Hugo Awards controversy

[Autumnal]

McCarty did a bunch of things that are explicitly not allowed, like removing ballots suspected of doing slate voting. But what really sucks about the political dossiers his committee compiled is that they were wrong. Like marking fan writer Dave Weimer as suspect for having gone to Tibet, and he was declared ineligible. But he didn’t. He went to Nepal. On the other hand, Best Novel winner Ursula Vernon did go to Tibet a few years ago and posted very extensively about it. So the committee acted on the basis of both false positives and false negatives.

Furthermore, there’s existing software to do all the steps of vote processing, but McCarty refused to use any of it. He wrote his own. Nobody is allowed to inspect it, while alternatives are open-source and up on GitHub. And according to him, as stated in a recent-ish interview, his program generates errors in response to SQL queries. So he didn’t bother validating the results.

I’m going to pause here to let the people with database experience pick up their jaws.

We also know from Lacey’s email dump that he’s decided to wait the maximum allowed time before releasing the vote data. Everything he said after the con suggesting it was nearly ready was a replanned lie.

This is actually the major reason I no longer think (as I did at first) that there was significant Chinese effort at censoring the results. The only person who’s talked about guidance, direction, etc, from vague sources is McCarty. We know that he’s a raging narcissist, that is is lazy, and that he is blitheringly incompetent. I find it easy to believe that all his talk on the subject is pure invention because he found it exciting to LARP the role of someone in international affairs.

Obviously every conclusion must be tentative now, and I’m open to the kind of interference I suspected at first. But when you’ve got a lying incompetent narcissist at hand, may as well lather up with Occam’s shaving foam.

Anyone interested in following the story should probably be reading file770.com - host Mike Glyer has covered fandom news for decades. He provides daily news roundup, and regular commenters include interesting authors like Ursula Bernon, WSFS people, other veteran consumers, and just plain cool people. (And a few jerks, but Mike seldom lets them go on too long.) it’s one of the two places where conversation about the Puppies led directly to EPH, and whatever fixes and changes come in the next few years are being incubated there now.

 

[Umbran]

Kind of like years ago building those towers another engineer said to me: "Hong Kong was our Auschwitz." What does one say? I don't know.

Mod Note:
One says that we are talking about one year of awards for writing fiction, and not the Holocaust.

Folks, while there are certainly political elements to this topic, we are going to have to ask folks to keep the rhetoric down to a dull roar, and remember the scale of the issues we can address here. Thanks.

 

[EKovarr]

McCarty did a bunch of things that are explicitly not allowed, like removing ballots suspected of doing slate voting. But what really sucks about the political dossiers his committee compiled is that they were wrong. Like marking fan writer Dave Weimer as suspect for having gone to Tibet, and he was declared ineligible. But he didn’t. He went to Nepal. On the other hand, Best Novel winner Ursula Vernon did go to Tibet a few years ago and posted very extensively about it. So the committee acted on the basis of both false positives and false negatives.

Furthermore, there’s existing software to do all the steps of vote processing, but McCarty refused to use any of it. He wrote his own. Nobody is allowed to inspect it, while alternatives are open-source and up on GitHub. And according to him, as stated in a recent-ish interview, his program generates errors in response to SQL queries. So he didn’t bother validating the results.

I’m going to pause here to let the people with database experience pick up their jaws.

We also know from Lacey’s email dump that he’s decided to wait the maximum allowed time before releasing the vote data. Everything he said after the con suggesting it was nearly ready was a replanned lie.

This is actually the major reason I no longer think (as I did at first) that there was significant Chinese effort at censoring the results. The only person who’s talked about guidance, direction, etc, from vague sources is McCarty. We know that he’s a raging narcissist, that is is lazy, and that he is blitheringly incompetent. I find it easy to believe that all his talk on the subject is pure invention because he found it exciting to LARP the role of someone in international affairs.

Obviously every conclusion must be tentative now, and I’m open to the kind of interference I suspected at first. But when you’ve got a lying incompetent narcissist at hand, may as well lather up with Occam’s shaving foam.

Anyone interested in following the story should probably be reading file770.com - host Mike Glyer has covered fandom news for decades. He provides daily news roundup, and regular commenters include interesting authors like Ursula Bernon, WSFS people, other veteran consumers, and just plain cool people. (And a few jerks, but Mike seldom lets them go on too long.) it’s one of the two places where conversation about the Puppies led directly to EPH, and whatever fixes and changes come in the next few years are being incubated there now.

I really, really need to see the rest of those emails! I only have one and thought it was the only one. Do you know where to find them? I also didn't follow all the File 770 threads (I've been ill) and clearly I should have. Thank you. Now that I know I might have been wrong I'll refrain from saying anything of substance until I catch up.

But there is one very important thing to consider: other than Diane 'leaking' internal email everyone is treating internal discussions the way they should be, internal. People can say anything they like on File 770 about Dave and he's not going to correct them nor defend himself. What "we know" is easily countered: he Chaired a convention with about 6,000 members. At the same time holding down a paying job - from the smallest to Worldcon level everyone is a volunteer.

Thing is I don't need to be told about the Puppies: I'm one of those WSFS folks, was part of the discussions after it hit the news and, as always attended the Business Meeting where the vote took place. I'm deeply disappointed by my people; they were reacting, not acting and had they taken more time they would have calmed down and we'd have something better than EPH. One even brought in a ringer. Now folks are trying to legislate morality.

File 770 was a lot better when it was a monthly. People wrote letters instead of just firing off responses. It's where I got my start: I had the write the In Memoriam for a dear friend for the Worldcon book and asked Mike for help. He came to my rescue, an amazing editor. When I met him at the pre-Hugo reception, my first, he asked me to write an article for him! Later on, when he'd reported something based on a scurrilous letter and only some of the facts I got in touch with him to let him know what happened, during the letter exchanges he surprised me by publishing one of my letters as a column.

These days people don't have to think about their responses, they just fire them off, people fire off a response to that, etc., by now mostly the same group of people.

Going back to the top, thank you for letting me know there are other sources of information on this subject. If I'm wrong or might be wrong I want to know.

 

[Autumnal]

Look through the list of posts for one about Lacey’s letters or Lacey’s mail. That’s got a link to her dump.

McCarty did show up on File770 to argue back, and has exchanged emails publicly with others quoted there. He just didn’t as badly as he did on Facebook, clearly not deigning to explain anything to the pixel-stained technopeasants.

He wasn’t con chair: he was Hugo administrator. The Hugo’s were his job, and he did it both dishonestly and incompetently. The success of the con as a while is due to others.

 

[EKovarr]

Look through the list of posts for one about Lacey’s letters or Lacey’s mail. That’s got a link to her dump.

McCarty did show up on File770 to argue back, and has exchanged emails publicly with others quoted there. He just didn’t as badly as he did on Facebook, clearly not deigning to explain anything to the pixel-stained technopeasants.

He wasn’t con chair: he was Hugo administrator. The Hugo’s were his job, and he did it both dishonestly and incompetently. The success of the con as a while is due to others.

I can still only find that one email thread, where Dave asks people to look for things that might need special attention as well as doing a technical check, and only one of the documents. But I've realized some of the impressions may be from when he lost his temper of Facebook. I didn't bother reading it because I know he's not tactful when frustrated and that doesn't work well online. In person he gets very passionate about things but you can shut him down and have an actual conversation. Someone reading his FB page should have sent him a note doing just that. No one did, he kept going, and it must have been awful. I do know he was censored for it.

I should have done a deeper dive but I hate people yelling w/out thinking. This is the only place I've found where people are being civil.

Sorry, when I said Worldcon Chair I meant Chicon 7, back in 2012. (Just looked it up: the Chicon 7 Committee had 12 divisions, each of those had departments, and each department had staff. That's a lot of cats to herd.) WSFS business, including the Hugos, is sort of a pocket in a Worldcon because it's WSFS.

 

[Autumnal]

Oh, thanks for following up! More data are our little friends, to be nourished and appreciated.

 

[overgeeked]

Wow. It somehow gets worse.

 

[Autumnal]

It’s just amazing. And is at this point a pretty thorough condemnation of the Worldcon conrunning culture - it took sustained systemic failures at multiple points to make such a set of things possible.

 

[EKovarr]

God almighty! Would someone please explain to me why we put ourselves through this?

Let's play a LARP:

Congratulation! You've just negotiated a 6-figure Convention Center contract! You now have a huge, raw space, football fields of it. Girders three stories above you, concrete floor underneath you, walls somewhere out there.
+ Put together the main space of a Worldcon. (Don't forget the trashcans.) .

Congratulations! You came up with enough money to run a successful Worldcon bid!
+Put together your initial budget. (Don't forget union wages.)

Congratulations! You have plenty of function space of different sizes spread between convention center and headquarters hotel!
+ Start drafting programming. (Don't forget that it's Time+Participants+Function Space and Program Tracks.)

Congratulations! You've discovered you need at least three departments!
+ Figure out what else you need and start filling positions. Divisions, departments, advisors, staff. (Remember that manaaging volunteers is different.)

Do it all without people who haven't been working on and learning this stuff for years, who know what's needed. Do it without knowing who's good at what, without people in your divisions, your departments, knowing who they can recruit in their areas, including who's ready to move up Do it without connections from Australia to Austria.

Friends and I used to write LARPs, back in the days of index cards. You're expecting people to play with scraps of paper.

Stop and think instead of being scandle lemmings. Someone's discovered a conspiricy: A lot of the same people work on the differernt Worldcons! Take way the juicy conspiricy threory and you're left with a question: Why? We're on our 82 Worldcon so there must be a reason.

It might help to remember that the culture isn't some amorphous blog. It's made up of individuals. People who put time and energy into things that matter. One of the many things that matter to me is explaining Worldcons. I don't think many people are following this thread but if you start thinking that's a good start. That there might be a reason people work on multiple Worldcons. Chengdu was a scandle, you'll be the people who comment that it was one, just one year. You can stop worrying. You've even met one of these people.

 

[EKovarr]

NOTE: People who are being told that they're awful, incompetent, that they and the thousands of people they know or know of are corrupt . . . decades of work, on their own time and own dime, and they don't matter until the one year something doesn't work.

They're people. People get hurt. They lose their temper. Dave McCarthy is impatient, gets fed up, and spouts before he thinks. I happen to be calm, patient, and I spend a lot of time and energy writing, talking with people. But my patience isn't endless, then I explode. I just don't say anything until I can keep my feelings in check long enough to respond. (Fortunately I have a lot of non-Worldcon friends I can blow up to.) No responses needed, folks just appear to need more data about Worldcon runners.