Hugo season

Just got a Hugo nominating ballot from the 2005 WorldCon, which surprises me because there's no Hugo nominating ballot available yet from the 2006 WorldCon website. But if the printed ballot from Interaction is accurate, it looks like there'll be no Best Website category in 2006; instead, the committee appears to have chosen "Best Interactive Video Game" as their special category.

Disappointing to me personally, but when I try to look at objectively, I think it may be a better category than Best Website. Websites are hard to pin down in a lot of ways: hard to say where their boundaries are (what counts as a "site"?); hard to say what chronological period to look at (only stuff that's first appeared on the site in the previous calendar year?); hard to say what different criteria to use from printed works (should a site be nominated only if it does things you can't do in print? what exactly does that mean?). Video games, in contrast, from the little I know of them, are easier to define, and are much more clearly delineated from other media.

I would be tempted to nominate some of the winners of the latest Interactive Fiction competition, but the category description clearly says "graphics-based game," so never mind.

The other item of unusual interest to some of y'all on this nomination form is that it doesn't say anything about special eligibility rules for the Campbell. I'm hoping that the 2006 Hugo administrator will provide more information about that; specifically about the question of whether people who lost some or all of their eligibility period in 2005's rule change will be eligible in 2006.

(I know it was only sort of a rule change from an official point of view, but from the point of view of most of the voters, it appeared to be a rule change.)

Speaking of LACon, I've now bought a membership. They've already got nearly 3000 members signed up, including nearly 1000 from California.

I would've reserved a hotel room as well, but there's no way to do that yet from the con website. (Presumably you can reserve a room in the hotel by phone, but I don't know if you can get con rates yet.)

. . . It occurs to me that with this WorldCon even more than most, rather than complaining about any shortcomings I could volunteer to help out with it. I think that would probably be a bad idea given how generally burned out this year has left me, but it's something I should keep in mind as a possibility.

2 Responses to “Hugo season”

  1. Jennifer Pelland

    I would be interested to see if there’ll be any kind of grandparenting going on for those of us who otherwise were only eligibile for a week (or made post-eligible), but it’s only an academic interest, as I certainly wasn’t published anywhere major enough this year to merit any nominations.

    reply
  2. David Moles

    At least if there isn’t, everybody who doesn’t win can have the satisfaction of blaming the LACon Hugo Committee.

    reply

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