sudo_xe

joined 1 year ago
 
 

Reading Diane Lacey's open letter about the (self-)censorship scandal of the Hugo Awards, the impetus of collusion/slating from Chinese publishers stood out. zionius actually dug further and presented evidence that the guilty party appeared to be Science Fiction World, which was involved in the Worldcon. So I thought I'd type up something adjacent to the matter.

SFW as a publication had been declining in quality for some time – the typical Chinese SF reader will remember their editors' failures to catch plagiarism while circlejerking pointless filler – and at one point actually blamed the planning of the Worldcon for taking up too much of their time. But this was far from the most mismanaged they had been, as one former employee exposed many more problems.

General incompetence

Chi Hui's relationship with SFW began with submitting short stories to the magazine Science Fiction World, eventually becoming an editor at the magazine when it already entered its period of decline, before departing about four years ago.

Due to the Worldcon 81 being highly-commodified and interest in the sci-fi industry, she took the opportunity to write an effortpost that delved into what it was truly like in industry. The gist of it was that as opposed to an actual "sci-fi industry", what investment went into it just made it a "Liu Cixin industry" — as much as a decade ago she noted the same about this "fairy ring", and now the "supply chain" is just as broken. Other authors in attendance, such as Han Song, concurred with this view.

Additional points in that initial post included specific details about the lazy and myopic initiatives at her former workplace such as:

  1. SFW defaulting to the assumption that its consumers are primarily young men without doing any readership surveys. They attempted to imitate the packaging of For Him Magazine, also popular among young men, only to fail thanks to the costs of printing in full-colour.
  2. SFW defaulting to the observation that its consumers are probably voracious readers, and since Zhihu and Qidian have young people that are voracious readers, SFW content should match Zhihu/Qidian webnovels. This project is still ongoing.
  3. Due to the popularity of web literature, SFW planned to create a site to host short stories and novellas. To increase engagement they planned to add gambling elements, except this fell through due to the illegal nature of the ideas.
  4. Since everyone wants to make SF movies, and successful western movies began from space opera, they wanted to fund IP development of space opera novels, except they had no budget to actually do this.
  5. Again without doing any readership surveys and assuming that its primary consumers are young men, SFW defaulted to the assumption that young men must like pretty ladies, so promoted and still are promoting attractive women authors for this reason.
  6. Without conducting any market investigations, and due to the scarcity of novellas, arriving at the conclusion that the market must clearly need sci-fi novellas. There continues to be heavy push to promote novellas while disregarding that no matter the length, they would have to be rewritten for an adaption.

Conversations among industry peers also involved them discussing:

  • They're not profitable
  • Having no work they can even commercialize aside from authors' names
  • Nothing that will sell in print
  • Intentionally leaning into works despised by actual SF fans but might attract more readers

Work environment

Yang Guoliang (aka La Zi) is a current editor at Science Fiction World, Chi's former boss, and previously defended SFW's deteriorating standards. He started making statements heavily implied to be directed at her that she "neglected and sullied" the efforts of everyone in the industry with her "impudent lies" and sought to sow division among writers.

In a follow up, Chi thought the accusations absurd, dissected Yang's arguments, and speculated perhaps she was too restrained in her criticism. She drew up an extensive list of her first-hand experiences of total unprofessionalism from 2017–2023 demonstrating which side exactly "neglected and sullied" the industry. Examples include:

  • Yang threatened that she wouldn't be allowed out his office unless she submitted to his demands
  • Relaxing editorial standards to publish a novel that had ripped off Liu Cixin, because Liu himself stopped writing
  • 20% of the staff's annual bonus were transferred to a random bank account to budget for event planning the following year and not reported to finance
  • Openly discussing Chi's bust size, and harassing other attractive female co-workers
  • Ordering editors to work on superiors' personal businesses on company time
  • Threatening to blacklist an author for publishing at rival Eight Light Minutes
  • A new employee had already finished working on an issue but hasn't been paid in 3 months, and after seeking payment, had her name removed from all articles she was credited on
  • A female employee's executive editor credit ended up going to a male employee and she wasn't given even a passing mention
  • Storing porn on company computers

That's just a sampling, and there were instances of toxic drinking culture, belittling women writers, blaming the SF community for poor performance that Chi also touched on. Implied was such an unreasonable workload that mental and physical health of workers were affected, such as requiring therapy or blood pressure medication.

So I guess this slots into the related discussion of writing SF, hope there's some illumination into the inner workings of one of the entities related to the scandal.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

From what I'm getting from wincentral's previous articles, the lingo sprinkled throughout their coverage have meanings per the below:

  • "Hudson Valley" is the upcoming Windows client (GUI), previously "Next Valley"?
  • "Germanium" is the Windows platform already in Canary/Dev channel (kernel), which will be version 24H2
  • "Windows 12" is still what they're calling the next major Windows product/OS release (not feature update)

...so at this point in time, Hudson Valley + some element after germanium might be what is considered Windows 12?

 

Crossposting the @windows11 link as it should relate to this mag too:

Windows 11 version 24H2 will be the name of the next major Windows OS update.

 

A Kyoto court found Shinji Aoba guilty of setting a studio on fire because of a grudge he held against Kyoto Animation, in one of Japan's deadliest mass murders.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

First voice access and now print, we're getting to see more and more changes to W11 in the finer aspects of productivity.

Now this is less about physical printers but - one of the buggiest experiences I had on W11 was using the built-in save to PDF feature, which was shockingly slow as it was somehow configured to convert webpages to images first before generating the file, resulting in large and unsearchable PDFs. Unsure of whether this was supposed to be intended behaviour as this print option made it out of WIP, but I'm going to hope WPP gets tested a bit more extensively by the print team lest it ends up spewing out unusable results too 🫠

 

geo-blocked:

C.E.75 ガンダムSEED の新たな物語

遂に物語の核心に迫る…

 

The police said they are looking into a threat of attack made online against activists from women's groups that are to rally in front of the game publisher Nexon on Tuesday.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Missed this before, but two separate guides were posted on taking advantage of IntegratedServicesRegionPolicySet.json after this update:

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

The news of this came out just as e-visas for cdns are getting processed again, is it now the US's turn to have service suspended or does a second attempt no longer fly?

 

'We are treating this issue with utmost seriousness,' says White House rep.

There's a surprising twist in the diplomatic tensions between Canada and India, and it involves a previously unreported event in the United States. American authorities thwarted an assassination plot against a Sikh separatist, on American soil, and they believed the Indian government was involved, a British newspaper reports.

 

The implication that legacy outlets had advance knowledge of the Oct. 7 attacks and “coordinated” with Hamas prompted Israeli officials to call for the death of journalists.

 

An Alaska Airlines flight was diverted late Sunday after a "credible security threat related to an authorized occupant in the flight deck jump seat."

Joseph David Emerson was taken into custody, the Port of Portland confirmed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

There also seems to be an edit to this article:

[ADDED 10/6] Under All apps in the Start menu, Windows 11 system components will now show a “system” label.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Article got updated with ISOs! Build 22631 via the Windows Insider ISO download page - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windowsinsiderpreviewiso

 

The Gran Turismo movie is based on the Englishman's fascinating story from video game player to professional racecar driver.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Please go on ahead! My instance still has federating issues, so right now from the Fedia POV m/windowsinsiders is actually m/random, making posting threads difficult on my end.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I tend to despise shortlinks, and aka.ms ones in particular remind me of how binged.it is longer than the actual URL, but I digress, I found the ones for WIP to be descriptive but short/sweet enough that I'd prefer them over the overlong explicit version numbers, i.e. the release for this one is https://aka.ms/wip-beta-7-13

Anyway, in addition to the separate posts, wonder if we can sticky the evergreen shortlinks for the latest release for each channel to the top of magazine for those looking for a quick shortcut:

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