David Selig

Lillard is awesome, but the rest of the team is pretty bad, especially with CJ playing with an injury. You can't beat the Lakers without playing great defense and Portland's is anything but great. I'd be shocked if this series goes to more than 5 games. Don't be fooled by LeBron coasting at the end of the regular season, he does it every year. Who would defend LeBron, BTW? Melo?

The resting of stars in the last games before the playoffs started earlier than usual this year, so did the blatant tanking to get a favourable playoff matchup. Inevitable given the lack of home court advantage in the bubble and the unusual circumstances in regards to conditioning due to the long break, but still it's a bit of a shame the race for the 8th spot in the West would be largely decided by which team would be luckier with their already qualified opponents resting players.

Yesterday was the best day of regular season basketball I can remember in a long time. Clippers - Blazers was great, Dame choked in the end against the Clippers backups, the Clippers depth is insane; Utah - Denver was a double OT classic (Jokic showing once again that he is the best clutch player in the league and it's not close), quite entertaining Lakers - Pacers game where TJ Warren continued to be the best shooter in the league, then a really good Miami Phoenix game, and the cherry on top was the spectacular show Luca put on against the Bucks, his passing is unbelievable.

Harden's been pretty good defensively in most games this season IMO, that switch everything scheme the Rockets ran now is suits him, he's probably the best post defender among all guards in the league.

Absolutely. They look so bad sometimes and completely dominant when they get going. A lot depends on how much contact the refs allow them, when they call it tight, it's much harder for their defense to generate the turnovers they need and to keep the rebounding disadavantage within reasonable limits.

I think Bud outsmarted himself in this game, the Bucks stuck to their gameplan too rigidly which is really not well suited for the small ball Rockets. As usual they tried to prevent layups at all costs but the Rockets are completely fine with it, they will just kick the ball out and chuck 3s all night and never get discouraged even if they miss 10 in a row. The Bucks helped off Westbrook way too much. There were times they were triple-teaming Westbrook on his drives and leaving corner 3s completely open. Still, it was a close game which could have easily been won by the Bucks, the Rockets had an unusually low number of turnovers too.

That's definitely true for the most part. And it works the other way round too - once you get nominated the second time, you usually get nominated again and again even for clearly weaker works. And you may even win with something hilariously bad, like Emergency Skin did this year. Seriously, who voted for that?

I agree with this. Campbell's views changed quite a bit over the years. He became a bitter old man in the 1960s. And if people want to make an argument that he was an overrated editor, they are more than welcome as far as I am concerned, that has been my view for a long time. IMO it was great that F&SF and Galaxy appeared in 1950 and gradually took the genre in a different direction. But just screaming "Racist" and "Fascist" (he was never a fascist, BTW, that word has a specific meaning which isn't "everyone you disagree with politically") and dismissing him completely isn't the way to do that.

BTW, it's an absolute travesty that Emergency Skin won the novelette award. It's by far the worst Jemisin work I've read and really one of the worst stories I've read in years. It's 30 pages rant saying over and over and over again that the richest men are totally evil and useless and the world would become an utopia almost overnight if they leave it". It's like a reverse Ayn Rand with the same complete lack of subtlety. Omphalos should have won this category by a country mile.

That's not true. Here is one example of a work with a black protagonist that he not only published, but also asked the author for several sequels despite some of Analog's readers reacting pretty negatively to it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Man's_Burden He not only bought this story and the sequels, but also according to the their author Mack Reynolds, he was the one who suggested to Reynolds to write them and defended them against the objections in some of the letters Analog received after their publication. Here is an interesting passage from Eric Leaf Davin's invaluable work "Partners in wonder" on this topic:

What did Campbell do in 1944 that was impacted the field so negatively?

Two wrongs don't make a right, you know.

A lot of the most vocal people in the community have become ridiculously woke and have mastered the art of being offended by anything. It's embarrassing. As expected, the Best Related Work award was given to the speech in which Jeannette NG called Campbell "a fucking fascist", which made this category even more of a joke than it already is. The same people who find racism in everything keep calling the likes of Martin and Silverberg "Old white guys" as an insult and feel smug about it. These awards have become extremely political and it's really no coincidence that white men have barely wbeen nominated for anything in the fiction category in the last 5 years. People on Twitter were even saying GRRM is transphobic because he made a joke about about the Oscar statues not having penises or something like that. It's insane.

People on Twitter are really mad at GRRM because he's mentioning John W. Campbell too much, which is apparently unforgivable since Campbell was officially cancelled last year by the woke crowd.

The situation is obviously pretty frustrating for a relatively small and independent publisher like DAW, Rothfuss is their biggest name. Betsy Wollheim has probably wished a lot of times that Pat Rothfuss had the exemplary work ethics of some of DAW's other big names, like Cherryh or Seanan McGuire.