 commenters/Filers with the policy of not only File770 as a whole but everyone associated with it continues to be, well, wrong. And annoying.
Anna Feruglio wrote: “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.”
Hi Anna. I’m responding now after giving myself time to reflect on the reaction to my comment. I did not, and did not intend to compare the substance of the issues in Racefail to what’s going on here. I was talking purely about the reputational damage, and the way things were escalating. While that escalation is common to many of these kinds of disputes, I chose Racefail ()of which I wrote a summary some years ago because many people on both sides are familiar with the degree of toxicity it generated, and, because the manner and speed in which this has blown up forcefully reminded me of it.
However, it was obviously an insensitive comparison, and I apologise to you and others I offended.
I won’t say more because this blowup has now gone past the point where either side is listening, and I didn’t help things the first time.
Andrew on September 23, 2019 at 4:36 pm said:
Not just during the Puppy years. Many of us are old enough to remember when simply admitting that you were an SF fan was enough to earn scorn, derision, and possibly some bullying.
Also worth noting: many of the Puppies were (and a few may still be) WSFS members–they wouldn’t have been able to shove their crap onto the ballot if they weren’t! So, when we say that WSFS folks aren’t all the same, we really mean it! Infighting has been a thing in WSFS since day one! The wounds from this latest skirmish may be fresh, but the battle is nothing new.
@Xtifr: True. I oversimplified. I’m old enough to remember that style of mockery as well.
Regarding the other point, I judged the more recent wounds to be the most sensitive ones, but I agree that that’s not necessarily true.
(eta: by “latest skirmish”, I mean the puppy attacks, not the AO3 kerfluffle which, by WSFS standards, barely rises to the level of “heated debate”.) 🙂
@Xtifr: I understood which skirmish you meant (but it never hurts to be precise).
Meredith:
Not to say how annoying the made up opinions forced upon three or four Filers are. But it is kind of fun to see how people who have been in Fandom four times as long as me call me part of “the old guard”. Or when I who have never even been to a business meeting suddenly am a representative for the WSFS.
Hampus Eckerman: I guess it’s a battlefield promotion?
Lis Coburn: But the same way JJ gets to claim that it’s perfectly fine to interpret anyone who threatens the Hugos as being just like a Puppy
I did not say anything even remotely resembling this, and holy hell are you pushing my “stop deliberately lying about me” button.
So yeah, stop deliberately lying about me.
@Mike
In some ways it reminds me of the typewriter episode at LASFS.
(Move to table until the sun becomes a red giant.)
P J Evans: I don’t think JJ is actually a moderator
I’m not a moderator. I have lots of private e-mail conversations with Mike Glyer, and I’ve come to know his character quite well. We often butt heads on things behind the scenes. Sometime he agrees that I’m right, and sometimes I agree that he’s right. Sometimes we just have to agree to disagree.
So when he tells me what occurred, and somebody posts a vastly different account of it, I have a pretty good idea which one to believe.
Meredith has posted a very good explanation of what has happened in this particular case.
Mike Glyer:
For my new hard earned Xp, I will buy the following skills:
Serpent Surveying
Nitpickers Time Spend
Galactic Groan
I can talk about how some of the moderation works at File 770, based on my observations, and on questions I’ve asked of Mike and the answers I’ve gotten. (This is, of course a function of my automatic “how does this actually work?” engineer response.)
All posts by first-time commenters go automatically to moderation. A commenter is identified by the nym + e-mail address combination. So if someone has posted a new comment using the same e-mail address with a different nym, or the same nym with a different e-mail address (including a typo in either one), the system considers it a post by a new commenter, and it automatically goes to moderation.
Posts using certain inflammatory keywords will automatically go to moderation.
People build up credibility points when they participate here in good faith over time. If someone who has been a good participant in the community completely loses the plot, Mike may delete their comment and send them a private e-mail remonstrance about it, or he may just send a warning (ask me how I know this).
How the commenter responds will have some effect on what happens next. If they acknowledge that they’ve stepped over the line, apologize, and say that they will do better, that will likely be the end of it. If they double-down and continue to be belligerent, depending on their past history as a participant here, they may end up:
1) going onto the moderation list for a set period of time, so that for awhile all of their comments have to be approved;
2) go permanently onto the moderation list, so that their comments will always have to be approved before they are allowed to post;
3) be permanently banned (from which it is possible to come back, if someone is willing to apologize profusely and show that they’ve changed their ways, but this doesn’t happen very often).
The longer and stronger that someone has been a good-faith participant here, the more leeway they are given. If a first-time commenter’s post is trolling, belligerent, or abusive, they get no leeway, and their comments are likely to be set to permanently go automatically to Trash.
Sometimes Mike goes to sleep. Sometimes he has real-life things that he does like spend time with family members or other activities. So sometimes comments will sit in moderation for a long time before he takes a look at them and decides whether to allow them through. Sometimes, rather than releasing a moderated comment, Mike will contact the commenter to have a dialogue about what was said, perhaps with a suggestion that the comment’s intent could be communicated in a better manner than it actually was.
Sometimes comments will inexplicably get sent to Spam with the thousands of actual spam comments — so if the commenter doesn’t mention it as Peace did, then Mike has no idea that the comment ever existed and went to Spam. I’ve taken a look at Peace’s post which originally got sent to Spam, and my best guess is that the word “Bestsellers” in combination with a long list of things (as opposed to a long section of prose) tripped the Bayesian Spam Algorithm. So if someone’s comment doesn’t post, if they’re a frequent commenter they can mention it in another comment, and if not, they can contact Mike at mikeglyer [at] cs [dot] com and ask about it.
Ultimately, this is Mike’s house, and he decides what gets posted here. I have found him to be extremely lenient and willing to entertain opinions which do not align with his own (hence the number of blog posts he has posted which were authored by other people, more than a few with which I am aware he vehemently disagrees). He is also willing to give the benefit of the doubt to people for much longer than I would, in cases where I would have just dropped the banhammer.
Moderating this blog is a hell of a lot of hard work, and not a job that I would want to take on.
@JJ
synecdochic didn’t just post a “different account”, she copied and pasted the entire email exchange as evidence. What is there not to believe?
@Meredith
I think you’re missing the problems people have with what happened with synecdochic, which are these:
1). Mike held her to a much higher standard than he did everyone else. Other people were making legal arguments with no evidence or context whatsoever, including arguments that were factually inaccurate. These were not screened. I therefore find Mike’s reasons, as given, insufficient to explain his behavior.
2). Phrases like “While I admire to some extent your self-educated legal arguments…” and “That’s just your belief” and “Which is to say, it appears as if you are building on a bad foundational assumption”, while not indicative of a “conspiracy to nobble the AO3 argument”, do seem to reflect a condescending attitude. If that’s what a well-researched legal argument from someone with experience dealing with intellectual property law gets, especially considering that nobody has yet to contradict the facts of her statement (and even Mike accepted that the caselaw supported her argument, at least enough to agree to post it), why should other AO3 defenders expect that their comments are being read in good-faith?
phocion42:
AO3 defenders? Is there someone attacking AO3 and if so, where!? This was a new thing to me.
Huh. The same synecdochic who wanted to post a comment here that included the line “…or Mr Glyer has forwarded you private correspondence without my consent” like she thought it was a bad thing? Why am I not surprised.
All I know is that I was willing to post synecdochic’s long legal comment if more support was provided. I wrote an email — you’ve seen it, of course. I didn’t get an answer til 24 hours after the comment was originally left. That answer provided sufficient support and I wanted to add it to the original comment and post it. If what synecdochic wanted was the comment posted, that could have happened right away at that point. You are aware that synecdochic then (1) took offense at the idea of adding that material, and (2) withdrew permission to post the original comment.
After all that, you object to my tone too?
The small group here are getting called “the WSFS people” mainly because you guys have spent the past week basically saying “my interpretation of the Hugo win is correct, you shouldn’t be saying [x], [y[, or [z]” and presenting yourselves as the defenders of the honor and respect of the Hugo Awards. OF COURSE, most people who know nothing about the Hugo Awards– which is a huge portion of this vast horde– don’t know enough other than to see people acting as though they have The Hugo Authority and assume you guys ARE part of the The Hugo Thing. I mean, why else would you care so much about a niche award?
Yes, we can quibble about how important the award is, but I, a librarian in a mid-sized city, have had to explain The Hugo Awards to my coworkers who order our books. If people who work with books for a living don’t know the award, you’re niche enough that it’s not surprising the general population of fandom doesn’t know who is and isn’t actually an authority.
I don’t know why it’s difficult to understand. The people who are actually paying attention know you have nothing to do with the award or con (and, honestly, I’m still kind of confused about why you guys care so much), but people for whom this wank is too much of a timesink, or who don’t care enough to track down the source? They pretty much just heard “the WSFS asked AO3 to do a dumb thing, and then people connected to WSFS got mad when AO3ple didn’t agree”. They don’t care that you’re not officially associated with the society or award when you’ve positioned yourself as defenders of the award and no one officially connected to the award have disavowed you.
sherlockian: The people who are actually paying attention know you have nothing to do with the award or con
If you’ve actually been paying attention the comments here, then you’re aware that many of the people who comment here at File 770 have served on committees for Worldcon, WSFS, and The Hugo Awards. Some of the people here have served on the committees for many Worldcons.
So can you explain to me how that translates to “you have nothing to do with the award or the con”?
Or maybe it’s that you haven’t actually been paying attention?
@JJ
If you want to own the bad will you’ve caused between the AO3 community at large and the WSFS community that overlaps with it, then go ahead. But it sounded like there were at least a couple of people here who have been pushing back against the AO3 jokes, and who don’t feel that they are authorities in the context of the Hugo Awards (Hampus, above, seems to imply it, at any rate).
And, of course, I know that a number of Hugo winners (Yoon Ha Lee, Naomi Novik, and Ursula Vernon) have said that they are a) part of the WSFS community and the AO3 community and, b) disagree with the louder discussion participants on File770 RE: how AO3ple should joke about or talk about their award.
But if you feel that you are representative of the Hugo and WSFS community, I’ll step back and let you own the backlash you’re receiving.
@sherlockian: this goes back to what I was saying about SF fans being mocked and disrespected. The Hugo may not be the biggest award in the world, but it was built by and promoted by fans, and fans made into one of the biggest awards in SF (generally considered more important even that the Nebula, which is given by the SF writers guild SFWA). We (science fiction fandom–not just WSFS) made it important and respected over the course of the last eighty years, and it is. No, your average librarian may not be sure what it is, but just ask some of the winning writers what it’s done to their income. Or ask some of the big SF publishers how much sales are affected by putting “Hugo Award Winner” on the cover of a book. Fans worked hard, and managed to earn respect, and I think some of us still aren’t quite sure how that happened… 🙂
So when one group of people that we happily gave the award to appears to be mocking the award, some of us (especially the older ones who remember when mocking SF fans was commonplace) are going to get upset. Possibly more upset than they should be, in some cases, but some scars take a long time to heal.
I think that some of us may have thought that fan writers, of all people, would be above such things.
sherlockian: I know that a number of Hugo winners (Yoon Ha Lee, Naomi Novik, and Ursula Vernon) have said that they are a) part of the WSFS community and the AO3 community and, b) disagree with the louder discussion participants on File770 RE: how AO3ple should joke about or talk about their award.
sherlockian, quite a few people who are both part of the community here and at AO3 have stated that they don’t agree with AO3 members saying that they are individually official Hugo Award winners. I’m sure you’re not saying that their opinions are less important.
sherlockian: it sounded like there were at least a couple of people here who have been pushing back against the AO3 jokes, and who don’t feel that they are authorities in the context of the Hugo Awards (Hampus, above, seems to imply it, at any rate).
Hampus has been a Worldcon member and a Hugo voter for several years. He is perfectly entitled to have an opinion, and his opinion is valid. What’s more, his opinion is correct, in that the way the Hugo Awards have always been run is that individual participants in group projects don’t get to claim that they are individual Hugo Award Finalists or Winners.
I don’t think anybody objects to the “.000000001% of a Hugo” jokes. But as Cora Buhlert has pointed out, the people who are joking by calling themselves “Hugo Award Winner” on Twitter are pretty much indistinguishable from the real individual Hugo Award Winners — and from the AO3 members who aren’t joking.
A number of people have explained that WSFS really does need to try to prevent such false claims, because they do damage the Hugo Award brand in the sense of making harder to protect and continue to claim the trademarks. You can insist that’s not the case all you want, but it’s true. If millions — or even thousands — of people are falsely claiming to be official Hugo Award Winners, then the award, and the marks, lose their value. It’s really understandable that there are WSFS members who are unhappy about this.
Is there any point in WSFS trying to police this on Twitter? Hell, no. That would just be a never-ending whack-a-mole. It would have been nice if the AO3 members who are seriously trying to claim that they are individual Hugo Award Winners would have the respect and courtesy to stop — but then respect and courtesy have never been part of the equation here, which was why, after a month, WSFS finally asked OTW if they’d be willing to gently say something.
Look at how proud AO3 members are (as they well should be) of the project after it’s been in existence for 12 years. Consider how proud AO3 members would be of that project after more than 65 years.
That is how proud a lot of Worldcon members are about the Hugo Awards. Perhaps you can understand why people falsely claiming to be winners, and producing merchandise saying they are winners, might feel really disrespectful to a lot of Worldcon members.
@Xtifr
As other people have noted, and I’m not really interested in arguing, transformative fandom has the exact same experiences as SFF fans from the mainstream at large for being in fandom, and the again from the SFF community in general because they are transformative fans.You can feel that AO3ple are being flippant, and also understand that it is, in part, a reaction to SFF’s general treatment of them and people like them.
But, at any rate, trying to enforce its norms this way doesn’t look great to those of us who aren’t as invested, and it’s absolutely confusing the issue at hand. Several people seemed to be objecting, in this thread, to being taken as part of “the old guard” or representative of WSFS and the Hugo community as a whole, while simultaneously having set themselves up as people who are Very Concerned About The Treatment Of The Award.
So what I am saying is not “The Hugo Awards don’t matter”, but “people who do not already care about the Hugo Awards have no way of knowing which of these Hugo defenders are actually representative of the Hugo community as a whole”. If JJ feels they (she?) are representative, than you can take my whole point with a massive grain of salt, but my original point was “people are lumping File770 commenters and WSFS together because the differences aren’t immediately obvious to people outside of the AO3/WSFS overlap and those who are closely following the blow-up”. Which, again, isn’t helped by whoever is in authority at WSFS refusing to step in and clarify.
Sherlockian:
Don’t include me with people pushing back against jokes. I have pushed back against trademark infringements and people being totally serious about their claims.
If you want to look at authorities, you will not be able to find any as WSFS is a non-hierarchial organization, but the closest you can get is the Hugo administrator and trademark lawyer cited in item 1) of the scroll.
Pity no one wants to listen to him.
sherlockian: Which, again, isn’t helped by whoever is in authority at WSFS refusing to step in and clarify.
So you’re saying, that if WSFS publicly posts a statement saying something like:
All AO3 members are welcome and encouraged to celebrate and enjoy AO3’s Hugo Award win. We just ask that you please not refer to yourself individually as winners, or produce merchandise saying that you are individually winners. Please do celebrate the fact that you are a Participant in a Hugo Award-Winning Project and Part of the Hugo Award-Winning Archive of Our Own.”
that that will sort it? That the vast majority of AO3 members will understand and respect that?
@Hampus
I’ve been watching this whole this from it’s inception and you absolutely did set yourself up as a defender– whether it was of trademark or something else. If you are not an authority within WSFS or the Hugo community, talking about how people are ruining it, and arguing the way you did at the beginning of the blow-up made you sound like you thought you were one.
I’m not going to argue the details. I was merely explaining why people are treating you as “old guard” or “hugo authority” when you don’t feel you are.
@Hampus
Is there anyone who is currently a spokesperson of some sort for the WSFS? I see that scifantasy has been involved in an official capacity in 2016 and will be in 2021, but isn’t right now.
@JJ
Honestly, at this point, I couldn’t tell you. If something like that had been posted originally– or even within the first few days of the past week, it probably would have soothed things. Now, though, a lot of hackles are up, and you’ve got Hugo winners of other types of Hugos, like Yoon Ha Lee and Novik, saying they actually believe everyone on AO3 won a Hugo. Whoever is in WSFS authority probably should reach out to the OTW board and/or lawyers and/or someone who is part of both WSFS and AO3 community and brainstorm that.
I’m not setting myself up as an authority either. I dropped in because there was a question I thought could be answered to everyone’s satisfaction (“Why are people conflating certain Filers with all of WSFS?”) Take it or leave it, I guess.
Automatic Fishwife:
No. WSFS is non-hierarchial and all members of a Worldcon are members of the WSFS. So between Worldcons, it is dormant.
The closest you can get is the Mark Protection Committee – of which Kevin Standlee is a member – and the Hugo administrators for the following Worldcon. Anything more official does not exist.
Oh good, another round of “Filer hivemind: People are really sure it’s a thing for some reason” and “hurt feelings: whence they came, and whose are most valid”. We’ve definitely not debated those enough.
Please, I’m begging you. We don’t need to groundhog day this argument every time we get a new page of comments.
Hampus Eckerman: The closest you can get is the Mark Protection Committee – of which Kevin Standlee is a member – and the Hugo administrators for the following Worldcon. Anything more official does not exist.
Adding to that: what is posted as the official results by the Hugo Administration of one Worldcon is final, and no later Worldcon, Business Meeting, or Hugo Administration is empowered to add to or change those results.
AO3 is a collective, made up by its individual members, but none of the members are, in and of themselves “the entirety of AO3”. They are a diverse bunch of characters, with a strong will.
WSFS is a collective, made up by its individual members, but none of the members are, in and of themselves, “the entirety of WSFS”. They are a diverse bunch of characters with a strong will.
There are also people who are part of both AO3 and WSFS. But that does not mean that AO3 is WSFS, or that WSFS is AO3.
I’m Spartacus.
Sure, I can understand that. But doesn’t it seem a bit misguided to try to punish the group of SF fans that just said “hey, we think you guys are cool! Here’s an award for putting together something so cool!” Even if some other group of SF fans was once mean to you?
I’m not trying to assign blame here. I’m hoping (possibly in vain) to contribute a little understanding. As natural as it may be for me to defend my “side”, I know it’s not actually a side; it’s a random group of often-quarrelsome individuals that I don’t always agree with. And I’m pretty sure your “side” is rather similar. 🙂 And I’m hoping (again, possibly in vain) that we can figure out how to celebrate our commonalities, rather than squabbling.
@xtifr
See my previous comments. I was here to state that the reason for the Filer Hivemind thing is that AO3 has a massive constituency and most of them don’t care enough to do more than go “huh, some people are really mad about the Hugos”, and aren’t going to differentiate between Filer, WSFS, and whatever else is going on, unless someone really wants to put in some legwork.
You’re going to have to talk to the people on that twitter list a page back or one of the DW posts on the topic if you want to contribute understanding, or talk to people you think are punishing the SFF community. I understand the situation and am not interested in discussing it.
@sherlockian: so you’re just here to lecture us? I really don’t understand the purpose of your posts if you’re not here to gain understanding.
As for twitter, not a member, not interested in becoming a member. And not concerned enough about the whole kerfluffle to do more than try to answer some simple questions when someone seems to have dropped by to ask in a place I can post.
Synecdochic will forever and always have a huge amount of credit in the fannish community for the creation of Dreamwidth. This isn’t about who-is-most-believable, this is: A misunderstanding happened, here are the facts, and there is nothing more sinister going on. She feels skin-crawlingly uncomfortable with any edits, that’s fine, but editing is not and has never been inherently wrong at all times. She turned down that option, which is also fine. And it’s fine that a comment objectively different – legal code rather than plain English – is treated differently. So. Once again: There are no conspiracies here. Misunderstandings happen. It’s a thing, it sucks, moving swiftly on.
(She says, feeling like this is just going to come up again in twenty comments or so, strongly relating to Sisyphus right now, not gonna lie.)
———
File770 regulars have argued pretty much every part of the spectrum when it comes to opinions on this (and most) debates. Not. A. Hivemind. So if we could all stop going “Filers think THIS” or “Filers are THAT” it would be very nice.
I mean, points for making me at least half as annoyed with some of my fellow transformative works fen as I am with some of my fellow Filers (the whole “suspicious of anyone with an AO3 account” thing was a highlight, fun times) on this topic, I guess, but seriously: Please stop. I don’t enjoy being told I must think things I decidedly do not think.
Each filer their own hivemind
Also, no-one doing the hivemind schtick ever picks my opinions to hate and also inflict on everyone else. Sniff. I feel it should be done by lottery, or popular vote, or maybe we could take turns.
“Sorry, it’s not [Filer1’s] opinions this week, you’ll have to blame all of us for [Filer7’s] opinions instead. They – and now, for this week only, we – think cheesecake is bland.”
This week we are all Camestros Felapton. 😀
@ Meredith:
Cheesecake? I’ve been thinking that about blanc-mange! THOUGHTCRIME! I shall go and arerst myself, right now. No! Wait! I shall let Trigger arrest me!
Meredith, I promise to give you my turn as hivemind next time, if I can have a Hampus Moment.
We’ve all been Camestros Felapton before! Several times! Not fair!
I’m sure it’s Meredith’s turn this time, and mine next week!
Right?
“Scroll if you must this old grey head, but dare not say aught bad about cheeecake!”
I thought we were Spartacus this week or is that only Mike? And when did he stop being Camestros?