1. Carla needed the car for an appointment today so since we've still only got the one, I worked from home. I didn't have anything that required being in the office anyway, so it worked out.
2. Speaking of the car, they finally found the leak, yay! It should be fixed tomorrow or Thursday. The not so yay part is that apparently it was not a malfunction but was caused by a rock or something getting kicked up into the engine, so we will have to pay for it. We have the money, so it's not a problem in that regard. I'd just rather spend my money on nicer things than car repairs. :p
About a month ago, TW chairs announced a new limit: each wrangler should have a maximum of 450 assigned fandoms. Of the 400+ wranglers in the committee, only 3 actually had more than 450 fandoms, so for most people this was going to make no difference in their lives at all.
So, hey, I’m one of the 3! Figured I’d write about it.
To be clear, the limit is for admin reasons. There hasn’t been any allegation of “you’re falling behind in wrangling because you have too many fandoms to keep up with.” Not to me, and I have no reason to believe it’s happened to either of the others, either.
The thing is, my habit for a while now has been “check the Unassigned Fandoms list for webcomic fandoms with less than 5 works, pick them up, tidy up whatever tags they have, and then just…keep them.”
I’ll take tiny fandoms in other areas of personal interest, too. For instance. at some point I picked up a bunch of Dracula spinoffs/adaptations. Webcomics are just the category I was regularly sweeping for.
So I ended up as the wrangler for hundreds of fandoms where they got one (1) fic, the fandom got canonized, and then nobody ever wrote another fic for them ever. Hundreds more where they’d be lucky to get 3 new fics in a year, so there’s a tiny irregular trickle of new tags that I have no trouble staying on top of. In the rare case where a tiny fandom takes off, and I can’t keep up with the tags anymore, I set it free to be scooped up by a new wrangler! Most of the time, that does not happen.
And that’s how I was wrangling 1527 fandoms as of November 15.
Chairs made it clear they weren’t saying “you need to cut that to 450 fandoms overnight.” Which is good, because I don’t even want to think about the effects of bulk-dumping 1000+ fandoms into in the “newly available, seeking a good wrangler” chat channel.
So far I’ve had a 3-pronged strategy:
1) Offer fandoms to wranglers of related series. Example: I had a bunch of Oz spinoffs/adaptations, so I reached out to the wrangler who had the Wizard of Oz movie, and asked if they’d be willing to take some off my hands. They were kind enough to take a combination of “spinoffs they were personally familiar with” and “spinoffs that get 0-3 new fics a year anyway.”
I do plan on circling back and doing this with those Dracula spinoffs, too. And there are plenty where I know they have related fandoms…but I need to get around to checking whether the others have any wrangler at all.
2) Put more fandoms on the “I’m wrangling this, but just to babysit, anyone who wants it is welcome to take it” list. Never sure if I’m hitting the right balance with this one — if there’s a fandom another wrangler would want, and I leave it off the list, they’ll never see it. But if I make the list too long, their eyes might glaze over before they get to it, so they still won’t see it.
I’ve been focusing this strategy on “English-language webcomics that are popular-enough I think there’s a decent chance they’ve been read by other wranglers.” And I’ve managed to hand off a few so far.
3) Just punting fandoms off my list, advertising that they’re available now, and hoping for the best. I’m trying to punt them in batches of 5-10 at a time, and aiming for “fandoms that are big enough another wrangler might have heard of them, but small enough that fans probably won’t suffer if they go completely unwrangled for a while.”
I’m also focusing this approach on the Korean/Chinese webtoons that I don’t personally keep up with. I can get pretty far with fan wikis and googling, but these would really be better off in the hands of a wrangler who (a) actively keeps up with the canon, (b) can read it in the original language, or (c) both. A handful of themhave been scooped by now, and I really hope that keeps up.
So far, so good!
As of today, my fandom count is down to 1400. Still got a long way to go before 450, but the progress is steady.
(It would be awfully satisfying if I managed to make regular status-report posts about this on the 15th of every month, huh? But no promises.)
About a month ago, TW chairs announced a new limit: each wrangler should have a maximum of 450 assigned fandoms. Of the 400+ wranglers in the committee, only 3 actually had more than 450 fandoms, so for most people this was going to make no difference in their lives at all.
So, hey, I’m one of the 3! Figured I’d write about it.
To be clear, the limit is for admin reasons. There hasn’t been any allegation of “you’re falling behind in wrangling because you have too many fandoms to keep up with.” Not to me, and I have no reason to believe it’s happened to either of the others, either.
The thing is, my habit for a while now has been “check the Unassigned Fandoms list for webcomic fandoms with less than 5 works, pick them up, tidy up whatever tags they have, and then just…keep them.”
1. Today I finished another big part of the project we're working on at work. It was a lot of double checking stuff and data cleanup, which was tedious but now we have workable data to upload, woohoo!
2. I had a couple things to mail today and managed to get to the post office a few minutes before they opened so there were only like four people in front of me and I was out of there in like twenty minutes. I was braced for worse since it's the holiday season.
Every time I eat an apple, I think of my Uncle Buck eating apples, or rather I think of my mom telling me how he ate them, my quiet uncle who loved horses and who cracked open the fresh wounds of our hearts when the cancer claimed him so soon after it claimed his brother, my father. I might have seen it— Uncle Buck eating lunch in the shop office, air conditioner hissing, the smell of oil and gas laced with sweet apple as he ate skin and flesh, his eyes closed as he pushed on, down and around and down, biting through the green crunch of core and the hard black seeds until all that remained was a slim brown crook of stem, a comma that once linked fruit to tree.
2025: Scientists are astonished when the largest ever dinosaur fossil trackway does not lead into the House of Lords, Tate Britain breaks with English tradition by returning looted art, and in a shocking break from centuries of Catholic precedent, the new Pope is a Cubs fan.
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley 14 (63.6%)
Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock by Maud Woolf 0 (0.0%)
Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.
Which 2025 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read? Annie Bot by Sierra Greer Extremophile by Ian Green Private Rites by Julia Armfield Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock by Maud Woolf
1. I have recently ordered multiple things off Amazon that are not at all urgent, and they're offering good rewards for getting them delivered after Christmas rather than before (most have been 7% cash back but the most recent one was a $2 ebook credit). So now I have a ton of stuff arriving on the 27th. D:
2. I finally got all of Alex's books repacked into nice boxes and stacked on the new shelves I put in the shed. It's looking so much more organized. I ordered two more sets of shelves (one of the above-mentioned purchases) so then there will be three sets on each wall, which will mean plenty of space for long-term storage as well as things like toilet paper and paper towels, which we buy from Costco and they come in huge packages that are too big to store the whole thing in the house.
3. I love getting these shots of Gemma looking out the window.
I was a bit surprised to come across this as Hartwell wasn't really the go-to editor where women's SF was concerned. An interesting snapshot of SF in a sixteen-year period. The end is the fall of the American republic. Not sure what was significant about 1984.
1. The weather today was very nice. It looks like it's supposed to be in the low 70s for a few days coming up, but I hope it actually stays at those temps and doesn't end up warmer than predicted as it often has recently.
2. I've been waiting for the right size box to ship some stuff out and today I finally got one! Amusingly enough, what I want to ship out is puzzles and the perfect box had some new puzzles I ordered recently in it. (The actual size of the puzzles I'm sending is different from the ones that just came, but the box fits both and came with lots of packing paper.)
I thought today would be less crowded than Monday because all three lower level passholders are blocked out, but it was super crowded. D: Still not as bad as Monday (especially because Monday was unfortunately timed with the parade, which makes things cloggier), but not great.
I am not aware of any big name authors who got their start with a work published by Baen Books after 2006. If there are recent analogs of Bujold or Weber, I do not know of them.
Luck was not with us in the first attempt at clementines this year. (The batch we got are far from inedible, at least, but...not very good.) They're such a gamble these years. :/ Our new freezer arrived a week ago, and the plan is to finally get it in place today once scruloose gets back from a market run. That hasn't happened yet due to a combination of factors and timing, the biggest of which is the fact that it'll require shifting some things out of the garage onto the driveway to make room for us to work with two upright freezers in play. (scruloose is going to take a stab at moving the old one out of its place without emptying it, via a hand cart, but we have no idea how likely that is to actually work. It'd sure be convenient, though.) My hair is dyed! It is. Um. Very dark. By which I mean it's not so much dark purple as "functionally black with some purple highlights that are probably some of my silver hair, but there's less of that than there is silver, so it's a little confusing". Oh, well. It looks fine, other than maybe making me look a bit washed out, and I don't much care about that.
(I might care more when I finally get scruloose to take a headshot of me to send HR at Dayjob so they can update my long-expired work pass. [Part of why I decided to finally just go ahead and dye my hair was in the name of having it done for this photo.] These days, the process involves just filling out a form and emailing that and a photo that meets their technical requirements to the department handling passes and also to my boss, presumably so the boss can look at the photo and confirm "yes, that is the employee in question". But this means we can make potentially-endless attempts at getting a photo I don't hate, and honestly, if I can live with the horror of my provincial ID photo, I can probably live with just about anything.) A few links:
Aside from Larry Correia, are there any big name Baen authors who debuted at Baen, after Jim Baen's death?
(So, Tim Powers wouldn't count because he debuted not at Baen and also long before JB died)
I got three names: Chuck Gannon, Jason Cordova and Mike Kupari. Gannon actually debuted at Baen in 1994 but only two (I think) short pieces, after which there was a long delay until his novels began appearing. I don't know the other two but SF is huge and it's perfectly possible for me to overlook BNAs. Still, granting all three, with LC that makes four... and in 2028, Toni Weisskopf will have been running Baen for as long as Jim Baen did.
This could, of course, be the natural consequence of the Del Monte approach.
If you desire to thank me for the pretend internet magnanimity I show by sharing my important and serious thoughts with you, I accept pretend internet dollars (Bitcoins): 19BqFnAHNpSq8N2A1pafEGSqLv4B6ScstB
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