Semiprozine Debate Videos

On account of the issue having come back up to the surface thanks to the latest issue of Locus, I spent about six hours last night extracting out the footage of the debate at last year's WSFS Business Meeting over the Best Semiprozine Hugo Award. Because the discussion was long, I had to split it into two parts.

The first half is the technical debate that concerned itself mainly with trying to define the precise effect of the proposal and how to accomplish it, and probably is mainly of interest to people interested in meeting mechanics.

The second half is the substantive debate on the merits of the proposal. Both segments are 13-14 minutes long, but if you're interested in the meat of the matter, you can pick up with the second half and you will not have missed much.

Once Google Video stops accepting uploads, I'll have to start breaking these things down into even smaller pieces, because YouTube has a ten minute limit.

The reason I haven't done the entire Business Meeting is because that's around six or seven hours or so of raw footage, and it took me six hours to produce less than 30 of usable output here, so you can see how long it would take me to cut up the entire meeting. If it were just a matter of posting the unedited video in one monster piece, that wouldn't be so much work. Also, I'm only just getting my bearings with the video-editing software. Perhaps by Montreal I'll be better at this.

Pain in the Back

The number of consecutive hours I have been spending unmoving at computer keyboards started catching up with me as I got a terrible pain the back last night that kept me awake until after 3 AM and is not making things at all nice today. I am working from home, trying to move around and find positions that are comfortable, but it's not easy.

Hugo Nominations Announced

I'd been advised that the Hugo Award nominations would be posted at 5 PM PDT, and the first place I saw them was when the Anticipation web site updated a couple of minutes past 5. I then spent the next 45 minutes or so doing the cut-past-reformat onto The Hugo Awards web site announcement. For the SF AwardsWatch announcement we just reference the Anticipation (and Hugo Award site) announcements, but it has been our policy that the official Hugo Awards site should have the full list. We did not include the "extras" on the Anticipation site, such as the links to the nominees and to free downloads of selected works, principally because those are almost certainly going to change as additional nominees add their works to the free download list.

Thanks to my rushing, I did manage to mangle the link from the Hugo Awards site to Anticipation's, but a couple of quick commenters set me straight and I fixed it quickly. I think we're okay now, and can start paying attention to the early reactions.

Congratulations to all of the nominees, although particular congratulations to Cheryl, of course.

I'm also pleased to see that Girl Genius made the ballot as I hoped it would. Pity there weren't more nominations in the category, though. I would have expected more people to have nominated there.

And speaking of number of nominations, I'm happy to see the total number of nominating ballots having increased over last year. Denvention Three had 483 valid nominating ballots. Anticipation received 799. Pity there wasn't one more to make it a nice round 800, although people being the way they are, I bet that if that had been the count, there would have been people assuming is was an approximation.