Pixel Scroll 7/19/18 And Then There Were 770

(1) DRAGON AWARDS. July 20 is the deadline to nominate for Dragon Con’s Dragon Awards. If you’re ever going to do it now would be a good time…. If you’re not, no hurry!

(2) “JUST WEAR CLOTHES, HONEY.” That’s the advice I got the time I called Arthur Bryant’s ribs place to ask if they had a dress code. I follow the same advice when I go to the Hugos.

(3) TOR TAKES LIBRARIANS BY SURPRISE. And not in a good way: “Tor Scales Back Library E-book Lending as Part of Test”Publishers Weekly has the story.

After years of relatively little change in the library e-book market, there has finally been some movement—unfortunately, librarians say, it is movement in the wrong direction. Leading Sci-Fi publisher Tor Books, a division of Macmillan, has announced that, beginning with July 2018 titles, newly released e-books, will be no longer be available to libraries for lending until four months after their retail on sale date.

In a statement to libraries through their vendors, Macmillan officials said the new embargo was part of “a test program” (although an “open ended” test, the release states) to assess the impact of library e-book lending on retail sales. But the statement goes on to say that the publisher’s “current analysis on eLending indicates that it is having a direct and adverse impact on retail eBook sales,” and that Tor will work with library vendors to “develop ongoing terms that will best support Tor’s authors, their agents, and Tor’s channel partners.”

…On July 19, American Library Association president Loida Garcia-Febo issued the following statement:

“The American Library Association and our members have worked diligently to increase access to and exposure for the widest range of e-books and authors. Over years, ALA made great strides in working with publishers and distributors to better serve readers with increasingly robust digital collections. We remain committed to a vibrant and accessible reading ecosystem for all.

I am dismayed now to see Tor bring forward a tired and unproven claim of library lending adversely affecting sales. This move undermines our shared commitment to readers and writers—particularly with no advance notice or discussion with libraries. In fact, Macmillan references its involvement with the Panorama Project, which is a large-scale, data-driven research project focused on understanding the impact of library holdings on book discovery, author brand development, and sales. For this reason, this change by Tor—literally on the heels of Panorama’s launch—is particularly unexpected and unwelcome.

“The ALA calls for Macmillan to move just as quickly to reverse its course and immediately lift the embargo while the Panorama Project does its work.”

(4) BIG REBOOTS TO FILL. Somebody thought this would be a good idea: “‘In Search Of’: Zachary Quinto Follows in Leonard Nimoy’s Footsteps… Again”.

We’re all very used to revivals and reboots these days but with the return of iconic sci-fi/mystery series In Search Of , one big reason to celebrate (besides its launch on the History Channel) is that actor Zachary Quinto is a part of this project.

Quinto, who first became known to TV fans for his role as the villainous Sylar on the original run of NBC’s Heroes, leapt to greater heights of fame in 2009 when he took over the role of the most famous Vulcan in the galaxy, Spock, in the updated Star Trek big-screen franchise. Of course, Spock was first played by Leonard Nimoy in the 1960s television series and, yes, Nimoy later hosted In Search Of.

 

(5) DROPPED IN POTTER’S FIELD. There’s an open question about why this happened: “London erects 25-foot Jeff Goldblum statue to commemorate ‘Jurassic Park’s 25th anniversary”.

They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should build a 25-foot replica of Jeff Goldblum.

Londoners and tourists alike were puzzled Wednesday morning to find a statue of Goldblum, his shirt unbuttoned in a recreation of his famous “Jurassic Park” pose, staring seductively at them from the banks of the River Thames near Tower Bridge.

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

  • Born July 19 – Benedict Cumberbatch, 42. Some of his sort-of genre and definitely genre roles include Stephen Hawking in HawkingThe Hobbit films as a certain cranky dragon, Star Trek into DarknessDoctor Strange, Sherlock, and possibly my fav role potentially by him as the voice of the title character in the forthcoming animated The Grinch film.
  • Born July 19 – Jared Padalecki, 36. Best known for his role as Sam Winchester on Supernatural, and not surprisingly, Supernatural: The Animation.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) OKAY. Mad Genius Club columnist Kate Paulk makes everything as clear as she usually does in “Eschew Claytons Diversity”.

…Take the Mad Geniuses. We’re Odds. We don’t fit in. But every last one of us fails to fit in in a different way than every other one of us….

(9) UNDER NEWTON’S TREE. At Galactic Journey, The Traveler is getting to dislike F&SF’s 1963 incarnation almost as much as he loathes Analog“[July 18, 1963] Several bad apples (August Fantasy and Science Fiction)”.  

I’ve discussed recently how this appears to be a revival period for science fiction what with two new magazines having been launched and the paperback industry on the rise.  I’ve also noted that, with the advent of Avram Davidson at the helm of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the editorial course of that digest has…changed.  That venerable outlet has definitely doubled down on its commitment to the esoteric and the literary.

Has Davidson determined that success relies on making his magazine as distinct from all the others as possible?  Or do I have things backwards?  Perhaps the profusion of new magazines is a reaction to F&SF’s new tack, sticking more closely to the mainstream of our genre.

All I can tell you is that the latest edition ain’t that great, though, to be fair, a lot of that is due to the absolutely awful Heinlein dross that fills half of the August 1963 Fantasy and Science Fiction.  See for yourself…

“Heinlein dross” turns out to be code for an installment of the novel Glory Road.

(10) SPACE SAILS. [Item by Mike Kennedy] An exploratory project at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville AL is examining metamaterials as the basis for a solar sail for CubeSat propulsion. The Near-Earth Asteroid Scout (NEA Scout) is being developed by Marshall and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a candidate secondary payload to launch with EM-1 the first uncrewed test flight of the Space Launch System.

NEA Scout would be a robotic mission to fly by an NEA and return data “from an asteroid representative of NEAs that may one day be human destinations.” The asteroid chosen will depend on the launch date; the current target is  1991 VG. Though this is still only a candidate mission (and thus may never happen), NASA explains the mission like this:

Catching a ride on EM-1, NEA Scout will deploy from SLS after the Orion spacecraft is separated from the upper stage. Once it reaches the lunar vicinity, it will perform imaging for instrument calibration. Cold gas will provide the initial propulsive maneuvers, but the NEA Scout’s hallmark solar sail will leverage the CubeSat’s continual solar exposure for efficient transit to the target asteroid during an approximate two-year cruise.

Once it reaches its destination, NEA Scout will capture a series of low (50 cm/pixels) and high resolution (10 cm/pixels) images to determine global shape, spin rate, pole position, regional morphology, regolith properties, spectral class, and for local environment characterization.

Popular Science article looks a little closer at the use of metamaterials for the sail, talking with Dr. Grover Swartzlander (Rochester Institute of Technology) who is the lead for the project.

The metamaterial Swartzlander is proposing would have several advantages over the reflective materials of the past. Swartzlander’s sails would have lower heat absorption rates due to their diffractive nature which would scatter solar rays, and the ability to re-use what Swartzlander told NASA was “the abundant untapped momentum of solar photons” to fly through the cosmos.

Swartzlander is leading an exploratory study through NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program. With nine months and $125,000, his research team will work on a NASA satellite called the Near-Earth Asteroid Scout, or NEA Scout for short. A robotic reconnaissance mission, NEA Scout is a CubeSat meant to explore asteroids. NEA Scout would be NASA’s first craft to be powered by sails.

(11) THEY SWORE A MIGHTY OATH. No “Second Variety”? “AI Innovators Take Pledge Against Autonomous Killer Weapons”.

The Terminator‘s killer robots may seem like a thing of science fiction. But leading scientists and tech innovators have signaled that such autonomous killers could materialize in the real world in frighteningly real ways.

During the annual International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Stockholm on Wednesday, some of the world’s top scientific minds came together to sign a pledge that calls for “laws against lethal autonomous weapons.”

“… we the undersigned agree that the decision to take a human life should never be delegated to a machine,” the pledge says. It goes on to say, “… we will neither participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade, or use of lethal autonomous weapons.”

The moniker “autonomous weapons” doesn’t draw the same fear or wonder as a killer robot, but weapons that can function without human oversight are a real concern.

(12) NOT THE SIZE OF A PLANET. No one will ever be wondering this about sff fans. Gizmodo’s article “Did Neanderthals Go Extinct Because of the Size of Their Brains?” follows up a paper in Scientific Reports and a theory that Homo neanderthalensis may have gone extinct because their brains — though larger than that of Homo sapiens — had a cerebellum that was proportionately underdeveloped relative to H. sapiens.

Indeed, though scientists have many Neanderthal skulls to work with, none of them contain actual brains, making it difficult to know what the inside of their heads actually looked like. The next best option, therefore, is to look at their fossilized skulls and try to figure out the shape, size, and orientation of the Neanderthal brain.

To do this, Ogihara’s team created virtual three-dimensional “casts” of brains using data derived from the skulls of four Neanderthals and four early modern humans (the skulls used in the study dated from between 135,000 and 32,000 years ago). This allowed the researchers to reconstruct and visualize the 3D structure of the brain’s grey and white matter regions, along with the cerebrospinal fluid regions. Then, using a large dataset from the Human Connectome Project, specifically MRI brain scans taken of more than 1,180 individuals, the researchers modeled the “average” human brain to provide a kind of baseline for the study and allow for the comparative analysis.

Using this method, the researchers uncovered “significant” differences in brain morphology. Even though Neanderthals had larger skulls, and thus larger brain volume overall, H. sapiens had a proportionately larger cerebellum, the part of brain involved in higher levels of thinking and action. Modern humans also featured a smaller occipital region in the cerebrum, which is tied to vision. Looking at these differences, the researchers inferred such abilities as cognitive flexibility (i.e. learning, adaptability, and out-of-the-box thinking), attention, language processing, and short-term and long-term memory. Homo sapiens, the researchers concluded, had better cognitive and social abilities than Neanderthals, and a greater capacity for long-term memory and language processing.

(13) FORTNITE. Brian Feldman, in “The Most Important Video Game on the Planet” in New York Magazine, looks at how Fortnite. since its introduction in July 2017, “has risen to become the most important video game currently in existence…obsessed over by rappers and athletes, hotly debated in high school cafeterias, and played by 125 million people.”

Since it launched in July of last year, Fortnite has risen to become the most important video game currently in existence. The 100-player, last-man-standing video-game shooter is obsessed over by rappers and athletes, hotly debated in high-school cafeterias, and played by 125 million people. All this, not because of a major technical or graphical breakthrough, or for a groundbreaking work of narrative depth, but for, essentially, a simple, endlessly playable cartoon. On a colorful island peppered with abandoned houses, towns, soccer fields, food trucks, and missile silos, players don colorful costumes, drop out of a floating school bus, and begin constructing ramshackle forts that look like they’ve popped straight out of a storybook, before blowing each other to smithereens.

(14) TITANS. Official trailer —

TITANS follows young heroes from across the DC Universe as they come of age and find belonging in a gritty take on the classic Teen Titans franchise.

 

[Thanks to JJ, Mike Kennedy, Chip Hitchcock, Lee, Carl Slaughter, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Dann, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kendall.]

166 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 7/19/18 And Then There Were 770

  1. August: I do, actually, know exactly what it’s like to do those things in many of those situations. So yeah, thank you for your time.

    And yet your assumption was that the finalist’s biggest problem would be figuring out how pack their semi-formal attire for a trip, rather than the possibility that they don’t even own any clothing which could remotely be considered “semi-formal”.

  2. The problem I discussed was the difficulty of traveling with those types of clothes, specifically; you will note that by my use of the word “travel” and the general construction of the sentence I used it in. I didn’t mention other difficulties because they’d already been addressed above and I didn’t think it was necessary to re-litigate literally every single issue in every single post in these comments. Perhaps I was wrong.

    I know you like to live up on that high horse, but you’ve made assumptions about both my life and intensions that are not accurate, and my patience for the fact that the conclusions drawn by someone who has extensive, lived experience with extreme poverty don’t exactly match your expectations of what those conclusions should be is exactly zero.

  3. August: you’ve made assumptions about both my life and intensions that are not accurate

    My comment was based on the level of awareness demonstrated by yours, which to be honest, was almost none. Whether you intended it or not, your comment trivialized the difficulties faced by someone living in poverty for whom many of the considerations which your comment seems to take for granted would not be a “given”.

  4. In 2002 for the Hugo Awards Ceremony, where I was going to appear on stage, I rented a tuxedo. But since then I’ve worn a suit and tie to the ceremony, even when I was scheduled to be on stage like I was in 2009 when I formally unveiled the Hugo Award Logo. Whatever level of formality that makes you happy should be sufficient.

    The request from Hugo Ceremony didn’t sound that unusual to me, and I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen similar requests in the past. Of course people aren’t going to be denied admission just because they’re not dressed up. If you’re a finalist and want to wear casual clothes for whatever reason, that’s your own call. OTOH, for a lot of us, this is just about the only time we ever have an excuse to get dressed up. (And aside from when I’m hosting Match Game SF, that’s nearly the only time I wear a suit.)

  5. Your comment was nitpicking nonsense that allowed you be holier-than thou for a few paragraphs.

    your comment trivialized the difficulties faced by someone living in poverty

    This is the part where my politeness ends and I just say it bluntly: fuck off. My comment came from a place of having lived those experiences. Literally, actually, being the body moving through those times and in those places and feeling the literal, actual starvation and malnutrition and the absolute actual agony of choosing whether to eat the entire slice of bread today or save some of it for tomorrow because it’s the only food in the house and it will be some days before there is more but oh my god it would feel so good to eat the whole slice… It should not be necessary to write my entire life story, including vocally and visibly reliving those moments for your consumption, alongside every single comment addressing, literally and specifically, only a small subset of potential difficulties faced by such a person. If you honestly think that because I (effectively) said “yeah, travelling with those clothes can be a pain, but it’s usually a manageable one” that I, a person who actually nearly fucking died from his poverty in 2005, need to subjected by you to a lecture on what it means to be poor, then I don’t know what to tell you other than what I just did. Fuck off.

  6. @JJ
    @August

    You will both watch this ENTIRE video and think about what you’ve done.

  7. JJ: I encourage you to consider the possibility that your experience is not a universal one, and that not everyone is white, cisgender, middle-class, travels frequently, or has been to awards presentations before.
    Imagine that you’ve never been to an awards presentation before and have no idea what to expect, or what’s considered “standard”. Imagine that you’re poor, you’ve rarely if ever traveled, you’ve borrowed and scraped just to afford a plane ticket, and will be staying in a hostel some distance from the convention center and eating bread and lunchmeat to save money. Imagine that you’re genderqueer, and there is no such thing as “appropriate semi-formal attire” for your identity and sensibilities. Imagine that this expectation has come out of the blue almost 4 months after you were notified that you are a Finalist and why the hell haven’t they said anything about it until now???

    We each have things that get our goats. But this isn’t working for me. Here’s why —

    Imagine that somebody made up an example but in order to stack the argument in their favor assumes the person in their example isn’t already making clothing decisions every day based on their own personal ideas about style and self-expression?

  8. @August, @JJ, you both need to spend a couple of days away from the keyboard.
    You’re BOTH being rude and nasty.

  9. Mike Glyer: Imagine that somebody made up an example but in order to stack the argument in their favor assumes the person in their example isn’t already making clothing decisions every day based on their own personal ideas about style and self-expression?

    Imagine someone stacking their argument by assuming that people actually have the financial ability to make clothing decisions every day — or any day — based on their own personal ideas about style and self-expression.

    I am so sad and disheartened by the number of people on social media who don’t seem to be able to recognize why the Hugo e-mail coming when it did and saying what it did might have caused real distress to some of the recipients. And that is the last thing I am going to say here about it. 🙁

  10. Kevin Standlee: The request from Hugo Ceremony didn’t sound that unusual to me, and I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen similar requests in the past.

    The Hugo night dress code is not as strict as some might think.

    Glyer in 1982

    Chris Garcia in 2011

  11. I’m going to regret this, but here goes:

    I read August’s comments and I did not take from them what JJ took from them. I read item 2 and thought Renay’s tweet and John Picaco’s reply were excellent.

    FWIW (probably nothing) I have attended exactly one Hugo ceremony and I wore semi-formal. I packed a dress coat for that purpose and wore it once the entire time. I have been hovering around the poverty line my entire life. I was so poor 25 years ago, church mice were collecting donations for me. The arguments people get into over first world problems will never cease to amaze me.

    Frankly, I thought item 3 would be the most frequently commented on item. I never even remotely imagined item 2 would cause this big a stir. We’re still talking about fen, right? Even suggesting what fen should wear is like trying to herd cats.

  12. JJ: Imagine someone stacking their argument by assuming that people actually have the financial ability to make clothing decisions every day — or any day — based on their own personal ideas about style and self-expression.

    You specified this person is a Hugo nominee attending the Worldcon. If you didn’t expect people to assume they’d be wearing clothes while doing so, you needed to include that detail. But if they are wearing clothes, as we all know will be the case, then these are issues they’ve already had to work out.

  13. Mike Glyer: If you didn’t expect people to assume they’d be wearing clothes while doing so, you needed to include that detail. But if they are wearing clothes, as we all know will be the case, then these are issues they’ve already had to work out.

    I’m sure that you think you’re being very clever, but that bears no resemblance to what I actually said. Either you’ve completely missed my point, or you’re deliberately ignoring it.

  14. Imagine someone stacking their argument by assuming that people actually have the financial ability to make clothing decisions every day — or any day — based on their own personal ideas about style and self-expression.

    So, let’s presume that this hypothetical someone got nominated for a Hugo and scrimped and saved and collected aluminum cans to pay for travel and lodging and Worldcon membership fees…. sure. Were they, up until this point, being all, “And for the ceremony I was just going to wear this trash bag, but now I’m all afluster”?

    Like, I understand what you’re talking about, but it comes off more as an extreme hypothetical rather than a genuine example of someone who actually is nominated. This kerfluffle reads to me like people are putting on a veneer of “But what if I can’t do it?” to put a sense of social nobility on the complaint, when it’s really just “Don’t tell me what to do!” Like, I’m seeing complaints about it from people who are all “I don’t know how I could do that” when those same people were fantastically dressed at the Nebulas just a month or so ago.

    TL;DR: I feel people are more complaining that they’re were asked rather than that they actually can’t (or weren’t going to.)

  15. @Ryan H–

    3) I think it’s an issue of friction. Having to go get physical books and never being sure when they will be available has opportunity costs. However eBook lending reduces that friction to an almost imperceptible level. At some point eBook lending is indistinguishable from an unlimited personal library.

    No.

    Not even close.

    Libraries can only lend at one time as many copies as they have paid for, and they have limited budgets. I was just able to download from my library yesterday a book that I requested over two months ago. That’s not even remotely like having that book in my personal library. It’s certainly not “zero friction.”

    Honest to God. People who don’t use public libraries shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions affecting them.

  16. JJ: No, I don’t think I’m ignoring your efforts to make it appear as if only cigendered white males have solutions for what to wear to a Worldcon.

  17. Marshall Ryan Maresca: TL;DR: I feel people are more complaining that they’re were asked rather than that they actually can’t (or weren’t going to.)

    Yes, this is purely a “You’re not the boss of me!” kerfuffle.

  18. Mike Glyer: No, I don’t think I’m ignoring your efforts to make it appear as if only cigendered white males have solutions for what to wear to a Worldcon.

    You are very well aware that that is not even remotely what I am saying, and I am really disappointed that you have chosen to deliberately try to pretend that it is.

    I’m going to try one more time:
    When you are trying to buy as many pieces of clothing as you can get for $2 at the Salvation Army store, and your priority has to be things which will keep you warm, “sartorial choice” is as far away from what you are doing as the surface of Mars.

  19. @Lis Carey
    Last month my wife got recommended a new series, checked the library app, and burned through all five books in two weeks without leaving the (metaphorical) couch. At one point she had to wait a day for book 3. Large Canadian public library system, for what that matters.

    I’m more of a “buy the stuff I really want on launch day, then watch sales and read a couple years behind the curve for the rest” in my own habits, but my own experiences with the lending system have been similar.

    Experiences and access are going to differ, but overall I think eBook lending is trending more towards this sort of experience.

    Being able to cycle a title though interested readers literally as fast as they can read it, without any physical or logistical constraints, makes for a very different lending environment.

    And is it just me, or is this community seeing a lot more “poster X hasn’t had the same experience as me, therefore they don’t actually use or have experience with Y and their opinion is invalid” comments? It’s so much less interesting than “huh, why has your experience been different?” Or “how can we get the best experience to more people” kinds of reactions.

  20. For Helsinki, Eric and I were a bit surprised when they asked for “semi-formal” attire, since (to me) that means tuxedos with black ties, which we’d need to arrange to rent. However, we asked for a clarification (and we looked online at pictures from previous awards ceremonies) and confirmed that what they really meant is what I’d have called “informal”: ordinary suit and tie. As it happened, that’s what most of the gentlemen were wearing, although quite a few skipped the tie.

    At least one person at the pre-award reception turned up in jeans and a T-shirt (what I’d call “casual”) but I’ll bet he was a little uncomfortable. (Not as much as a friend of ours, though, who turned up at a wedding that way because he misunderstood what “informal” means. Smart invitations usually spell it out.) 🙂

    Expecting people to pack a suit and tie for a trip isn’t really a big deal. Expecting them to shell out hundreds of dollars to rent a tuxedo for the night would be a big deal. (The place in Helsinki we were referred to wanted $500. In the US, though, you can rent a tux for around $150.) That said, I think if you had showed up in a dress shirt, dark pants (e.g. brand new jeans), and dark shoes (even tennis shoes), no one would have even noticed. (It was rather dark in there, after all.)

    I should have some comment on how the ladies dressed, but although gay men are supposed to have an innate ability to judge women’s attire, I’m afraid I didn’t get that part. I just remember lots of beautiful, flowing dresses in bright colors, but at least a few women were dressed the same as the men.

  21. @Ryan H–I was describing my experience with my local library, which is typical of every other local library system I’ve used. In fact, it is part of a regional consortium, and I can borrow any book any library in the consortium has an available copy of–but that means I’m also competing with all those other library users, too.

    I also have an ecard for the Boston Public Library, which has a much bigger budget and more resources, and served most of the state…more available, but competing with more library users.

    I’ve also been on the other end of this transaction, explaining to users why ebook lending doesn’t eliminate the waiting list delays, even though it’s just a computer file.

    Maybe Canada has some magic, or is just, as Canadians so often assure us, better, but I do think my experiences as a librarian, as a library user, and talking to fellow librarians have not given me a false impression of what’s typical for library ebook lending in public libraries in the US.

  22. (1) On the topic of the Dragon Awards, people have sometimes wondered how it could even be possible to conduct a fair poll, given that there’s no cost to register, so anyone who wanted to could vote repeatedly. Or even write a program to vote thousands of times. The Dragon folks did hire Survey Monkey to count the votes, but the question was, what could they do? You can’t even discard IP addresses that generate lots of votes because there are legitimate reasons why multiple people might present behind the same IP address.

    The key, I think, is to recognize that they aren’t going to compute a count of votes in the usual way. I’ll bet they simply treat it as any other survey. One way to do that (and I’m sure there are much better ways) would be only count votes from IP addresses that generated a single ballot. To improve that a bit, use the results from the one-IP-address, one-vote system to evaluate the other IP addresses and discard any that deviate too far. In practice, you could do a lot of more sophisticated things (including cross-comparing votes in different categories and estimating the probability a given ballot was bogus rather than simply discarding it).

    The catch is that you’re going to end up with percentages and error bars–just like in any other poll. For many categories (maybe most), that won’t matter; the winner will be unambiguous. For others, though, you’ll have some probability that a given candidate was the winner, but it won’t be 100%.

    Still, it’s not an unreasonable way to go about it, and given that this is like what Survey Monkey does all the time, it’s reasonable to guess that that’s what they do for the Dragon Awards. It also explains why the Dragon folks really don’t want to release the polling results. People who’re used to the Hugos would want to see exact counts–not estimates–even though, logically speaking, it shouldn’t be that big a deal.

    Anyway, that made me more comfortable voting for the Dragons, and I found Red Panda Faction’s spreadsheet made it very easy to do.

  23. @2 I remember when GoH Heinlein suggested that everyone (not just nominees) dress for the 1976 Hugos. I actually packed tails (not intending irony), but found I’d left the pants behind; when I saw what my roommate was wearing(*) I put the coat over shorts and a random button-down shirt. The people waiting in line applauded our taste.
    (*): One of those semi-formless hats with a brim sagging all around, and an “Israeli peanut vendor’s shirt” (~3″ vertical stripes in white and bright red). I never asked whether that was an Ipv’s uniform or just who he’d bought it off, and now it’s way too late to do so.

    @9: However cranky the comments excerpted here have been, the reviewer is far from alone in calling Glory Road “dross”; ISTM that it’s actually a story of a man who largely didn’t “learn better”. This seems a common problem with taboo-busting (note the epigram) works read out of their time, as if even the editors miss glaring faults under the fireworks. I haven’t read enough of this retro-review line to know whether he’s taking this position or attempting to take an early-1960’s attitude (which might consider the work dross on its face).

    @Greg: like you and unlike Niall, I’m used to “semi-formal” in the evening meaning tux; “formal” was tails. However, I haven’t had a real-time sighting of a tailcoat in decades. (I’ve seen classical-music conductors wearing something like a morning coat, but never a cutaway.)

  24. And because I probably do have to spell this out explicitly: I’m not saying that library ebook borrowing always involves a long wait. I’m saying it’s about as likely to involve a waiting list, and of similar effective length, as borrowing print books from a library.

  25. 2. I wonder how much of this is the ingrained geek reflex that ‘fancy dress is for the normals’. I mean, literally every female Mary-Sue in fanfiction is guaranteed to hate dresses and only wears jeans and t-shirts.

    I don’t think Worldcon 76 owes anyone an apology for asking attendees to take the awards presentation seriously by dressing accordingly. If semi-formal to you means your best Hawaiian shirt, that’s all cool. But showing up in whatever casual clothes you spent the day wandering around the con in projects that you don’t care and that the Hugos aren’t something to be taken seriously. It’s supposed to be an ‘Event’. Asking people to plan accordingly should not come as a huge surprise.

  26. @Lis Carey
    Great. Now we have multiple geographic and cultural data points. My library system has an annual budget that works out to roughly $45 US for each person in the metropolitan area. The Boston public library has a budget of just over $6 US per person. All numbers from Wikipedia, so your mileage may vary.

    It’s not surprising we have had very different experiences with our library systems. But I think this is a lot more interesting and useful than “Honest to God. People who don’t use public libraries shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions affecting them.

  27. When you are trying to buy as many pieces of clothing as you can get for $2 at the Salvation Army store, and your priority has to be things which will keep you warm, “sartorial choice” is as far away from what you are doing as the surface of Mars.

    While, of course that level of poverty is far too prevalent, what is the Venn Diagram overlap of people who are in that situation AND have decided to attend WorldCon? Like, we can talk about how WorldCon is a fundamentally privileged event that favors people who can afford to spend a couple thousand dollars on a weekend, and how that alone excludes many of the people who are honored. And we can talk about how the term “semi-formal” might be confusing or misleading or means different things in different cultures. These are valid things to consider.

    But let’s stop the handwringing over the theoretical person who had to choose between “WorldCon” and “eating this month”, and chose WorldCon (because they’re nominated and weren’t going to miss it), but YET hadn’t considered what they were going to wear for the event or even somehow doesn’t know what “dress up nice” even means to them.

  28. @Chip Hitchcock

    @Greg: like you and unlike Niall, I’m used to “semi-formal” in the evening meaning tux; “formal” was tails. However, I haven’t had a real-time sighting of a tailcoat in decades. (I’ve seen classical-music conductors wearing something like a morning coat, but never a cutaway.)

    Yep, tails and a white bow tie. It’s what I learned in prep school, plus I checked it on Wikipedia, so it must be true!

    The only time I think I ever wore tails was when I was an usher in someone’s wedding. Maybe the naming system really does need to be updated. We could use a distinction between “beach casual” “business casual” and “ratty worn-out casual” too. “Formal” these days probably should just mean “coat and tie,” “semi-formal” you’d drop the coat and “informal” you’d drop the tie. If you wanted more than that, you’d have to spell it out.

    Maybe we should put an item on the agenda for the business meeting to add fannish definitions for the dress code to the constitution. 🙂 (@Kevin Stanlee: I’m only kidding.)

  29. @Lis Carey
    I’d also like to apologize. I’ve been snippy entirely out of proportion to the original comment.

  30. My obscure point being I don’t see that Worldcon 76 needs to “walk back” its request. People can still wear whatever they’re going to.

    I like the idea that the Hugo Awards are a semi-formal event, but we all know that the actual attendees will include a lot of people who won’t dress to that expectation or can’t. Any statement on what people should wear needs to account for that.

    Something along the lines of this: “We ask that everyone attending the ceremony wear semi-formal dress, as we are striving for an elegant, professional looking event. But everyone is welcome regardless of how they choose to dress.”

  31. @Marshall: “what is the Venn Diagram overlap of people who are in that situation AND have decided to attend WorldCon?”

    THIS. The cost of attending a convention and staying in a hotel room dwarfs the price of a reasonably nice outfit… and you can wear the outfit again. Someone shopping at the Salvation Army out of necessity is going to look at WorldCon’s “attending” price tag, laugh bitterly, and never get to the local room rates, let alone the part about a suggested dress code. Going is just not an option.

    Attending a convention, unless it’s in your hometown and you can day-trip it, is a luxury, and a somewhat expensive one. Let’s not pretend otherwise.

  32. @Ryan H–i would also like to apologize. You reacted to what I said, rather than what I was thinking. 🙁

    The “people who don’t use libraries,” inside my head, were the bean counters at publishing houses, who make these decisions. Not readers, who, however they read, don’t decide on what terms libraries are allowed to buy and lend ebooks. I did not manage to say that, at any point.

    I envy you your well-funded library system! There are better ones than Boston in the US, but also much worse.

  33. @Marshall Ryan Maresca

    As a data point, several finalists are only attending because of crowdfunding for them to do so.

  34. Anybody who is self-conscious about their insufficiently formal clothes is welcome to hang out with me and my SJW cred and look for a Hugo party with a livestream (because I understand his kind is not welcome in the auditorium even though cultural appropriation in the form of cat onesies will be happening). Fair warning, you’ll probably get covered in shed fur. BYO lint brush and/or Benadryl.

  35. August on July 20, 2018 at 6:50 am said:
    2) Is this… an unusual request? I get that fandom tends to be a bit more of a cargo-shorts-and-Hawaiian-shirts crowd (a look I will never, ever understand) than a lot of others, but surely an awards ceremony is, in fact, a reasonably formal event?

    Yes, it’s unusual. I have very warm memories of Jay Lake vaulting on the stage in his usual trademark hawaiian shirt, and I am irritated beyond measure by forcing what should be a completely personal choice – go dressed like Cinderella at the ball or in jeans and sneakers – into being either bowing down or rebelling against an explicit instruction.
    Mostly I’m annoyed because I like dressing up, and this will force me to make a point of going to the Hugo ceremony in jeans and sneakers.

  36. Oh, wait.
    What?

    Do people understand “dress code is semi-formal” to mean “dress code is semi-formal or more formal”? Whut? To me, specifying a dress code is an exact specification (that is “semi-formal” means exactly semi-formal, not semi-formal, morning dress, evening dress and/or black tie).

    because my specific problem here is that the desired formality register is one that I don’t own, and refuse to wear, but if more formal is actually OK… And possibly having read too many antiquated etiquette manuals from non-anglophone countries.

  37. PIXEL MASH UP

    PLOT:

    In a world of corrupt clothes policing and rising couture madness, a group of teenaged fashion vigilantes unite to battle casual Friday.

    THEME:

    Worldcon dinner, you know who to call
    Jeans Fightin’!
    From their tower, they can see it all
    Jeans Fightin’!

    When there’s evil on the hat rack,
    You can rest knowing they got your back
    ’cause when the world needs scribing on clothes
    Jeans Fightin’ SCROLL!

    With their haberdasher they unite
    Jeans Fightin’!
    Never met a milliner they liked
    Jeans Fightin’!

    They’ve got the fab five on the run
    They never stop ‘till the job is done
    ’cause when the world is losin’ all control
    Jeans Fightin’ SCROLL!

    One, two, three, four, SCROLL!

    Jeans Fightin’!

    SCENE:

    A dark alley. Guy Hero #1, a menacing group of hipsters.

    HIPSTER #1: Where’s your hat, man?

    GUY HERO #1: F*ck hats, man!

    SCENE:

    A diner. Guy Hero #1, Gal Hero # 1.

    GAL HERO #1: I know it’s wrong but sometimes Levi’s feel so good…

    GUY HERO #1: Fight the darkness, Gal #1! You don’t have to be evil, no matter your father.

  38. Re: the dress code

    In Becky Chambers’ “A long way to a small angry planet” there’s a lovely scene where a character from a very different cultural context realizes that another character is interested in them after realizing that effort has been made in reguards to how they look. It’s not how they look that matters, it’s the recognizable effort.

    In a fanish context I think that effort has been made is both the most and least that anyone expects. Did some thought and consideration go into this? Great! Whether that thought and consideration resulted in a galactic jellyfish outfit or a fitted suit or a really well chosen clashing Hawaiian shirt is irrelevant.

  39. @Ryan H

    Yes! If Zoe Quinn can’t turn up in an unicorn outfit then the dress code is wrong.

  40. As a data point, several finalists are only attending because of crowdfunding for them to do so.

    True! But I’m boggled at the idea that someone organized their crowdfund to go but hadn’t given any consideration about what they were going to wear to the event. What were they planning before this email came out? Were they honestly not thinking about it? I’m very skeptical that that would be the case.

  41. In this specific case, I don’t think “straight white able-bodied cisgender male” is terribly relevant. There are some complicating factors for some people outside that – genderqueer has been mentioned, and the Fans for Accessible Conventions facebook group has been discussing some of the difficulties disabled people have with dressing formally – but essentially the primary difficulty and the difficulty that has been dominating discussion here is poverty, and white cisgender straight men are not and have never been immune to that condition.

    I strongly suspect most finalists and others planning to attend the ceremony were already planning to wear something nice* and that whatever their definition of “nice” is, it would be perfectly acceptable on the night. I’ve seen pictures from the Hugo Award Ceremonies. The request was not so very out of line from what people are already wearing. It could have been worded differently but as Worldcon controversies go, this seems to me very much like a storm in a teacup. If anything, I wonder why they bothered since by and large it already happens.

    *Some of us poor people also own nice clothes, you know. There isn’t a ban on it. They might not be bought for the occasion, but nice clothes don’t expire after one use. I want to gently caution against assuming otherwise because those sorts of assumptions can be very damaging – “can’t be that poor, look at their clothes/phone/car/fridge” is not a good burden to have on top of the rest, and it can lead to being denied sorely needed help.

  42. I see it now; we need a new term: “fan formal.”

    First crack at it (for men): suit and tie or a really cool costume.

    @Ingvar

    Do people understand “dress code is semi-formal” to mean “dress code is semi-formal or more formal”?

    You can certainly turn up in a tuxedo if you want. I saw a number of men do that in Helsinki. I can remember attending an event in San Francisco about 30 years ago where they were at pains to make sure we understood that “semi-formal” meant “tuxedo with black bow tie” not just suit and tie. My office mate turned up in white tie and tails, commenting that it was always okay to be a bit overdressed, and, anyway, he’d paid for the outfit and he was going to wear it given the chance.

    Overdressing a little is (I think) always okay. Wearing a tux when everyone else is wearing “beach casual” would likely be embarrassing, but this isn’t that kind of event.

    @Meredith

    If anything, I wonder why they bothered since by and large it already happens.

    People are always asking “what should I wear?” when invited to public events. I’m sure they posted something just to stave off such questions.

  43. I apologize, the link I shared gave only permission to view and not edit the Dragon Awards Eligible Nominees spreadsheet.
    Here’s a link that will allow anyone to edit.

  44. @Marshall Ryan Maresca

    I’m not clear on why “hadn’t they thought about it” is coming into this. The email has told them to wear a specific type of dress that is only a subset of what finalists usually do, and might incur a notable cost if they didn’t already have it available. If they have thought about it, they have planned something totally different already.

  45. I do wonder what the deviser of that e-mail had in mind for “semi-formal”–it used to mean something like what Chip Hitchcock and Greg Hullander recall, but the protocols I was raised with have nearly vanished, outside perhaps diplomatic circles and the Nobel Prize ceremony. If I had to guess, it would be “what you’d wear as a wedding guest” or some version of business-formal (though for women the upper limit gets extended to the current version of what we used to call “cocktail dresses” or the Little Black Dress).

    On the other hand, SF-world dress protocols have always played with and against current mainstream conventions–you can find photos from Worldcons and regionals from the earliest days onward. Note how attendees dressed for panels and for the costume ball and/or banquet. Through the 1950s, you see coat-and-tie/heels-and-hose on the writers at least.

    At the big events of the 1970s and later (when I was attending both regionals and Worldcons), you saw a greater range of playful and conventional dress at the signature events: businesswear, ironic and serious versions of “formal” (tuxes for men, fancy dresses for women, occasional tailcoats, sparkly top hats), costumes, and whatever kids-those-days were wearing. Those who were likely to wind up on stage at the Hugos tended to do something “special” for that possibility–Charles Brown always wore Hawaiian*, often with sandals, and eventually with his toenails polished and a ring on his big toe.

    We haven’t been to a Worldcon for more than a decade, but I almost always wear Hawaiian shirts at other conventions, including the academic International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (though hotel air-conditioning sometimes requires a jacket for comfort), where the big banquet is generally very dress-up. (And always with some grad students in not-at-all-formal gear.)

    * I would note that “aloha wear” is considered formal-equivalent in Hawai`i. You’ll see it specified in notices for funerals and memorial services.

  46. Since “semi” means “half” I assume that one half should be formal. Since the other half is not specified I guess you should be going half-naked, half-formal.

  47. I’m just beyond the edit period, so this caboose:

    I just figured out what bothers me about that advisory e-mail: the phrase “we are striving for an elegant, professional looking event.” Fan culture has always had a mildly transgressive flavor–we were not mundanes, we were fans, and the demographics of the subculture skewed young and at least mildly bohemian and very playful.

    That showed in the tradition of the costume ball, which morphed eventually into hall costuming and a general tendency to treat a con as a pocket universe where you didn’t have to appear conventional or respectable or even human–freak flag flying, etc. Even our “formal” events had a strain of the ironic, with Hugo MCs overdressed. (It took mundane-world televised award ceremonies to outdo fandom in the over-the-top fancy-getup department.)

    And I keep thinking of Frank Zappa’s famous remark about everybody being in uniform, and don’t kid yourself.

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