John is demanding, Alison joined a Discord, and Liz knows a lot about the WSFS Constitution.

Please email your letters of comment to octothorpecast@gmail.com and tag @OctothorpeCast when you post about the show on social media.

Content warnings this episode: Genocide and war (chapter 1), racism and capitalism (chapter 2), sexism (chapter 5)

• Letters of comment
  • Liquid of comment from This Never Happens (Cornish branch)
  • Jonathan Baddeley: “Tedious NPC” would make a great badge ribbon
  • Ali Baker
  • Dave Coxon
  • Chris Garcia
  • Kat Tanaka Okopnik says Nice is not bidding for 2026
  • Crying movies
    • Fran Dowd: Platoon
    • Farah Mendlesohn: Fried Green Tomatoes
    • Ang Rosin: Dead Poets Society
  • Alison very much appreciated this sponsor read on Podside Picnic
• Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction edited by Otherwise Award-winning author Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki
  • Kindle Direct Publishing took down Ekpeki’s account shortly before having to pay him royalties
  • File 770 reports on the eventual end of the saga
  • This is a continuation of Jason Sanford’s discussion of financial barriers to global authors
• The DisCon III Site Selection fiasco
  • Salon Futura’s write-up of DisCon III
  • File 770’s comment thread with a lot of inside baseball
  • Steve Cooper has set up a mailing list on groups.io to look at Electronic Site Selection
• Chicon 8 says:
  • “Hugo nominations will open later in January, and will run through mid-March. All members of DisCon III and anyone who joins Chicon 8 before the 31st of January 2022 will be eligible to nominate in this year’s Hugo Awards.”
  • Section 3.7.1 of the WSFS constitution, fact fans
• Awards!
  • Nicholas Whyte answers our questions
  • Nerds of a Feather has recused itself from the 2022 Hugo Awards
    • Commentary and interesting history courtesy of File 770
  • We listened to Hugo, Girl!, a fancast in which feminists read and discuss SF
  • The FAAn Achievement Awards 2022
    • The Incompleat Register 2021
    • “A ‘fanzine’, for our purposes, is defined as an immutable artefact, once published not subject to revision or modification. The fanzine might not exist in a physical form. A PDF, for example, is an artefact.”
    • “[A perzine is a] fanzine which typically has few, if any, contributors other than its editor(s).”
  • Alison has joined the Hugo Award Study Committee which is a Discord server
    • If you’d like to join then contact the chair, Cliff Dunn
    • Their last report was in 2018 at the San Jose Worldcon
• New Year’s resolutions
  • John: Publish more fanzines and make an app
  • Alison: Have at least one SFF book a month ready to talk about on Octothorpe.
    • Alison’s super nerdy iPad board game challenge
  • Liz: Read 80 books on Goodreads (maybe)
• Picks
  • Alison: Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction translated and edited by Xue Christine Ni (epub, Kindle)
  • Liz: She Who Became The Sun by Shelly Parker-Chan (epub, Kindle, hardback, paperback pre-order)
  • John: The Expanse (Amazon Prime)
• Music credits
  • Our theme music is Fanfare for Space by Kevin MacLeod, used under a CC BY 4.0 license