I hope to post more about stats from this year’s Hugo Awards soon. In this first such post, I’m looking only at the cases where Instant Runoff Voting led to a different result than first-past-the-post would have: Related Work: Rather to my surprise, Zoe Quinn’s Gamergate book got the most first-round first-place votes, but the […]
Good tweet from KTO: ...we can either find reasons to improve inclusion, or we can make excuses for continuing past exclusion.— Kat Tanaka Okopnik (@KTOkopnik) August 23, 2018 Which reminds me of a recent thing I was thinking about. During the discussion about this year’s Worldcon programming, I had the following series of reactions (in […]
Some things I did today, in roughly chronological order: Got approximately enough sleep. Not enough to catch up on sleep dep, but probably enough for one night. Made it to work for a 10 am meeting. Which I realize is late for many of you, but is relatively early for me; usually these days when […]
A friend asked when Strange Horizons became eligible for the Semiprozine category of the Hugo Awards. Here’s my response. Part 1: the early days For our first couple of years, we firmly declared ourselves to be not a semiprozine. We paid SFWA-qualifying professional rates for fiction, and we wanted to be taken seriously as a […]
Here’s this week’s Strange Horizons Flashback story: “The Desires of Houses,” by Haddayr Copley-Woods All the parts of the house adore her. (NSFW.) (Published in 2006.) (900 words.) The floor is sulking. [The woman] almost always wears shoes in the basement, and the cement lies all day in agony listening to the first floor's boards […]
At this morning’s WSFS Business Meeting, there turned out to be some strong opinions about how to revise (or not revise) the Fan Artist and Pro Artist Hugo Award categories. In the end, the Business Meeting decided to refer the issue to a committee, which will report back at next year’s Business Meeting in Dublin. […]
I’ll be attending Worldcon in San José this coming weekend. My only specifically scheduled plan is to attend the Hugo ceremony on Sunday evening. Other than that, I’ll be wandering around, attending panels, maybe attending some parts of the WSFS Business Meetings (though probably not the whole thing this time), hanging out with friends, etc. […]
When you’re interviewing for a technically oriented tech-writing job in the software industry, chances are fairly good that at some point in the process, you’ll be asked to read some code and explain what it does. So before you apply, I strongly recommend familiarizing yourself with some common simple things that a brief code sample […]
When I described the boardgame Terraforming Mars to someone a couple months back (I forget who, sorry), the first thing they asked was “What about atmospheric pressure?” I hadn’t thought of that question, but it seemed like an excellent question after they raised it. Presumably you would need to significantly increase atmospheric pressure to make […]
I didn’t manage to post last week’s planned Strange Horizons Flashback story, and in the past, falling behind has been the beginning of the end for this project; I don’t get the week’s story posted, and then time passes, and eventually I accept that I’m not going to continue the project, and then a year […]
The bad news: I needed to get a smog check this year for my 2005 Prius. The good news: I went and got one a couple of months before my registration renewal was due, back in late March. The bad news: I apparently then forgot to actually pay my registration renewal. The good news: The […]
A month or so ago, a carton of milk in my fridge went bad a couple of days before the sell-by date. A couple weeks later, the same thing happened again, this time with an unopened carton. Around the same time, half of an avocado went moldy in my fridge. That had never happened before, […]