The recent announcement from the Glasgow Worldcon committee about some unexpected patterns in Hugo voting ballots, the conclusions made about those patterns, and the actions taken in response, have naturally raised interest in the nomination process for this year. As readers may remember, both the nomination process and voting process in 2023 had clear anomalies that cast severe doubt on the validity of the outcome and generated a great deal of concern among the SFF community.
ETA: See also Part 1, link to the combined Camestos Felapton/Heather Rose Jones analysis.
See also: Part 2, link to the combined Camestos Felapton/Heather Rose Jones analysis.
Hey, so I'm going to be at Worldcon in Washington DC next week and I'll be on some programming. (See the event link.) If you happen to be there, look me up to say hi. The convention is being quite careful about Covid precautions. (Everyone must document vaccination, no exceptions. Required masking in all convention spaces.) I know we were all hoping that greater vaccine distribution and fergoodnessakes common sense precautions would have made the pandemic much less of an issue by now.
This will be the last session I blog for this year—and just in time because the recorded sessions will be going off the web in a day or two. In the past half dozen years I’ve been delighted at how many papers there are on the history of magic, across a wide variety of cultures and practices. One of the pitfalls in writing historical fantasy is being insufficiently imaginative regarding magical elements. We get so much of our exposure to historic magic filtered through popular culture, which has all the hazards of anything picked up from popular culture.
It's a bit frustrating that some of the more interesting papers are the ones the authors don't want shared. But there are a lot of reasons why speakers request no social media sharing. In some cases, the images are shared that require licences for general "publication" as opposed to research purposes. In some cases, the paper is part of a research project intended for publication and general sharing would undermine the "value" as a publication.
One definite advantage of watching these sessions in recorded form in the comfort of my own home is that I can take the laptop out into the garden and relax in a lawn chair while watching. These papers were all jam-packed full of details and descriptions, which don’t always make for good textual summaries. So this is just a taste of what was offered.
Lucky Charms: Instances of Protective Amulets and Trends in Byzantine Dress - Ms. Angela L. Costello, MA, Independent Scholar
I had meant to start watching the recorded sessions from Kalamazoo last week, and then my day-job landed on my head, not to let up until 10pm Saturday night when my emergency investigation closed. So I'll be blogging the remaining recorded sessions I have earmarked this week, since the recordings are going away after that.
Dressed to Fail: Textile Signifiers in Medieval Icelandic and Welsh Texts - Dr. Sarah M. Anderson, PhD, Princeton University
The conference is over, save for the sessions I've marked for viewing when they come out in video in a couple of days. (So there may be a few more blogs on those over the next week.) As a wrap-up for this, the first virtual 'Zoo, I present to you the collated, edited, and organized...
(also applicable to other conferences)
