I only got an Ipod in 2007, a freebie I got at an ultimately failed job interview. With 2gb of storage it had enough room for a dozen or so albums, i.e. enough variety to last a medium length commute. Loved that thing, even if I’m no great Apple fan — something about them presenting locked down computer products as tools of freedom rubs me the wrong way — but sadly I lost it when it slipped out of a pocked while biking one day. Progress being what it is, that specialised piece of consumer electronics has been replaced by a more generalised bit of kit, my mobile phone which has the same amount of space and which cannot just hold music, but also books and movies undsoweiter.
Also ten years old today: Grand Theft Auto III. The first Grand Theft Auto was cool enough already, in all its old skool topdown 2d glory and controversial enough with its antisocial, crime glorifying violent gameplay, but once it all became 3d and the violence became up close and personal, whoa boy… Brilliant though.
First up, can we please stop it with the 9/11 hysteria already. Yes, it’s the tenth anniversary, yes it’s an important turning point in recent world history and a raw wound for a great many people still, but can’t it all be done a little bit more dignified and restrained? Every television channel seems the need to come up with its own unique 9/11 spin and it’s getting sick making. I can’t imagine how bad the family and friends of those who died that day must feel right now, having this shoved in their faces 24/7 this week…
Second, this is the week that Michael S. Hart died. Who he? Just the founder of Project Gutenberg, who had a simple vision: make public domain books freely available on the internet. For all your Google Books or Internet Archives, Hart thought of it first, back in 1971. He was an avatar of the old skool, not for profit internet, seeing it as something that would enrich people’s lives, not something to make himself rich. He’ll be missed.
Third, you should never tug on Superman’s cape, but that hasn’t stopped Jim Lee and DC comics from “improving” it. It’s not just that it now looks like a thirteen year old’s idea of what a cool costume should look like, but that it looks like what a thirteen year old twenty years ago would think was cool. All it misses is some goddamn ankle pouches. DC should know better than to try for the hip, edgy look: it’s constitutionally incapable of doing so. Superman’s costume is a design classic, something that has been able to stay iconic and classy for decades with only little tweaks. It doesn’t need to be chucked just because some nerd can’t live with the underpants over his trousers jokes anymore.
Fourth, well, this:
Horatio brought him his sword. “Laertes is looking for you,” he said.
“I don’t have time for Laertes. He must know I didn’t mean to kill his father,” Hamlet said.
“It’s not his father,” said Horatio. “It’s his sister.”
“Ophelia? I didn’t touch her.”
“She killed herself. Walked out into the sea, dressed in her heaviest gown. A funeral gown. Two soldiers went in after her, and a boat was launched, but when they brought her body back, she was dead.”
“And for that he wants to kill me?”
Orson Scott Card “improves” Hamlet and makes it all about teh gay menace. The homophobia is expected and you can feel some pity for Card being so messed up in the head by his church, as by now it should be quite clear that he himself is the biggest old queer to ever force himself into the closet, but the sheer arrogance of wanting to adapt Shakespeare for our times? Ugh. Have some antidote:
The reaction to this year’s results, however, has been the worst I can remember. Depressingly much of this has come, not just from outraged fans, but also from professionals in the field. And some of those people, accidentally or otherwise, have said things that can be taken to imply they think the process is corrupt.
[…]
I guess this sort of thing is inevitable. The higher profile a set of awards, the more carping there will be. But I’m tired of having to worry about it. In particular I’m tired of worrying that projects I’m involved in, which I care deeply about, will suffer through their association with whatever mud-slinging is affecting me. And I have to face up to the fact that for a large segment of the community I will never be anything more than a fan who won fan Hugos in controversial circumstances.
So I am bowing out.
Honestly, this all seems a bit over the top, especially the idea that the bogstandard complaints of the Hugos being a popularity contest has anything to do with Cheryl Morgan herself; that’s rating yourself far too highly. In fact, the first time I’ve heard Cheryl Morgan mentioned in the context of Hugo controversies is erm, here. It is of course Cheryl’s right to get away from fandom, but to blame unnamed Hugo bashing critics for her own decision is absurd.
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…
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….
