MCE The Jaw Droppers 2023 #7: The Toymaker Spices Up Our Lives
With the 60th Anniversary Specials for Doctor Who we had 3 solid adventures featuring old favorites The Doctor and Donna Noble.
1st sets the mood.
The 2nd which was the weakest did show how well David Tennant and Cathrine Tate play off of each other today as they did 15 years earlier.
It was the last that saw the return of the Celestial Toymaker that gave us our jaw dropper here.
We knew how great Neil Patrick Harris already was, but when it came to The Toymaker, nobody saw this coming.
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How sad and bad and mad it was -
But then, how it was sweet...
-- Robert Browning
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Chinese Censorship of the 2023 Hugo Award Nominations
Back before the 2023 Hugo Nominations were conducted, I noted that the Chengdu Worldcon Hugo committee had inserted a worrying clause indicating that local government officials could invalidate nominations for breaching the norms and standards of China. I suspected this would result in arbitrarily applied censorship to control the ballot. I am sad and unsurprised to discover I was correct.
The 2023 Hugo Nomination vote data has been published (https://www.thehugoawards.org/2024/01/2023-nominating-and-final-ballot-statistics-published/), and includes notation where nominations were excluded from the ballot. Those with normal reasons, such as being in the wrong category or not being published in 2022 are identified with their reasons for exclusion. This time there are a number of nominations that are merely marked at "Not eligible".
Here is the list of those nominations, that would otherwise have been placed on the final 2023 Hugo Award Ballot.
Babel - R.F. Kuang - Best Novel: Very likely excluded for referencing student revolution, and the use of language and translation as coercive tools of oppression.
Color the World - Congyun "Mu Ming" Hu - Best Novellette : A story about perception of, aid of, and discrimination against disability. Congyun Hu has left China and now lives in New York.
Fogong Temple Padoga - Hai Ya - Best Story : Either there is something in the original Chinese that was not translated, there's a taboo subject that elides my reading, or this otherwise innocent looking near future tale of cultural building restoration was written by the wrong person.
The Art of Ghost of Tsushima: Dark Horse and Sucker Punch Games - Best Related Work : The video game Ghost of Tsushima was subject to directed social exclusion for it's depiction of the Mongol invasion of Japan.
Sandman, Amazon Studios: Best Dramatic Presentation (Long and Short) - A diverse and divergent cast, includes subject matter and social issues that are currently taboo in China.
Paul Weimer - Fan Writer: Publicly Critical of holding a Worldcon in China.
Xiran Jay Zhao - Astounding Award: Qualifying work "Iron Widow" is reimagined story of Chinese Empress Wu during a fantasy/mechanical alien invasion.
This raises a lot of questions as to if this basically taints the process, and what can be done about it.
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Unexpected Guests Chapter Ten, Act Two: Page 13
First / Previous / Next
Talk might be the only thing that can break Gaster out of his tunnel vision--it's enough to give him pause, at least...
Will our heroines' arguments be effective? Look for the next update coming Mar. 7th!
Wingdings translation under the cut:
Panel 2: "?"
Panel 8: "WHY RECALL THIS? A DIVERSION? MY WORK... THE CORE..."
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