Mark Dennehy

Mark Dennehy

  • Commented on The present in deep history
    The black death (not for the loss of life, but for the subsequent legal and social developments). The rise of near-universal literacy and the rise of printing which went hand-in-hand with it and which led to the enormous acceleration...
  • Commented on How I learned to stop worrying and love the concept of punitive slating....
    "Hugo Fandom as a whole is conservative-to-reactionary, old, and fairly cranky." -- You're kidding, right?one of the things that came out of all this was some demographic studies of who attends cons in general and who attends worldcon in...
  • Commented on How I learned to stop worrying and love the concept of punitive slating....
    It's not democracy. It's a one-off vote that "work 3 in category D is prettier than work 1 in category D". And that's all. You shouldn't be voting for (or against) the author(s) of works 3 and 1. Cool, but...
  • Commented on How I learned to stop worrying and love the concept of punitive slating....
    Mark: the Hugos are a beauty contest, not an election. Er, the comments say you were replying to Dirk there, not me, but just in case you were: A beauty contest that has a thousand people picking entrants is better...
  • Commented on How I learned to stop worrying and love the concept of punitive slating....
    Charlie: What do you do if a good work is put on (say) Vox Day's slate for 2016 against the author's express wishes, but that author doesn't actually formally withdraw their work from submission with WSFS?...
  • Commented on How I learned to stop worrying and love the concept of punitive slating....
    The slate idea is how political parties came into existence and which now dominate all of "democratic" politics. The Hugos might go that route. And then it would lose all of its value to casual SF readers as it drops...
  • Commented on How I learned to stop worrying and love the concept of punitive slating....
    Ugh, the formatting on that came out all wrong, sorry :(...
  • Commented on How I learned to stop worrying and love the concept of punitive slating....
    I'm going to be lazy and repost something I already posted on file770, because this is too on the nose not to (and honestly, I haven't enough time to totally rewrite it, when all I want to say is the...
  • Commented on Bad puppies, no awards
    So far the rules as they stand are working. I thought the same thing when Andy Weir won the Campbell......
  • Commented on Bad puppies, no awards
    Again, it's perfectly OK for a MINORITY slate vote to get their "choice(s)" on the final ballot for a Hugo. This is a feature, not a bug. Yes, as I said above about two sentences before that bit you've quoted:...
  • Commented on Bad puppies, no awards
    I think you're missing the point, a little. A popular choice, even backed by a concerted campaign like the Puppies or any other group is not a problem for the Hugos which are a popular vote award to start with....
  • Commented on Bad puppies, no awards
    Yes, this came up at the business meeting too. Some people were willing to accept that it did very well in simulation and others were not; there was some call for it to be checked against actual Hugo nominations. It...
  • Commented on Bad puppies, no awards
    The great thing in both your cases is that you can actually get an answer. No hand-waving needed. Just actually run the simulations or the tests with the data and look at the outcomes. I'm not sure it's that cut...
  • Commented on Bad puppies, no awards
    If I were being Evil... That is in fact a valid question you're raising. The test is: can you sufficiently game the EPH system (assuming you have perfectly loyal minions) to control a statistically significant portion of the outcome that...
  • Commented on Bad puppies, no awards
    if 500 slate voters select A for Best Long Form Editor and leave their other slots blank then it's likely A will be on the final ballot along with four other non-slate nominees, given the total number of nominators will...
  • Commented on Bad puppies, no awards
    Much as I love both Australians and Irish, I don't think they're particularly outstanding from the rest of the human race in terms of mental abilities This is true. We make up for it with the prodigious size of our...
  • Commented on Bad puppies, no awards
    I'm not sure that "I had to read something" should be considered a valid criticism to be honest. I mean, if you literally can't read two or three pages of text, how can you cast a vote on an entire...
  • Commented on Bad puppies, no awards
    It takes a bit more work for the administrator to process the data after nominations close but it can be automated with verification, probably by running the same data through two or three implementations of the software Funny thing...
  • Commented on Bad puppies, no awards
    Look, I've got the meeting agenda right here, and there's a reason EPH runs from page 13 to 22. It would add a whole subsection to the WSFS constitution, the text of which runs longer than the whole 4/6 proposal....
  • Commented on Bad puppies, no awards
    I'll bet the people who process the Irish vote have actual, probably paid, staff; It's a mix - those overseeing it are paid civil servants (and the Gardai who provide security are on duty, naturally); but the actual workers, those...
  • Commented on Bad puppies, no awards
    SDV and STV differ so little in their design that they are functionally identical. Both transfer a voter's support from an eliminated option to the rest of that voter's choices. The difference in the mathematical way in which that is...
  • Commented on Bad puppies, no awards
    Fair enough, but remember that for an aging SF author to neglect entertainment value in favor of anvilicious political messages is the definition of brain-eater syndrome. You're a professional entertainer; you can't afford to be tedious. Oh noes, he'll have...
  • Commented on Bad puppies, no awards
    Here's hoping the politics gets dumped The problem is not politics; the Hugos have always had politics because they are a system where a group of people who don't agree on who should get something (a Hugo Award) vote to...
  • Commented on Bad puppies, no awards
    2015, when being male and/or white is equal to being evil. And on twitter: #HugoAwards winners that aren't #SadPuppies Boy look at all that diversity! https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CNEcxJ-UwAAJG3C.jpg Seriously, make up your mind already......
  • Commented on Bad puppies, no awards
    The amount of ludditism that was being displayed over EPH was kindof disheartening though. Lots of "Oh, it's complex, it can't be done by hand". Er, Ireland runs its general elections using STV voting which is functionally identical to EPH;...
  • Commented on Second childhood?
    Also on my science fiction webcomic list, though I usually check the others I mentioned above first: NukeEs - Nuclear engineers and a penguin. What's not to love? Dresden Codak - Very stylish, nicely done so far, lot of promise...
  • Commented on Second childhood?
    Hey, it won the Hugo three years running because it's just that darn good :P :D...
  • Commented on Second childhood?
    Also, Freefall is amusing, as is Girl Genius (which you'll enjoy if you enjoyed Girls with Slingshots, with added steampunk and mad science), PhD comics is excellent if you ever set foot in a grad student's world, and both Vexxarr...
  • Commented on Second childhood?
    Does Atomic Robo not count as a webcomic these days now that it's going up on atomicrobo.com before it hits the printers?...
  • Commented on A different cluetrain
    So: a) it's going to take my head a week to chew that over, but it appreciates the meal; and b) damn I wish you hadn't mentioned guns, because now the signal to noise ratio is going to suffer because...
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