Links to Waste Time With

My (un)usual round-up of links that have kept me interested in the last week or so.

• The Hugo Awards were announced on Saturday. The biggest surprise to me is that they weren’t so horrible in their choices – I am especially happy that John Scalzi unseated Dave Langford for best fan writer. There is always interesting discussion on the results – and I find the Westeros discussion of most interest, as usual. I found this post by Patrick Nielsen Hayden very interesting as it indicates the ‘age-ist’ voting tendencies of both the Hugos and Nebulas – younger authors need not get their hopes up. I've written of my opinion of SFF Awards before and I see no reason to change that opinion.

• John at Grasping for the Wind has a new Ask the Bloggers series going on – of course I’m interested.

• This was getting a lot of attention for a while, but I’m happy it’s fading away.

• The World Fantasy Award short-list was announced – I find this award to be the most interesting of the various SFF awards, though I haven’t read a single one of these – heck, I haven’t heard of most of them.

• And for the random geo-related links: One of the more magnificent arches in Arches National Park collapsed last week. Alaska has quite a few volcanic eruptions at the moment, with one causing havoc with airline schedules.