This is a slightly cleaned-up version of the notes I made for myself while going through the 2015 Hugo Awards voter's pack, set down here in case anyone's interested, what with the awards happening today and everything.

For every category not listed here, I either ran out of time and didn't vote, or my though process wasn't in-depth enough to be worth recording.

Possible spoilers ahead.

( Read more... )

Regarding the entries from the Puppies' voting blocs, most of them turned out to be poor to mediocre. If that's the very best SF&F that they deem ideologically acceptable, I can see why it hasn't previously had much success getting on the ballot. They've pretty much demonstrated, hilariously thoroughly, that it's crapness that keeps their approved works from getting nominated, not some shadowy radical-left cabal. There were a few Puppy entries that I enjoyed reading, to be fair, but nothing that clearly stood out as award material. I will, however, say that I reckon Kary English is capable of Hugo-winning writing, and I hope to see some of her work nominated in future years under fairer circumstances.

 

I think we need to talk about Pigeon Street. For anyone who wasn't a small child in early-80s Britain, Pigeon Street was an animated series about the various residents of the titular city street. It had a colourful cast of characters, such as Clara the truck driver, Mr. Jupiter the astronomer, William the window cleaner, Mr. Baskerville the detective, and all their friends and neighbours. The street had actual pigeons too, of course, who occasionally played some minor role in the plot but mostly just fluttered around making cooing noises.

Many of the characters had their own theme songs, which ranged from catchy to the kind of earworm that stays with you for life (I'm willing to bet that everyone of a certain age has had the "Long-distance Clara" song going around in their heads since the last paragraph). Each episode featured a couple of these songs woven into a connecting plotline. This would typically be a slice of everyday life, with a few of the characters going to work, helping each other out, and dealing with the little problems of human existence. Simple, charming little stories about a friendly urban community.

Here, watch a couple of episodes so you can see what it's like:

Episode 1: "All In a Day's Work"

Episode 6: "Pigeon Post"


And then...

And then there was the episode "A Light in the Sky". This one starts out normal. The pigeons fly around a bit. Reg the street sweeper has his leaf pile scattered by Watson the dog. There's a song about Mr. Baskerville and Mr. Jupiter. Then, a few minutes in, it takes a sudden swerve into the bizarre.

The residents are puzzled and disturbed by a twinkling, dancing light in the evening sky. They stare and chase after it. It disappears after luring all the characters to the top of a tower block. The next day, they show lingering confusion and strange behaviour. The light is never explained, even in the frankly creepy song that ends the episode. It's just some unknowable, sanity-challenging entity that human minds cannot comprehend.



It's not even as though this happened when the creators ran out of ideas. This was episode 2.

Let me tell you, it is distinctly unsettling as a pre-school child to have your cute cartoon show descend into cosmic horror. Decades later, I still can hear the weird piping sounds. The unearthly geometries still haunt my waking thoughts and seep into my dreams. What was the light in the sky? WHAT WAS THE LIGHT IN THE SKY?

Thank you to all the nice people who turned up to help me move house on Saturday! The carrying of things, transport, making of food, and providing of moral support were all greatly appreciated.

New place is actually a bit of a dump, but it'll keep the rain off until I can find, or possibly even buy, somewhere better.

There is no landline or doorbell, so if you turn up at my new place, give me a call on my mobile phone so that I can come and let you in. Alternatively, knocking loudly will probably bring someone random to the door.

If you do not have my new address and/or my mobile phone number, please comment and I will send it to you.

I 'm clearing out as much stuff as possible, because it looks like I'll need to move house soon. This means the following workstations and PC bits are all free to a good home:

• Asus A7A133 motherboard with 1GHz Duron processor (with heatsink and fan). I can also give you a couple of PC133 memory sticks for this if you like.
• 1.7GHz Celeron processor and motherboard. Needs a CMOS battery and a CPU fan, and is therefore untested. Has onboard sound and Ethernet. Comes in a mini tower case.
• Matched pair of 1.7GHz Xeon processors (http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=27262). They're in a motherboard and tower case, but since it's some weird Dell server I'm not sure how much use it is.
• About 50 floppies, with and without various bits of software on them. Relive the baffling mid-90s obsession with installing poorly-drawn novelty icons for your desktop.
• Internal SCSI CD-ROM drive.
• SGI Indy with 17" monitor. Needs a standard PS/2 keyboard and mouse, which I can probably supply if necessary. Currently running some old version of Debian Linux, I think.
• Two DEC 3000 workstations. Half a gig of RAM each (which was jaw-droppingly impressive for 1993). No monitor, but will work fine with a serial console. Will run NetBSD fine, but Linux hadn't been ported to these things last time I checked. One has some sort of tape drive, the other has a caddy-style CD-ROM drive. I can provide tray-style CD-ROM drives that should work with these. I also have a PDF manual for them somewhere.
• VT420 terminal. White phosphor. Could be a nice retro interface for one of the above DEC workstations! Has a cable to connect it to a standard 9-pin serial port.
• External 5.25" floppy drive with SCSI connector.
• External SCSI CD-ROM drive (untested).

All of them worked when last powered up, unless otherwise stated. Please offer them a home!

( Curiously-named groceries... )

In other news, still looking for a housemate. Anyone want to come and live in Leytonstone in a really nice house?

Thanks to the estimable auntsarentgents, I now have an account over here on Dreamwidth. If you're there too and I haven't found you yet, please come and add me!

I'll be crossposting everything to LJ for the foreseeable future, so if you don't have a Dreamwidth account, you'll still be able to see my woefully-infrequent updates.