Delicious LiveJournal Links for 9-24-2009

[andrewducker]

• Fox hat ad inspires comedy event
  They're building a comedy festival around one of my favourite ads! And I had no idea it was Rich Hall in the ad!
  (tags: advertising comedy scotland)
• First amateur HD Video from the edge of space
  Attach a HD video camera to a balloon. Send it right to the edge of the atmosphere. And back again, when the baloon pops!
  (tags: space video balloon)
• If You Want to Catch a Liar, Make Him Draw
  Able to spot 80% of the truth-tellers and 87% of the liars by looking at their drawings of a scene.
  (tags: psychology lying)
• British Fantasy Society admits lazy sexism over male-only horror book.
  And well done to them for not trying to bluster their way past it.
  (tags: scifi writing feminism sexism fantasy)

Comments

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

I read the Guardian article about the British Fantasy Society yesterday, and I didn't really get it. Anthologies should be compiled on the basis of interesting content, not quotas and tokenism. Obviously you'd hope that interesting content and representative demographics coincide, and indeed they usually do, but there are going to be occasional exceptions because of simple statistical variation. Should interesting content really be sacrificed in these cases in order to give the impression of representativeness?

How many authors in the anthology were black? How many gay, transexual, disabled, over 60, under 30? If the answer to any of those is "none", is that also a shocking omission to be profusely apologised for?

The BFS chair says "this kind of lazy sexism is unacceptable" - presumably meaning publishing an all-male 15-interview anthology. At what point does it become acceptable? Five interviews? Two? One?

What surprised me was not that people were offended (people are always offended about something), but how self-condemnatory the BFS people are being. None of them seem to question the implication that the gender of the contributors is the most important thing to consider when compiling an anthology. I agree that if they did something wrong it's far better to apologise sincerely and not fall back on pseudo-apologies like "I'm sorry you were offended", but I'm not convinced they did do something wrong.