(1) MATCHLESS PROSE, WE HOPE. Will Frank (scifantasy), Vice-Administrator of the 2016 Hugo Awards and Administrator of the 2021 Hugo Awards, who also identifies himself as a fanfiction writer on AO3 and a trademark attorney, is trying to pour some oil onto the stormy waters that separate parts of the Worldcon community from parts of the AO3 community: “HugO3”. (Please don’t strike a match.)
…If the Worldcon-running community doesn’t police use of the phrase, someone else–someone with less humorous, less celebratory, less free-spirited intent–might be able to plausibly argue that he can call his self-published book a Hugo Award Winner just because it was fanfic, or he has an AO3 account, because the term has lost all of its significance by not being protected.
Is that likely? Who the hell knows. Is it something the Worldcon-running community wants to risk, especially so soon after a concerted effort to undermine the award, not by fanfiction authors in celebration of their validation but by a group of politically-motivated writers with an axe to grind? Definitely not.
(I’ve also seen some people saying that there isn’t any prestige in a Hugo Award given some of the historical winners, and…well, get in line behind the Oscars and the Grammys and the others, I guess. The fact is that “Hugo Award” on the cover of a book does indeed help sales. It matters. There is still cachet in being a Hugo Award winner. Or even a finalist!)
So, no, the Worldcon-running community is not saying “Hey, don’t have fun.” It is saying, “please, don’t undermine our ability to stop people with malicious intent from poisoning the term Hugo Award.”
I’m not even telling you that you have to think I’m right. But at least, please know that this isn’t just a matter of “don’t have fun.” It’s a plea for your help.
(2) HEINLEIN’S OTHER VERSION. The Number of the Beast versus Pursuit of the Pankera – not the same book at all. Arc Manor would be delighted for you to put the claim to a test — http://www.arcmanor.com/as/Comparison.pdf
It is a different book. Of the 187,000 words in the new book, it shares the first 28,000. But then is totally different. The separation occurs in chapter XVIII and here is a side by side comparison of the chapters in the two books with the point of divergence clearly marked.
(3) HISTORIC CON MASQUERADE (AND OTHER) PHOTOS. At Vintage Everyday, “Wendy Pini Cosplay: 22 Rare and Amazing Photographs of Wendy Dressed as Red Sonja in the 1970s”.
Wendy Pini does it all. In the 1970s Wendy used to hit the cons dressed as Sonja. She was born in San Francisco in 1951, and from an early age demonstrated the talents later to come to fruition as a professional illustrator, and eventually as the creator of Elfquest.
(4) CHANGES AT TOR. Shelf Awareness is reporting a couple of promotions at Tom Doherty Associates:
- Theresa DeLucci has been promoted to senior associate director of marketing of Tor Books, Forge, and Nightfire.
- Renata Sweeney has been promoted to senior marketing manager, Tor.
(5) ELLEN VARTANOFF INTERVIEW. From Small Press Expo 2017 (but just posted on YouTube today.)
Rusty and Joe talk to Ellen Vartanoff about her decades in the comics field and the early days of comic conventions!
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY.
- September 19, 1952 — “Superman On Earth” aired as the pilot episode for The Adventures of Superman television series starring George Reeves.
- September 19, 1961 — On a return trip from Canada, while in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Betty and Barney Hill claimed to have been abducted by aliens.
- September 19, 1986 — The Starman series debuted with Jeff Bridges replaced in the role of The Starman with Robert Hays. The series lasted for twenty-two episodes.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born September 19, 1867 — Arthur Rackham. English book illustrator who is recognized as one of the leading literary figures during the Golden Age of British book illustration. His work can be seen on genre fiction ranging from Goblin Market to Rip Van Winkle and The Wind in the Willows. Derek Huson’s Arthur Rackham: His Life and Work is one of the better looks at him and his art. (Died 1939.)
- Born September 19, 1911 — William Golding. Though obviously best known for the Lord of The Flies novel, I’m more intrigued by the almost completed novel found in draft after his death, The Double Tongue which tells the story of the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo at Delphi. (Died 1993.)
- Born September 19, 1922 — Damon Knight. Author, critic, editor. He is the author of “To Serve Man”, a 1950 short story which became a The Twilight Zone episode. It won a 50-year Retro-Hugo in 2001 as the best short story of 1950. Wiki says “He ceased reviewing when Fantasy & Science Fiction refused to publish a review.” What’s the story here? (Died 2002.)
- Born September 19, 1928 — Adam West. Best known as Batman on that classic Sixty series, he also had a short role in 1964’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars as Colonel Dan McReady. The less said about his post Batman films, including a softcore porn film, the better. (Died 2017.)
- Born September 19, 1928 — Robin Scott Wilson. Founder, with Damon Knight and others, of the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop. He edited Clarion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction and Criticism from the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Clarion II and Clarion III. He wrote one genre novel, To the Sound of Freedom (with Richard W. Shryock) and a lot of short fiction. Alas, neither iBooks nor Kindle has anything by him available. (Died 2013.)
- Born September 19, 1933 – David McCallum, 86. Gained fame as Illya Kuryakin in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and has rounded off his career playing medical examiner Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard in another TV series that is known by its initials, NCIS.
- Born September 19, 1940 — Caroline John. English actress best known for her role as scientist Elizabeth “Liz” Shaw in Doctor Who as companion to the Third Doctor. She’d repeat her role in Dimensions in Time, a charity special crossover between Doctor Who and the EastEnders that ran in 1993. Her only other genre role was playing Laura Lyons in The Hound of the Baskervilles. (Died 2012.)
- Born September 19, 1947 — Tanith Lee. I hadn’t realized that she wrote more than ninety novels and three hundred short stories in her career. And even wrote two Blake’s 7 episodes as well. I was more fond of her work for children such as The Dragon Hoard and The Unicorn Series than I was of her adult work. (Died 2015.)
- Born September 19, 1952 — Laurie R. King, 67. She’s on the Birthday Honors List for the Mary Russell series of historical mysteries, featuring Sherlock Holmes as her mentor and later partner. She’s also written at least one genre novel, Califia’s Daughters.
- Born September 19, 1972 — N. K. Jemisin, 47. Her most excellent Broken Earth series has made her the only author to have won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in three consecutive years.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
- Candorville makes Trek and Doctor Who jokes.
(9) UNIDENTIFIED WALKING OBJECTS. Aliens have landed at the convention hotel (a couple years early) reports the Tonopah Nevada in 2021 for Westercon 74 page – see the photographic evidence there!
Starting to see some out of this world stuff in honor of Alien Weekend… these aliens came all the way from Michigan to check out the happenings…
(10) OH NO, NOT AGAIN. “False Tsunami Warning In Hawaii Triggered By Police Exercise”.
Emergency sirens wailed on Hawaii’s Oahu and Maui islands Wednesday evening, warning of a tsunami, but the alert turned out to be a mistake, sparking anger from residents who recalled a similar false warning last year of an imminent ballistic missile attack.
Within minutes of the alarm going off shortly after 5 p.m. local time (11 p.m. ET) authorities were trying to calm the public by getting out word of the mistake.
The National Weather Service in Honolulu tweeted: “***NO TSUNAMI THREAT*** We have received phone calls about sirens going off across Oahu, but we have confirmed with the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center that there is NO TSUNAMI THREAT.”
Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell also took to Twitter. “Mahalo to everyone for taking appropriate action & tuning into local media,” he tweeted, adding that the sirens had been “inadvertently triggered” during Honolulu Police Department training.
(11) I’M MELTING! FastCompany tells everyone “Burger King is melting down plastic toys to recycle them into something actually useful”.
… Burger King has decided to remove all plastic toys from its kids’ meals. Not only that but the initiative, created by agency Jones Knowles Ritchie and starting this week in the U.K., is also calling for people to drop plastic toys from meals past in “plastic toy amnesty bins” at Burger King locations to be melted down and recycled into things that are actually useful, like play areas and surface tools, which can be recycled many times over.
People in the U.K. who bring in toys to melt down next week will get a free King Junior meal when they buy any adult meal. To promote the project, Burger King has created a cast of melted-down plastic toy characters, including Beep Beep, a jeep-driving bunny, which the brand has installed a giant melting version of on London’s South Bank to promote the project.
(12) IF YOU WERE A PTEROSAUR AS TALL AS A GIRAFFE, MY LOVE. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Inside Science reports: “Newest Pterosaur Was Likely as Tall as a Giraffe”.
Ancient flying reptile dubbed Cryodrakon boreas, the “cold dragon of the north winds,” may shed light on the evolution of these dinosaur relatives.
CBC News agrees: “Giraffe-sized flying reptiles once soared over Alberta”
Newly identified pterosaur species had a wingspan of 10 metres
Mark Whitton’s 2013 article has additional details and a great illustration: “9 things you may not know about giant azhdarchid pterosaurs”
Despite their giraffian proportions, giant azhdarchid torso were relatively tiny. Witton and Habib (2010) noted that, like many pterodactyloid pterosaurs, their torsos were probably only a third or so longer than their humeri, suggesting a shoulder-hip length of about 65-75 cm for an animal with a 10 m wingspan. That’s a torso length not much larger than your own, although they were considerably more stocky and swamped with muscle. Azhdarchid shoulders, in particular, are well endowed with attachment sites for flight muscles, as are (for pterosaurs) their pelves and hindquarters.
(13) JURASSIC SHORT. Battle at Big Rock on YouTube is an eight-minute video, set in the Jurassic World universe one year after the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom that premiered on FX last night and was put online today.
(14) BRADBURY INTERVIEW. Here’s a 9-minute video of Ray Bradbury’s 1978 appearance on the Merv Griffin Show.
The always brilliant Ray Bradbury, one of the greatest sci-fi writers in history, talks with Merv about the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, Steven Spielberg, his mission as a writer, the future of mankind, and ends by reading from his poem “If Only We Had Taller Been” from his collection “When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.”
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chip Hitchccock, JJ, Mike Kennedy, Kevin Standlee, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day JJ.]
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Yes, I agree, which is why I qualified it with “I’ve personally seen” and “based on my experiences in the last week”, which includes here, it includes AO3, it includes Twitter, it includes author’s blogs, which I know and understand is not the entire community, but no one has exactly taken a poll of all past and current WSFS members, either. Our experiences are all we have right now.
And no one is intending to be a singular skunk ruining a party we were hoping to join… I mean, I get the metaphor, and I think I understand what you’re going for with it, but in my opinion of how to alter the metaphor, the AO3 users were having their own picnic separately, in such a way as we’re used to being separate from “official” fandom or what-have-you… And then we’re being told that we, unbeknownst to us, have been stinking up another separate picnic we had no idea we were present at.
LectionaryStan: And then we’re being told that we, unbeknownst to us, have been stinking up another separate picnic we had no idea we were present at.
Of course AO3 members knew about the Hugo Award picnic, they were celebrating the fact that their project won an award at it.
@Xtifr
It would be more accurate to say some AO3ers. Clearly not all of them are saying it, and AFAICT most are not, just as most people on the WSFS side aren’t arguing against them.
It certainly isn’t unusual to feel some pride when something you were involved with, even if just a teeny part, gets an award!
Yep, which many people were celebrating in Twitter or fandom accounts which were separate from their real-life, public-facing accounts, and had no reason to believe that some members of the WSFS were even paying attention to, much less feeling hurt or offended by.
LectionaryStan: Yep, which many people were celebrating in Twitter or fandom accounts which were separate from their real-life, public-facing accounts, and had no reason to believe that some members of the WSFS were even paying attention to, much less feeling hurt or offended by.
How many of the people who were celebrating in this way stopped to find out what the Hugo Awards are, and how they work?
This is my instinctive reaction to everything. What is this? How does it work? If someone gave an award to something I worked on, that is the very first thing I would do: go and find out, instead of deciding that I had the right to determine how the award worked and that I could do whatever I wanted.
There are 2 million AO3 users. I would generously estimate that maybe 10% are currently aware that AO3 won a Hugo, and probably not even that. It’s a big website! And nowhere near exclusively focused on SFF. There are plenty of users whose only fannish interests are Italian soap operas, or sports anime, or historical romance novels, or whatever, who likely had either only vaguely heard of the Hugos or never heard of them at all prior to finding out that AO3 had won one.
Obviously there are plenty of other AO3 users, including myself, who knew about the Hugos, and some of them were involved in trying to get the website nominated and then voting for it, but that last group was a teeny-tiny fraction of the AO3 userbase overall.
Yeah, I totally get that. But that’s not universal, or a fair thing to expect in order to gauge someone’s sincerity – or at least, that’s my understanding of what you mean by that. A lot of the younger generation of fandom who were happy to hear that were excited and sent up a hurray and didn’t even make the joke, but then moved on. Then there are the younger Tumblr/Twitter AO3 folks I would also wager don’t even know this conversation is happening, and were happy to use a meme they would expect would be seen only by their friends and other fandom folks where there’s a reasonable expectation that they’re all using the same social encoding, and that’s that. And that’s just two examples of several different reactions to the Hugo win.
The people I follow on Tumblr – most of whom are members of AO3 – aren’t talking about it that I can tell..
@PJ Yeah, I’m in the tail end of the older generation of the fannish community; my current fandom friends (who happen to be a couple years younger than me) had no idea this was happening, like, at all.
@ M Lin – I know a lot of others feel that if it won’t be 100% effective, then it’s pointless to even make the effort. I’ve always thought individual change can have a huge effect in a group so I do see a point in however many people end up embracing a change in wording.
It’s not that I don’t think this has been 100% effective. I don’t even think that it’s been 1% effective. I think it has been negatively effective in that it has gotten many people who weren’t paying attention one way or another to think seriously about the question of whether or not they had won a Hugo and come to the conclusion “Yes, it seems that I have.”
This conversation has, ironically, therefore spawned many new Hugo winners.
And this effect was predicted extremely early on when one commenter warned Kevin that he was “just asking for the Streisand effect but ok.”
FWIW I don’t think I won a Hugo and I don’t think it would be particularly meaningful if I said I did.
Demanding to be able to refer to oneself individually as an individual Hugo Award Winner is asking Worldcon members to change the way the Hugo Awards work, to conform to AO3 cultural expectations.
What exactly is it that Worldcon members must now do to accommodate the existence of a handful of hyperbolic twitter comments?
M. Lin: What exactly is it that Worldcon members must now do to accommodate the existence of a handful of hyperbolic twitter comments?
It’s not the hyperbolic Twitter comments which are the issue. It’s the people who are now insisting that they have the right to individually refer to themselves as official Hugo Award Winners.
What happens when AO3 members decide to post books on Amazon labeled “Hugo Award Winner” or “Hugo Award-Winning Author”? People saying that they are officially individual Hugo Award Winners are arguing that WSFS and Worldcon members should be fine with that — and with author bios and LinkedIn profiles saying it, and anything else along those lines.
@JJ
This would be true only if AO3 people were referring to themselves as Hugo Winners and saying that Worldcon members have to refer to them as Hugo winners. If an AO3 person says “I’m a Hugo winner,” that does not require anything from a Worldcon member.
To me, this sort of feels like like… Speaking to this specific scenario, there is such a low probability that this will happen, because even the people who mean the Hugo winner claim seriously do not want to attach their fanfiction to their real-life name, whether it’s on a book, an email signature, or LinkedIn. It’s a fandom win, meant to be celebrated only amongst other fandom people. Even AO3 people who are claiming the Hugo winner title in earnest would at minimum roll their eyes and scoff at someone foolish enough to put it on a book. I’d personally be horrified that someone would attach their fic to their real name and make it all public. It’s just very much not on the table. No one has actually put it on a book. No one has actually put it in their LinkedIn, or CV; it hasn’t already happened, and it’s very likely not going to. The idea of linking fanfiction to the real-life self in such a way makes me ill, it’s that repellent. This isn’t just my personal reaction, it’s part of the culture of AO3 and fannish folks. It’s why no one publishes fanfiction on AO3 under their real names, it’s all pseudonymous. There’s a concrete wall between the fandom life and the real world life, and a Hugo win is not going to knock that barrier down.
Saying that it all needs to stop because “what if”… It’s a preemptive present reaction against a potential future that no one has shown any indication of trying. It’s not a slippery slope here. If something like that were to happen in the future, it won’t be because the WSFS was too lenient about what people put in their Twitter bios, it was because someone decided to be a fool, someone who doesn’t understand fandom cultural norms, never mind WSFS cultural norms.
@LectionaryStan
Without polling the entire membership of WorldCon 77, you cannot know how the majority of WSFS members feels about this issue. Even if all 770 people who voted for AO3 as their first preference agreed that all AO3 members can individually call themselves Hugo winners (and I strongly doubt that all of them agree), that’s only about ten percent of the total WorldCon membership.
Of course, you can look at what people are publicly saying about the issue, but the results will be biassed. You’re an AO3 member and you probably follow other AO3 members on social media, so of course you’ll see how other AO3 members think about the issue (and they seem far from united). Meanwhile, from my POV as someone who has visited AO3 twice in my life, it seems as if there are maybe 20 people who insist that they have the right to say “I won a Hugo” plus a somewhat larger group of folks who were egged on by them and jumped on the bandwagon, while the vast majority of people who know and care about the Hugos go, “Duh. But everybody knows that’s not how the Hugos or any other awards work.”
And even if you look beyond your circle, as you’ve said you did, you will only see the views of a small number of people who have publicly spoken out about the issue. The vast majority of WSFS members, however, have never commented on the question at all and may not even be aware that this debate is happening. So you have no way of telling what the majority of WSFS members thinks.
Also, if the jokes and memes (if they were jokes) had stayed on AO3, I don’t think anybody would have minded, because AO3 users would have been in on the joke and outsiders would probably never have seen the jokes in the first place. However, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr are public spaces. Even if you (general you) only interact with fellow AO3 users on social media (which is extremely unlikely), posts get shared or retweeted, etc… Ever since the Hugo finalists have been announced, I’ve repeatedly seen random AO3 users calling themselves Hugo finalists and winners on Twitter and I don’t specifically seek out such posts, they just popped up in my timeline.
Also, we have had people who claimed to be Hugo and Nebula nominees, because they had nominated themselves, and put this on their (self-published) books and on their author websites and bios. That is why the preferred wording is now Hugo and Nebula finalist rather than nominee. So in short, it has happened before and it will happen again.
@Cora Yup, I did mention polling and all of that in my post before, too, and I am aware of who I’m seeing. That people outside of their intended audience saw the Hugo-winning line is not what I meant by their Twitter bios not being public-facing – I meant that they weren’t attached to their professional, real-life personas. Ie. Not their public face.
I think I have seen two or three people do it with what seems to be their real name, including one writer (not primarily of SFF) in their real-life professional persona. But even if accounts with handles like Jack/Ianto_Lover_5 (apologies if that’s someone’s real handle) claiming to be Hugo finalists/winners, pop up in your timeline, it’s irritating.
@Cora That’s a fair reaction. But irritation being the reason to try and get the full weight of the WSFS community norms to try and get that to stop doesn’t feel… good.
Out of not entirely idle curiosity… How many people follow strangers with a sense of humor unknown to them on Twitter? (Are there people who still use the web interface, with its tendency to shove strangers into the feed?) The only people I see on Twitter are the people I follow, or people retweeted by the above, quoted with some message about what’s being said. It’s “public” in the same way a conversation with a friend while walking across campus is public. Anyone could overhear, or jump in, but it would be very odd if someone neither of us knew paid much attention or responded.
Because my first response to “if accounts with handles like Jack/Ianto_Lover_5 (apologies if that’s someone’s real handle) claiming to be Hugo finalists/winners, pop up in your timeline, it’s irritating,” is to say “Then unfollow them?”, but goodness knows Twitter does weird things at times. Perhaps you can’t get strangers out of your timeline?
If so, I highly recommend using Tweetdeck. Nice clean chronological feed. Only shows you the people you follow. Lots of handy customization bits, like blacklist/whitelist words, to help there too.
I periodically do ruthless culls on who I follow on Twitter and on Tumblr, and then I have various keywords muted on top of that. I don’t see many unpleasant things on either unless my friends are retweeting/reblogging to yell about it, and even then, I can usually get that out of my feed pretty fast. There are some people on Tumblr with absolutely absurd ideas about the morality of writing certain types of fiction, and I very, very rarely hear about them, despite people I follow fighting with them regularly. Term blacklisting makes so much of the internet a happier place.
P J Evans on September 22, 2019 at 6:44 pm said:
Very fair point. Sorry for the imprecision.
Absolutely not! Every time Debian won an award, I said “yay, we won an award!” What I never did, and cannot fathom doing, is saying “yay, I won an award” in such a case. Which a very tiny minority of AO3ers have been doing.
bill: If an AO3 person says “I’m a Hugo winner,” that does not require anything from a Worldcon member.
It requires that Worldcon members be okay with people who are not themselves actually individual Hugo Award Winners referring to themselves as such.
I’m not entirely sure how @s should work here so please tell me if I’m not doing it right.
@JJ:
What happens when AO3 members decide to post books on Amazon labeled “Hugo Award Winner” or “Hugo Award-Winning Author”? People saying that they are officially individual Hugo Award Winners are arguing that WSFS and Worldcon members should be fine with that — and with author bios and LinkedIn profiles saying it, and anything else along those lines.
@Cora:
Also, we have had people who claimed to be Hugo and Nebula nominees, because they had nominated themselves, and put this on their (self-published) books and on their author websites and bios. That is why the preferred wording is now Hugo and Nebula finalist rather than nominee. So in short, it has happened before and it will happen again.
This is a valid concern. There are a couple of things here.
Misrepresentation about the Hugos have happened before and will happen again by people with shaky ethics. Ao3’s win did not make this sort of misrepresentation possible, as the comment about previous attempts at trickery show. Generally I assume that the quality of their work reveals the fraudulent nature the claim. And of course if someone claims they won and can’t produce anything but the Ao3 award as evidence, that’s that.
The segment of fandom as represented by Ao3 takes an extremely dim view of people who try to exploit fandom culture/community for material gain. They also have a much stronger separation of their fandom activity and their professional lives. This comment on Ao3 makes clear the general Ao3 attitude towards putting “Hugo award winner” on a linkedin profile. The very idea that someone would do such a thing is unthinkable to the same people who are tweeting about having won the award.
So, if a hypothetical person were to claim that they were a Hugo winning author on an Amazon book by virtue of having an account on Ao3, the fandom would laugh them straight out of the room.
It’s my opinion that if someone were to say they were a Hugo winner in attempt at gaining some professional advantage on the back of this award most people calling themselves winners casually in celebration would have the WSFS’s back in clarifying that they did not win anything on the merit of their individual fiction, and an insinuation otherwise is fraudulent. The original clarification on Ao3 was clear on this and even people who say, “I can call myself a winner” have not gone on to say, “and can advertise myself professionally as such.”
But these tweets were the ones that were identified by JJ previously as being problematic.
https://twitter.com/CA_Young/status/1113156601706369024
https://twitter.com/allyousailors/status/1165746529308762112
https://twitter.com/delabaisse/status/1163654912451891200
https://twitter.com/ArtistFailure/status/1163602182366781441
https://twitter.com/KaiserNoire/status/1163285210580029441
Please notice that out of all of these tweets there is not a single account that currently identifies itself within its profile or name as a Hugo Award Winning Author. This is because these tweets were temporary, hyperbolic, celebratory jokes, and the authors had no intention of any misrepresentation. The vast majority of comments that were objected to were of this nature. I will eat my hat if any of these people try to exploit the Ao3 win for their own gain in the future.
It is possible, because people can be assholes and the population of Ao3 is large, that someone will try to make fraudulent claims about the Hugos. This will not be because a bunch of people celebrated Ao3’s Hugo with unauthorized language for a short period of time. It will be because some people are jerks, and they will be jerks whether the rest of us fall in line or not. And when those jerks show up we will identify them for what they are and shun them right along with you.
But we’re not going to submit ourselves to your authority because you have anxiety over them.
If my previous post goes through, of course digging around I see one of the accounts I brought up does have “Hugo award winner” in their patreon so lol at me. But yeah, I’m not into that and think it crosses the line.
LectionaryStan: It’s a fandom win, meant to be celebrated only amongst other fandom people.
And how is that being enforced?
LectionaryStan: No one has actually put it on a book. No one has actually put it in their LinkedIn, or CV; it hasn’t already happened, and it’s very likely not going to.
You know this how?
(“I haven’t personally seen it” does not equal “no one is doing it”.)
As I said about something else, humans are going to human. At least a few people are already doing it. It’s only going to be a matter of time before more people do — and if WSFS says sure, it’s okay for you to call yourselves individual Hugo Award Winners, then a lot more people will be doing it.
And in terms of commercial use, when someone with “Hugo Award Winning Author” in their bio on Twitter promotes their Patreon account, then technically that’s commercial use. Where do you draw the line on that?
@JJ Well, I don’t know, I don’t think it needs to be enforced, it was the common understanding and it doesn’t really need to be legislated.
You also don’t know that it is happening, and I feel like there are two assumptions here, that it is happening a lot and that if it is, that it’s a major damaging issue. Can’t prove a negative, so… Not going to even try? If something turns out to be major, it’s not going to be on the level of things discussed in this conversation so far.
There are already a lot more people calling themselves Hugo winners because a big thing was made of it, and I think that number is larger than it would have been if this hadn’t happened.
For the Patreon? I don’t know. I’m shrugging at that on a personal level, and for the purposes of this argument, if that is a commercial use then let the MPC do what they want about it, which has already been the consensus everybody has already agreed on basically all sides for days now. My emotion right now is a shrug, it’s pretty late.
@LectionaryStan
I did find a Patreon account that has “Hugo Award Winner” as the header. I think that’s crossing the line right there, and both WSFS and the Ao3 community should not tolerate that sort of thing. To be fair to the other side, while the Ao3 has been consistently strict about soliciting money through their platform it has become more and more common for people to try to make money off of fanfic, and there is a division of opinion on whether that’s ok.
I don’t think that the fight over language is going to have one effect or another over whether or not instances like this will appear, but I do think that such advertisement is not appropriate and it’s well within the WSFS’s rights to pursue action against people who do that.
Sure, but I just don’t get why commercial use is being brought up again when it seemed to me that had been finally dealt with to everyone’s satisfaction and we were all now discussing non-commercial use. I feel like I’ve been pretty good about using “if” statements to allow for the possibility of a few people doing this; and when a few people do this, nobody has complained about the idea of commercial use being stopped. I’m not interested in getting into a fight about someone’s Patreon, right now or again, especially since it seems to be involved in a part of the conversation that I thought had actually been resolved.
Allowing non-commercial use isn’t going to lead to an avalanche of commercial use, but even if it did, (1) very few would complain if the WSFS took action to stop the commercial use, and (2) it wouldn’t give the right to throw the non-commercial use in the same boat.
@LectionaryStan
I agree with you completely. Unfortunately the post I made saying as much did not pass moderation (i believe a link and a bad word may have done it. I don’t think it was malicious. ) and since I’m going to bed I won’t be typing it up again.
LectionaryStan: nobody has complained about the idea of commercial use being stopped… it seems to be involved in a part of the conversation that I thought had actually been resolved.
In addition to the Patreon account found by M. Lin, I’ve found two other Patreons calling themselves Hugo Award Winners, as well as a t-shirt for sale.
This is why it’s a good idea to never make absolute claims about something — because when it turns out that the claim is false, it puts everything else you ever say into doubt. At this point I’m going to figure that any further claims you make, unless accompanied by actual citations, are just you making things up.
You’re acting like this is no big deal. It is a big deal. Because there are people with real lives, and more important things to do with their time and energy like spending time with their family and friends, who are going to instead have to be sending e-mails, and if the person doesn’t respond and agree to take the false claims / merchandise down, contacting websites asking for takedowns, and if that doesn’t work, wasting money getting attorneys to do their thing.
All because inconsiderate people decide that they’re going to be that person.
@ camestros felapton:
I always use a spell checker. It is important that the syntax and semantics of my spells are 100% correct. I don’t use an autojmated spelling checker, because it frequent;ly insists that I should spell thing in the American fashoin.
@ Meredith:
Heh, the main reason Trigger stories are not on AO3 is that, well, I don’t think AO3 is the right place for them (however, I may change my mind on that down the years). I do consider then fan fiction, in the broadest sense of the word, though.
“No automagic spell checkers in the Dungeon! We lost the whole party last time when you cast ‘fire all’!”
As I said before, I believe my use of “if” statements in my previous posts do cover the minority who are doing it. I’m sorry that that wasn’t good enough for you, but from my side, it feels very much like bringing up small things as gotchas when it was both allowed for and part of the conversation that was already finished.
Oh, Hampus, have you seen that Anders Blixt is almost done with a new BRP-based pen&paper RPG called Nova? I may just about have to get me a copy, because… you know…
I mean, just after a little more thought, I know I said “speaking only for this specific example”, that being book covers, CVs, and LinkedIn, not even the things I’m trying to be held account for. I am still very confident that very few will try the former, because it assumes that people Google claims like that for professional reasons and doing it would only destroy their professional credibility, hence my calling them likely a fool. Patreons and pins were no part of that post, so my confidential assertions weren’t even present there. So it feels like my posts aren’t even being read anymore, which does make it feel like a waste of time to type them up. Just how I feel, but at this point I think I can safely say it is a fact things in my posts already accounted for are being missed.
Ingvar:
Not my thing, I think. It is only a system without setting?
@ Hampus: At the moment, looks like “just rules engine” (and I am wrong about the name, it’s Expert Nova). The second planned book is one (or more) campaign settings. Possibly-relevant blog post (mostly in Swedish)
Ingvar:
I’ll wait to see if there will be more substance. I need to concentrate on playing the games I’ve already bought. 😛
@JJ
This is why it’s a good idea to never make absolute claims about something — because when it turns out that the claim is false, it puts everything else you ever say into doubt. At this point I’m going to figure that any further claims you make, unless accompanied by actual citations, are just you making things up.
This is ridiculous and reflects a mentality of wanting to win a fight, not come to an understanding or the truth. I offered up the information about the patreon freely and don’t believe its existence has weakened any of mine or LectionaryStan’s points.
But I don’t think anyone has been laboring under the delusion that this conversation has involved good faith for some time.
I’ll leave it at this. You can’t make us do anything and we don’t care what you do. I wish you the best of luck getting the rocket you shot out of the hanger back in.
@JJ
It requires that Worldcon members be okay with people who are not themselves actually individual Hugo Award Winners referring to themselves as such.
The situation bill cites does not require WSFS members who do not like non-commercial use to feel happy with or good about the non-commercial use. It does not require WSFS members who do not like non-commercial use to agree with or support the non-commercial use. It does not require WSFS members who do not like non-commercial use to like the non-commercial use.
What it requires is for WSFS members who do not like non-commercial use to not demand, order or tell other people to alter their non-commercial use. It requires WSFS members who do not like non-commercial use to not attack, harrass or malign people for their non-commercial use.
And I say it ‘requires’ in my second paragraph, but that’s obviously not enforceable. It’s more that WSFS members who do not like non-commercial use have no moral standing or authority to make demands or speak aggressively/combatively and if they choose to they will very much be being That Guy. (Again, I am only talking about non-commercial use. Please do not misunderstand or misrepresent me.)
Essentially, your feelings are your own and are sacrosanct. Your right and ability to demand behavioural change from people who are not doing anything wrong in a space you do not control is not. (Non-commercial use has not been established to be wrong.) It sucks. A lot. Feeling negatively about it is absolutely understandable. It’s just that those feelings are your responsibility to process. And that’s not an imposition of people who are engaging in non-commercial use on those who don’t like people engaging in non-commercial use. That’s just the experience of being human. And it’s also, to my understanding, the only result of what bill was saying, nothing more.
———————————————————————
The last post closed before I could thank the people who were kind enough to welcome me and explain how to make your way around the comment section a little more. I’m still not sure what the protocol around continuing conversations into new posts is, so this may be entirely the wrong thing to do and if so I apologise. But I wanted to say it somewhere and as someone with high anxiety I may go back to lurking after this and not get another opportunity.
M Lin: File 770’s unhappy history of commenters calling each other assholes in the Puppy days (2015-2016 A.D.) led me to filter that word so I can see how it’s being applied before approving the comment. Yours has been posted.
@Cora:
Did this have any staying power? Can you link to someone who still has a website or online bio saying this? Or to a book for sale that says this?
If you say it happened, I believe you, but I’ve never seen anything that made me think that doing so made any difference to anyone in the world.
@M Lin
These tweeters all identify as Hugo winners in their bio (or is it profile? dunno), or their user name.
https://twitter.com/nyxisnyx
https://twitter.com/Neffectualism
https://twitter.com/NishiuraBoys
https://twitter.com/5kinnypenis
https://twitter.com/christawolf94
https://twitter.com/elizabethdanger
https://twitter.com/PhoenixJustice
https://twitter.com/jenmishstiel
https://twitter.com/fcukign
https://twitter.com/linzstam
https://twitter.com/MarineBassas
https://twitter.com/MarcQuill
https://twitter.com/LauraHibble
https://twitter.com/emmyloo03
https://twitter.com/elsajeni
https://twitter.com/deathandsaints
https://twitter.com/SuplexRanger
https://twitter.com/geekmystic
https://twitter.com/Accalia
https://twitter.com/ScullzGolightly
https://twitter.com/AlliCrain
https://twitter.com/Marinaisgo
https://twitter.com/lazypadawan
https://twitter.com/anatsuno
https://twitter.com/Ralkm
https://twitter.com/clex_monkie89
https://twitter.com/callmearcturus
https://twitter.com/elorrainem
https://twitter.com/FumblesMcStupd
https://twitter.com/Alisbian
https://twitter.com/nighthawkms
https://twitter.com/damnparka
https://twitter.com/RiddlePanda
There are many, many more. And people who do likewise on tumblr:
https://everywitchway-ao3.tumblr.com/
https://lostiesgirl.tumblr.com/
and Patreon
https://www.patreon.com/ailurea
(if any of these folks have actually been awarded a Hugo by the WSFS, my apologies for sticking them on this list)
I’m an AO3er who’s been slogging through the backread as best I can, but I’m wondering: Have people yet been presented with a legible explanation of why every AO3 user is in fact inseparable from the inherent structure of the site? I mean, it is not the content or quality of my smut that contributed to the excellence of a site that won a Hugo; and yet, my smut’s existence on the site, and the interactions I had with the site as an author, did contribute in a real and meaningful way to that technological excellence. But it seems to me that a lot of people here do not understand why or how. I don’t want to just infodump if that’s been covered on a page of comments I didn’t see, but if that would actually be of interest, I can explain.
What makes this discussion so frustrating to read, as an AO3er who’s dreamed of being able to go to Worldcon and join the SFWA and everything else since she was 13, which was… many many moons ago… is that the feelings of people in the WSFS and their experiences with the Puppies are treated as very relevant, but the feelings of people in transformative media fandom and how we’ve been treated in this context since the 1960s are worse than irrelevant; when we bring them up, we’re “toxic”.
People in the AO3 are as angry and defiant as we are because no, really, giving Fuzzy Nation a Hugo award or doing something else that is “technically fanfiction” does not reflect actual knowledge of fanfiction culture. Fanfiction culture has involved experiencing a lot of shame and rejection at the hands of “traditional” SFF fandom.
I think that the fanficcer’s traditional experience in trad SFF con fandom–of having fanfiction treated with hatred and derision all the time, of our work being assumed constantly to have negative literary value, our traditions and tropes and aesthetics being completely unwelcome in traditional publishing, of authors who cross over having to practically steam-clean their public image before they get book deals, of having to erase as many fanfictional tells as possible from our writing if we want to get traditionally published–would be VERY relevant to our reaction when we’re told, the moment we’re recognized not for disclaiming our roots and being as Acceptable as possible, but for making and celebrating fanfiction, to cut it out and stop saying we belong in the winners’ circle.
After reading File 770 I have come to accept that some? people who object to this behaviour aren’t actually going “Ew, gross, fanfic, get away.” But the same way JJ gets to claim that it’s perfectly fine to interpret anyone who threatens the Hugos as being just like a Puppy, I think we should get some empathy and consideration for suspecting that this is, in fact, a continuation of 50 years of cultural experience of, “Girl, if you go to Worldcon DO NOT mention that you write fanfic, they’ll look at you like you just pooped on the rug.”
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I’ve used the imperfect analogy of a library before. The physical building, the system of shelving etc all contribute to the quality of the library but it absolutely depends on the actual books in the actual library. Likewise AO3 as an entity clealry includes not just the works but the community of people.
However, if I say “this library is great” I am also not saying “every book in this library is great”.
At this point I am completely disinterested in whose feelings are the most hurt and for what reasons and for how long. Okay, everyone’s feelings are hurt. Everyone’s feelings are valid and based on real past experiences. What now? Because I don’t think the “what now” should be “and now we debate, endlessly, on what the feelings are and why my/our feelings are the most important feelings” and that seems to be the “what now” that’s happening. What’s next?
@Lis Coburn
Well, speaking personally as an AO3 user and transformative works fandom person of not quite two decades now§ who is absolutely over the moon about the win, I mainly just think that since Best Related Work is a non-fiction category, no-one can really be a Hugo Winning Author (of either fanfic or original fic) as a result of the win. Award winning member of award winning community/community project, yes/maybe/maybe not/I keep changing my mind/wafflewaffle, award winning author, definitely no. I really value Related Work’s celebration of the non-fictional works around, which don’t generally get as much attention as the fictional stuff, so I’d hate to see it turned into a way of crowbarring more fiction onto the ballot (even fiction I really like). Fiction’s already got nine (or fourteen, depending on how you look at it) categories!
But I’m going to keep plugging away at sticking my fave/most admired transformative works fen on my nomination ballot in Fan Writer (especially ones who write great fic and great meta) and the appropriate length fiction categories, because really, there’s Hugo nomination-worth fanfic and authors out there that deserve recognition in its/their own right and not just as some sort of AO3 gestalt.
§For people reasonably aware of my age, yes, I was carefully avoiding mentioning it. To almost anyone. For the first few years I was in tranformative works fandom. Minor undercover!
Hey, I’m back. No idea what was actually leaking the water, but I mopped it up and it should be fine. It better damn well be. I’ll try to get into the conversation as it evolved now.
Re: feelings, addressing points from JJ, longleaf, Lis Coburn, Meredith mostly:
As laid out, feelings are valid, on both sides. However, on both sides, it is reasonable to expect that people are able to manage their feelings, check how grounded in reality they are and correct course if need be. If someone has a reaction to the extend of trauma, that’s valid but also they are maybe not in the best place for a discussion if they get overwhelmed by this. I’m not suggesting anyone is, but that is the example JJ gave.
I’m gonna give an example of my own. It doesn’t happen everyday, but when I get negative feedback I sometimes get a sinking feeling in my stomach that tells me 1. I’m awful and worthless 2. noone will ever love me and 3. I should just stop bothering people. Now, that feeling? Is a fucking liar. I know it because when I check thesethings carefully, I find that I did things I think went well, I have a list of people who like me and even if 1 + 2 are true, I cannot change them by doing 3. That’s a real feeling that’s valid, but I have to actively not listen to it. The protect function it once had is now worthless, it does more hurt than good. Same with the feelings re: puppies. They are useful when dealing with puppies! Get mad at them! But it behooves people to check if these feelings are getting started up outside of puppy situations. Because I don’t think people who are not like the puppies deserve to be treated like they are.
About the persistent fan arguent that has been gooing in circles:
Everyone agrees that commercial use is not cool and that the WSFS should protect their trademark in these cases. It is not really something AO3 members or the AO3 in an official function have to do for them. We are, however, talking about people using it on twitter. LectionaryStan and M Lin have been on point about this. The claim about dilution of trademark has in light of rahaeli’s/synedochic’s posts on twitter weakened and I haven’t seen enough proof for it from people arguing for a strict following of the Hugo stature. There are also the claims about destroying/burning down/devaluing/watering down the Hugo if shared by so many winners. I think that’s grounded in feelings and the sides obviously differ on that. So as I see it, there is no real impetus for this except respecting the wishes of part of the WSFS members – we don’t know who is in the majority on that even.
At the rate at which some filers and WSFS have been burning through the gooodwill you had from the puppy years, there is really not much there. Instead it very much worked like the Streisand effect. I get wanting to stop this trend, but, as an unrelated AO3 member, don’t see why I have the duty to fight this fight on behalf of some of the filers. I don’t really feel like understanding of how different AO3 is has happened. Part of the problem I would say is that there is no precendent for any similar structure with almostzero hierarchy wining before.
And finally, most jokes don’t go “I won a hugo” but “I am a winner” (as in a winner amongst many in the archive) and “my fic won an hugo award”. Fictional content is not separatable from the archive structure because it forms and is formed by AO3 in return. It’s not the biggest nptable feature that made it difference for the win, maybe (we can only speculate), but it’s still part of the archive. You get the great AUs with the filthy porn, that’s the point. Otherwise it’s like awarding Shakespeare but not the dick jokes he makes, when the crossover between deep thoughts and penis jokes is the point of any Shakespeare play. Because we have seen people wanting to carve out what they like from the archive and leaving the rest behind as “unworthy”, AO3 members aren’t willing to let any splitage happen.
@Lis Coburn:
The essential tragedy of the current interaction is that AO3 folk have a history of being treated badly by people who dislike fanfiction , and WSFS folk have a history of being treated badly (during the Puppy years), and so both groups have some very sensitive spots that can provoke strong reactions when touched. I certainly empathize with your feelings, and am glad that you are empathizing with the feelings of others.
My favorite fanfiction of recent years is a Miles Vorkosigan/Buffy fict I ran across, called “With A Star” (https://www.tthfanfic.org/Story-2251/DonSample+With+a+Star.htm). Since I’m a huge fan of both Buffy and Miles, I was delighted to see them in the same story.
True but when I say “Shakespeare’s play are timeless and historically important” I am not saying “dick jokes are timeless and historically important” even though it is 100% true that dick jokes are timeless and historically important and Shakespeare’s plays are part of that. Of course, that is also why people avoid talking to me about Shakespeare.
Camestros:
Reminds me of this bit from Blackadder:
Blackadder:
Which reminds me, Auntie…
Lady Whiteadder:
Don’t call me “Auntie.” Aunt is a relative and relatives are evidence of sex. Which is hardly a fitting conversation for the dinner table.
Blackadder:
Or indeed, any table.
Lord Percy:
Except perhaps a table in a brothel.