A topic thread for your comments about WSFS rules changes.
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A topic thread for your comments about WSFS rules changes.
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I would applaud the admins taking a hard line, for reasons already discussed this week. We’re sacrificing too many years to Beale. This year’s winners are laudable but the full ballot is tragic.
Ultragotha,
You’re right, it wasn’t included BUT the link was there and the reason for not including the whole thing were purely legal concerns.
The rules say nothing about the voter packet and not much about the ceremony either, I think, so no rules would have been tossed. What the WSFSBM could do about it if things roll according to the rules, I don’t know.
You may be right about the BM attendees’ approximate reaction, though.
@Bill: I’m not aware of any slate-like behavior in Retro Hugo campaigns to date.
This year, Vox Day didn’t post a Retro list for the Rabid Puppies. The Sad Puppies listed only three Retro choices (all of which were by Robert Heinlein, and it’s unlikely that any of them needed the Sad Puppy support to make the ballot).
Speaking as a four-time Hugo Administraotr (1998, 2002, 2006 and 2015):
Anyone how feels that they, as a Hugo Administrator, should have the power to exclude nominees just because they don’t like them…should never be allowed to administer the Hugos.
rcade — Keith Kato, of The Heinlein Society, accepted the Retros on behalf of Heinlein. Jonathan Eller, Ray Bradbury’s biographer and Director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, accepted Retros on behalf of Bradbury.
Any WorldCon is free to dispense with the Voter’s packet. There would be grumblings but they can do it. It’s not in the constitution. It’s just a well-loved convenience for the membership and finalists.
They also could include some things provided for the voter packet but not others. Absent a really good reason, like a lawyer telling them they were putting people in legal jeopardy by downloading an offering, the Business Meeting would Not Be Happy.
We know the Puppies are griefing us. But I don’t think the Business Meeting would view kindly a deliberately un-evenhanded set of Admins. Look what we did after the LoneStarCon Admins stuck Lady Astronaut of Mars in BDP-Short, and that *was* a technical, as opposed to anti-griefing, decision.
How are Hugo Admins chosen? How does one volunteer? In all the discussions we’ve had this hasn’t come up and I’m not sure where to look to find the information.
Anyone how feels that they, as a Hugo Administrator, should have the power to exclude nominees just because they don’t like them…should never be allowed to administer the Hugos.
As a minor Rat in 1984, I second this. (It did come up. We allowed the questionable nominations. We even tried to find out what voters actually intended, on ambiguous ballots, including some of the final ballots, because getting it right matters.)
I started off thinking that of course the admins should have the power to boot slaters’ votes, but I’ve been binge-re-reading Sherlock Holmes stories and have changed my mind.
It matters, a lot, that no admin has been willing to admit to wanting the power. “Worldcon admin” is not a homogeneous category, not when it comes to the nitty-gritty of conrunning. Look at the split among past and present admins over measures like EPH for a handy demonstration. Universal agreement means, necessarily, that every single conception they have of their position, no matter what else it holds, holds this, and that’s remarkable.
SF fandom has a long-standing fascination with rules and definitions, for various reasons, which I am absolutely not getting into in any detail here. The relevant fact is that con-going fandom likes to make rules and work out their application. On the one hand, this can lead to endless, often basically futile debate, like on where the boundaries of sf, f, dark fantasy, weird tales, etc., lie, so that we can put every story into one (1) precisely correct box. On the other hand, it actually helps end a lot of debates, because someone can say “But this distinction doesn’t matter for what we’re doing, the rule doesn’t care and so we don’t have to either.”
Conrunning is a lot of things. One of them is helping to develop good rules, and then apply them well so that as large a fraction of the attendees as possible can have as much fun as possible, taking advantage of what the con’s offering. Another is resolving problems and disputes as efficiently as possible, where efficiency is measured by taking into account the con’s various priorities. (Like, “defenestrate anyone found legally drunk anywhere in con space, from any Nth floor where N >= 5” is very efficient in terms of not requiring extensive adjudication. But it’s very inefficient in terms of preserving safe, fun party conditions as is fannish traditional intent.)
It turns out that undeserving works winning Hugos thanks to slate voting doesn’t actually interfere with most congoers’ safety, and while it’s a bummer, it probably doesn’t ruin a lot of people’s congoing enjoyment overall. Which means….that it’s not the sort of thing that’s been part of many conrunners’ experience. Why should it be? And what has prepared them to do that kind of work?
If Hugo admin duties were entirely separate from Worldcon ones, then it might be worth insisting more that this kind of vetting is a suitable chore. But That’s not how Worldcon and the Hugos work, and there appears to be no overall interest in making them disconnected. Perhaps there could be Hugo-specializing admins who do nothing else, but again, not what we’ve got now. What we’ve got are people who think about the happiness and well-being of people at the con as their fundamental mission. I don’t quite see how editing the nominations for morally invalid ballots fit the task, and it seems like no admins do, either.
I’m prepared to think that these folks understand their work, to respect their universal decision that this ain’t it, and to look at other solutions.
Has anyone here or elsewhere suggested that a Hugo administrator exclude a nominee just because the admin disliked it?
@Tasha: Yeah, basically, it’s volunteering. There’s a conrunning culture, with mailing lists and such, unsurprisingly. They interact face-to-face and online throughout the year. They share info about how their cons have gone, who did what, possibilities for the future, cat pictures…picture this place with everyone having volunteered at least one convention, and you’ve got the vibe, really.
Most volunteers start off with grunt-type work, and if they like it, stick with one or more local/regional cons, building up experience and reputation. They trade on that for growing responsibility and authority. Once the alien mind worms have eaten their brain, excuse me, if they’re really hooked, they do the same thing at larger scales, trading on their experience doing X for Con 1 as a recommendation for their ability to do X and Y for Con 2. There are con runner cons, where people gather to socialize and work out matters of interest faster than online, and to get a sense of what others are like in person. This opens up opportunities for some, closes them off for others, as you’d expect.
So the typical Worldcon admin is someone who’s helped run a bunch of other cons, and almost always someone who also has experience volunteering for various positions in multiple Worldcons.
I’ve been writing part of a roleplaying rulebook lately. I seem to be in unusually intensive “let’s learn things” posting mode, even for me. 🙂
John Lorentz:
Any sensible person would feel the same way, I hope. If I’m not mistaken, the failed proposition was about increasing the number of finalists — a thing that does no direct harm to anybody.
That is a judgement call that would have to be made, and the admins feel that they don’t want to make it. Making judgement calls is probably uncomfortable for people who don’t want to make non-technical decisions but I think the Hugo Awards would be in much better shape today and there would not have been any No Award nonsense if we had that kind of rules in place.
A quote from the amendment text: “The purpose of this amendment is to allow the Worldcon Committee to make a judgment call to allow additional finalists onto the final ballot if the Committee thinks that it would be in the best interests of the membership to do so. [–] There is a rare, but extant precedent for a Committee to add a work when they think that the five finalists do not, for whatever reason, reflect the actual intent of the electorate. This proposal would make this authority explicit.”
Voting this down without debate was an unfortunate decision and I was sad (but not surprised) that a bunch of old admins could beat the meeting to agree to that with their rants.
ULTRAGOTHA:
I’ll have to confess that I’m unfamiliar with that case. There have been no anti-griefing decisions that the Business Meeting could evaluate yet, though, so it remains to be seen what it would make of them.
Has anyone here or elsewhere suggested that a Hugo administrator exclude a nominee just because the admin disliked it?
It has been suggested that the Hugo administrators exclude nominees because they are on a slate. Being on a slate is legal under the current rules, we just don’t like it.
rcade: Has anyone here or elsewhere suggested that a Hugo administrator exclude a nominee just because the admin disliked it?
No.
And there seems to be some confusion between the various things that have been suggested. Spacefaringkitten began by saying that she wished the rule change giving more powers to the admins had been passed. But others have responded as if she were suggesting that the admins should, now and without any special authorisation, have rejected some votes. Some people have proposed that (though the rejection would be on issues of principle, of course, not just because they didn’t like the things); but it wasn’t the point at issue here.
The Hugo ballot being used as a political attack for two years by an arsonist has affected the comity at Worldcon. I don’t think it’s accurate to state that the Hugos are completely independent from how people treat each other at the con. Beale’s arson leaves a lot of people upset and divided. There also has been fear of what might happen at a Worldcon because of this politicized atmosphere.
Nicholas Whyte: Thanks for that analysis. I had not considered before the point that 5/6 would help to mitigate some possible problems of EPH (though that, of course, is not what it was introduced to do). The one EPH result that actually worried me was the replacement of Sex Criminals by Schlock Mercenary, which seemed to me to be penalising convergence on quality; but 5/6 cancels that out; it makes it easier to reconcile convergence on quality with breadth of representation.
I think we’ll need the DP results before we can say for certain what the outcome of EPH would be, though. (The likelihood, I think, is that in Short Form it would bring about a result that many people would consider an improvement – similar in effect to Nominee Diversity, which we have endorsed – but in Long Form it might produce something problematic. Though again we may hope 5/6 would cancel that out.)
I don’t regard it as legal to nominate an entire slate of somebody else’s choices. If a Hugo administrator last year had thrown out all the bloc voted nominations and announced her criteria for doing so, I would have applauded the move. I expect I’ll be told that view puts me in the minority, and I concede that’s probably true.
I don’t regard it as legal to nominate an entire slate of somebody else’s choices.
But there’s no rule actually forbidding it. As I said earlier, it’s considered a bad thing because of the special nature of the Hugos; in regular public elections it’s absolutely normal. But the special nature of the Hugos has never been officially defined.
There’s no rule that says I can’t buy 100 memberships for my friends in exchange for them voting exactly like I do, either. If I got caught, or if I did this in public through my blog, I think it would be within the discretionary power of the Hugo administrator to throw out those votes.
Nicholas Whyte — thanks for your post-Hugo analysis.
You suggested that “Horton Hatches the Egg” would have moved onto the ballot if the new rules had applied. The administrators would have had good reason to disqualify it under those circumstances for not meeting the definition in the WSFS Constitution of a “Graphic Story”: “Any science fiction or fantasy story told in graphic form.”
“Horton” is told in text form, with illustrations. It is no more a graphic story than any other illustrated text story. (But it would have been eligible as Best Short Story).
The next work on the list, Flash Comics #1, is problematic for two reasons:
1. Despite having a cover date of Jan 1940, it was published in Nov 1939 (house ads in other contemporary comics print the release date). I realize that I’m in the minority on thinking that actual publication date should trump cover date.
2. Flash Comics #1 is not a single graphic story, but a collection of six graphic stories. The most prominent one is “Origin of The Flash” (by writer Gardner Fox and illustrator Harry Lampert), which is the first appearance of The Flash, and is what I’d imagine that most nominators were thinking of when they nominated it. But the comic also includes one other significant story, “The Origin of The Hawkman” (by writer Gardner Fox and artist Dennis Neville), which is the first appearance of that character. Again, I realize hardly any one else cares, given that the actual winner (Batman #1) has exactly the same problem and no one has beefed about it.
So if Flash had been kept from the ballot for either of those reasons, the next potential work would have been “Prince Valiant” by Hal Foster. It is subject to the same criticism as I levied against Horton — strictly speaking, it is an illustrated text story rather than a graphic story. In terms of storytelling, the (gorgeous) pictures supplement the narrative, rather than carry it along themselves. It’s much easier to ignore this issue in the case of Prince Valiant, though, as it is told in a medium (weekly comic strip) that is traditionally considered to be a graphic story. But “Prince Valiant” is a catch-all label for several stories that appeared in 1940:
“The Legion of Hun-Hunters” strip #128 (23 Jul 39) – 169 (5 May 40)
“The Road to Rome” #169 (5 May 40) – 187 (8 Sep 40)
“Valentinian’s Justice” #188 (15 Sep 40) – 199 (1 Dec 40)
“Fights for the Singing Sword” #199 (1 Dec 40) – 246 (26 Oct 41)
As in the case of the comic books, it would be better if a single story had been nominated an voted on.
And the last nominee to receive at least 5 votes was “Flash Gordon”, also a catchall, and which is somewhat superseded by the higher-placing “Flash Gordon Ice Kingdom of Mongo”.
And while I’m nitpicking what must seem like every single thing in the category, why was Batman #1 even eligible? What SF/Fantasy elements did it contain in 1940?
And you’d be entirely wrong.
I need to create fake Hugo nomination data for a year so I can run it through some slate-detection code. I thought I’d do 2012, since that year preceded the puppies.
This is easy for the works that are counted in the 2012 statistics.
But I can’t figure out a good way to fake the nomination counts for the long tail of works that got too few nominations to be listed.
Any programmers here with an idea for how to tackle that?
@rcade: Something like a fifth of Worldcon members vote for the Hugos, and not all people who vote for the Hugos are all that worked up about the Puppies and their works. I’ve talked with acquaintances who regularly do the supporting membership thing, vote, and know little and care less about it, figuring it’s just another fuss that’ll blow over.
It’s a thing for the con to consider, of course, but admins do. And the more I think about it in a con-centric kind of way, the more sense the admins’ anti-desire for nomination-editing power makes.
You think an open campaign of buying the votes of 100 members would be allowed to occur?
If someone did that and the Hugo administrators allowed it, there’d be a huge outcry among members. It’s an overt, undeniable example of rigging a vote.
There are publishers and authors who could afford a lot more than 100 memberships.
Show me a rule against it, and then you’d have some basis for thinking “something should be done”. Until then, you’re only saying the the administrators should through out ballots simply because they don’t like the votes.
Coordinating votes has a long history. From people trying to suggest what prople should vote for in GEnie forums, to the author who sent his mother a check for a membership with an already filled-out ballot with Post-It note attached telling her how to send in the ballot (she forgot to remove the Post-It when she mailed it in), to a certain religious group started by a former pulp writer.
But as long as the voters are members and there’s some indication that the votes are cast separately by the holders of those memberships, there is absolutely no basis for the administrators to arbitrarily throw out votes (no matter how despicable some of those choices are.).
There are currently no rules against slates in the Hugo rules. And above all other things, we want Hugo administrators who follow the rules, not their own personal whim.
Spacefaringkitten said: That is a judgement call that would have to be made, and the admins feel that they don’t want to make it. Making judgement calls is probably uncomfortable for people who don’t want to make non-technical decisions but I think the Hugo Awards would be in much better shape today and there would not have been any No Award nonsense if we had that kind of rules in place.
I…think you can only hold this opinion if you’re unclear about the role of the admins and where exactly the decision making power resides. Because it has historically resided with the members and not with the admins, coming up with a plan that requires a Strong Admin Making Good Decisions is going to get you pretty much the response that +2 got in the business meeting, which was polite disinterest and summary dismissal.
Yeah, it’s waaaay more efficient to have one or a few people in charge of something, but that’s not the sort of organization WSFS is and any remedies for current and future issues have to take that into account. That’s why EPH and 5/6 passed in spite of minority opposition and +2 had only a tiny minority supporting it.
@Bruce Baugh
Thanks pretty much what I thought from glimpses I’d gotten.
@rcade There’s no rule that says I can’t buy 100 memberships for my friends in exchange for them voting exactly like I do, either. If I got caught, or if I did this in public through my blog, I think it would be within the discretionary power of the Hugo administrator to throw out those votes.
ETA: removed John Lorentz said it better.
It’s why I wasn’t surprised +2 got shot down without any debate. It’s why several of us can state your wrong so quickly and easily.
Learning the history of past Hugo voting scandals, how they were handled, the business meetings reactions to them, wider fandom reaction, and how it’s affected how the Admins see their job in response to it helped me understand why things are the way they are and why it’s amazing we got as many changes as we did this year. Took a couple years for me to learn so much pre-SP1-SP2 following many rabbit holes.
Spacefaringkitten: Voting this down without debate was an unfortunate decision and I was sad (but not surprised) that a bunch of old admins could beat the meeting to agree to that with their rants.
I think you’ve arrived at an utterly erroneous understanding about what actually happened.
+2 was voted down without debate because the members attending the WSFS Business Meeting overwhelmingly did not want it. No one (as far as I observed, and as far as I am aware) was “beaten” into having that opinion.
I would say that at least 95% of the people in that room were very strong-minded individuals with their own very pronounced opinions (and the other 5% were there because they cared, but weren’t really sure about the minute details of what exactly was being proposed).
These are not people who are “browbeaten” into going along with anything. People who agreed fervently with each other on some things disagreed just as vehemently with each other on other things.
The reality is that the vast majority of the people there viewed +2 as a proposal to give arbitrary powers to a small number of individuals who will change from year to year. Some opposed it because it violated their sense of “fairness”. Some opposed it because of the “arbitrary powers to individuals” part. Some opposed it because they don’t feel Hugo Admins should have to be responsible for making those sorts of judgments. For the record, I opposed it for all of those reasons.
As unhappy as a lot of people are about the Puppy manipulation of the Hugo ballot, I think you would be surprised at the vast numbers of people who, like me, have zero interest in getting down in the Puppy mud by violating their own sense of fairness.
Yes.
And as a result, the members would vote any resulting nominations under No Award, which is how overt vote-rigging has generally been handled in the past.
And the reason they don’t do it is that it’s antithetical to the spirit of the Hugos and they’d wind up getting No Awarded. So they don’t.
If they actually did persist with it, then perhaps rules would be written to block it, as we’re working on blocking slating and grieving now.
But there is no rule that says “That which would cause outcry among the members is illegal.”
No, I’m saying they should be thrown out because the votes were bought.
I wouldn’t have thought it necessary to pass a rule that makes it illegal to buy votes. If something as overt as a public vote buying campaign would be allowed because no one thought to pass a rule against it, we’re so open to abuse it makes me wonder how many stunts voters have pulled in past years.
Would you even support a rule that rejected votes which were bought, or would you be uncomfortable asking a Hugo administrator to make this determination?
No, I’m saying they should be thrown out because the votes were bought.
Precedent says that they’re not different from other ballots. The rules don’t distinguish. And how are you going to tell them from, say, a school club that bought memberships as a group?
(This has come up in the past.)
@rcade
In the post-nominations “post your ballot” thread you have (iirc) over a hundred real ballots to play with, if that’s any use to you. You could run EPH in miniature, or use it to judge the distribution of the long tail.
We know this isn’t true any more. Beale’s stunt is antithetical to the spirit of the Hugos and his choices often get No Awarded, but he has kept doing it. Why? Because he’s openly antithetical to the spirit of the Hugos and it brings him a lot of attention.
So we’d put up with it for at least two or three years.
I guess I don’t have as much patience for riding this out as other members.
Depends on the rule, and how the admin is expected to make that determination. If the admin is just supposed to be a strong man who can sweep aside any ballot based on their unilateral determination that it must have been bought, that would strike me, at least, as bad.
rcade – No, I’m saying they should be thrown out because the votes were bought.
No Award is how those votes get thrown out.
You’re making the same error as Spacefaringkitten about where the decision making authority resides. It really doesn’t reside with the Hugo admins, who don’t seem to want it anyway.
A dictatorship (aka Strong (Wo)Man) is an efficient form of government. It can make decisions quickly and without discussion, doesn’t have to answer immediately to a constituency and makes sure the trains run on time. It’s also not a form of government that most of us want to live under and probably not a good model for a member run organization.
Who’s been buying memberships and directing how the members should vote?
And WSFS is taking action against it. As I noted when I said:
“If they actually did persist with it, then perhaps rules would be written to block it, as we’re working on blocking slating and grieving now.”
Maybe, maybe not. Seems to me that 3SV would take care of the problem of openly buying votes pretty bluntly, so even as a hypothetical, that may be taken care of soon.
Clearly.
I don’t know if it makes any difference, but maybe, instead of insisting that you can’t imagine the rules being what they are, instead of a more autocratic-admin formulation you’d prefer, you could weigh the fact that at least to date, the voting members of WSFS are clearly opposed to the more autocratic formulations you favor.
I mean, sure, you’d like it better that way (or imagine you would), but the larger membership, when offered the chance to vote on that sort of thing, vote against it.
The rules aren’t what you want them to be, and there’s no wellspring of support for them becoming what you want them to be. As such, other approaches will need to be formulated.
Spacefaringkitten on August 27, 2016 at 11:42 am said:
Did you watch the videos of this year’s and last year’s Business Meetings? Because there is no way on God’s Green Earth that any bunch of old anyones could browbeat the WSFS business meeting into doing anything the majority disagree with. That is one of the most independent-minded body of people I have ever seen in action.
ULTRAGOTHA:
Lady Astronaut of Mars is a novelette published as an audio book and also as text (with two small stage directions in parenthesis) on the author’s web site. Members nominated it in both the Novelette and BDP-Short categories. The Hugo Administrators, plainly within the constitutional discretion we give them, moved it from Novelette, where it had enough nominations to make the final ballot, to BDP-Short, where it did not. This was discovered when the final long-list was released right after the LoneStarCon Hugo award ceremony.
The reason the Administrators gave was that, due to it being an audio book and also because of the two small stage directions in the text version on the author’s web site, they considered it to be a Dramatic Presentation more than written fiction.
A large number of WSFS nominators for LonCon 3 (the next WorldCon) did not agree with this decision for a variety of reasons including having a previous audio book anthology considered eligible for the written fiction categories. They expressed this as feedback to the Administrators and on Social Media. Tor.com published a print edition of Lady Astronaut of Mars on their web site without the stage directions in the hope the LonCon 3 Administrators, should it be nominated as a Novelette by the LonCon 3 members, would now consider it a print work published that year as a distinct work from the version published the year before. The following year it gained enough nominations to make it to the final ballot as a Novelette and it won, to boot.
Members also drafted an amendment to the WSFS constitution to enshrine our opinion on this for future administrators. It was passed at LonCon 3 and ratified at Sasquan.
Bill – on Horton Hatches the Egg, I don’t see why it is very different from the Flash Gordon strip. (Horton, Flash Gordon.)
In any case, the nominators deemed it eligible.
On cover date v publication date, it’s pretty clear what the practice has been, and for good reason – it is much easier for nominating fans to look at the front cover than to delve into Library of Congress records or contemporary mentions to determine eligibility. So Flash would have been Ok, but Captain America was not.
I must say I struggled to find much of sfnal relevance in some of the Dramatic Presentation Short Form elements. I suppose talking rabbits and pigs do count in and of themselves, and I guess voters thought so, as those finalists were voted second and third.
Andrew M – I share your tastes in graphic novels, I suspect. The other case that concerned me was rescuing the winning fancast from elimination in 2014, which is fortunately achieved by 5&6.
No Award doesn’t throw anything out. The nominees who finish below it are listed forever in the Hugo results for that year with their nomination and vote count.
All No Award does is keep somebody’s paws off a rocket at the price of a voting outcome that looks like a personal insult against the nominees who finish below it.
rcade, are you a member of WorldCon 75? If you are, there are several people who would help you draft an amendment to present to next year’s business meeting.
I conceded my viewpoint is likely in the minority.
I didn’t know until John Lorentz’s comments that Hugo administrators would allow an openly conducted vote-buying scheme. I’ve voted for over a decade without knowing how far the use-no-discretion philosophy goes.
There is no other approach. I am speaking out on the chance that others feel the same way I do, or will feel that way in the future when they’re tired of how we deal with arson.
I’m a trickle. I hope to become a wellspring. I just need to find other drips.
Here’s a thing I wrote about voting systems. It barely mentions the Hugos at all, but it might be of interest to some people here.
I will be one. Are you telling me this as general advice, or because I asked about a no-vote buying rule? If the latter, I wouldn’t start that ball rolling without the support of a business meeting lifer.
@ Nicholas Whyte:
I hadn’t looked at Flash Gordon, and now that you point it out, I can’t disagree. But like I said, the fact that it and Prince Valiant are both comic strips weighs somewhat in their favor, as comic strips and comic books have traditionally been viewed as closely related, while illustrated fiction seems more distant.
In any case, the nominators deemed it eligible.
Obviously, the nominators did, else they wouldn’t have cast nominating ballots. I wonder if the admins reviewed it in this light, though. I tend to think the vetting process (by the nominators/voters and the admins) for the Retro-Hugos isn’t as rigorous as it is for the Hugos (witness the need to remove “Darker than you Think”, or the fact that no one involved noticed that Batman #1 is an anthology). Like I’ve said elsewhere, I suspect much of the support for entries in the Retro-Hugos (particularly the ones that aren’t text-based fiction) is based on nostalgia, memories of encountering the work long ago (rather than having read it within the last 14 months, as current Hugo nominees must have been) and a perceived sense of historical importance.
I don’t really know what that means. If you’re saying that there aren’t any other approaches, I think you’re mistaken, since we’ve been debating, proposing and voting on other approaches than the one you’re pushing.
If you’re saying there are no other approaches you’re interested in, well, so it goes, but I assume WSFS will continue as they’re going.
Without attempting to interfere with your rights of free speech whatsoever, I hope you’ll eventually decide that saying much the same thing over and over to the same people will not prove productive, and you’ll at the very least try saying it to other people.
I, as a (four-time) Hugo Administrator, have never made any statement on the eligibility or non-eligibility of the “also-rans” in the long list–instead, I just listed them as the voters ranked them. It’s only the items on the final ballot that I’ve verified whether they belonged. (It’s hard enough to get those checked in time before final ballot is released, let alone another ten–or more–per category.)
Don’t judge based on three panels. FLASH GORDON also looked like this in 1940:
https://comics.ha.com/itm/original-comic-art/comic-strip-art/austin-briggs-flash-gordon-daily-comic-strip-original-art-dated-6-4-40-king-features-syndicate-1940-/a/7136-92026.s
@John Lorentz: Clearly, you need better tools. Dad remembered reading a Lensman parody, either during his World War II time on duty or close to it, which included an integrating goniometer. He used that as a module name at one point, to his co-workers’ confusion. I say if it’s good enough for ’70s NASA, it’s good enough for Worldcon today.