SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
So, last night the SJW types over at the Hugo awards decided they'd rather burn the whole thing to the ground than give out an award based on what the readers like instead of social justice reasons:
The members of the World Science Fiction Society rejected the slate of finalists in five categories, giving No Award in Best Novella, Short Story, Related Work, Editor Short Form, and Editor Long Form. This equals the total number of times that WSFS members have presented No Award in the entire history of the Hugo Awards, most recently in 1977.
Here are a few of the people on the #SadPuppies slate that should be quite surprised to learn that they were denied a chance at an award for being white males when they wake up this morning: Rajnar Vajra, Larry Correia, Annie Bellet, Kary English, Toni Weisskopf, Ann Sowards, Megan Gray, Sheila Gilbert, Jennifer Brozek, Cedar Sanderson, and Amanda Green.
takyon: Here are in-depth explanations of the Hugo Awards controversy.
Previously: "Rightwing lobby has 'broken' Hugo awards" Says George R.R. Martin (240 comments)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Monday August 24 2015, @05:58AM
I was not a fan of a confusing opinion piece (just the original submission's text and the blog post alone are not very informative), and I had forgotten the details of the controversy, so I added a Wired link at the bottom that cmn32480 sent me, the Wikipedia article, and the previous story. I read the entire Wired link to get a grasp on what was going on. For example, I wasn't clear on how the nomination process had been rigged or who these "SJW types" (the voters) were.
In retrospect maybe I should have written two extra sentences saying "Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies, two movements intended to stack the Hugo Award nominations in favor of popular/low-brow, or white-authored science fiction, depending on who you ask, have failed. Thousands of World Science Fiction Convention attendees chose to give 'No Award' in 5 categories rather than pick from the 'stacked' nominees."
If we publish a user's "propaganda" opinion piece, the user's view will be challenged in the comments. In that sense it is not much of a disappointment, except the obviousness of this bait. I'm not sure if any other editor was going to add more information to the summary, but 5 hours before the story ran, it looked just like the Original Submission. The Hugo Awards link does not explain the controversy at all. So it could have been worse.
I checked the Slashdot summary and while it may be "slanted", it's more concise and explanatory than TMB's. timothy added the same Wired link. Not sure how the other site's summary is incredibly disappointing; it looks better.
TMB's list of diverse losers that were on the Sad Puppies slate is at least a debatable counterpoint to accusations that the movements are misogynist/MRAs/anti-SJW/whatever. The argument that popular fiction is being snubbed may be true. Personally, I don't see why a "social justice" work can't be considered the "best" work in a category - e.g. The Water That Falls on You From Nowhere mentioned in the Wired article. Is it "bad" writing, do the movement(s) dislike the homosexual/minority elements, or do they simply believe using such elements gives an inflated chance of winning?
Here's an idea for the Hugos. They should vote on the current year's winners and next year's nominations during the same convention. It would lag everything by a year but could fix the "problem".
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 24 2015, @06:23AM
> Here's an idea for the Hugos. They should vote on the current year's winners and next year's nominations during the same convention.
They've already fixed the problem, it's called "E Pluribus Hugo" - you get a single divisible vote which means you can spend the entire vote on one entry, or divide it up among multiple entries. So if you want to nominate book A and book B each gets half a vote. That makes it much harder to pack the list of nominations, while still letting people vote for more than one work if they really want to nominate more than one.
The problem is that, due to hugo constitutional rules, it won't go into effect until year after next, so the 2016 awards will still be subject to the same exploit. Whether the puppies will still give enough of a shit to shit on the nominations remains to be seen — it will be a presidential election year so much less outside agitators like Breitbart plus the emotional impact of being so thoroughly repudiated by the general electorate this time may cause the group to lose momentum.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday August 24 2015, @06:33AM
From Wired:
I don't see momentum that depends on paid dues being sustained for very long.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Marand on Monday August 24 2015, @03:07PM
They've already fixed the problem, it's called "E Pluribus Hugo" - you get a single divisible vote which means you can spend the entire vote on one entry, or divide it up among multiple entries. So if you want to nominate book A and book B each gets half a vote. That makes it much harder to pack the list of nominations, while still letting people vote for more than one work if they really want to nominate more than one.
You say vote, but it's a change to the nominating process,not the voting one. This is an important distinction because it means there is no damage control for bloc voting -- such as what was supposedly used to block awards in so many categories this year -- still. All this does is make nomination control require more people -- interesting because, since nominations have a fee attached, the people in charge of the rules have financial motivation to ride the wave of drama to enact these changes.
It also seems like you could still bloc nominate a single entry, then also vote in lockstep, and still control the process. The only (arguable) improvement is that, again, it's more expensive. That doesn't seem like "fixed" to me, even assuming it passes.
(I haven't followed this debacle closely and may have missed something when researching what "E Pluribus Hugo" is, so corrections or clarifications are welcome.)
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday August 24 2015, @03:54PM
Man, I thought Slashdot editors were bad doing yellow journalism. Holy crap.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday August 24 2015, @04:06PM
The submission doesn't explain what those movements are, and that sentence is entirely accurate.
There are two co-existing movements, with a range of goals.
They stacked the nominations.
There are a range of opinions on what the movements want to achieve.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday August 24 2015, @04:07PM
The second part is from Theodore Beale
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]