(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. […]
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 […]