My firmly held beliefs, your didactic nonsense...

I don't know how many people reading this (if anyone is, given the lack of comments on a regular basis, but that's by the by...) remember but last year I bought a supporting membership for this year's WorldCon. This was mostly to support the Helsinki bid for the WorldCon in 2017, as each location is decided by the members of the convention held 2 years earlier. Go Helsinki! \o/

Another reason people might get a supporting membership for a WorldCon is to do with the Hugo Awards, the nominations of which were announced yesterday to much kerfuffle. In short, there's a bunch of folks who think that the awards have long been taken over by groupthink (because how else would all these lefty non-male and/or non-straight and/or non-white people win things?) and the best way to counter that was with more groupthink. Namely, pushing a slate of nominations and squeezing out the people who are Not Like Us.

Which they managed to do quite successfully last night in those categories where there are lots of nominations and it's always a close-run thing to see who gets in the 5 places on the final ballot. For example, last year saw over 500 different short stories nominated for Best Short Story and iirc only 3 got the required 5% of the nominations to get onto the ballot. This year our groupthink folks have managed to get all 5 places filled and with their choices alone.

Things got a little trickier in categories like Best Graphic Story, where 4 of the 5 slots got taken up by Saga, Ms Marvel, Rat Queens and Sex Criminals. Decidedly not suitable reading material for righteous straight white menfolks. So sad. It's going to be interesting to see the full details of all the nominations when they release the figures in August.

Clearly those of us who are supposedly mind-controlled by the lefty Illuminati didn't get our thought control properly in time to get our shit together. My messages must have been mixed last year too, because I didn't agree with some of the 2014 winners - what, is that allowed? - for example, thinking Max Gladstone should have won the Campbell Award. Gosh, yes, I voted for a straight white guy to win. But probably not the right kind of straight white guy, eh?

I know, it can't be that people who don't agree with you and like what you like all of the time, actually aren't members of a grand conspiracy? Does not compute, I know, but there it is. Sadly, time travel does not exist and you can't put the genie back in the bottle or make us folks who don't like what you like suddenly change their minds. And the rules say if I don't think the nominations are good enough to merit a Hugo, I can vote 'no award'; got to stick to the rules, right? ;)