Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

To our bemusement, several people approached us after we announced that we were seeking someone to take over SF AwardsWatch with the assumption that we were trying to sell it and that they were apparently trying to determine what our revenue stream was and how much traffic we were getting. I say bemusement because SFAW was never set up to make money, doesn't earn anything, doesn't get a huge amount of traffic (except around the time of certain major award announcements), and has been basically a labor of love funded by Cheryl and supported mostly by her work with assistance from me and Petrea Michell. We aren't selling the site; we are trying to give it away to anyone who will maintain it and keep it going. Cheryl has updated the announcement post to reflect this.

We have received a number of proposals, some of which are quite good, and we're working on something that we hope will keep SFAW going, as we think it's a valuable service to the community but not one that we can afford to keep running ourselves.

I had to set an alarm this morning so I'd be up in time to be part of the Prix Imaginales coverage. I awoke feeling poorly and realized that I'd picked up a bit of a sunburn from my walk yesterday afternoon. It's now sufficiently summer-like that I'll need to start wearing sunscreen when I go out for those walks, even with my floppy hat partially protecting my head and face.

Before the event this morning, I ran down to the Centerville Farmers Market where I wanted to pick up a few things, and that made me a few minutes late, but the coverage started late as well, so it evened out.

I moved my computer into the living room because there was an amazing tennis match going on at the Madrid Open (the Masters event that's a sort of a warm-up for the French Open). ( Just in case you planned on watching it later ) And that's just the warm-up, with Del Potro taking on Federer in the second semi-final. I reckon both of them are hoping for a quick match, seeing as their opponent in the final will be coming off the longest match in ATP Masters history.

I reckon to be taking things fairly easy today, as I haven't had a lot of chances to do that, won't have an opportunity next weekend (BayCon), and there's a World Fantasy Con committee meeting tomorrow morning. I should probably go out for another walk later today, but this time I'll remember the sunscreen. And I'll probably wait until the evening, as we're set for pretty hot weather today. It will be worse inland, but it's still a good day to stay in the shade.

Tomorrow morning (US West Coast time) I'll be part of the "studio team" for SF AwardsWatch's coverage of the Prix Imaginales ceremony. Cheryl's coverage through her blog and Twitter posts sure make me wish I was there, as it sounds like a lot of fun, even though I don't speak the language.

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.

Cheryl is traveling between Boston and New York today, and is apt to have erratic-at-best internet connections. So that means that I need to do more for SF Awards Watch than kill spam, which is my main work for the site as one of its editors. As it happens, some awards news from Japan came in overnight. We don't like letting these things sit around, so I did my best to craft it into a site posting. I reckon that if I made any significant style mistakes, Cheryl will be able to fix them when she can next get to an internet connection. In the meantime, the nominations have been posted as soon as we saw them, which is part of our self-appointed job at SFAW.

I admit to being slightly grumpy a few weeks ago, right after Cheryl got back to the USA, when we got a complaint about a comment spam that had been posted for a few hours. The filters don't catch everything, especially with human spam factories out there, so it's up to the human editors (Cheryl and me) to swat spam posts that slip through the filters. But we have to sleep sometimes, and particularly when we're both in the same time zone, there are a few hours each day when the spammers can get through until we wake up and look at what's come in overnight.