2014 Hugos — Congrats towards the winners! No, I’m not bitter that none of my nominees won. I think some of the anti-“OMG the Wheel of Time is a single entry WTFBBQ!!11!!” and the anti-VoxDay backlash hurt the voting for quite a few deserving entrants but again, since this was the most voted-on Hugo in recent memory (perhaps all time; numbers are hard to come by from the “olden” days), you can’t be too upset with that. Not unless you really, really wanted to win a Hugo or have a lot of energy and time invested into it.
However, a few people have already called shenanigans (I called who the winners would be when I saw who won Best Editor, Short Form — voting trends always follow certain guidelines, and predicting winners is easy when you know what to look for). So I let the numbers from the Hugo Award voting percolate in my head for the past few days, looked them over and thought “The Australian voting method sucks and makes no sense to me, but the numbers seem right.” In fact, the only thing that looked screwy to me was Best Editor, Long Form. Not entirely sure how someone who had the most votes for the first three rounds comes in 4th place. I’m sure there’s some method to this madness, but for the life of me I can’t figure it out. Just goes to show that you really should make sure you fill out your Top 3 favorites instead of just 1, because you can influence the weight of certain votes apparently even though it’s not your first choice.
Now… I listen to a lot of my friends moaning about the injustice of the Hugos and blah blah blah should have won and I can’t help but to think “So did you vote?” Almost all of them didn’t vote, which means that if you don’t vote, you have no right to bitch because it obviously isn’t that important to you. However, I did have an idea that might encourage more voting for the, ah, lackadaisical individual. There could be Hugo voting registration tables at some of the cons out there. It’s just a thought, one way to stimulate a fairly hidden part of SFF that many fans don’t know about. And if you think “Well, the common fan shouldn’t be able to vote, because then all we’d get are summer blockbusters”, well then, you’re part of the problem right there and not the solution.
I thought I might have more to say about this, but I don’t. Far more interested in watching Missouri burn and the Bill of Rights be trampled upon.
