Hguos six: Are we there yet?

[melannen]

I might even make it through these by Friday! Who knows.

Fancast: Two nominations.


Galactic Suburbia Podcast

1. Is it SF?
Sort of? It's a bunch of friends in the Australian SF community, talking about stuff, some of which is at least partly SF related, although I'm not sure how much, because a lot of it was talking about cons and they didn't really explain what the cons were? At least one of them seemed like it was a mystery fandom con rather than an SF con. And over a quarter of it was talking about GamerGate in ways that didn't reflect on SF much at all.

2. Is is good?

..eeehhhh. It was "a group of friends get together and shoot the breeze." I do follow several podcasts that are *basically* that, and by those standards, this one wasn't terrible, but it wasn't all that good, either. It was rambly and a lot of the rambling didn't really add much content, and there was no focus at all, and they didn't make much effort to clarify what they were talking about or give background info or anything. Basically it compares favorably to one of the worst episodes of the podcasts I follow? But this was their own choice for the voter packet, so presumably they thought it was their best?

3. Is it good SF?

...is it wrong if I assume this gets nominations because it's basically THE podcast of Australian SF, and so all the Australian nominators nom it? If I was active in the Australian SF community, I would probably appreciate it a lot more (or at least know something about what the stuff talking about without context).


Tea and Jeopardy

1. Is it SF?
It's got a framing device about a magic butler and being shrunk down to tiny size and doctor who references, and then a SF author comes on and gets interviewed about mostly SF-related stuff. So sure.

2. Is it good?
The framing device is cheesy as all get out but everybody is clearly enthusiastic and the production values aren't bad and the interview was fairly well done.

3. Is it good SF?
See above: RE: cheesy as hell, but it's got a lot of what I like in SF-fan-community works, so yeah, yeah, I think it was.

Best Fan Artist
No puppies! Five nominees.
That's a lot, and they're art and I'm bad at talking about art, so these are going to be short-ish.

All the stuff in the voter packet, tbh, was kind of sad. Was there a rule that you could only put in three items, all of them mediocre? I've seen a lot of people commenting on how little this cat has in common with the fanart we see online, but then again, a lot of these artist show to much better advantage if you look them up online, too. But then I realized the category is specifically for art that's been published in fan publications, which would explain why they were struggling to find qualifying pieces. Also, at least one of the artists has much better stuff from 2014 but a lot of it was sold professionally - it could be that most SF artists who are a) professional-quality and b) connected enough to get a Hugo nom transition to "pro" too fast to win this award.

Anyway that leaves me with the dilemma of, do I go by what's in the voter packet, assuming a lot of their other stuff is ineligible, or go by what I think of their art as a whole?


They are all acceptably SF, at least

Ninni Aalto - the stuff in the packet is just kind of simple and boring? I like a lot of what I saw on her blog, although a lot of it was not very SF.

Brad W. Foster - Good variety of styles! I like the black & white piece, although it's signed 2013 which is worrying; the color piece had some really amateurish gradients/lighting going on, the linework piece there's something wrong with the shape of the dude's head.

Elizabeth Leggett - based on the voter packet pieces, I'd've said this is exactly the kind of mushy, over-photoshopped stuff I wish there was less of in SF art. But I really really like some of what's on her webpage. A lot of it probably isn't Hugo-eligible, though.

Spring Schoenhuth - The jewelry was kind of neat, although I wish I could find out more about how much of it is original metalwork and how much is assembling premade pieces. The painting was.. okay. ish.
Steve Stiles - According to Doctor Science, at least two of his three pieces aren't from 2014 anyway. Other than that, he certainly has a mature style and knows exactly what kind of art he wants to do!

Comments

[the_rck]

I have an oil painting that I got for $45 at a con art show in the 1980s because the artist considered himself an amateur (it was his first con). The next con he had stuff at, the prices were about ten times that, and he considered himself a professional. That gave me the impression that people, at least in the 1980s, didn't stay amateurs for long.

Some of that, too, might be that a lot of artists who make the art equivalent of fanfic can actually sell it if it's any good at all.

[melannen]

Yeah. I mean, it's not that there *aren't* pro-quality artists working as fanartists because they can't find their markets (or pro artists who still do fanart for fun), but if you're that good *and* you're at the point where you're illustrating SF 'zines and doing con art and stuff (which is required for the Hugo), you're probably at the point where you could go por if you wanted.

[qem_chibati]

Anyway that leaves me with the dilemma of, do I go by what's in the voter packet, assuming a lot of their other stuff is ineligible, or go by what I think of their art as a whole?

I think it is legit to vote based on their online stuff. The voter pamphlet isn't meant to be all encompassing and is a relatively new addition. like if you didn't want to go elsewhere, it's fine to just use the voter packet, but otherwise if you know more about their art - I'd vote based on that.

...is it wrong if I assume this gets nominations because it's basically THE podcast of Australian SF, and so all the Australian nominators nom it?
Possibly? I've never heard of it, but I'm anime fandom rather than SF; it's mostly the multi-focus cons where we overlap. But a lot of the con-going scene in Australia is small, so I can easily imagine these guys being friends with a lot of the people would know them from cons etc. So can stack up votes that way.

[melannen]

It's not so much being in the voter packet itself as knowing whether the art they have online actually qualifies as fanart from 2014. :? Legget, at least, was already selling bookcovers to pro publishers in 2014, best I can tell, and I suspect all of my favorite stuff of hers counts as pro. And a couple of the others seem to mostly have REALLY OLD works up, with no clear way to tell which ones qualify for this year. I don't want to give the award to people who did almost no fanart that year; it's not meant to be a lifetime achievement award.

Theoretically at least the voter packet stuff is actually 2014 fanart, although even them I'm side-eyeing some of it.

And my impression of Australian 'old-school' SF fandom - the con-going, zine-publishing, hugo-nominating part, anyway - is that it's small and insular, but mighty - there's been a lot of epic SF fan production out of Australia for how small and dispersed that community is. (And not necessarily hooked in to other Australia geek communities.)

And the podcast wasn't *bad* but I suspect you would have to be part of that community to actively love it.