"What sitename do you want?" he asked.
I'd been posting on usenet under the alias "AutoPope -- pontifications by email". (If you don't know what the long word means, go look it up.) So I said, "How about autopope.uucp?"
"Okay." Hic. Burp.
And the next day, I was the somewhat bemused owner of a site called antipope.uucp
My fun fact: Some antipopes resided in Avignon France, and a (delicious) wine from that region (allegedly, I'm not a wine guy) is called Châteauneuf-du-Pape (House of the New Pope) for this reason.
That reads more like "[The] Pope's New Castle" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teauneuf-du-Pape_AOC
In fact, Avignon was the site of the Apostolic See and indeed, seven canonically-accepted Popes resided there, plus two antipopes. https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/avignon
This period also featured Italian antipopes! It was dramatic! https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/western-schism
All I can say is that while yes, these awards do matter, they don't have to matter as much as you think. At best, all the outcome tells you is what someone else thinks is worth reading. Consider it a starting point. It follows that any given list of nominees is way more important, in terms of gathering a list of books with neat ideas and execution, than a list of winners.
And, while it's always been a popularity contest at it's core, I can't help feeling some disappointment at seeing it descend into whatever nonsense it has become.
So really I guess I miss them as the high quality signal it used to be and it's on me to find new signals
We are literally only a GPT generation away from the book writing machines of 1984 and as a new author myself this makes me so sad.
I think we're there already, no? Amazon is being flooded with AI-written novels, including "fun" ones like a guide to foraging mushrooms; Clarkesworld had to stop accepting submissions for awhile due to AI-generated garbage flooding their inboxes.
and like icebergs while melting, rolls over every now and then, so what was up is down and down is up, and not in a regular way but in a chaotic way
R. F. Kuang's Babel was on many other lists of top book of the year. I was surprised that it did not even on the nomination list. Now I find out that it was pre-emptively removed from the nomination list before the vote!
I am not a big fan of Babel (and posted my issues on Goodreads) but I do want the vote to be fair.
Netflix's Sandman was also disqualified. On Bluesky Neil Gaiman said he was never told why it was disqualified. He also said he was one of four disqualified authors.
The lesson learned is do not have a world-wide vote in a country with censorship.
TL;DR: A conservative block of voters swept the nominations for certain categories. At final voting, members voted to not give awards at all in those categories.
You can take this as an illustration of the risk of an organized voting slate scoring a huge own goal.
Sad Puppy 2015 slate: https://www.scifiwright.com/2015/02/sad-puppies-3-announces-...
Patterson biography, volume 2: https://www.amazon.com/Robert-Heinlein-Dialogue-Century-1948...
But in the age of the internet, it's much easier to find communities that you can break this way. These systems are resilient to a few people who are bad actors, but totally fall apart if there are coordinated actions.
It's exactly what the Republican party is doing in the US now. And what Trump supporters plan to do if he's elected with Project 2025.
Having attended a couple conventions, including a worldcon just before this happened, I would say that the same low voter turnout that made sad puppies possible was being abused to prop up obscure books based on the identity of the author rather the quality of the story.
The sad puppies effort was more mutually assured destruction than really trying to win. They know their books are pulp. But they also believed that nobody actually read those other books.
I've been to conventions biased one way or the other and they have one thing in common: nobody seems concerned with whether a story is good or not. This is probably why we keep getting superhero movies.
Which undeserving stories/authors exemplify this?
He disavowed their coordinated campaign and then engaged further:
Satirical erotica author Chuck Tingle's massive troll of conservative sci-fi fans, explained
Right-wing sci-fi writers tried to delegitimize the Hugo Awards by nominating a writer no one took seriously. Here's how he took them all by surprise.
A world that were to shrug off this influence would be, for better or worse, fundamentally different.