And here's the video of her speech:

[youtube 8lFybhRxoVM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lFybhRxoVM youtube]

Other cool historic things that happened this year (not to take away from Jemisin at all, I think it's fucking awesome, it's just that some other winners came out of this year's ceremony that I reckoned were kind of significant and cool):

- Rebecca Roanhorse in winning both the John W. Campbell Award and Best Short Story is apparently only the second person to get the Campbell and a main fiction prize in the one year
- Monstress won Best Graphic Story, and it's the only work ever to win more than once, never mind consecutively, since that odd time when the award started up and Girl Genius won the first three years in a row
- And Sana Takeda picked up Best Professional Artist too!
- The Good Place picked up Best Dramatic Presentation - Short Form for "The Trolley Problem", which I think is the first half-hour show to ever win it, but honestly I'm really only mentioning it because it's fucking awesome that it happened and it's the kind of thing I hoped would happen but hardly dared to assume it. Though it makes me even more grumpy that basically no-one at work has still ever really been able to get into it :/
- On a(nother) more selfish note, the Irish nominees didn't do *too* badly this year. Liz Bourke came fifth in Best Related Work (can't believe a single vote less would've had AO3 in the final instead of her, smh), Journey Planet came fourth in Best Fanzine, and In Other Lands came third in Best YA Book Award beating out Frances Hardinge, Sam J. Miller and Philip Pullman!

Yeah, when they brought in the big rule change for last year's awards it mostly neutered the Puppies' ability to affect the final ballot so they went with only suggesting one entry per category instead of an entire full ballot like they did the two years before that. They didn't really get anywhere apart from stuff that would've already done well without them, and women and POC took most of the awards like they did this year too. So this year they basically completely gave up on the Hugos and turned their attention to the Dragon Awards it sounds like.

Of course the Dumpster Fire Who Walks Like a Man is claiming he won anyway, because of course he is, but who gives a fuck about him anyway?

So I've been watching 3% and fucking hell I didn't expect it to be as consistently twisty and downright brutal as it is. No wonder it got all the Patreon commissions. Yvxr vg'f abg yvxr gur erfg bs gur fubj vf fybhpuvat rvgure, ohg Rmrdhvry'f orra trggvat yvxr guerr gb svir Purffznfgre zbzragf rirel fvatyr rcvfbqr abj, naq vg'f yrnivat zr va n xvaq bs njr. Plus it's been really nice to see that the show got a budget bump between seasons, it's not fair I know but that had been visibly holding the show back for me a bit in S1. That and maybe the lighting, though not as much as the budget'd been.

Seconding this; I picked up Monstress recently on the back of its Hugo win and in preparation for Volume 3 and it is aces. Took me a while to roll with the odd sheen the art team uses, but once I did nearly every single one of Takeda's panels is a dream. And while it's not the most easily understandable story, and arguably never quite lives up to the barnstorming promise of its bumper first issue, it all seems to fit together in an intuitive sense, and it still plays with a bunch of really neat ideas and concepts with an astonishing power and confidence.

Fair warning though - it gets very grim and bloody sometimes. I've seen it described as a gender- and framework-flipped Berserk, which I've never read, but I can see where the comparison is coming from.

[CW: abortion]

In happier and more international news, Ireland * voted to repeal the 8th amendment to its constitution this weekend.

The best way I've got to put this in context is that this is essentially our Roe vs. Wade. Yesterday, 35 years after two thirds of the country voted to make abortion illegal except where the mother's life was at risk, # another two thirds banded together across age, gender, party and regional lines to stare the status quo in the face and in no uncertain terms reject it.

As a result the government can now bring legislation in to regulate for abortion here - the vote wasn't on what shape the laws will take, just on whether laws could be brought in or not. That being said, the consensus that's been agreed is that the proposed laws will be very similar to those in other European countries, and I can't see them not passing. It likely won't be until the end of the year, but either way the 8th is no more.

It's been a pretty great day.

* The Republic that is. Northern Ireland will still have restrictions in place for the foreseeable future, thanks for nothing DUfuckingP.

# Although some years later we did vote for the right to allow people to find about and travel abroad for abortions. Some consolation I suppose. Abortion is fine now, but just not here. Then again we've always been good at looking the other way in Ireland.

So I've been feeling weird about Infinity War.

Admittedly I've been feeling weird and vaguely unfulfilled about the MCU since about GotG (not coincidentally the last one I saw in theatres until Black Panther, which is The Best). And admittedly I'm not a filmmaker, and I don't say that to sound disingenuous. I'm not. And it's not like I want the film to be bad either, I want to go and have a good time like we all do. Heck, the marketing's gotten to me to the extent I might want to see it in IMAX 3D, and definitely on opening weekend. (nearly €20 tho)

But still.

See, I've been surface gazing at the hype, everybody talking about all these characters and all this death and Thanos is the main character and it's the most ambitious crossover event in history (lol), and I'm just sitting here thinking... Jesus are they really going to be able to pull this off? Like:

1) For all that this has been built as the culmination of the entire 10 year MCU journey give or take Avengers 4 next year (don't mention the TV shows though ;)), I honestly feel like while Marvel's been pretty great about providing standalone stories that lead their individual characters nicely into the next film, they haven't been that great about doing an actual metaplot. I'll happily admit to being out of the loop, but we've barely seen Thanos since The Avengers, and it's great we'll see so much of him now, but he's just going to be rocking up and collecting all these McGuffins and we'll have a hard shift to metaplot and... I just don't know. I've come around to this more now, but at the same time it could all just be too much too late.
2) There are so many characters and we don't even have the whole cast list yet. Someone's gonna get short shrifted in this. I don't see them being able to juggle all these characters without at least some falling through the cracks, and it could easily just be a huge mess.
3) The death. Sure, death's good to increase the stakes, show us things are serious. And if we get through this film without at least one big character being killed off I'll still be disappointed. But death is cheap. Death is easy. Especially in Marvel ;) (though tbf when it happens first it's gonna be a huge deal) I still can't see it being that impactful though. It'll be the ones we all expect or the ones that are big enough to shock, but not big enough to be all that big of a deal in the end.

So yeah. I don't know. Basically I get the sense Infinity War's set itself up to do so much, some of which it hasn't really earned yet, that it's got a good chance as ending up a mess. A perfunctory mess, an exclusionary continuity-heavy mess, a clusterfuck of characters and stuff that's gonna happen that means actual character stuff falls out of the picture entirely. Some kind of mess anyway. But I hope not.

I'm back... and I liked it! It's not a patch on Brotherhood of course, starts out better than it ends, and it's absolutely the case that being a fan helps and that there's some bias in play, but honestly I'm properly happy with it. Sure, I wish it could've been better (in some respects a lot better; I might go into more detail tomorrow if people want), but while I can only speak for myself I really think if you go into it with an open mind it should hopefully not turn out to be a trainwreck at all. :)

(Though at the same time, looking at it less charitably it's a film that manages to avoid being a trainwreck because the parts that aren't as good aren't interesting/spectacular enough to make it count as one. Or something like that.)

Sitting down to watch this right now, and I never watch films on weeknights! Heck, I'm so excited I even finally watched Sacred Star of Milos on Friday

It sure does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQUKaqrGOz0

(Not embedding because the bastards made one of those scenes the preview image! It's like they knew what you/we wanted)