psocoptera

Kevin Standlee has posted on Dreamwidth - sure looks like he's indirectly confirming Chinese government interference. (Honestly I feel like he's saying fuck you to anyone who thought China could possibly run an honest Worldcon, which feels a little unfair to me, like, I don't know, maybe we-the-voters (in this case not me-the-voter, as I don't attend and don't site-vote) did not thread the needle properly between appropriate skepticism about totalitarian states and outright racism about non-Anglophone fandom, but I think it's good if people were trying to avoid the latter!) I don't even know what I think should happen at this point. A frantic group text thread of all the winners trying to decide if they want to collectively reject their Hugos in retrospect?

I believe we've hit 90 days later and they became required to release these. Here.

I don't understand their charts or EPH well enough to follow exactly what happened in Novel. It looks like Babel was third in raw nominations, and then has a value that doesn't change between subsequent rounds while other things are eliminated, and is just low enough at the end to not make the ballot, but also has an asterisk with a note that google-translates to "it wasn't eligible". I think there are some big questions here. Other than that, the first runner-up was something Chinese, and then Mountain in the Sea, which is neat to see it make it that far. Half-Built Garden also on the longlist.

In Novella, Prayer for the Crown-Shy is listed as having Declined Nomination, which is definitely a different annotation than Babel.

The Novelettes have both a Not Eligible and a Declined Nomination from SB Divya, who had said back in June that she was declining. "Turing Food Court" also seems to be on the list twice??

In screamtastic news Across a Field of Starlight got one less nomination than Supergirl. So close. So fucking close. And Other Ever Afters made the longlist too.

In Fan Writer, Paul Weimer (third most ballots, "not eligible") is on File 770 saying this is news to him and he'd like an explanation. He was a finalist in 2020, 21, and 22.

Xiran Jay Zhao was Not Eligible for the Astounding despite having been a first-year nominee in 2022. Zhao's final number is higher than Xin Weimu's, who did end up on the ballot.

I don't want to be like "soooo, I guess China could not be trusted with a Worldcon after all" but seriously, what the fuck happened here.

No Hugo stats and longlist yet, so here's some other recent awards news. ( Read more... )

Fan Artist continues to frustrate me by leaning so heavily towards artists who do work for fanzines and convention programs; I continue to wish for some sort of category reform. It's been pointed out to me that that day might come sooner if we let Fan Artist get nuked by the 25% rule, but I believe people are also actively working on getting rid of the 25% rule before it eats Fanzine, Fancast, or Fan Writer (see here), a proposal which seems likely to make faster progress than any pressure-driven reform of Fan Artist.

Anyways, here are this year's finalists, my ranking under the cut.

Best Fan Artist

Iain Clark
Richard Man
Laya Rose
Alison Scott
España Sheriff
Orion Smith

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Best Professional Artist

Sija Hong
Kuri Huang
Paul Lewin
Alyssa Winans
Jian Zhang
Enzhe Zhao

I nominated Hong, Huang, Lewin, and Winans, beating out Novella for the category in which I have the most nominations on the final ballot. Zhao and Zhang's stuff is also very cool, these are going to be hard to rank.

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Google translation of the third Xin Weimu story from the packet, 血肉之锤. About 13200 words.

Historical steampunk fantasy about the real-life Rock Springs massacre of Chinese miners by white miners. Story contains racial violence and racial slurs.

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When the Hugo finalists were announced, I was hoping there would be more translation activity than there's been. Either formally (I thought Clarkesworld, with a strong history in doing English-translation reprints of Chinese fiction, might rush some of the finalists into publication) or informally (I am peripherally aware via Untamed fandom of the world of fan translators - there are some very smart, dedicated, generous bilingual people out there doing fan translation work on danmei, it seemed possible that there might be similar people in SFF fandom). None of that has really materialized, or possibly it has but I can't find it - the collapse of Twitter has been really bad for my following anything going on in either fannish or SFF spaces.

Obviously nobody is obligated to do any work to spoonfeed us monolinguists! But given that the Hugos have historically been Anglophone, it would have been nice to get a *little* more content directed towards us? Not, like, by the concom, who are surely very busy, but just by... someone. By other fans or writers, who do bridge the two language spheres. Articles or essays or interviews in the magazines, introducing these exciting writers to their new Anglosphere Hugo-voter audience. Again, maybe that's out there and I just can't find it. But it feels like a missed opportunity.

Anyways, here's what I've been able to put together about Xin Weimu. (I'm like 95% sure Xin is her surname and Weimu is her personal name, that's the first thing.) She's on Twitter as xinweimu , which I guess is useless now that you need an account to see anything on twitter. She's posted some nonfiction essays here at a site called Sixth Tone, including one about being a danmei reader and author.

There are three stories included in the packet. I've Google-translated the first one, 哈农练指法, which I'm pasting in here behind the cut. Instantaneous machine translation is on the one hand amazing and mindblowing and on the other hand still kind of laborious and annoying to actually do - all the highlighting and copying and pasting and going back to put in the paragraph breaks, and the other two stories are longer (18 and 21 pages vs 14 for this one). I hope to get to them over the next couple days. But here's "Hanon Fingering Practice", about 8700 words, in case there's anyone out there who hasn't already done the Google-translate work themselves but would like to read it if they didn't have to.

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I skimmed enough of Where the Drowned Girls Go a couple of weeks ago to feel confirmed in my ongoing dislike of the series, so I suppose I can in fact rank novellas.

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Nope, 2022 movie. I really liked this - smart and gripping and original. The first of Peele's movies I've watched without reading a synopsis first, and it was just fine for my level of horror-aversion. Reminded me of Green Knight in some ways, tonally and in some of the use of imagery, although Nope is definitely more coherent/traditional in how everything eventually adds up where Green Knight was more surreal.

I suppose I can rank Hugo movies now, behind the cut. ( Read more... )

I also watched Hidden Blade, 2023, which I had failed to see in the theater, which turned out to be just as well, since by renting it streaming I was able to watch it once through, read some stuff, go back, watch most of it again, read some more stuff, and watch some scenes an additional one or more times. I mean, I really liked it, but the combination of nonlinear storytelling and my own illiteracy made it a challenge! For context, this is a Chinese spy movie about Chinese resistance to the Japanese occupation. My relevant history classes were a long time ago, and while I remembered the basics about the Communists, Nationalists, and Japanese, I had definitely forgotten most of the specific names, years, cities/regions, and progression of events that get referred to, and I never had the visual literacy to, like, quickly recognize uniforms. And my monolingual ears don't even pick up the difference between Chinese and Japanese (really different languages!) unless I'm paying very close attention (definitely not on a first pass while reading subtitles), let alone the differences between Mandarin/Cantonese/Shanghainese (much less different, to my untrained ears, at least), so, all of the information and characterization being conveyed by language choices was flattened in the English subtitles. (I suppose really good subtitling could have used different colors or fonts or italics or something...)

Anyways, I found the whole process of figuring it out and then catching new details on the second or third watch very satisfying, and this is very much a movie about gorgeous people wearing gorgeous 40s costumes having psychological drama at each other (punctuated by occasional violence and war atrocities), so it was also a treat just to spend more time looking at them, even if I wasn't also looking at the complicated and subtle things people were doing with their facial expressions. It is definitely from the Chinese Communist perspective in the way that many American spy thrillers are from the American perspective - the Communists are the heroes here - which I thought was interesting (I'm not sure I've ever watched a spy movie where the leads weren't American or British? maybe I'm forgetting something?) but might be off-putting if you don't want to compartmentalize it from the wider context of shitty things the CCP has done (the same way you might compartmentalize an American spy thriller from the shitty things the US has done). For me, I already agreed with the POV of this movie that the Japanese invasion was horrific and the Chinese were the right side of that situation, and I don't really feel strongly about Communists vs Nationalists but was willing to go along with "these characters believe that what they're doing is right and necessary and given the information they have in this time period that's a reasonable belief". (Interestingly, the movie (at least from what I could tell) mostly stuck to saying critical things about the Nationalists rather than positive things about the Communists - I guess it would be fraught and complicated to have characters, like, talking up Mao, but slamming Chiang Kai-shek isn't going to wade into any contemporary muddy waters.) I definitely don't have the literacy to think in any serious way about where the characters might be in 10 or 20 years, re the famine and Cultural Revolution and all that. I bet there's some fascinating fic out there in Chinese...

Let's try this again! See the list here on File770, or behind the cut. The only differences from the prematurely-released list are in the Short and Long Dramatic categories and the Related Works. ETA: Correction: a different Lu Ban short story is now on the short story list, I was comparing by authors and looked right over the difference in title. [Second ETA: per a comment on File770, the correct Lu Ban story was listed on the premature ballot in Chinese, and it was just the English title that got mixed up.]

There are also apparently some differences in which/how many creators are listed for some of the collaborative categories, which is of course very important to those people but not actually very much to me, so I'm not going to check those closely.

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The big end of June announcement was that they're finally sending out the emails to finalists?? People need to check their mail?? The list will be announced *once everyone has confirmed by email*, a process we're only starting *now*??? Look, I know there are much worse things happening in the world, the Supreme Court just greenlighted anti-gay discrimination and killed the hope of student loan relief, but here in my particular sports fandom we are having what's shaping up to be the weirdest year since 2015. Oh, and in my *other* sports fandom the people who flounced from the women's hockey league have come back, bought it out, cancelled all operations and fired all the players, so, uh, there is drama all over and I don't like any of it.