We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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How do you qualify for these awards?
And..how do you subscribe to blogs? I forgot…
I’m not 100% certain actually how the awards are done. I’ve never been a part of them. I know the Hugo’s have a lot of community involvement since anyone can put in a vote.
As for subscribing. The easiest way is to use Google Reader: http://reader.google.com/
You should have a Reader anyway since you are on Blogger. If you don’t have a reader, activate one and then come to my site and on the left hand side towards the top is a orange colored square icon. Click that and it will take you to the feed page. You’ll see on the right top there are all these buttons there. They are for all the different feed readers. Find Google or if you are using a different feed reader look for that. Click it and follow the instructions. I prefer Google Reader since it is easy to add stuff. It shouldn’t take you more than 3 clicks actually. Just click the button, click Add To Google, and then Add To Reader and it should just do it and you’re done.
Woo! Diana Wynne Jones thoroughly deserves that award. She’s a genius.
Wwhich reminds me: she should be in the canon somewhere.
Well then you should PROBABLY go over to the SFF Canon Project blog and put a comment there suggesting some of her works so I can put them on the list of stuff to discuss 😛