Item The First: A couple of times in August I wrote about favorite movies. Another to add to the list, “Iron Giant”. I don’t care how sappy the ending was, I still love it. I know that it belongs on this list because I came across it about a third of the way through the other night and ended up watching the rest of it. I think that was literally my definition of how a movie qualified for that list.
Item The Second: The Hugo Awards ceremony from San Antonio last night was supposed to be live streamed, but there were issues again this year. Last year everything worked fine right up until they started showing “Doctor Who” clips for the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) award, at which point some DRM-bot assumed that they were streaming pirated and copyright protected material and killed the feed. This year they took care of that issue, but apparently had problems with getting the signal out of the hotel and convention center so the feed was offline more than it was on. I think the longest period we watched without it crashing was maybe fifteen minutes.
Disappointing, to say the least. Let’s hope that the folks in London can get a better handle on this, or that I’m in London and can just live-tweet it to folks myself. On the other hand, and to emphasize something that I didn’t make clear yesterday talking about Worldcon, all of these conventions are run by unpaid volunteers, fans who give a LOT of their time, energy, and often money to make things happen so that the rest of us can enjoy the con. I might be disappointed and on occasion I might offer suggestions about changes that could be made to make something run better. I’ve even volunteered to do the work to make things better – the lack of west coast filking is one of the reasons that my friends and I started ConChord. But I won’t be snarky and/or critical. For better or for worse, it’s work being done by volunteers on a shoestring and they’re doing the best that they can.
Item The Third: Despite the problems seeing the Hugo Awards ceremony, I was not displeased by the results of the Hugo voting. John Scalzi won the Best Novel award for “Redshirts: A Novel With Three Codas”, which I liked a great deal. I was very happy to see Stanley Schmidt get the Best Editor (Short Form) award at last, as well as a Lifetime Achievement award from the LoneStarCon 3 committee. I was very happy to see a “Game Of Thrones” episode win the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) award instead of a “Doctor Who” episode. (Sorry, I really like GoT but never got into “Doctor Who”.) It was great to see Seanan McGuire and her cohorts at SF Squeecast win another Hugo for Best Fancast.
Overall I was not terribly unhappy with any of the results. I also noted that creating this blog and getting involved with Twitter has made me much more aware of the range of the nominated works and artists. I hope that this means that next year I will be even more involved and knowledgeable. In other words, expect more books to be read and more reviews to be posted here. You’ve been warned.
Item The Fourth: This afternoon came word that one of the Grand Masters of Science Fiction, Frederik Pohl, passed away today at the age of 93. There’s a detailed obituary on the Locus Magazine site. Mr. Pohl was not just an author, but also a fan, an editor, an agent, and a past president of SFWA. He won Hugo Awards and Nebula Awards for his writing, as well as Hugo Awards for his work as an editor. He wrote volumes of short stories as well as novels, with his career stretching back to the 1940’s.
I’m pretty sure that the first time I ever saw a Hugo Award up close was when I ran into him holding his at that very first convention I went to, Iguanacon II in Phoenix in 1978. He won Best Novel for “Gateway” and I remember him as being very gracious to a very wet-behind-the-ears newbie who wanted to take his picture. He will be missed.
Item The Fifth: In the last hour or so we’ve heard that Time Warner Cable and CBS have decided to mutually declare victory and cancel their particular little multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporate pissing contest that has left us peons (i.e., “customers”) as pawns caught in the middle. I wish that this “inconvenience” to the consumers caused by both sides would mean that both CEOs and management teams would be getting their multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses dinged this year, but who are we kidding?
More importantly, since it’s becoming increasingly clear that we live in an information-based society and the corporations that have monopolies on delivering that information seem to be operating in 100% loose cannon mode, it would be nice to think that the FCC and Congress would do something to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. “Protecting the public trust” and all of that.
Again – who are we kidding?
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 