WSFS business opinions
Aug. 19th, 2018 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraSo I guess Worldcon decided to reduce the amount of neck protection on goalie chest pa - what? Wrong sport? Oh, right, sorry. Hugos! Potential changes! Business meeting business!
Lodestar ratified as the YA award name with no last-minute shenanigans - I approve, especially since I've finally made myself memorize it :)
I'm fascinated by the proposal to allow some sort of remote participation in the business meeting - I totally would, if they decide to let us! I'll be watching this with interest.
If changing the category name to "Best Graphic Story or Comic" magically encourages people to nominate more webcomics and fewer superhero trade paperbacks, that would be neat, but it's probably not going to, so who really cares.
I don't really understand the proposed change around longlist reporting but I'm always in favor of More Things On The List because more information is delicious (and I like to see how much better my failed nominees would have had to do to make it).
Artist Hugos! So. I'm, in general, really pleased that people are working on some sort of redefinition or clarification of the Artist categories, because every goddamn year I'm like "who the fuck is a professional artist vs a fan artist", so, like, yes, please, what if it didn't have to be so confusing somehow. HOWEVER, I hate this proposed idea that "Fan Artist" should be a Hugo for people who donate art to fanzines and convention programs, because I have *also* been railing for years about the eternal tedious ballot presence of Foster and Stiles, and for fuck's sake, the *last* thing we need is to redefine the category to protect them from people who actually do interesting art online! The Art Hugos Should Not Be Service Awards. The proposal has been bumped to a new committee so we now get another chance to come up with something better, which I guess is a good outcome.
Personally, if I was the new committee, I'd be tempted to propose scrapping Pro Artist and Fan Artist entirely and replacing them with works awards rather than person awards. I don't know historically why they're person awards (but would be very interested in the justification for that) but work awards just seem so much more straightforward? Like, I don't know, covers, digital works, and traditional media? Covers, illustrations, other? We could look at the Chesleys, which I believe are the artist professional society equivalent of the Nebulas (voted on by ASFA members the way the Nebs are done by SFWA). In much the way that it's nice to have both the Nebulas and the Hugos, I think it would be fine to have fan-voted art awards that overlapped with the professional society ones. I don't think there's a chance in hell they're actually going to do this, because Tradition (and maybe because there's a whole bunch of different Chesleys and nobody wants to nominate in ten different art categories), but honestly it would make more sense.
... part two to follow at some point but the Hugos are actually starting. :)
Lodestar ratified as the YA award name with no last-minute shenanigans - I approve, especially since I've finally made myself memorize it :)
I'm fascinated by the proposal to allow some sort of remote participation in the business meeting - I totally would, if they decide to let us! I'll be watching this with interest.
If changing the category name to "Best Graphic Story or Comic" magically encourages people to nominate more webcomics and fewer superhero trade paperbacks, that would be neat, but it's probably not going to, so who really cares.
I don't really understand the proposed change around longlist reporting but I'm always in favor of More Things On The List because more information is delicious (and I like to see how much better my failed nominees would have had to do to make it).
Artist Hugos! So. I'm, in general, really pleased that people are working on some sort of redefinition or clarification of the Artist categories, because every goddamn year I'm like "who the fuck is a professional artist vs a fan artist", so, like, yes, please, what if it didn't have to be so confusing somehow. HOWEVER, I hate this proposed idea that "Fan Artist" should be a Hugo for people who donate art to fanzines and convention programs, because I have *also* been railing for years about the eternal tedious ballot presence of Foster and Stiles, and for fuck's sake, the *last* thing we need is to redefine the category to protect them from people who actually do interesting art online! The Art Hugos Should Not Be Service Awards. The proposal has been bumped to a new committee so we now get another chance to come up with something better, which I guess is a good outcome.
Personally, if I was the new committee, I'd be tempted to propose scrapping Pro Artist and Fan Artist entirely and replacing them with works awards rather than person awards. I don't know historically why they're person awards (but would be very interested in the justification for that) but work awards just seem so much more straightforward? Like, I don't know, covers, digital works, and traditional media? Covers, illustrations, other? We could look at the Chesleys, which I believe are the artist professional society equivalent of the Nebulas (voted on by ASFA members the way the Nebs are done by SFWA). In much the way that it's nice to have both the Nebulas and the Hugos, I think it would be fine to have fan-voted art awards that overlapped with the professional society ones. I don't think there's a chance in hell they're actually going to do this, because Tradition (and maybe because there's a whole bunch of different Chesleys and nobody wants to nominate in ten different art categories), but honestly it would make more sense.
... part two to follow at some point but the Hugos are actually starting. :)
no subject
Date: 2018-08-20 12:57 pm (UTC)