Wow, it’s been over a month since I last posted here. Not gonna try to post about everything I’ve been up to during that time. But here’s some of what I did this weekend: Read or skimmed or evaluated-and-discarded five books. (And continued reading two or three others that I’m in the middle of.) My […]
Update on David Levithan gendered-pronoun issue: As I may have mentioned here a while back, I was startled and a little dismayed when I read the author note at the beginning of Levithan’s Six Earlier Days (prequel to Every Day), which used the word “his” in referring to the nongendered protagonist, whose name is A. […]
Last night, I saw In the Heights at Woodminster Amphitheater in Joaquin Miller Park in the Oakland hills. Produced by Woodminster Summer Musicals, “Oakland's Broadway in the Redwoods Since 1967.” It was great. Highly recommended. There’s another performance tonight, and four more next Thursday through Sunday, if you’re interested. I listened to the recording of […]
As I’ve mentioned in various contexts, for the past month or so I’ve been sleepy almost all the time, regardless of how much sleep I’ve had. For the first couple weeks, I guessed it was a stress issue. But most of the biggest stresses got resolved, and I’m still sleepy. Saturday night, I got nine […]
(This post is about last week’s Robert Silverberg quote that criticized N. K. Jemisin. If you read about it last week, there’s nothing new here. Content warning for descriptions of racism and for referring to Vox Day.) Last week, Vox Day posted in his blog to the effect that the list of this year’s Hugo […]
More notes on the 2018 Hugo stats. This time I’m looking at categories where the gap between the top two items in a category was particularly big or particularly small at various points in the IRV process. (Not listing the ones where the first two swapped places; see previous post for those.) Note: When I […]
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. […]