(1) AGENT OF TERRA? Brad Templeton confesses, “I was investigated by the feds for taking a picture of the sun”.
A week ago, a rather strange event took place. No, I’m not talking about just the Transit of Mercury in front of the sun on May 9, but an odd result of it.
That morning I was staying at the Westin Waterfront in Boston. I like astrophotography, and have shot several transits…
I did not have my top lenses with me but I decided to photograph it anyway with my small size Sony 210mm zoom and a welding glass I brought along. I shot the transit, holding the welding glass over the lens, with all mounted on my super-light “3 legged thing” portable tripod….
At 10am I got a frantic call from the organizer of the Exponential Manufacturing conference I would be speaking at the next day. “You need to talk to the FBI!” he declared. Did they want my advice on privacy and security? “No,” he said, “They saw you taking photos of the federal building with a tripod from your hotel window and want to talk to you.”
(2) SHINING EXAMPLE. Ann Leckie discovered someone’s named a nail polish after her.
https://twitter.com/ann_leckie/status/732208511619239938
There’s a Jemisin and Le Guin too. In fact, Nerdlacquer has named its products after all kinds of sf/f references, from Octarine to General Effing Leia.
(3) #STARWARSFORJJ. Not our JJ. An Irish kid — “Star Wars hero Mark Hamill stuns brave Northern Ireland cancer teen Jamie Harkin”
Star Wars hero Luke Skywalker was reduced to tears when he felt the remarkable force of a brave Northern Irish teen who has fought off cancer twice.
Actor Mark Hamill, who plays the famous Jedi Knight , met up with super fan Jamie Harkin.
The brave 17-year-old has raised more than £15,000 for other children battling the disease….
And on Monday the Derry lad joined his idol for breakfast during a break in filming for the latest instalment of the sci-fi saga in Donegal.
“People say that you should never meet your idols, because you build them up in your head so much that when you do meet them, they are a let down, and to that, I say, ‘you’re wrong’,” he said.
(4) SLACKEROO BANZAI. Birth. Movies. Death. is not enamored of reports that Kevin Smith might get to make a Buckaroo Banzai TV series.
Dear fans of The Adventure Of Buckaroo Banzai,
We regret to inform you that, on a recent episode of his podcast, Tusk director Kevin Smith revealed that he has been approached by MGM about possibly adapting The Adventures Of Buckaroo Bonzai for television.
In situations like these, it is natural to look for someone to blame for your grief. In this case, it appears that you have The CW’s The Flash to thank (or, rather, Smith’s recent episode of The Flash).
According to i09, the studio was impressed with Smith’s work on that single episode (the studio is apparently unaware of Tusk, Red State, the porch sequence from Tusk, the trailer for Yoga Hosers, Mallrats, Smith’s intention to make a movie called Moose Jaws, Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back, most of Dogma, Clerks 2, and Cop Out), so much so that they invited him over to pitch ideas….
(5) KALDON CLARION SCHOLARSHIP. SF author Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon passed away on April 20. A GoFundMe campaign has been started to create a Dr. Phil Memorial Scholarship for the Clarion workshop.
Janiece Murphy says, “Dr. Phil was a kind and generous man, and we’d like to memorialize him in a way that reflects these qualities.”
Murphy explains there are two ways to give money.
Folks can donate to the GoFundMe campaign at https://www.gofundme.com/drphilclarion , or they can donate directly to Clarion in Dr. Phil’s name at http://imagination.ucsd.edu/support.html . If they choose the latter, I would ask that they ensure the gift is designated for the Dr. Phil Clarion Scholarship, otherwise it will go to the general fund.
The GoFundMe appeal has raised $1,045 of its $5,000 goal as of this writing.
(6) WHAT’S IMPORTANT. Joe Sherry makes a great point in “My Favorite Stories Sometimes Win: A Nebula Love Story” at Nerds of a Feather.
First, it should be noted that two of my favorite stories from 2015 did, in fact, win Nebula Awards on Saturday night. I adored both Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti as well as Sarah Pinsker’s “Our Lady of the Open Road“. Both are wonderful stories and I am so happy both Okorafor and Pinsker were recognized as being excellent pieces of fiction…
This leads into my second thing I’d like to talk about. So much of the conversation about awards, whether it is the Nebula or the Hugo or the any other award you’d like to mention, is about the winner. Don’t get me wrong, of course I want my favorite stories to be recognized as the “best” novel or short story or whatever other category. Of course I do. I not only get emotionally invested in the story, I sometimes also become emotionally invested in the success of the author. Of course I want my favorite author to win all the awards and sell all the books. Of course I do.
That’s okay, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that just receiving a nomination is a significant recognition and is difficult enough to do in any given year, let alone a single time in a career. Publish your best work in the wrong year and it may still miss the ballot for any number of reasons. The recognition of a nomination is important, both for the work as well as for the field itself. The nomination says “yes, this story was excellent and we value it”….
(7) KAGAN BOOKS AVAILABLE. To capture a news item seen the other day in comments: Baen has republished several long-out-of-print Janet Kagan works as ebooks – Mirabile, Hellspark, and The Collected Kagan.
(8) SFWA ELECTIONS. SF Site News covered this weekend’s SFWA officer elections.
Last year saw some officers elected for two year terms and others elected for one year terms. This year, elections were only held for positions which were elected for one year terms last year. Erin M. Hartshorn, Justina Ireland, and Lawrence M. Schoen ran for two open Director-at-Large positions.
- Vice President: M.C.A. Hogarth, re-elected, unopposed
- CFO: Bud Sparhawk, re-elected, unopposed
- Director at Large: Justina Ireland
- Director at Large: Lawrence M. Schoen
(9) NEBULA DIVERSITY. K. Tempest Bradford reported on the Nebula Awards for NPR.
…This weekend’s winners reflect many different types of diversity beyond gender. Half are women of color, half are self-identified queer women – which mirrors the overall diversity of the ballot. 24 out of the 34 works nominated for the award were written by women from multiple racial and cultural backgrounds and a spectrum of sexual orientations. Of the 10 works by men, five of them were written by people of color and queer authors.
“The Nebula ballot is everything a ballot should be in this community,” said Brooke Bolander, author of the nominated story “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead.” “It’s diverse, it’s wide-ranging, and it includes amazing stories by amazing authors.”
That’s an important point, given the ongoing conversation about diversity happening now in speculative fiction circles. The Hugos — the other major awards in the genre — are nominated by fans. Last year and again this year, Hugo nominations have been affected by the Sad and Rabid Puppies groups, who campaign against what they see as affirmative action-based nominating and voting in the Hugo and Nebula awards.
But “people want these stories,” says Alyssa Wong. She was the first Filipino author to be nominated for the Nebula award last year and is now the first to win it for her 2015 short story “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers.” Though she says she’s seen some Puppy-style criticism of her success, most of the reaction has been positive.
Readers “want to read stories from the points of view of people who have been historically been locked out of the genre,” Wong says. “‘Hungry Daughters’ is about a group of women who are all Asian-American and all from very different backgrounds, all of whom feel isolated in some way … But clearly this is not just Asian-American audiences who this is resonating with. I’m appreciative that people are reading more widely now. It means more opportunities — not just to be published, but to be seen.”
(10) SITE PICKED FOR 2019 COSTUME-CON. Over Mother’s Day weekend at Costume-Con 34 in Madison, WI, the site for Costume-Con 37 in 2019 was chosen. It will be run under the auspices of MCFI with Aurora Celeste and Sharon Sbarsky as co-chairs. Social media still to come.
Costume-Con 37
Salem, MA
March 22-25, 2019
DoubleTree Boston North Shore
(actually Danvers, MA)
$129 Hotel Rate including Free WiFi, Free Parking, and Free Cookies!
$60 ($45 for those that voted) through at least December 31, 2016
(11) HUGO FIX. Damien Walter takes a math-lite approach to fighting slates, where Yobs = Ø
https://twitter.com/damiengwalter/status/732257822767878145
(12) DARLEY OBIT. Dick Darley, who directed Space Patrol, died April 21 at the age of 92. He also directed the first season of The Mickey Mouse Club.
Born in Los Angeles, he served as a fighter pilot in the United States Navy during World War II, then studied radio production and writing at USC. First working at San Diego’s KFMB, he later joined L.A.’s KECA where in 1950 he became director on the channel’s new series Space Patrol.
Set in the 30th century, the series followed the adventures of Commander-in-Chief Buzz Corry of the United Planets Space Patrol, who along with his sidekick Cadet Happy faced off against a rogues gallery of villains inspired by then-current Cold War. For its first 10 months, the show aired as 15 minute episodes Monday through Friday. In December, 1950, ABC commissioned a half hour version that ran on Saturdays, concurrently with the 15-minute version. Aimed at children, the show picked up a following of adult viewers and would go on to make history when it became the first regular live West Coast morning show to be beamed to the East Coast.
(13) A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. Norman Spinrad has some strong opinions about Facebook.
Well my attempt to split my so-called Facebook “Timeline” into several different forums has been a dismal failure. Didn’t work, and more recent news (and I mean real news, not Facebook’s so-called “News Feed”) about Facebook begins not only to explain why, but begins to illuminate far larger issues about what Facebook is doing and trying to do.
Facebook has been accused of using both secret algorithms and human “editors” to control and even censor its so-called News Feed and “Trending topics” feed to suit the political agenda of Mark Zuckerberg &Co. But not to worry, Zuckerberg himself has appointed a committee to investigate.
Facebook had generously offered to finance free Internet service to third world countries, notably India. Well not exactly. The Facebook “free Internet service” would only connect to web sites approved and chosen by Facebook. India at least being a sophisticated democracy said no thanks. And other so-called “developing countries” have likewise gotten the point.
The point being that Facebook is becoming a threat to democracy itself, nowhere more so than in the United States, where a majority of people are getting their “news” from Facebook already and Facebook is expanding the process exponentially, as witness how it has weaseled itself into most of the televised presidential primary debates and now is funneling selected news stories from legitimate journalistic news channels through “News Feed” and “Trending” to far larger demographics than they can possibly reach by themselves.
And now it has been revealed that Facebook is in effect filtering and editing these feeds according Mark Zuckerberg’s political agenda. But not to worry, Zuckerberg has appointed a committee of his own minions to investigate himself.
Why is this a threat to democracy? Because it is already a huge threat to professional and politically neutral journalism itself, the commons cornerstone of any democracy….
(14) PROTECTION OR THEATRE? Recently the Society for Promotion of Japanese Animation, which runs Anime Expo in Los Angeles, announced a new Youth Protection program that requires all employees, volunteers, vendors and panelists to submit to a criminal background check and take online courses. Christopher Macdonald argues in an Anime News Network editorial that “The SPJA Needs to Change Its Youth Protection Policy”.
On the surface the new policy seems like a great idea. Who isn’t in favor of protecting children from predators? This policy isn’t unwarranted either, as with every similarly large event, bad things happen… and have happened. Unfortunately the SPJA’s new policy has many unintended consequences. Here are but a few:
- Cost: It isn’t entirely clear who has to pay for the background checks, but these checks could be very expensive for people who have to pay for them. While a typical background checks costs as little as $50, the actual price can be prohibitively expensive for some vendors. For example, some background checks cost an extra $50 for every country a subject has visited in the past 5 years, and an extra $200 if they have lived outside the USA. With those prices, my background check would cost over $1,000 (note: AX has stated on Twitter “No artist, volunteer, guest, staff is being asked to pay for own bg check,“ however it seems that vendors and exhibitors do have to pay for the background checks).
- Privacy & Security: The new SPJA policy requires that all vendors register with their real names & info. Many people in our industry, particularly professional and semi-professional cosplayers, have problems with stalkers. They do not want to be forced to wear badges with their real names, and they do not want their home address in the SPJA’s database. It may even be illegal to force employees of California based vendors to undergo background checks. There is a very limited number of cases in which an employer can mandate a background check, and this is not one of those cases. Therefore, it may be illegal for companies like Aniplex of America, Bandai, Crunchyroll, NIS America and Viz Media to ask their employees to undergo the background check.
- Good People will fail the background check: I won’t go into too much detail about this here, there is plenty of information online about it, but many people often have significant trouble with background checks. Here are but a few of the reasons you can fail a background check: a name change, a minor violent arrest (got into a fight in a bar back in your college days), visiting an “undesirable” country (have you been to Iran or Cuba? I have), sharing your name with an actual criminal, etc…
- It’s Insulting: Picture this, “Hi, you’re one of the top manga artists in Japan, and we’d really like to have you as a guest of honor at our show, but first we need to make sure you aren’t a child molester.” This is straight up offensive; you should expect that people will be insulted by this. And they are; I can say with absolute certainty that some of AX’s potential guests have pulled out because of this, and in at least one case an artist is disturbed enough that it is having an effect on their work. Have you noticed that we’re less than 2 months out, and almost no guests of honor have been announced? Guest contracts are in limbo while they wait for this issue to be resolved. For some guests it is already too late for them to commit to the event, their schedules are made more than 2 months in advance.
(15) TESTING FOR HUMANITY. The Futility Closet blog describes a proposed replacement for the Turing Test.
The original test, in which a computer program tries to fool a human judge into thinking it’s human during a five-minute text-only conversation, has been criticized because the central task of devising a false identity is not part of intelligence, and because some conversations may require relatively little intelligent reasoning.
The new test would be based on so-called Winograd schemas, devised by Stanford computer scientist Terry Winograd in 1972. Here’s the classic example:
The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they [feared/advocated] violence.
If the word feared is used, to whom does they refer, the councilmen or the demonstrators? What if we change feared to advocated? You know the answers to these questions because you have a practical understanding of anxious councilmen. Computers find the task more difficult because it requires not only natural language processing and commonsense reasoning but a working knowledge of the real world….
In July 2014 Nuance Communications announced that it will sponsor an annual Winograd Schema Challenge, with a prize of $25,000 for the computer that best matches human performance. The first competition will be held at the 2016 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, July 9-15 in New York City.
(16) SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED. George R.R. Martin weighs in on the EPH discussion with “All the King’s Horses…” at Not A Blog.
I can hear the proponents of EPH and 4/6 saying their reforms were never meant to be a cure all. Yes, I know that, I never believed otherwise, and I applaud your efforts to help. I just wish these reforms helped more. Neither EPH nor 4/6 is going to prevent us from having VD on the Best Editor shortlist from now until the heat death of the universe.
And I also know that there are now other proposals out there, proposals that call for three-stage voting, for negative votes and blackballing, for juries. Some of these cures, I fear, might be even worse than the disease. We have plenty of juried awards; we don’t need another. Three-stage voting, with fifteen semi-finalists that get boiled down to five finalists and one winner? Maybe, but that considerably increases the workload of the Hugo administrators, whose job is hard enough already… and I fear it would actually ratchet up campaigning, as friends and fans of those on the List of Fifteen rallied around their favorites to get them on the List of Five. And a blackball round, voting things off the ballot? Is that really a can of worms we want to open, in this present climate? That would dial the ugliness up to eleven, I fear… or higher.
Sadly, I don’t think there is an answer here. No magic bullet is going to fix this. And I fear that the people saying, “pretty soon the assholes will get bored and go away,” are being hopelessly naive. The assholes are having far too much fun.
(17) BABELFISH NOW REALITY? Here’s the pitch.
Although the Indiegogo did not reach its goal, Waverly Labs appeas to be going ahead with production — the preorder campaign is scheduled to launch May 25.
1. How much will it cost? Retail is expected to be $249-$299
2. How much is the early bird? Early bird will be first come first serve. A limited quantity will go for $129, then another round for $149, and then a few more Late Early Bird options for $179+. Signup here: www.waverlylabs.com/launch
3. When can I preorder the Pilot? The preorder campaign is scheduled to launch on May 25th. We will keep everyone updated via email. As long as you have signed up for the launch then you will be alerted.
4. When will they be delivered? We are releasing a translation app this summer for basic translation. This is included in your purchase. However, the earpieces require much more testing, manufacturing and production time. Therefore, we anticipate the earliest will be in late fall/early winter, although fulfilling all orders could take until next spring. Again, it is first come first serve.
5. What’s included? The full package includes the Pilot and secondary earpiece (2 earpieces total), 1 portable charger, and an accompanying app. The app is where the languages are downloaded for the earpiece.
The rest of the FAQ is here.
[Thanks to Rick Kovalcik, JJ, Will R., Mark-kitteh, Lola McCrary, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
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@Kevin Standlee And by your own numbers only about 20% of those eligible to nominate this year did so. What if the entire 20K that were eligible actually nominated?
@Jake: 20% is actually quite high. I have seen the numbers for other award systems and they are quite a bit lower. I think it might be unrealistic to expect more.
My feeling is that this is basically a GMing problem, and should be dealt with the same way munchkins and griefers generally are. Add a clause to the rules that say, “The Hugo committee has the discretion to throw out any ballots that they deem disruptive and not in the spirit of the nomination process.” Sure, Beale and his twits would cry foul, but they will cry foul no matter what you do or how you solve the problem, and this would at least get rid of them. Any procedural solution just turns the whole thing into an endless round of rules lawyering, and guys like Beale live for petty bickering and min-maxing. Just do what good GMs do. Tell them, “You don’t get to play anymore because you’re an asshole.”
@Kevin Standlee
I can see how that might be, although we do seem to be looking at a run of years in the near future where we’ll start hearing complaints about the poor disadvantages Americans who have had the Worldcon taken away from them
I’m not seeing the similarities between the effects of a permanent rule change, and a temporary situation brought about by people’s own decisions on what to bid for and when. If there is a run of non-US worldcons then I’m sure the pendulum will swing back soon enough.
@Sean A Wallace Well, I’d say that if 80% of the nominators allow a troll and a few dozen minions minions to mess up the process, I don’t think any sort of rules-tinkering is going to fix anything. Any system can be gamed. It’s up to the members to keep things honest.
Isn’t there some saying about if you don’t vote you get the government you deserve?
Maybe what’s required is both relatively sophisticated analysis of nominations and votes, to detect slates, plus an undemocratic dictator/committee authorized to evaluate and disallow frivolous (or worse) nominations.
@John Seavey I agree with you 100%, that the most effective solution is to simply dismiss the trolls from the room.
However, I’d love to see a solution that would could be applied universally. A nominations system that doesn’t reward bloc voting, regardless of the politics of the bloc, would be preferable in the long term. If it were up to me (and most would be glad that it isn’t), I’d only allow one nomination per category. After all, nominating five works means that you’re nominating the one you think should win and four that you believe shouldn’t. That wouldn’t prevent blocs from getting one or two works on the final ballot, so we’d still have a Butt Raptor problem, but it would be much more difficult to dominate the entire ballot.
And if someone were to dominate the entire ballot? Then the GM can boot ’em.
If the people proposing this committee had had it this year, what would they have liked it to throw out? Castalia? Tingle? Pournelle? Weisskopf? Stevenson? Butcher? Polansky?
You could do it by ballot, but what about ballots that include some but not all slate items? Is a ballot with Stephenson, Butcher, Weisskopf and Pournelle a slater, or a fan with varied tastes?
I’d very much like to hear practical examples.
I’ll believe that these people have invented a practical, good automatic translator when they deliver it to my front door in a flying car powered by fusion.
All told, I like 3SV or DN far better than allowing the admins go through and pull things by fiat. Aside from the able reasons people have already laid out, theres the question of time. I have heard a few people now say that inserting an extra round, while more work, would not be insurmountable. I think that the work of running an intermediate round is likely to be far less than having the Admins have to pour through piles of ballots to read minds.
Re (13)
Isn’t there bond to be some suppression of conservative media sites as long as Facebook is trying for the Trending feature to be more of a news source? I mean, as long as they have some people picking the stories that would pass muster in J-school, you’re not going to see in-depth coverage of Jade Helm’s plan to take over Texas, or the President’s secret Kenyan Muslim birth certificate, or the cruel oppression of straight white men, or how the rich recipients of grad student STEM grants invented global warming to oppress the penurious oil companies. There’s the view that something should have a factual basis in reality to be view was news.
The conservative media has its traffic, but why should it expect it to pop in places that are curated to the simple standard of “supported by facts that exists in contemporary reality.”
Yes, he does seem to be putting a radical spin on the story.
Couple of things.
1. I bought supporting memberships for World on before the Hugo packet was ever conceived. I will continue to purchase when I can’t attend because World on supporting membership IS NOT ABOUT THE AWARDS; it’s about supporting the institution and making sure the convention has the money to do so.
This dynamic makes me think that perhaps voting should be divorced from membership; nominating and voting privileges ought to be a separate charge…maybe. (Due nods to what diminishing the vote pool can do.)
2. The one sure way to know if someone has nominated a slate is to see whether their ballot matches the slate. Right now, we all vote anonymously. I for one would have no objection to having my nominating ballot displayed publicly during the nomination orocess.
If we’re going to have any system that negates individual voters/ballots, the only transparent way to do is is for all nominating ballots to be made public. No need for such with the final vote, of course.
Anonymity contributes to this problem; I’m positive that there are slate voters out there who only participate because how they nominated will not be known.
There are problems with this – ones that could affect people professionally, but we’re stuck dealing with the reality of the circumstance and I don’t think that any potential solutionshould be overlooked.
Crying foul isn’t the problem. They’re going to do that. How do you prevent someone with puppy sympathies getting to be an administrator five years down the line?
Peace Is My Middle Name said:
I will not dispute this statement in the general case. But: can you think of any examples where no one knew the predator was a predator, and they had a conviction for being a predator which would have turned up on a background check? That is the only case where this policy would make a difference.
The usual failure mode is that people know about some sketchy behavior, but it’s dismissed as “Oh, Bob is just awkward/super-friendly” or “But it’s worth it for the extra memberships he’ll bring in!” And if Bob is that good at getting his behavior excused, how is he going to have been convicted of anything?
nickpheas said: “Crying foul isn’t the problem. They’re going to do that. How do you prevent someone with puppy sympathies getting to be an administrator five years down the line?”
Honestly? They don’t have the subtlety or the patience for that. The whole reason they’re doing this is that it’s easy, it’s (relatively) cheap, and they get the instant gratification of people paying attention to them and getting angry. They wouldn’t be able to hide their opinions and associations long enough to get onto a Hugo administrative committee, and Beale doesn’t really have the logistical skill to run that kind of a scam. He’s too addicted to bloviating about how brilliant he is to actually do something that requires him to keep quiet for a long period of time about his true intentions.
Having just watched Monday’s Person of Interest, 6741 I have to say they’re raising the Holy Shit Quotient for the series to a whole new level.
Some speculation in ROT13 to avoid late arrival spoilers:
Tvira Fnznevgna’f yvxvat bs gheavat crbcyr vagb zrng chccrgf naq vgf fcernqvat bs vgfrys ivn znyjner vagb zber naq zber ryrpgebavpf V’z guvaxvat vgf raqtnzr vf fbzr fbeg bs Genafpraqrapr zber va yvar jvgu Gur Oyvtug sebz N Sver Hcba gur Qrrc. Gur jubyr frevrf unf unq n Ivatr yvxr srry gb zr.
Gur bgure boivbhf vasyhrapr vf Arhebznapre, naq V pna’g uryc jbaqrevat vs gur svanyr fbyhgvba jvyy or Gur Znpuvar gnxvat gur Jvagrezhgr fbyhgvba.
After all, nominating five works means that you’re nominating the one you think should win and four that you believe shouldn’t.
That’s not how it works. You’re nominating five works that you thought were that good. If you think only one is that good, why would you nominate the other four?
(In other news, my missing suitcase has arrived. I guess what stayed in Vegas, happened in Vegas.)
Two steps:
1. Adopt a rule: If a nominating ballot contains anybody who has been permanently disqualified the entire ballot will be discarded.
2. Disqualify anybody who has publicly and repeatedly stated their desire to destroy the Hugos. In particular VD.
I’m not sure if I am serious about this… but it might work…
Jake on May 17, 2016 at 8:58 am said:
1. I still don’t think it would make as much of a difference as you think, unless there was a mechanism for concentrating members votes in some way. You’d just see the long, flat curve get longer and flatter.
2. Sean Wallace says it well:
Sean A Wallace on May 17, 2016 at 8:59 am said
Based on historical analysis, as the number of members grows, the percentage of participation seems to shrink. Now that’s probably reversed a bit of late, but I still agree with Sean that 20% is a better turnout percentage than you might think. You can’t force people to vote. The right to abstain should always be part of the right to vote in a free society. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Australia.)
John Seavey on May 17, 2016 at 9:07 am said:
This is not IMO an unreasonable proposal; however, convincing two consecutive WSFS Business Meetings to pass it might be challenging. Are you up to the challenge of proposing it? I’ll draft the proposal for you if you are.
Mark on May 17, 2016 at 9:10 am said:
You might be surprised at how foolish people can be. Back in the 2000s, when we’d had a run of US/non-US/US Worldcons for a while (2002 San Jose, 2003 Toronto, 2004 Boston, 2005 Glasgow, 2006 Anaheim, 2007 Yokohama, 2008 Denver, 2009 Montreal), I encountered people who insisted that the Melbourne in 2010 bid was illegal, because “the rules require that Worldcon be in the USA in even-numbered years.” That’s not in the rules, and actually never has been, although there was a brief period in 1970-71 where Worldcons had to be in the USA in odd-numbered years. Nobody remembers this because the rule was repealed before it could have any substantive impact.
One thing that I’ve learned over the years is that many people make up rules in their heads, and that “sandlot rules” are all over the place. And humans are pattern-matching primates, to the extent that we find patterns even when they are the wrong patterns.
GiantPanda on May 17, 2016 at 11:59 am said:
Mark on May 17, 2016 at 9:45 am said:
Who gets to decide who (or what) has been permanently disqualified?
The broad analogy for solutions to fix the Hugos are:
1. giving enforcement discretionary powers to act (admin committee to throw out ‘slate’ ballots),
2. taking away citizens’ rights to reduce their potential ability to cause problems (limiting nominating to attending members only), or
3. empowering the citizens to act as a whole (DN with approval voting in the second stage).
Of the three, I would be against the first two ideas (they make me distinctly uncomfortable), and would support the third idea. I want to increase democracy, not reduce it.
@John Seavey
You’re right and you’re wrong. Right that Voxman’s people don’t have that kind of discipline. The wrong is that it puts a weapon out there which could be used by God Kelly knows who.
Would it have been ok had the administrator has that power in the year everything Seanan McGuire wrote got on the ballot? What if the administrator really hated horror and thought that only science fiction deserved a rocket? What if the administrator’s girlfriend had run of with a prominent author? What checks and balances are available?
@rea
And this would be the NY Times that pointedly ignored the Soviet induced famine in the Ukraine back in the 1930s? Is that really an appropriate editorial filter through which the news should pass?
Every media source has their own version of birther/truther/etc going on. That’s why a variety of sources…unfiltered by the folks at Facebook for purposes of the current discussion….are essential to having an informed electorate.
—
Regards,
Dann
Australia raises one eyebrow, rather pointedly puts down a book on the history of voter suppression laws in the United States, and patiently points out that Australians have every right to abstain, but they are obliged to turn up. Then it returns to its reading having correctly assessed that this actually has no bearing on the Hugo Award process. 🙂
*gives oneself pat on back for not getting into political argument*
(1) AGENT OF TERRA? Brad Templeton confesses, “I was investigated by the feds for taking a picture of the sun”.
But The Phantom is a troll for suggesting banning things from conventions in the name of safety will soon result in con-goers being searched and having their cosplay items, writing implements and nail clippers confiscated.
Just sayin’.
The Phantom is a troll because of trolling as the comment above shows ample proof of.
Just sayin’.
The point being is we haven’t heard why Facebook is obliged to be different. Newspapers get to pick what news they report. TV stations get to decide. News Corp owns a vast range of newspaper, TV stations and other media worldwide and gets to decide.
You can have laws requiring some commitment to balance on commercial bodies that act as news media and I can see arguments for that. You can say that is none of the governments grudamn business and I can see arguments for that. But I really can’t see an argument in which mass news media owned by one group of people falls under the second argument but news media owned by a different person falls under the first.
Because then it begins to look a lot like that it is the sanctity of free speech when it comes to Rupert Murdoch but regulating balance when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg.
(1) Brad Templeton confesses, “I was investigated by the feds for taking a picture of the sun”.
Or, as the Feds might put it, taking a picture of a nuclear fusion site.
dann665 on May 17, 2016 at 12:39 pm said:
Facebook is a media source. They’ll have a bias. Even when they remove the editorial staff completely and allow algorithms to control what you see, those algorithms will be gamed and while the bias won’t necessarily be agenda-driven, it will still be there.
The informed electorate will have to seek out their own sources, I guess.
Today’s read — Occupy Me, by Tricia Sullivan
Science fiction. A [spoiler] who looks like an angel is trapped on earth when a [spoiler] steals her [spoiler] and tries to use it to [spoiler] with funds he obtains by [spoiler]. As you might guess, it’s a complicated plot with a lot of reveals.
I’m … not sold on it. As with the other book by Tricia Sullivan I’ve read, I found myself quite interested in some characters but utterly uninterested in others, and at some of the big reveals at the end I reacted with more of a shrug and a “so what?” than anything else. While there is a story here, I got the distinct impression that the story exists mostly as an excuse to let the Big Ideas spool out. In that regard, it reminded me a little of Charles Stross when he gets in that mode, so big fans of that style might find more to like here (and come to think of it, a lot of the book is set in Edinburgh, although I’m sure that’s coincidence rather than homage.)
This is a 2016 novel. I, however, will not be adding this book to the 2016 recommendation list.
The Phantom, I presume you didn’t see Lenora Rose’s question to you in the MidAmericon II Posts Weapon Policy thread.
A link is provided for your convenience.
@Kyra
Great review. I’m actually tempted now just because I want to see how the heck all that goes together!
Karl-Johan Norén on May 17, 2016 at 2:55 am said:
I have yet to see any evidence that Beale is, or ever was, a member of any of the WorldCons he attacked.
Kate on May 17, 2016 at 4:10 am said:
I cannot IMAGINE the Hugo Administers reading Beale’s slate list and tossing those nominees off the final ballot. They have the power to do that, because no one, not even the MAC2 Committee or the Business Meeting can gainsay what they do. They could award a Hugo to my left pinky toe and we couldn’t stop it. But they don’t have the authority or any mandate from the membership to do it. Backlash from the membership and the Business Meeting would be epic. My God, the havoc that would wreak.
Kate on May 17, 2016 at 3:01 am said:
Anything is “possible”. But, given the political dynamics of the WSFS Business Meeting, I find it highly improbable we’d do it.
I agree with NickPheas. Personally, I’d like to find a solution, or at least a partial remedy, that addresses the overall problem, not the specific griefers. Even if they stopped tomorrow, someone else could just do the same thing. So the solution lies in addressing the vulnerabilities of the system without regard to who is exploiting them.
I was dubious about Kevin’s 3SV proposal and I still don’t like downvoting. But given those EPH results it may be that we need to do something like that.
Kevin said:
12,715 people were eligible to nominate this year. That’s a record, but not 20,000.
@Kevin Standlee: Do I need to be physically present to propose something? I mean, obviously I’d want to say something a little bit more sensible than just a one sentence blurt, and I can’t physically make it to WorldCon, but I would be interested in trying to turn that into something not just yammered out. 🙂
@Camestros
I don’t see where we disagree.
My only contention is that the NY Times is as unreliable a source as is Facebook as is The National Review as is The Wall Street Journal as is….
The point….it is made.
—
Regards,
Dann
Well played!
Apologies. I misunderstood.
I don’t know if all news sources are all equally unreliable (e.g. in the UK, The Times is more reliable than The Sun even though both are organs of Rupert Murdoch have the same underlying biases – reliability isn’t just a question of bias) but yes the very nature of a news organization is to pick and choose what to report on of all the many possible things they could report on. So even the most scrupulously fair minded news outlet is still having to think ‘what do our consumers want to read about?’ and that creates political biases of various kinds – particularly in what is NOT reported.
In the Incan ruins of Saksaywaman that sit on the hills above the modern city of Cusco and acts as the head to the underlying puma shape of the former Incan capital, is a natural rock formation. The rocks, via erosion, have formed into a series of undulating shapes with broad channels. If you sit on the top you can descend to the foot of the rocks on your bottom as if on some sort of fair ground ride.
It is a genuine slippery slope.
And people tell me that they don’t exist!
Ergo, all my past slippery slope arguments are correct.
It seems to me that some limitation on nominating (not voting) is quite a reasonable idea. The vote is an expression of popular will, but the nomination is more a matter of people familiar with a field making suggestions to a wider public. (‘Familiar’ doesn’t imply massive expertise; for most categories, if you have read ten items in a category you are more familiar with it than the average fan.) It makes sense that short fiction nominations should come from regular readers of short fiction, that semiprozine nominations should come from people who read semiprozines, and fancast nominations from people who listen to fancasts. If a YA (or youth) not-Hugo is created, it makes sense that nominations (not votes) in that category should come from regular readers of young people’s fiction. The idea that everyone must vote in all categories, in order to stop slates, has a distorting effect on the process.
Of course, open nominations are not inconsistent with the actual number of nominators being small (in fact, that’s what we’ve had until recently). But some limitation may be needed in order to ensure that nominators are people with an ongoing interest in the field, rather than people who have joined up to vote for a particular thing. And I think there has been an ongoing feeling – even before the slates – that the awards somehow lack legitimacy if there aren’t lots of nominators (not just voters): I think that mistakes the purpose of nominations.
Unfortunately, I can’t think of any actual way of limiting nominations which won’t discriminate on a financial and geographical basis, which clearly is not what we want. Limiting it to people who have been supporting members three times might have worked, but it’s too late for that now – many slate supporters would have been members three times by the time it came into force.
I think that limiting Hugo nominations to (previous year and current year) attending memberships could be the most sensible solution. As has been noted, the problem is in the nominations process, not in the process of voting on the final ballot.
Everything we’ve seen so far indicates that the Puppies can keep gaming the nominations process indefinitely; but they have completely and utterly failed to game the voting process, and they seem very likely to keep failing.
A quick search of attending members of Sasquan and (so far) MACII indicates a complete absence of Puppy leaders and banner carriers. By all accounts, Puppy-follower presence was very low at Sasquan. Since Puppy rhetoric is emphatically contemptuous of WorldCon and fandom, this isn’t surprising and seems unlikely to change. And the cost of an attending m’ship is probably high enough to discourage most Puppies from registering just to game the Hugos again.
And if I’m wrong and they do pay the full attending-member rate just to game the Hugos… that doesn’t solve the Hugo nominations problem, but at least it’s win for WorldCon, which will get those much higher m’ship fees.
It would be unfortunate that sincere supporting members could longer nominate, but nominations have traditionally been low, anyhow, and supporting members could still vote on the ballot.
It’s not a perfect solutio (a perfect solution would be one that eliminated the Puppy problem while still allowing sincere supporting members to vote), but I think it’s the simplest and most effective one I’ve heard so far…
By keeping the focus on banning VD all you’re doing is increasing his influence. No matter what rules you come up with, he’ll keep trying to find ways to game them until he gets bored or the Hugos have tweaked themselves out of recognition, which means he wins.
Maybe you should just drop the nominations all
together and just have people vote for their favorites and tally it from there.
Or maybe just keep on as usual until they get tired of playing games. They live on the outrage, after all.
Considering attending m’ship size and how much WorldCon moves around, I think there would be a substantial sized nominating pool (5,000? 8,000?) in any given year if past/current attending m’bership was the basis of eligibility, And there would certainly be geographic variety in that pool, which would consist of: Sasquan & MacII; MACII & Finland; Finland and San Jose or New Orleans; San Jose or New Orleans and Dublin; etc.
By “sincere,” I should add, I mean anyone who nominates on the basis of what they read/see/listen to and like.Nominating on the basis of someone else’s slate is not a sincere Hugo nomination in my opinion; it’s a sign of disrespecting the Hugo Awards and an attempt to undermine them.
Clearly, Worldcon needs to be renamed The Ancient Mystic Society of No Vox Days.
And this would be the NY Times that pointedly ignored the Soviet induced famine in the Ukraine back in the 1930s? Is that really an appropriate editorial filter through which the news should pass?
There has to be some sort of filter, if you are suggesting a limited number of articles worthy of attention.
Focusing on banning VD makes no sense. Whether or not he registers for WorldCon, and whether or not his “publishing company” or future endeavors are declared ineligible, he can still convince his tragically dimwitted blog audience to register to vote in the Hugos, and with apparently no ability to function without his instructions, they will continue to nominate whatever he tells them to nominate. In this way, he can still get any sort of garbage onto the ballot. Neither the Hugo administrators nor anyone else can possibly control what VD says on his blog. They can recognize ballots they receive which are in lockstep with his blog-posted slates, but if the administators pass any sort of “anti-slate” rule to eliminate such ballots, presumably VD will switch to posting slates full of good writers and editors whose talent and success routinely makes rant with demented envy, such as Scalzi, Jemisin, PNH, etc., etc., and then the Hugos will discover that they have essentially ensured that VD completely controls who is NOT allowed on the ballot. Etc.
Similarly, banning VD and/or Castlia House doesn’t take into account that Brad Torgersen gamed the ballot in 2015. How do we know that he or Larry Correia won’t decide that SP4 was a lame disappointment, take over SP5, and again spend the year aggressively promoting their own full slate for the 2017 Hugos. How do we know that John C Wright won’t decide that the way to get “his” Hugos, of which he was “robbed” in 2015, is to promote an all-Wright slate in 2018? How do we know that someone won’t get so sick of Puppy ballots that they publish and promote a slate–even one with really good works on it, but nonetheless a slate? Or maybe someone will post a list of their eligible works, or a reviewer will post a list of what they’ve decided to nominate–and the someone else will launch a campaign to declare THAT is a slate and should be declared ineligible, and the Hugos become mired in an idiotic controversy about whether or not TELLING PEOPLE YOU’VE GOT ELIGIBLE WORKS automatically disqualifies your works from nomination.
I don’t see how banning individuals or their companies can work. I don’t see how banning slates can fail to backfire. I think these are very bad suggestions.
Buying an attending membership instead of a supporting one would, well, stretch my budget a bit (and would feel like a waste, given I’ve no realistic prospects of physically attending any upcoming WorldCons). However, I’m inclined to suspect that VD and some of his gang have deeper pockets and fewer compunctions than me. In short, limiting the voting/nominating to attending members would discourage people like, well, me, more than it would people like the Rabids. (You’d like me if you met me, you know. I’m cute and winsome, for certain values of cute and winsome.)
Something clearly needs to be done – I think we can all agree on that. I’m not in favour of the “something” being either the use of arbitrary exclusion powers by the admins, or the imposition of restrictions that might hit people of goodwill (in which category I include myself, probably without justification) harder than the actual bad actors. The most sensible suggestion I’ve seen so far is the intermediate stage in the nomination process, where “fandom as a whole” gets to up-vote the good stuff onto the final ballot, or down-vote the obvious dross. (Whichever. I have a slight preference for “up-vote the good stuff”, as it seems more positive in spirit, but I’d take either.)
I appreciate it’s more work for the admins and it complicates the process, but I think that’s true of any effective step that we can take. (And the blame for that lies fair and square at the door of the twerp who’s made it all necessary.)
I see your point but a focus on VD does make some sense in so far as VD is qualitatively different from other bad actors. Brad or Larry or John C Wright have certain limitations in terms of: their own sense of ethics; their capacity to get a group of people to all do the same thing; their capacity to sustain their own interest towards the Hugos.
Having said all that – I don’t see a plausible way of banning the troll.
John Seavey:
From the rules:
Harold Osler:
If Beale smeared himself in the face with dog poop, he would still scream that it was part of his victory. His opinions aren’t interesting.