Literary Clusterfucks 2013

isn’t associate prof typically tenured?

He claimed he hadn't read it in a tweet and she said he should have googled since he called it Hanging Out

The idea someone should have Googled a phrase that's been in common use for half a century or more is ridiculous.

i’ve spent most of my life hanging out all the time and still manage to do it a fair bit, but i now have some friends who don’t hang out at all. it’s interesting. for them any social gathering must be a planned activity with a well-defined beginning and end, and almost always needs some intrinsic function to justify it. like i once met up with this guy for a movie and we met up outside the theatre 5 minutes before and then as soon as the movie was over he caught a cab home, didn’t even do the “so what did you think of the movie?” chat. another time my partner and i went to dinner with him and his wife on a saturday night, we met at the restaurant at 6 then they went home promptly at 7:30. not even a hint of a consideration that we’d grab a drink or walk around a bit. the restaurant was a block from their place; they could’ve invited us over. and they don’t have kids. for the longest time we thought they just didn’t like us, but then at one point he told my partner he considered me his best friend. he does text me a lot. it was really confusing, but i think for some people the idea of idly spending time with your friends because you enjoy their company is just not a concept they are aware of. so i could see Sheila Liming thinking she invented “hanging out” if she’d previously exclusively lived amongst these kinds of people. like to her she’d unearthed some kind of lost tradition. the subtitle of the book calls hanging out “radical” which is consistent with that

that’s kind of foreign to me, too. I guess the main difference between now and when I was younger is I’m just hanging out at a friend’s place less than I used to.

part of that is the shared urge to get out of the house and we’ll bounce around a bit before going back to our respective homes. people in my sphere also have tighter schedules when you figure in kids, different work hours, etc. so things can seem time-boxed

obviously most of humanity’s greatness comes from just chilling

Man that is disappointing when people don’t want to engage in the post-movie stroll and chit-chat. Weather permitting of course.

The whole idea of hanging out at a friend's house is dead for almost app my friends but two.

One of them now can't really have me over as much because he's promised not to drink in front of his kids anymore and most of the time we'd be drinking fancy whiskey or beer and watching football.

The other sometimes has me over or comes over but ALWAYS wants to go out while simultaneously saying she needs to save money.

But there is no activity more enjoyable to me than just hanging at a friend's pad or having them over mine. Don't gotta worry about "finding parking", or feeling overwhelmed in public which happens often to me lately.

And then more money to do more substantial things with these friends, like the road trip to see Snoop Dogg with this same friend and her boyfriend last year, which was an amazing two day trip

*all

yeah kids change the calculus. but my friend from the above post is childless and both he and his partners have jobs with very flexible schedules—so no excuse

Feel like I only ever hear about the Hugos because of blunders and controversies, maybe they should scrap them.

Feel like I only hear about widespread efforts to remove books from libraries as the result of organised campaigns by a tiny coterie of right-wing creeps, maybe they should scrap libraries.

Fuck sake.

tbf, removing books from libraries is done by external, (mostly) right-wing forces, and the Hugos shot themselves in the foot, thigh, and sternum during the 2023 awards, based on the details that have just come out

one thing im a bit confused by with the hugo stuff—isn’t babel by rf kuang quite widely acknowledged to be terrible? everyone i know who attempted reading it basically threw it across the room, and the excerpts ive read were awful

yes but that book throwing helped people increase muscle mass

shot themselves

has tipsy been hearing about the 2024 awards since 2013 or was it something else

xpost I haven’t read the book, but it won the Nebula so apparently not everyone agreed it was terrible

Feel like I only ever hear about the Hugos because of blunders and controversies, maybe they should scrap them.

With respect, this might be a you problem, it's kept on being one of the two big awards (which is why the Sad / Rabid Puppies went after it, though they never really got very far) - if you don't follow sci-fi awards, where would you expect to hear of it?

xp also the Blackwell's book of the year for fiction (also my wife loved it)

lol my primary source on Hugos is Chuck Tingle. I don't really have an opinion about them.

Hugo winners are a good way to get new scifi reading in - well, they were on point with NK Jemisin anyway she's awesome.

Any awards that keep being given to Sean McGuire are deeply suspect awards. And they're popularly voted, so the literary equivalent of the Logies.

Hmm, except that no one knows what the Logies are

xp I am assuming you're not deadnaming Seanan McGuire there?

Just autocorrect kicking in, annoyingly

I actually wasn't aware she'd had any other name.

And the Logies thing was my point.

Logies have only been open voting for a decade or so, you used to have to spend $2.95 on the form and 37¢ on the stamp, at least

(so they were rigged by publicists instead of the public)

Any organisation’s membership giving awards, contrarily, is a completely normal and reasonable process for awards. And rarely results in a significantly more demented slate than one which has juried noms and attendee voting tbf.

(I have no opinion about the recipients of any of them in the last 8 years except that two went to a friend and those ones are, unrelatedly, good and justified. if tipsy wants to call for the awards to be scrapped bcz he has now heard of them four times, not twice, in eleven years, go ahead tho)

all awards are bad

thread winner

Historic Hugos (and Nebulas) award winners still a dece enough guide to the best in the genre for newbies.

if tipsy wants to call for the awards to be scrapped bcz he has now heard of them four times, not twice, in eleven years, go ahead tho

I dived into the whole sad puppies thing when it was going on — which ran for like five years, didn't it? — and now obviously this whole China debacle. All of which suggest — to, yes, somebody who doesn't pay much attention or attach any particular significance to the Hugos — that there are some organizational/structural issues or vulnerabilities. I don't care if it gets scrapped or not, but it looks like they're going to have some work to do to re-establish whatever credibility they had.

There are probably 50 different awards for SF writing given out yearly, but the only ones most people know of or care about are the Nebulas and the Hugos. That's why the Sad Weirdos tried to hijack the awards in the first place. It makes more sense to replace whoever was making censorship decisions in this case than to get rid of a fan voted award entirely.

all awards are bad

NY Times is leaning toward mean takedowns: Alexandra Jacobs on Anne Lamott and Ducks, Newburyport's Lucy Ellmann on Danielle Dutton.

where's the takedown of Ducks?

no the author of Ducks (Ellmann) published a much-maligned takedown of Dutton

Ducking A!

well I read that punctuation incorrectly. I thought everyone loved Ducks! (The Canadian graphic novel)

just because you can write a book doesn't mean you can review a book

^underrated REO Speedwagon album