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[james_davis_nicoll]

Who's been saying the Hugo process is corrupt?

Comments

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Who needs corruption when mummification works so well?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Claiming corruption is very different from saying "The Windup Girl is an abomination and everyone who ever voted for it for any award aside from the Squickies should be ashamed of their terrible terrible taste". One is deliberately perverting the process and the other is just due to other people having lousy taste. They're completely different.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I was too busy being aphoristic to be clear. I was trying to say precisely what you just said.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

No one, Cheryl is straight-up lying. What happened is that Lavie made fun of the Hugos, Farah suggested that she can't complain unless he votes, I said that was ridiculous—surely she could complain about the results of US elections from the UK and that one need not play a crooked game to complain that it's crooked. Cheryl then wrote, "'crooked', eh? Are you suggesting criminal wrongdoing?" and after the obscure concept of metaphor being explained to her by Rose Fox, decided that she was going to run with crooked=corrupt anyway. "Corrupt" as a term was actually introduced by Farah, who wondered if there's a difference between UK and US uses of the term "crooked." (There is.)

That said, the Hugos purport to measure "Best" when they really measure "Most Disciplined Voting Faction" and "Name Recognition."

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

You forgot "Books or Authors Preferred by Wealthy Middle-Aged Readers".

* I was going to say "comfortably well-off" but that made the phrase even clunkier.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

I'm not familiar with the median income of Hugo voters. I'm very familiar with objectively bad books being nominated for or winning the award due to Name Recognition or campaigning on Twitter, LJ, online writing groups, etc. Heck, even my nomination is due largely to a) our host here and b) the uptick in Japanese supporting members, not on any real widespread understanding of what I was doing. But this sort of actual discussion of voting behavior, instead of pleas to think only of Fans! and Taste! is apparently an excuse for endless fannish shrieking.

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

I think this is the twitter debate in question:
http://sfy.co/GAW

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Wait, does this mean I am not allowed to complain about or criticize Denkinger’s call in game six of the 1985 World Series? I didn't ump, play for either team and I wasn't at the game.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen studies, either. I will opine that the ability to spend approximately $50 solely for the privilege of voting in the election -- to say nothing of the cost of an attending membership -- classifies you as "comfortably well-off".

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

She has now indulged herself in a classic flounce. I BLAME YOU.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Or just willing to prioritize it by deprioritizing meals out, or movie theater trips, or pie. I will say that the voter's packet makes the $50 more amenable to me, now that many people read ebooks as a matter of course. Many people would spend $50 on five novels, five related books, and several books worth of short fiction.

It's much better than a few years ago, when I saw heartfelt LJ posts fro people vowing to spend the $40-50 for supporting membership to vote for [Some Novelist] because it Was Important to Make Sure [Some Novelist] Got On the Ballot and the Tyranny of the Old Destroyed Forever.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

I like Cheryl fine and she may well be going through some personal issues, but one reason why some segments of fandom will never ever take the Hugos all that seriously is the constant hectoring on the part of the folks who have taken organizational responsibility.

It's also rather a joke to insist that the same people who voted for Connie Willis voted for Clarkesworld. We have no idea how the votes shook out; my guess would be that most CW partisans were primarily supporters or either Jemisin or Macguire in the novel category. But the important thing is to insist that any critique or complaint of Hugo results is a priori wrong and bad unfannish and elitist.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

The voter's packet does look like value for money (assuming you trust the opinions of the nominators, of course.)

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Correct.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

It sounded to me from the content of the post that she was already exhausted by her responsibilities, as well as having suffered a recent personal loss.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

I don't think that's true. Feed seems to appeal to a younger, blog-reading audience, and it is so terrible that there's no appealing to differing tastes to justify its nomination.

Si!

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

Sigh

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

But it's widely acknowledged to be the worst call in the history of baseball. Granted, baseball doesn't have the historic importance of hockey but still.

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

I'll let you have that one if I can complain about the World Series being called the World Series even though I have no interest in baseball.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Perhaps, but after 15 minutes it was still loading, nothing visible.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Actually, he said brightly. I quite liked it.

I thought Feed was significantly better than Blackout/All Clear.

[yendi]

Are you running NoScript or another blocking application by any chance? I got it to load just fine, but I could see it being nailed by a helper app.

(That said, it's clearly missing tweets from the conversation, although it does help flesh out the background.)

[daveon.livejournal.com]

While I have issues with the usual skew we get with nominations being predominately focused on US Convention goers, and, yes, I don't agree with at least 2 of the nominations for Best Novel this year - generally speaking I tend to think it's representative as, by and large, a reasonable cross-section of Fandom is represented at a convention.

The Voter's Packer is a pretty significant improvement though, which stops me from voting randomly like I used to for several categories.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I prefer to think of it as not being able to complain or criticize the stinking, cheating, Australia 4th official who ruled out Mike Tindall's OBVIOUS try in the 2007 Rugby World Cup final!

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Looks like it was being blocked, yes.