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"The​ earliest known author was married to the moon"

Oh wow, it's also stopped working on the page itself. But this link should work.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:53 PM on February 2, 2024

Anna Della Subin was Thomas Jones’ guest on the LRB Podcast and they had a good discussion about Enheduana and the new translation.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:32 PM on February 18, 2024

Russia Without Navalny

Here in Finland people were in shock yesterday over the news. It doesn't really seem to matter what they thought of him the day before, but once the reports filtered out it was what everyone I knew was talking about. And I'm in shock.

I mean, I guess I'm a kind of fatalist, not that I believe in fate, but in that I'm never surprised when someone who does a dangerous thing pays for it with his life. But it shouldn't be dangerous to protest the state. It shouldn't be… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:19 AM on February 17, 2024

adrienneleigh: Putin is a bad guy. So was Navalny.

Navalny said a number of bad things. Putin is responsible for such a great number of deaths that it's in the realm of statistics.

There is no equivalence.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:45 PM on February 17, 2024

Proof that the Hugo Awards were censored

I wanted to avoid editorializing, but the best I can say about all this, is that at least the cover-up was really inept and incompetent.

I also want to echo what Sanford and Barkley said, that Lacey deserves praise rather than condemnation.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:37 AM on February 15, 2024

Oh, and I forgot to link to the previous post.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:39 AM on February 15, 2024

Ah well, I called others inept and incompetent, so it makes sense that I messed up the post. The phrase "dossiers of Hugo Award nominees deemed to be potentially troubling" was supposed to link to this spreadsheet, which Lacey leaked to Barkley.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:45 AM on February 15, 2024

One thing from Camestros Felapton's response has been preying on my mind, namely this: I believe Best Novel, Best Novella and Best Series were rigged to ensure that the finalist list ONLY had English-language nominees to ensure that a Chinese work did not win those categories. I assume this was done to ensure the 2023 Hugo Awards would get international coverage. If it's true that Chinese novels were removed from the list of nominees by Western admins to aid some local business people, that… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:15 PM on February 15, 2024

I thought that this comment on File 770 by a Chinese fan who goes by Yusa, which I don't think has been highlighted in this thread, was very interesting: Some insights from the perspective of a Chinese SF fan:

Firstly, the censorship standards adopted by the Hugo committee are ridiculous even by Chinese standards. Babel is on sale in China, and Xiran Zhao is portrayed as an advocate of Chinese culture by state media.

Secondly, weird stuff… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:10 AM on February 16, 2024

clavdivs: small pressure was brought to bear. subtle word, a disapproving look

The weird thing is that it seems like that a lot of those small pressures, subtle words and disapproving looks only existed in Dave McCarty's head. I'm beginning to suspect that someone, say a sponsor, hinted to McCarty that perhaps it would be good if a certain author would be included on the nomination list and in his head McCarty went all: Regulators. We regulate any… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:26 AM on February 16, 2024

Vajra Chandraseka's post that bq linked to which makes the connection between the disqualified Chinese works and SF World's recommendations lines up with Yusa's speculation that I posted earlier in the thread.

It seems that a big part of this absolute clusterfuck was that the magazine which sponsored the Chengdu Worldcon wanted to exclude their competitor.

That said, my mind still boggles at the fact that somehow that led to McCarty, Jones and… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 9:14 AM on February 16, 2024

I thought I couldn't get angrier about this than I already was… and then I read the thread Two unicycles and some duct tape linked to. Holy goddamn fuck.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:06 PM on February 17, 2024

Worldcon does it again

kingdead: They just need to make it an explicitly Anglo award--like the Booker with the US and Australia/New Zealand thrown in, and with the hosting held accordingly. There are a ton of places that would love to host a Worldcon, either because they have a large and growing sci fi reading population or because they want to show themselves off as safe for tourism or both.

I don't know how else to put this, but China is not the same as Finland, which I… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:33 AM on January 22, 2024

RonButNotStupid: Who goes to these events when they're held in such places? Who went to the World Cup in Qatar? People who were somehow ignorant of it being held in Qatar? People who were wealthy and/or selfish enough not to care? People who did know better but still went anyway for the experience? Who?

People from the region, broadly speaking, and people from countries who have difficulties getting visas to go to Europe and North America. Morocco, who… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:23 AM on January 22, 2024

One idea about the Hugo Awards that does come up from time to time, and I've seen floated again in response to this, is that the Hugo voting should be administered by a WSFS body that's somehow separate from each individual Worldcon committee.

This has, de facto, kind of been the case. The Hugo Administrators have been a fairly small group of people, usually helping each other across conventions. For instance, Dave McCarty, who administered the voting this time around,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:38 AM on January 22, 2024

Camestros Felapton, who Wobbuffet linked up top, has a new post summarizing and quoting some frankly bizarre exchanges between Dave McCarty and sundry others on his Facebook profile page.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:21 AM on January 22, 2024

Camestros Felapton: I’m coming around to the Unified Stuff-Up theory. This is speculation, like almost everything else, but he's been digging into the released stats and following the discussion closely, so at least this is informed speculation.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:11 PM on January 23, 2024

Artw: I’m unclear on how any level of data mess up leads to Babel being “ineligible”, unless I have missed something?

Camestros Felapton's theory is that Babel wasn't declared ineligible beforehand, but that it was left off the ballot due to a stuff-up, and was then labeled ineligible afterwards to cover up the mistake. That neatly explains why otherwise innocuous-seeming works and authors are also said to be ineligible, such as Hai Ya's short story… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:35 AM on January 24, 2024

Thanks, penguinliz! I hadn't seen that the strangeness with the votes for "Destiny Delayed" had been accounted for.

I think my point still stands with just Hai Ya's short story being deemed ineligible (he won in another category) and Paul Weimer's mysterious ineligibility, but the stuff-up is maybe a little bit less total than I thought.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 4:04 AM on January 24, 2024

Camestros Felapton goes through what the data says, and comes up with various observations on the “vote cliff”. The whole thing’s worth reading, but here’s an excerpt from the conclusion part: What could it be:

* An organic outcome of an unusual Worldcon? Anything is possible and people are strange but we’ve never seen anything like this since EPH votes became available.

* Slate voting? There is some indication of slates from Chinese publishers… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:23 AM on January 25, 2024

At the risk of being “guy who links to Camestros Felapton” as this thread slows ever more down… he makes an interesting observation in his latest blogpost. Now, I should preface this by saying that he treats this as a half-baked attempt to account for one of the weirdnesses of the data, namely that if there was a slate, it would’ve had more entries than there are slots to vote for on the Hugo ballot. Excerpt: Clause 3.8.9: I’ve said in various conversations about the limits of some numbers in… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:58 PM on January 26, 2024

I’m fully embracing my role here as “commenter who just posts links to Camestros Felapton’s analysis”, and he’s finally gotten around to Best Editor Long Form. Excerpt: So on BlueSky I was asked about Best Editor Long Form. Now, this is not a category I care for and I’ve given my reasons before but it still deserves to properly counted. I assume other people have already written about it but I went looked and this time paid attention and it is NUTS. I recommend reading the whole thing, as the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:03 AM on January 29, 2024

If, like me, you were a bit confused why Kevin Standlee was part of the list, given that he wasn't involved in the Chengdu Worldcon, he wrote about it on his Livejournal page: Effective earlier today, upon the election of my successor (Donald Eastlake III), resigned as the Chairman of the WSFS Mark Protection Committee and as Chairman of the Board of Worldcon Intellectual Property, the California non-profit corporation whose directors are the members of the WSFS MPC. I did not resign as a… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:54 PM on January 30, 2024

I was about to suggest the same thing, Lentrohamsanin.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 8:26 AM on February 15, 2024

New post.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:35 AM on February 15, 2024

Every Best Picture Winner Ranked by How Good a Muppets Version Would Be

Matt Fresh lost me immediately with the first entry, specifically this sentence:

I’m not here to argue with any of the 7 Nomadheads who love this movie, but watching Miss Piggy traveling around and living in her van would undoubtedly be the worst of any of these.

Excuse me, that sounds like the Best Movie Ever, not the worst of any of nothing.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 8:06 AM on February 13, 2024

24 and Gone

.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 9:43 AM on February 12, 2024

Pekka Haavisto could become Finland's first Green and gay president

grumpybear69: I'm going to arrive in Helsinki on the 18th of February. Should I be worried about political unrest?

Not really. The city might be eerily quiet, but that would be because it's the start of the school winter holiday.

It's been odd, as a foreigner living in Finland, to follow this election campaign. I think both of the final candidates are fine. I prefer Haavisto, but Stubb is the least problematic version of a rich… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:15 PM on January 31, 2024

It was much closer than anyone was anticipating, including Stubb himself. He usually is prepared for questions, but when he was asked about it being close, he stumbled and even had to reach for the English-language term "first past the post" in his answer.

Also, the media was not prepared for this either, and they were having to work things out on the fly, clearly expecting something like a 55-45 split, and didn't have correct datasets prepared to analyze this… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 6:28 AM on February 12, 2024

Carved with curious but distinctive signs

I just recently watched an hour-long lecture by Prof. Tom Palaima, an excerpt in Aegean Scripts, about Alice Kober, the other pivotal figure in the decipherment of Linear B. It's a really fascinating story.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:20 AM on February 11, 2024

I'm Gonna Give My Despair

.

Such a mesmeric performer
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:43 AM on February 11, 2024

A difficult year ahead for Ukraine

If you've been following the chatter about the war lately, one statistic you might've heard over and over again is fairly stark. Currently, the Russian military is being supplied with triple-to-quintuple the number of artillery shells per month that the Ukrainian army is. This is partly because of the way the production cycles are lining up, but partly it's because US aid has been held up for so long, while North Korean munition factories have been increasing their output. Bloomberg got hold of… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:22 PM on February 10, 2024

Originalism as God intended

I have a friend who used to work for the publishing house that put out Heartstopper in Hungarian. He and his husband left the country ten years ago and while the judicial ruling gave him a lot of joy, it just confirmed that living abroad is the right choice for them.

But at least for right now history is repeating as a farce.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 5:50 AM on February 10, 2024

Another Sleepy Dusty Delta Sweete

Oooh! Please link it here if you release it, thedaniel.

A friend of mine mentioned off-hand that The Geraldine Fibbers had covered Fancy and it was extremely my jam.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:20 AM on February 9, 2024

Perhaps he'll get together with Glenn Frey while waiting for Don...

.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:57 PM on February 7, 2024

Aznable: I guess Don Henley won that one.

Here's a fun story from the Austin Chronicle: No memory boasts greater mythological status than the night of July 31, 1992, when Eagles singer/drummer Don Henley jumped onstage with Mojo Nixon & the Toadliquors to join in a version of "Don Henley Must Die."

"I don't know how many people can fit in the front room, 100 at the most, but about 5,000 people have told me… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 4:38 AM on February 8, 2024

Bluesky takes to the air

I've found Bluesky a lot simpler to use than Mastodon.

To give a personal experience, when I originally made my exit from Twitter, I tried to recreate something of my previous social network, which was a mix of MeFites, Icelanders, Finns, science ficton fans and various other communities I belong to or am adjacent with. On Mastodon I had some success connecting up with MeFites, thanks to people sharing their handles here. Finding anyone in the other communities was a… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:53 PM on February 7, 2024

Toby Keith Arrives at the Great Oil Rig in the Sky.

I was a college exchange student in the US in the winter of 2002-03. It was a weird time to be in the States, and only got weirder in hindsight. We international students at the college would sometimes have little parties, mostly just to decompress from the strangeness of being a foreigner in America. One night, while fairly drunk, we had a sing-a-long of Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue, and then sang it again, and that was a really cathartic moment for us foreigners. Since then I've had a… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 8:28 AM on February 7, 2024

The Paranormalization of the Plastic Bag

When I was a kid I fully bought into UFOs. I read my share, and several other people’s shares, of paranormal books. I honestly think that if it hadn’t been the case that my secondary school’s library had a subscription to the Skeptical Inquirer magazine, I’d have continued on that path. Ironically, it was a picture of a UFO on the cover that attracted my attention.

Being presented with the skeptical side of the UFO question was eye-opening, and I ended up reading through… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:43 AM on February 6, 2024

Baethan: You know what would be hilarious? If the first extraterrestrial contact happened by accident. They aren't curious and they don't have the slightest interest in us, our resources, or anything. They pop in, go "oh shoot", get their bearings and leave because they'd accidentally taken a wrong turn on their interdimensional freeway or something.

That’s pretty much the premise of the excellent Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky Brothers.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:42 AM on February 6, 2024

Zoozve — Now it's Official (plus contest to name an Earth quasi-moon)

Lots of fascinating reasons for names given in that bulletin RichardP linked to. For instance, I never knew that Barbe-Thérèse Marjou had been such a close collaborator with her husband, Pierre Méchain, that she could continue with the project after his death: (21004) Thérèsemarjou = 1988 BM4
Discovery: 1988-01-22 / H. Debehogne / La Silla / 809
Barbe-Thérèse Marjou, born 1755, was the wife of Pierre Méchain (1744-1804), a French astronomer who undertook a geodetic survey… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:16 AM on February 6, 2024

The MeFite as writer ... it's your weekly free thread

I’ve spent the last month or so largely in an artists/writers residency in rural Finland, though currently I’m home. I was supposed to come swing by for two nights to spend some time with the kids before heading back to the residency, but a couple of friends visited with their kids, one of whom turned out to have a Norovirus infection. So the last twenty four hours have been very not fun.

I and an American translator got a grant to work on a collection of my poetry,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:25 PM on February 5, 2024

Time for a Drink

I don't drink very much, but if I had a bar easily accessible to me with a bartender that made a good Perfect Martini, I would absolutely have a drinking problem. I guess that's the writer in me.

A good martini only tastes like the future.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 4:13 PM on February 2, 2024

Around the World in Eighty Lies

A noble dictionary embiggens the smallest word.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:01 AM on February 1, 2024

Здорово! ser la leche! macizo! ヤバイ! knorke!

I'm using Firefox on a Windows PC, and the site is barely useable. I've had to use "view source" to do things like browse by language or see the latest entries.

Anyway, once I figured that out, it was interesting to putter around. Though when I checked the Icelandic and Finnish entries, I found both to be oddly staid. There's not much there, to begin with, and they're decades-old slang, or not really slang at all.

I like the idea of the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:29 PM on January 29, 2024

Oh, you're right! Search worked fine both with Finnish and Icelandic.

I tried that with French, and the first two results were from Brazilian Portuguese and had no obvious connection to French, so I assumed the search function was busted or counterintuitive in some way I couldn't fathom. But scrolling further down gives me nothing but entries in French. So I'll just assume that I stumbled on some odd bug in my first search

I feel bad for having… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:17 PM on January 29, 2024

Nothings which are made Great and dignified by an ardent pursuit

This is quite savage, and I couldn’t work out why. The previous articles I’ve read by Susan Eilenberg have been really clear to me, but I couldn’t figure out what made her turn against Anahid Nersessian’s book so fiercely. From everything I’d read before, and the description in the article, it seems like a fairly typical personal essay, taking a major cultural touchstone as its launching point.

Either way, it made me more interested in reading Keats’ Odes: A Lover’s… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:11 PM on January 26, 2024

lay down, lay down

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posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:05 PM on January 24, 2024

"8 km away from the villa where the Wannsee Conference took place"

So many people showed up for the march in Munich that the protest had to be called off. 25 thousand had been expected, but estimates are that between 100 to 250 thousand people showed up, and so it was canceled out of safety concerns. Here's a link to the Süddeutsche Zeitung liveblog, which is in German, I haven't found any English-language sources yet.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:07 AM on January 21, 2024

Deutsche Welle: Germany sees second day of large anti far-right protests. Excerpt: An estimated 1.4 million people in Germany domstrated against the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) from Friday to Sunday, according to the organizers of the events.

From Friday through the weekend, demonstrations were called in about 100 locations across Germany. On Sunday, rallies were held in major cities such as Cologne, Munich and Berlin. Several other German cities,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:10 PM on January 21, 2024