Kevin Standlee (kevin_standlee) wrote,
Kevin Standlee
kevin_standlee

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Hugo Daze

The finalists for the 2015 Hugo Awards were announced today, starting at 12 Noon PDT, with a live UStream broadcast from Norwescon. Aside from some technical glitches (one microphone not working all of the time, sound from some other broadcast on the line), it went okay.

I was hovering over the broadcast because I was in possession of embargoed Hugo results, and I wanted to get them online as soon as the webcast was over but no sooner. This is nervous-making stuff because one wrong mouse-click and *boom* you've jumped the embargo. Fortunately, that didn't happen, and I put both the results and the web site post pointing people to it up within minutes of the broadcast ending. Then I settled in for a long day online.

It was another record year for nominating ballots cast, with 2,122 ballots cast (breaking last year's record turnout of 1,923).

I'm going to try and avoid all of the rehashing of the results, but today was a day of great online activity for people with any interest in the Hugo Awards. And those of us who run the Hugo Awards web site were ready for it. First of all, earlier this month we changed our web host from a small company targeted at low-volume non-profits to a commercial hosting service (Pair.com). Secondly, we did a short-term upgrade from shared to dedicated hosting in order to deal with the anticipated spike in site hits. (On the shared hosting service, they told us that they'd "throttle" access to the site if too many hits come too close together.) From the stats (behind the cut), I think we did the right thing.

THA Web Stats 4 Apr 2015 22:13
Here you see the number of hits on TheHugoAwards.org over the past month, per day. The gap in data on March 25-27 is an artifact of the hosting change. The big bar on the right is the (as of 10:13 PM PDT tonight) the 25,642 hits on the web site today. Hourly numbers spiked rapidly just after the end of the announcements. As I type this, it's now up over 26,000 views. We'll probably not hit our all-time record of 31,191 (August 18, 2014, the day of the announcement of the 2014 Hugos), but we'll be close. The increased usage on the site starting last August eventually caused our old vendor to raise our rent, which is why we switched to Pair.

We'll be watching carefully for the next few days to see when the storm dies down on the web site.

One of the things I wrote when someone complimented me for not being on the "Social Justice Warriors'" side: I'm not on the "Sad/Rabid Puppies" side, nor on the so-called SJW's side. I'm on The Hugo Awards' side. And by that I mean that activities that I think bring the awards into disrepute, legal or not, are morally reprehensible. I believe that there is a cabal of people who take delight in destruction and who sincerely want to destroy Worldcon and the Hugo Awards because they think it will be fun. Inasmuch as I've spent more than half my life working with the organization that makes those Awards possible, and a significant chunk of it working on things like TheHugoAwards.org, you can imagine that this makes me angry.

I'm also pretty angry at those people who say, "Well, it's okay to have a slate of voters, since [those people, whichever name you want to give them] were doing it all along, just in secret. We're just doing it in public." That is, they ascribe the fact that certain works were getting nominated to a Sekrit Conspiracy, and manipulate numbers until they find a correlation, then conclude that, for instance, because in 2008 40 people nominated Halting State and 41 nominated The Last Colony that this is proof of a conspiracy and a Sekrit Voting Slate. As I pointed out, I nominated Halting State but not The Last Colony, so there's your lockstep voting slate disproved right there.

I spent much of today trying to keep up with corners of the wide-ranging online controversy, giving factual responses where I could, and also using my Hugo Web Site moderating powers, by moderating posts that personally insulted individual commenters or hurled accusations of fraud at finalists. And despite not doing much physical labor today (except hauling in that air conditioner), I find myself pretty tired right now.
Tags: hugo awards, worldcon, wsfs
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  • 16 comments

  • Now What

    I had expected better from my fellow citizens. Now we have to figure out if the winners will do what they said they wanted to do: replace American…

  • Construction and Destruction

    Lisa and I voted a couple of weeks ago. We went to Big R and bought that pallet of firewood yesterday. (I have to remember to always bring the…

  • Fire in the Hole

    The temperatures have dropped low enough and stayed that way the the electric heater cannot stave off the cold any longer. Yesterday, I gave in and…