3) Ice-T will has some startling information for you in these (fake) SVU screencaps.
4) Most Heinous Stories of Role-Playing Games Gone Wrong.
5) Picture Yourself as a Stereotypical Man. “Stereotype threat” and academic achievement, or how to erase any statistical difference between whites and blacks / men and women.
Okay. I am. A little bit, but only to float an idea.
Eric Flint (possibly aiming for a fan writing Hugo himself) wrote a long post called The Divergence between Popularity and Awards in Fantasy and Science Fiction, in which he argues that the award-winners of Ye Dayes of Olde (before the mid 80’s, I guess) were also the best sellers in the genre, but for the last 25+ years, that hasn’t been true.
He comes at this argument through an odd, winding route, attempting to magically divine the top sellers by seeing how many feet of books are modeled[1] on the shelves, using pre-Amazon measurements he took at B&N and Borders. (Kids, Borders was once a big chain bookstore.)
Which… fine. Let’s just pretend that this is a good measure of sales. Assuming that the big sellers of today are no longer necessarily getting the awards, why not?
Let’s put aside the idea that there’s some sort of left-wing cabal handing them out to their friends, because that idea is dumb. Let’s also put aside the idea that the standards for the awards are especially literary. To quote Abigail Nussbaum:
The truth is—and this is something that we’ve all lost sight of this year—no matter how much the puppies like to pretend otherwise, the Hugo is not a progressive, literary, elitist award. It’s a sentimental, middle-of-the-road, populist one.[2]
I basically agree with her, although I don’t feel the urge to “walk away in disgust” and am in no way disappointed. The Hugos are what they are, and I think that’s fine for the people voting for them.
But here’s my suggestion, tentatively offered: what if the Hugo voters/nominators aren’t the one’s who’ve changed these last few decades? I mean, sure, some folks age out, new folks come in, so they aren’t the same individuals. But what if they’re the same sort of novelty-seeking reader, preferring clever, flattering books to pretty much everything else?
Because that would mean that the bulk of the readership now are the sorts of readers who don’t care about fandom or voting for Awards. Who have maybe sampled a few award-winners and found them not to their taste. They’re the people who came into the genre through Sword of Shannara, because it was the first fantasy to hit the NYTimes list, through STAR WARS and dozens of other action/adventure-with-ray-guns movies that sold millions of tickets, through D&D novels like Dragonlance, or through shoot-em-up video games.
Maybe the award hasn’t changed very much, but the readership now suddenly includes huge masses of people who are looking for Hollywood-style entertainment, with exaggerated movie characterization and a huge third act full of Big Confrontation.
Obviously, some Hugo voters enjoy that sort of thing, too. If they didn’t, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY wouldn’t have won this year. They may not think R.A. Salvatore’s work deserves an award, but they’ll read it and enjoy it. But the few thousand people involved in the Hugos are not enough to fill out the readership of someone like Jim Butcher or Robin Hobb. That’s a whole other group.
Flint’s post seems to suggest that the awards seem to have moved away from the influential big sellers, and he’s not sure why[3]. I would say that science fiction and fantasy have become large markets with a readership that’s less insular. It has more “casuals” to steal a gaming term. Those are the people who are blowing up the sales of the books at the “basic entertainment” end of the spectrum.
That’s a good thing.
It might seem funny at this point for me to say, once again, that I’m not all that interested in the Hugo Awards. I’m really not, although I’m very interested in selling large numbers of books [4]. The divergence between what sells in large numbers and what wins popular awards is an interesting data point.
[1] Modeling: When bookstores make a special effort to always have an author’s books on the shelf. A copy of The Two Towers sells, and a new one is ordered instantly. That’s a good place for an author to be.
[2] I found her writeup in this io9 summary of Hugo articles.
[3] Do the people who give out the Edgars worry that the books winning awards aren’t on the bestseller lists?
[4] Check out my books. I’ve got sample chapters for you and everything.
1) Wheel of Misfortune. Love this comic. Love. It.
2) Every JRPG ever: Video. Reader, I laughed at them.
3) Exotic polyhedra dice, made of marble, gator jawbones, carbon fiber, and more.
5) 15 Delicious Regional Sandwiches. A chow mein sandwich? I don’t think so.
6) Texts from HP Lovecraft. This made me laugh.
7) Ten tabletop games that you can play as couples. Video.
A lot about this NYTimes article, Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace, seemed familiar to me. I worked at Amazon.com for a little while, in the late nineties when the Seattle fulfillment center was their only one.
I was temp-to-hire, which meant I was a temporary employee packing books into boxes or whatever, and if they liked my work they would offer me a permanent position. They did like my work. They did make that offer. I turned them down.
Here’s the thing: it was October, and the supervisors running our section were all gung-ho about the company. Real cheerleaders, and I just assumed it was an act. We were all standing in front of a terribly-inefficient packing machine, and they kept talking about giving our all. For a bullshit warehouse job.
Then one day in October, one of the supervisors stands on a box or something and gives us this lecture about the upcoming holidays. I guess it was supposed to be a coach’s halftime talk or something, but she was telling us that Christmas was going to be hugely busy, and it was “going to be like a war in here,” and that we should be ready to put our personal lives on hold.
My first thought was Fuck you.
My second thought was that she was joking.
When I realized my second thought was wrong, I knew I wasn’t going to stay.
At that point, I’d been with my then-girlfriend, now-wife for a few years, and one thing I’d learned was that she had no intention of being a career widow. If I was planning to ignore her over the Christmas holidays, she would never stay.
And besides, fuck that. Amazon.com wasn’t my company. I just worked there. I had people in my life, and my writing, and was I really supposed to put all that on hold so Jeff Bezos could create his dream company?
Eventually, one of the supervisors pulled me aside to offer me a job (because let’s face it, I’m a good worker) and I told him I wasn’t going to accept because I could never be part of Amazon’s culture. I could never be yay-gung-ho over a day job.
He instantly deflated, going from upbeat to morose, and we talked for a while about not really knowing where we belong and not knowing where we could make a future for ourselves.
I think about that guy sometimes. I hope he’s happy.
Anyway, Amazon is one of the reasons that Seattle has such a thriving economy, but I’d never want to work there myself. Check out this quote from the article:
A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”
A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover.
A former human resources executive said she was required to put a woman who had recently returned after undergoing serious surgery, and another who had just had a stillborn child, on performance improvement plans, accounts that were corroborated by a co-worker still at Amazon.
“Put your personal life on hold.”
“Put your personal life on hold.”
My personal life IS my life, and it’s the only one I get. I’m not wasting it to make some obnoxious super-libertarian richer than he already is.
1) How One Misunderstanding in the 1870s Created an Entire Sci-Fi Subgenre
2) Every state flag is wrong, and here is why.
3) Someone is setting hipster traps in New York.
4) An “accomplished writer” takes James Patterson’s “Masterclass.”
5) What if Werner Hertzog directed Ant-Man?
6) Architects crowdfund to build £1.85 billion Minas Tirith in England.
7) I read NPR’s 100 best sff novels and they were shockingly offensive. Nothing to argue with here.
1. How many of the “world’s strangest delicacies” would you eat? I consider myself an adventurous eater, but: five-ish, depending on the moment.
2. Video series compares the changes made to the Star Wars movies.
3. The Ten Best Tales of Online Drama from Ten Years of Fandom_Wank.
4) Academics unlock Agatha Christie’s “whodunnit” code.
6) The amazing high technology behind the NYC subway system.
7) A skateboard sidecar for toddlers: Video.
1) Why do people go bald? Video
2) A conversation between graffiti artists and removers.
3) Fearless girl rips out own tooth with a slingbow. ::faints::
4) The names of ten fireworks effects.
5) Assigned to write an essay about a “leader” a group of teens decide to stand out from the pack and contact gangster Whitey Bulger in prison. He wrote back.
6) Ten Paintings of Guy Fieri as a Renaissance Baby.
7) The Detective As Speech. “An early letter I received after publishing my first book, Indemnity Only, came from a woman who wanted to know why V. I. Warshawski was allowed to “talk back” to men without being punished. The writer wasn’t seeking help in learning to talk back herself; she was criticizing V. I. for behaving in a way that was neither right nor natural.” h/t James Nicoll
Want to check out an excellent post for people who a) like cool artwork and b) want to be a professional in a creative field? Well, here you go:
How I Became an Artist: The 12 year journey of my art thus far.
Takeaway: At the start, he wasn’t much better than me. Maybe a little better. At the end, he’s creating art so cool that it’s downright spooky.
But there’s no mention of the word talent–except once, in quote marks. All he talks about is hard work, and education. When he was starting out, he found a useful community for mutual support and critique. As he continued, he took classes, worked on techniques to improve the places he felt weak, continued to strengthen his strong points, and he practiced like whoa.
It’s a reflection of the growth mindset discussed in (among many others) this Atlantic article: Don’t Call Kids Smart. The way to find success is to force yourself to grow and improve, and to expect it to take a long time and a lot of work.
This is important. Too many people would look at the art at the bottom of that page, think how talented! and assume his ability to create that artwork comes from some spooky inborn trait. It doesn’t. It’s just hard work and self-education.
This is something I’m trying to impart to my son. It doesn’t have to be art; it can be anything. You suck at things when you start out, and you get better over time. With extra effort, you get really good. That’ what it takes.
1) Peanuts comics with Game of Thrones quotes.
2) The Tumblr I Work At A Public Library.
4) Energy harnessed from humidity can power small devices. Cool.
5) If JK Rowling had written the Harry Potter books from Voldemort’s point of view.
6) Remove cat before takeoff. Video.
7) Six SF/F authors who hated their legacy. Quick note to the universe: I don’t know if I would grow to hate a book of mine that became wildly successful, but I’m willing to risk it.