True enough. I did keep an eye on the mess as it was developing, so it was easier for me to filter the search results for something that resembled sanity and objectivity than for someone new to the debacle.
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Note to Self: Write a Sci-Fi book about equality, love, and acceptance of all titled “No Award”
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Photos (candid and posed) from the ceremonies and from the pre-ceremonies Hugo Reception can be found here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/135602186@N03/
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There are a couple of well documented voting fiddles in the past. The ‘Church’ of Scientology bought a lot of memberships to force an L. Ron book onto the ballot one year (it lost, hard) and a very early Hugo had some dodgy stuff involving an apparently justly forgotten book called They’d Rather Be Right, which won in suspicious circumstances, long before the current voting systems came into play.
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I think there’s better ways to fix the voting system than just throwing it wide open - I’m not against fan-voted awards, but as it stood, the Hugos were broken. I don’t know much about how to fix it, without sitting down and actually working it out, it’s a tricky thing to design a good voting system that scales well.
They definitely need a larger pool - I’m not sure how to achieve that, but the larger it gets, the harder it is to mess with, which is a plus. Definitely should keep the money requirement, even if it does become cheaper - I don’t know, throw in some extras or something as an incentive.
My problem was purely with their voting system an insistence on keeping the voting pool small. And their voting system was awful, and made it trivially easy to game, even unintentionally. Happily, they’ve started taking steps to fix that, it seems - or at least so the word goes.
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Small nitpick: The actual voting system seems to work well. It’s the nomination system that was susceptible to a brute-force slate.
The two solutions to that problem (EPH and 4/6) have both passed the first round of ratifications already. They will be voted on again next year for implementation in 2017
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No, that’s fair comment. I was referring to the whole thing from go to woah as the Voting system, and I should have been more specific. Though I do think the voting itself could be improved - few things can’t be, I think - it’s functional enough. It was the nominations that were causing the problem.
Glad to hear they’re definitely taking steps, and that the measures have passed ratification - they’re making moves to sort it all out, and I can’t hold too much against an organization willing to learn from it’s mistakes.
Any news about the small voting pool issue, though? That’s always irked me - I understand we’ll never have a group vote of all sci-fi fans everywhere, but that few thousand just isn’t enough.
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And now, a prediction for the future!
“Next year, I hear the Puppies slate will be decided by Donald Trump’s skull merkin, worked like a puppet by the ghost of a drunk, racist Ayn Rand.”
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Am I the only one who feels “lmgtfy” links are condescending, and obfuscated ones doubly so? Makes me see the person posting them as a jackass…
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Why do I get the feeling that Bruce Schneier is taking over the world? Good thing I know him a little.
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To be fair, “condescending” is kind of the function of LMGTFY—to make fun of someone asking a foolish question when they could just Google it, to teach them to Google it for themselves in the future.
So, yeah, it kind of is.
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could not you say the same thing of Asimov’s, or Analog, or FSF?
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OK, I’ve seen the same claim enough elsewhere that I’m prepared to admit I’m probably wrong.
(But boy, if there is such an overlap, it certainly sheds new light on just how small the GamerGate movement really is. Even if every single Puppy voter were a GamerGater, there were only about a thousand of them who could afford to pony up the $40 necessary to cast their vote?)
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I’m fine with that since I see people who ask people to spoon feed them information that they could get in 30 seconds with Google as idiots or lazy.
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Exactly. Why are people caring about the logic of conspiracy theorists?
Jet fuel can’t melt feminist sci-fi beams, folks.
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Various puppies claim that John Scalzi did this first, as he does an annual thread on his blog where he allows people who’ve produced something that’s eligible for that year’s Hugos to post about said things.
Scalzi is a particular bete noire for the puppies. Beale particularly has a hate-on for him dating back 10 years to an argument on the forum that would later become Making Light - Scalzi was initially standing up for Beale’s participation in SFWA, and ended up schooling him after Beale continually went on about how women couldn’t write “proper” SF because their brains couldn’t handle physics or somesuch.
Similarly, Brad Torgesen has defended putting Michael Z Williamson’s Wisdom From My Internet, which is a collection of his bad taste jokes on Twitter on the slate because Scalzi won Best Related Work in 2009 for Your Hatemail Will be Graded.
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Vox Day also claims black folks are subhuman (see recent blog posts) so why should I care what he has to say? In other words, just because he claims something happened, doesn’t mean I believe it.
I’ve read Scalzi’s blog plenty. He never set up bloc voting.
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Asimovs(I think they’re the Dell awards now) are judged, rather than selected by voting, so not the same thing.
Analog awards are a reader poll, but attracts far more responses.
I’m not familiar with what you mean by the FSF awards - do you mean the Nebulas? If so, those are a writer’s award, so not really for everyone’s vote, bit of a different story. If not, you’ll have to tell me which ones you mean - the only other thing I can think of in terms of literary awards that could be shortened to that is the F Scott Fitzgerald award, which is both judged, and not a sci-fi award.
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In every category that went No Award because it was all Puppies, a legitimate author was robbed of a Hugo. It’s great that the Puppies lost, but if things continue as they are, they can keep sabotaging the awards for everyone else each year.
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Oh, yeah, totally. It’s basically the equivalent of having a real-life conversation, and someone says “hey, guys, what are you talking about?” and you go “Ugh, don’t talk to me, get out your phone and google the words I’m using.”
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