Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Not that he needs me to link to him, but John Scalzi pretty much nails it in his round-up of this year's Hugo Kvetching and his overview of the situation. I thank him very much for noticing the number of people who want those of us who are doing the work to change what we're doing to suit them because they Can't Be Bothered. Or, as I put it, they want to steal someone else's intellectual property and re-purpose it to their own ends, but only if it doesn't require actually doing anything more than pounding on a keyboard.

The proposal I read a couple of days ago to actually create a worldwide equivalent to the Clarke Award — a juried award that would go to "quality" works as opposed to that "populist" stuff — is good, because it doesn't understate the rather considerable effort it takes to set up a decent award. I know both sides of the fence, as I'm a director of the non-profit corporation that runs the SF & Fantasy Translation Awards. Just a couple of days ago I did one of the several bits of housekeeping for the corporation; an annual filing with the California Attorney General's office.

Good Awards are Hard Work, regardless of whether they're popular-vote, juried, or something else.

Today is the San Francisco Giants' Opening Day. And for the first time in several years, I'm not actively sick. I don't mean "conveniently sick so I can go to the ball game." I've never been able to attend Opening Day — it's too expensive. (Being "conveniently sick" for that even if I had the money wouldn't do me any good because we use a Paid Time Off system that combines sick leave and vacation.) But for some reason, for the past several years, I've been sick in various ways on the Giants Opening Day, sometimes rather badly so, similar to the Lurgi that afflicted Lisa and I through the better part of March. (In most cases, I worked from home while I was sick rather than inflict myself upon co-workers.) Today, though, I'm in the office and I'll just have to content myself to listening to the Giants on the radio.