Ran

Fair enough. The publishers were the ones out of bounds, the Chinese voters did not know better. True. I suppose the fact that nothing like this has happened before, though, is why people are bothered by the implications -- it really would be absurd if the biggest SF publishers in the US/UK colluded together to propose which of their works should be nominated and which works should win awards, and people would be annoyed (rightly, I think) by this sort of naked attempt to influence the results. Recommendation lists are one thing, coordinating to try and decide who'll be getting awards is quite another. The Western side of the debacle has much more transparency thanks to Lacey's e-mail dump, but we're basically shut out entirely on the Chinese side of it other than the very few details the Chinese local government and McCarty's remarks have informed us of to date, and what sleuths have figured out from Chinese social media and anonymous comments. It's interesting that back in mid-2023, the existence of this slate was known, and people were glad that EPH seemed to have limited the impact. And now we know that, no, EPH was not to thank for it, it took the administrators making the call that this mass of identical ballots were not organic. ETA: Jeebus. Someone pointed me to tweets from ErsatzCulture, who had been digging through Weibo (Chinese social media), and a few days ago he shared a tweet he had founded that translated as an encouragement for everyone to vote, to read actively and choose their favorites... and doing so on their own behalf "(rather than the organisations collecting votes to manipulate)" A symptom of just paranoia with this one Chinese fan... or an indication of just how fucked things were? A slate is problematic enough, the idea that some organization(s) were convincing fans to hand their ballots to them so they could submit them for them to manipulate the results...

I don't know how deep you are into Lovecraft scholarship, but Providence includes S.T. Joshi as a character in the final issue. Joshi seemed bemused but not unpleased, as Moore had clearly inserted him because he had read some of his scholarly work on Lovecraft. I would also point to this site run by dedicated Lovecraft/Moore fans/scholars which have extensive annotations for Moore's various Lovecraftian works. I don't know if they might give you a different perspective on the issues you had with it. There's a lot of depth, I think, in what Moore is doing with the Lovecraft mythos. ETA: Oh, also, Issa López signed on to a multi-year development deal, including showrunning season 5 of True Detective. Oh dear. Well, popular is popular.

Commenting early, but the Visual Effects Society Awards have been announced, and The Creator did very well -- leading the pack with five wins out of seven categories. Apparently, the news is that Gareth Edwards is pretty much locked to direct the next film in the Jurassic World franchise, after having had meetings with Spielberg and Frank Marshall in which they were impressed with his vision for the film. Screenplay by David Koepp, who did the original Jurassic Park screenplay, as well as Carlito's Way, the first Mission: Impossible, the Sam Raimi Spider-Man, and lots more.

Normally, no, but when it's said several publications all put forward the same bulleted item, they appear to be colluding together to clearly influence the voters about what to vote for as a finalist, not just a nominee. It's really strange. I do not blame Chinese fans at all in all this. I am sure they acted in a way that seemed entirely right and within bounds. The antipathy towards slating that exists at the Hugos, and efforts to defeat it, are something that most would have had no idea about.

Alas, the rest of the show doesn't really live up to it, but it's totally watchable.

I've heard the gunplay in Borderlands is pretty good.

Which Western magazines bullets recommendations (e.g. offers up only one candidate in a category despite having published multiple eligible stories in a category) and which Western magazines that are publishers of nominatable fiction decide to include nominees from other publishers? A quick Google shows that sites like Tor.com and Clarkesworld will publish lists of all their Hugo-eligible works in a given year, and Locus provides its very lengthy recommendation list yearly, but Locus is not a publisher of fiction but rather a trade magazine.

First off, my ritual fuck you to DC, HBO, and that scab Lindelof for participating in pillaging Watchmen when they all know that they have abused Moore's rights. That's from the 1990s, not 1980s, though.The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Promethea, Lost Girls, Top Ten... IMO, he's written a lot of great stuff in the 21st century as well. LoEG is a ridiculous masterclass in Victorian literature and popular culture while also interrogating all the ugly, nasty sides of it. As it progresses he pushes into post-War Britain (featuring his unvarnishedly brutal take on "Jimmy" Bond), and eventually contemporary Britain as well. Neonomicon doesn't strike me as at all stupider than the Lovecraft mythos, but to each their own. He followed it up with Providence, which eventually ties together the ending of Neonomicon.

Which one? I've heard Penelope Cruz is really good in it, so I hope it's not her.

Interview at IGN with Miyazaki, answering some questions, including explaining the setting (which is in the same universe, but sort of another dimension, from the Lands Between)

She worked with Roth (and Jack Black) before in The House With a Clock In Its Walls, which was a hit. So maybe she liked the experience, plus, you know, money. Roth is coming off his best directorial streak in years, with that film, a well-received shark documentary he documented called Fin, and last year's horror film Thanksgiving. But there's a lot of garbage in his past, too. My understanding is that Borderlands has a very crass, vulgar, toilet humor sensibility, very "meme" focused, and that seems to be what the film intends to deliver (plus over-the-top action and bright, colorful character designs).

Since they couldn't make any changes to the scripts during most of the filming due to the writer's strike, I'm guessing that they wanted to improve some sequences that they normally would have fixed while filming.

Naked Hatted Avatar Week.

I think the argument I've seen is not that it was just a slate, but that two or more big publications/publishing house in China colluded together to form a fairly unified slate, including some categories featuring only one recommended work, which goes well beyond your typical slate. EPH exists to deal with slates from a minority of voters having outsized power, but when multiple influential entities collude together to form a super-slate, it overwhelms the ability of EPH and basically means that the result is determined by these influential entities. As far as I know, only custom says publications can't do this -- if Random House, Tor, and Del Ray put out a super-slate where they divvied up the awards between them, and then 50% of the electorate voted the slate, I'm not sure if people would have felt that was kosher, but there's nothing in the rules explicitly against it. And yet, if it happened, I think people would be pretty pissed off, and there would be action taken to codify that this sort of collusion isn't allowed. And the stance of McCarty, at least, seems to be that the WSFS rules give the Hugo Administrators discretion to toss ballots if they believe they are outside the bounds of what WSFS envisions. And the fact that EPH even exists suggests that WSFS has previously shown a strong aversion to slates, and so the Hugo Administrator using their discretion to throw out ballots that were clearly part of this slate seems in line with a reading of the previously indicated will of the WSFS. Above and beyond, we are told that the Chinese Hugo Administrators reviewed the nominated Chinese works because the Western administrators did not read Chinese and could not vet them, we know at least one Chinese work (Hai Ya's "Fogong Temple Pagoda") declared ineligible for no obvious reason that anyone can determine but given the previous that was likely a determination of the Chinese Hugo admin, and we know that the Sichuan propaganda committee took credit for having a hand in censoring the awards. I don't need to look at a single thing that McCarty has said to believe that we don't know the half of the role of Chinese administrators, local political or business interests, publishers, etc. had in this debacle.

Yeah. @Mr. Chatywin et al. Try Malwarebytes to find and remove it.

In general, I agree with that approach. If you take the money, you should shut up. And he has certainly showed himself to be an asshole before, so this could just be another fine example of that. But we don't really know the story, so I've got to leave open the possibility that HBO basically forced him to put his name on it, in which case, I don't know, down with corporate slavery, right ya'll?

Weirdly came across some oooold NHAW Avs of Linda and myself. Oh, when we were young(er). As to posting images, best shot is put them in an imgur.com album and share the link here.

He sounds like he basically didn't have a choice when HBO insisted on turning Lopez's pitch into part of the True Detective franchise, so he's lashing out. He should have waived his executive producer credit, though, if he wanted his name off of it and wanted to be able to criticize it with clean hands. Taking the credit -- and presumably the check that comes with it -- does suggest he should be a lot more circumspect. OTOH, who knows, maybe HBO also strongarmed him into taking the credit and money, perhaps threatening his development deal with them if he didn't play ball because they knew it'd look bad if his name was nowhere to be seen.

@Mexal You are welcome! @Isis I feel like the ending of the film is inspired by the ending of Call Me By Your Name, with a similar long focus on a love-lorn protagonist, dealing with their emotions: The difference lies in the camera in Guadagnino's film making us the sole observer, while Sciamma's camera makes us voyeurs alongside Marianne, who secretly watches Héloïse's grief. Of course, Guadagnino lets the credits play over the scene, so it's not quite the same and maybe feels less long because of it (but it's actually a bit longer). But yeah, gorgeous, beautiful film, which rocketed up into the Sight and Sound top 200 (maybe a bit early for it, but to me it's such an undeniable masterpiece, absolutely one of the great films of the 21st century, that I don't mind it too much).

@IFR My friend Sean T. Collins has a interesting pan of the finale that I think you may appreciate. And did you see the NYT review of the whole season? The writer coined the term "virtue-noir", which I suspect will be getting a lot of play. @dbunting

Not sure this is global or not, but Netflix put the full-length animated film Nimona on YouTube. It's a YA fantasy based on a graphic novel, with a dnsitinctive production design:

You might also try Alexander's Westmark trilogy if you are checking out more of his work. It's more mature and darker in a lot of ways, and there's some philosophical matter too. It's not really a fantasy, but it uses a made-up world and history, and features the kingdom of Westmark which is sort of an analog to late-17th/early-18th century France, with muskets and pistols and all. Machinations, printing presses, revolt, intrigue, etc.

There's a lot of manufactured drama in the show, and this was certainly one -- literally no reason to gather material and start a fire when they could have warmed up the cabin of the car in a couple of minutes. and been way more comfortable. Those cars probably had heated seats, too. Or... like, Tsalal. They barely spend any time looking at that scene, but there ought to be a ton of evidence This sort of critical viewpoint is not unknown to me -- it happened as GoT progressed and they made some very sloppy decisions, but they had big "shock and awe" going and the critics mostly just ignored logic and went with the vibes.