Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

In case you missed the post on the Hugo Awards web site, here's a note that the finalists for this year's Hugo Awards will be announced this Saturday. The main announcement event will be at Eastercon in Glasgow starting at 8:30 PM BST (12:30 PM PDT where I am in Nevada), along with satellite events at Minicon in Minneapolis (2:30 CDT) and Norwescon in Seattle (12:30 PM PDT), and the whole thing is to be broadcast on UStream, technology permitting.

Due to the arrangements coming together rather late in the process, we're not planning a CoverItLive event on the announcements this year; besides, except for Dave McCarty — who as Hugo Administrator will be too busy on Announcement day — none of the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee members are going to be at any of the Announcement events. I'll be watching them, however, and posting the nominations shortly after they're announced at TheHugoAwards.org.

Note that Loncon elected to go with the terminology "Hugo Award finalists" rather than the traditional "Hugo Award Nominees." I think this is the right decision now that people have got it into their heads that one person writing their name on a Hugo Nominating Ballot makes that person a "Hugo Award Nominee" despite more than fifty years of contrary practice and tradition.

The good news is that Norwescon Programming has advised me that, due to the availability of a hard-wired internet connection in Cascade 10, we can do the Live Announcement of the Hugo Award Nominations at 2 PM Sunday afternoon in Cascade 10. Tech services tells me that they do have a data projector and screen available for then as well, so we should be able to show the results to anyone present.

The bad news is that it's a wired connection, not wireless, so other people in the room won't be able to participate as much as we might have liked (although they can send Twitter messages through their own wireless devices). Had I known, I could have brought my small 5-port hub and extra cables so that a few other people could join the event on the spot as well.

Cascade 10 is half of the room where we're doing Match Game SF tonight, so we should be able to test the internet connectivity this evening. In case of last-minute technical failure, an alternative location (where the free lobby wi-fi reaches) is the foyer outside the Evergreen Meeting Rooms. If you're at Norwescon, look for me in my WSFS uniform on Sunday.