geekdom

Scalzi is being wrong on the internet

geekdom, science fiction
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In which I overanalyse some throwaway remarks made by John Scalzi on his blog:

There’s always post-Hugo kvetching, for the same reason there’s pre-Hugo kvetching, which is, people like to kvetch, and/or they have a hard time internalizing that their own tastes are not in fact an objective standard of quality. I do think there’s a core of commenters whose problem internalizing that other people have other tastes is overlaid with a more-than-mild contempt for fandom, i.e., “Oh, fandom. You’ve shown again why you can’t be trusted to pick awards, you smelly, chunky people of common tastes, you.” Fandom does what fandom does with folks like that: it ignores them, which I think is generally the correct response to such wholly unwarranted condescension.

Apart from the slight defensiveness, which Damien Walter also noted, the mistake made here is to believe the Hugo Award voters equalise fandom. Once upon a time this was true, but that time is at least four decades ago. Even within print sf, there no longer is fandom, there are fandoms. The Hugo Awards and the Worldcon are the legacy of the arguably oldest still existing strand of fandom, but cannot be said to represent fandom as a whole. Hence the criticism aimed at the Hugos in general and this years abysmal winner(s) in particular is not that of outsiders condemning fandom, but an argument within fandom itself.

And the real problem with the Hugos is not that the voters have inferior tastes, or even so much that they keep rewarding the wrong books or people, but that they’re still seen as representative for the tastes of the whole of fandom, rather than a smallish subset of fandom. You could see that very well with this year’s Hugos, where the tastes of “online fandom” (or a sizeable subset of it anyway) differed so much from what the Hugo voters in the end awarded. Not just with the Best Novel Hugo, but also with the Best Fan award — which would’ve probably gone to James Nicoll if online fandom had had its say.

But no other subset of fandom has such a prestige outside of fandom as the Hugo voters do, as the Hugo Award is one of the two science fiction/fantasy awards well know to sf&f readers and other “civilians”. If the general taste of the Hugo voters is mediocre it reflects on science fiction and fantasy fandom as a whole, in a way e.g. the Clarke Awards do not. And since it’s only a small and distinct group of people voting on the Hugos, chances are they’ll get it wrong…

Real names and other dangers

geekdom, Life under Capitalism
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On the subject of Google’s childish insistence on “real names” for its new Google+ service, jwz is scathing, but it’s this comment that gets it right on what mature online communities need to remain civil:

In 20+ years of online communication (much of it with people I either have never met, or only later met) I’d have to say the only reliable predictor of civil discussion is stability of identity, which allows reputation to work. You want people to use the same identity by which they are regularly known, so you can recognise it’s the same person again. As you note this worked just fine for most of USENET’s existence, through most of LJ’s existence, and across a wide range of BBSes prior to that. It even works across a diverse, but loosely related by theme, set of blogs, and their comments, providing there’s a general understanding that people will continue to use the same identity on all of them.

It’s not the only thing you need for a decent online community — you also need a good system to block the numpties, either through active but fair moderation or on the user side ala Usenet’s kill lists — but what you really don’t need and what’s in fact counterproductive is to insist on “real names”. Insisting on that is just another unnecessary hoop for people to jump through to start participating and only an idiot won’t realise that for very many people for very good reasons this is one hoop too far.

But of course Google and Facebook and all the other socalled social media sites are not interested in creating a proper online community, but rather an exploitable resource to sell to advertisers, for which purpose “real names” are much more valuable….

UFO (Enemy Unknown)

geekdom, science fiction
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Found at James Nicoll’s, the title sequence of the old Gerry & Sylvia Anderson live action series UFO. Three years ago Brad Hicks called this his favourite retro future, which was when I first heard about it. UFO is one of those series that, if you didn’t catch it when it was first aired, you’ll never know about and I was much too young (or even born) to do that. Since then I have managed to watch some episodes and seeing this title sequence reminded me of how much it resembles a similarly named classic computer game, UFO: Enemy Unknown. So much so the 1971 television series has to have been an inspiration for the 1994 video game; which the Wikipedia entry indeed says it was.

UFO: Enemy Unknown is one of the best games I’ve ever played and one of the few that actually scared me. A combination of strategy/god game and tactical squad combat, the player is the leader of the X-Com organisation defending Earth against UFO attack, having to set up bases and manage funds to equip his squads, improve weapons and ships and do research. Once an UFO is signaled you can try to intercept it and if you do you can send a squad to capture it and capture or kill any aliens it carries. There are also alien infestations you may need to combat etc. It had relatively good graphics and decent, atmospheric sound effects for a mid-nineties game.

It was when you went to actually fight the aliens that the game got scary. You could only see what was directly in your line of sight, especially in night missions you had little visibility and at literally ever corner some alien menace could hide. Add the music and sound effects, which though synthesiser based were quite spooky, then play late at night with the lights off not to wake anybody up and it could make you jump when you turned a corner and some nasty mo-fo was waiting for you…

I remember one time I had loaded my squad on a Shuttle, which had landed on the site of an UFO crash, I had moved my first soldier out, who had been armed with a grenade launcher, moved out the second one, then some alien fscker psionically possessed that first soldier and got her to launch a grenade right into the shuttle. Whoops, that was the squad gone…

Shorter me: I really should dig out my copy of this game again…