maverick_weirdo | Pegasus Nomination Reminders

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Pegasus Nomination Reminders

It is that time of year again, to consider nominations for The Pegasus Award for Excellence in Filking and the Brainstorming Poll Results are up, however these suggestions are an unedited list which may contain people/songs who are Ineligible for awards this year. (Note: I am not an official part of the Pegasus Awards; I am just trying to remind people of some of the rules that can affect nomination.)

Anyone who has won Best Composer is ineligible to win again for 5 years. The last five years winners are:
Tom Smith
Cynthia McQuillin (who is also ineligible for an other reason)
Talis Kimberley
Seanan McGuire
Vixy & Tony

Also ineligible for Best Composer by the "2 years nominated, 1 year off" rule is:
Brooke Lunderville

We have an official ruling: Ju Honisch is eligible for the 2010 Pegasus Best Composer Link

Likewise anyone who has won Best Performer is ineligible to win again for 5 years. The last five years winners are:
Heather Dale & Ben Deschamps
Vixy & Tony
Dr. Mary Crowell and Seanan McGuire (tie)
Judi Miller
Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff

Also ineligible for Best Performer by the "2 years nominated, 1 year off" rule is:
Amy McNally
Wild Mercy

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Where is the "2 years nominated, 1 year off" rule mentioned? The page I was reading -- http://www.ovff.org/pegasus.html -- only says, (e.g.) "Any performer in the filk community who has not won this Pegasus Award in the past 5 years."

Sorry...commented too soon. The rules on that page are only partial rules; the rest are on the rules page! :-)

Thank you for posting this, I frequently forget and fall afoul of the fact that they never have time to vet the list against people who aren't eligible.

The one I found most ammusing is in the "Best Filk Song" Category

Someone suggested Wreck of the Crash of the Easthill Mine Disaster which is ineligible because it Won "Best Filk Song" award last year

Well, it is a pretty awesome song. ::g::

And if you don't pay enough attention to the awards, you might not remember what was nominated, let alone what won.

That is sort of the issue. Without a proper guideline on the site, (usually not in place because of time constraints) people do actually waste votes. I am now wondering if I was guilty of doing so this year. I do tend to remember the winners, but I don't always remember the off-cycles.

It would help if the voting form included either a list of the ineligible songs/filkers or a link to such a list. I don't know how much work that would be, but I shouldn't think it would be too much of a hassle, and having the list be really accessible would probably help people remember to check eligibility before voting.

Sorry. It really depends on how much time that the person scrubbing the list has to spend on it and how encyclopedic their knowledge is being on any particular day. :)

For example, in 2009 I did the scrubbing of the brainstorming list and removed a couple of songs that are frequently performed by filkers, but which were actually written by mainstream folk artists. (Well, as much as there are mainstream folk artists. :) )

It turns out that sort of list scrubbing is harder than you might expect. And while I sort of agree that it really isn't too hard to get the list of "previous winner ineligibles" in the Composer/Performer categories, it's a bit harder to sift out all of the previous song winners or those that are ineligible due to two-on, one-off. I admit that I just check the songs that I'm planning on nominating as I type them into the ballot, because that's a much smaller set than the whole list of songs from the brainstorming poll.

Edited 2010-07-06 20:29 (UTC)

Bill, what if there was a script on the brainstorming ballot that would reject people or songs that were ineligible? It wouldn't clear up the non-filk songwriters, or songs, but it would be a start.

I suspect we could come up with the volunteer coding to get it written and implemented.

It's not impossible, but since I don't know how that's coded, I can't tell you whether it's simple there or not. :)

tarkrai maintains the site and polls, so he would be the one to check with.

That's not a bad idea. Thanks Bill!

I have the impression that the site is really not that simple. Plus, Steve simply has NO time whatsoever to implement even more stuff there.
There isn't a lot of spare time, lately.
But feel free to check with him ...

Does Steve want volunteer help? I've heard quite a few good coders say in my hearing recently that they'd love to find a way to contribute. Maybe we can put them in touch and take some of the heavy lifting off of Steve?

I suspect I'm on the long list of people who would love it if you guys had more free time and sanity.

It's all plain text, received in normal mail.

The reason that it defies coding is that there are 15 ways to spell "McQuillin", "Kimberley", "Michelle", et.al. And there are a million different ways that a song is identified in the poll.

Therefore, on the first pass, you try to clean up as much of the spelling as you can, and try to create consistent song titles.

On the second pass, you find things you missed on the first pas.

On the third pass, you're starting to get some consistency, and standard unix tools (sort and uniq) become useful. However, if you are inconsistent in how you put spaces/tabs in names (and hyphenation, like Van Daele-Hunt); you still have to go through again.

Knowing who got married this year is important, too (we still get poll entries for Eva Wiest, for example); as well as gender changes, and random official name changes (Raul Benefiche to Blind Lemming Chiffon).

In general, there are between 600-1000 raw individual entries that have to be manually reviewed. Something *always* gets missed, regardless of how many people help with the review.

I agree that doing a comparison script of winners/ineligibles against the list just before it goes live is a good idea; and something I've been intending to do for a couple of years now. I just simply haven't had the time to code it when it's important; and when the Poll is out, i don't think about it again for another year... :)

I know Ben Newman and a few others had some ideas about how to implement scripts for this, taking the multiple thousand spellings into account.

Should I point Ben your way?

Also, thank you, and *hug*

I've thought for a while that the Pegasus brainstorming could potentially work a lot better as a wiki page than its current system ("Steve gets a lot of e-mail that he has to deal with in his non-existent free time").

That would let people note ineligibles, correct and standardize spelling, etc., plus have the advantages of an actual in-person brainstorming session, where one good idea can lead to another.

The disadvantage of a wiki, of course, would be that you'd need someone to moderate it against vandalism, plus you'd lose anonymity. And it'd need to be hosted somewhere, which might or might not be the Pegasus site.

This is more complicated than it sounds,

Catching that a song won last year is relatively easy, but if a song wins in Any category it is ineligible for all future Pegasus awards.

So a song that won 10 years ago in another category, is still ineligible. The easiest thing to do is check any songs you want to nominate against the All Nominated Songs list, which will also say if they won.

From this year's Best Filk brainstorm list we have
WotCotEHMD already mentioned

One Small Boat by Marilisa Valtazanou is ineligible due to the "2 years nominated, 1 year off" rule

Still Alive by Jonathan Coulton is ineligible because Jonathan chooses not to be consided a filker. (Please do not debate on this here, I am simply reporting the past finding of the Pegasus Comittee)

And Mal's Song by Michelle Dockrey, which Michelle chooses not to enter for her own reasons(also, the brainstorm poll spelled her name "Michele")

How much of this should the person editing the Brainstorming Poll be responsible for?

This. Thank you. IMO, checking the list should not be too much to ask for. That's what it's there for ...
It is still a site run by someone with no spare time in his spare time ...

Note: Mal's Song might or might not be eligible for a Pegasus award -- I don't think the committee has ruled on that -- but Michelle has said that she'll decline the nomination in any case. I don't think that the committee is responsible for scrubbing the list of items of that nature.

If someone wrote and specifically asked to have a song removed from the brainstorming poll results, that would be a different case, but would be dependent on how much time the poor guy who is maintaining the site has to handle the changes. (Lately, not a lot, for a variety of good reasons.)

Exactly.

Part of the point is that the Brainstorming Poll is not necessarily intended for accuracy. it never was.

It's just an idea generator. In and of itself, it has no official bearing on someone's standing towards winning a Pegasus Award- that's reserved for the Nominating Ballot (out now!) and the Final Ballot (out sometime in August).

I try to help ensure that ineligible people/songs don't appear in the poll; some years are better than others (my apologies, this is a particularly poor year). However, *every* year there are ineligibles in the list.

Prospecting the list for other ineligibles:

I am not sure whether Ju Honisch is eligible in Best Composer or not, since she was nominated with Katy in 2008 and alone in 2009.

Songs that are ineligible due to two on one off are:

One Small Boat -- Marilisa Valtazanou
Chess -- Juanita Coulson

(In theory, they would be eligible in the floating categories, but I don't believe either actually fit this year's categories.)

edited original post to mention Ju Honisch

I'd honestly feel better about it if you could check this with Steve before making it public. I'd hate to have Ju miss a chance because of something that is possibly not a correct information ...

Sorry. My intent wasn't to say that Ju was ineligible -- it was more an attempt to note that the Pegasus Committee needs to decide how the rule applies in this case. It may be that it's thoroughly covered and the answer is clear one way or another.

I have updated my post to include

(Note: I am not an official part of the Pegasus Awards; I am just trying to remind people of some of the rules that can affect nomination.)

and

(Ju Honisch eligibility is currently in a Schrödinger state)

Once I hear something official I will post it. That's the best I can do.

I have recieved official word that Ju is eligible to be nominated for the category of Best Writer/Composer this year, and have updated my original post to reflect this information

I'd think we're separate. She writes tons more than I and has a different style. If we are nominated together, it's usually for songs that I have written the music for and she has written the lyrics ...
To me, it always feels that people should nominate just her since she writes ALL the lyrics. If nominating me alongside (for my music writing) would make her ineligible, I'd be tempted to decline that ...

Oh, I understand.

I'm not on the Pegasus Committee (although I help out from time to time), so I'm not in a position to actually speak for them on this subject. I don't recall whether it's explicit in the rules (I don't think it is), so it ends up being a judgment call by the committee if it isn't explicit.

It turns out that the Best Song results on the Brainstorming Poll are from 2009. Oops. Steve will fix it as soon as he's at the right computer long enough to have a chance t do so.

(But that would explain how Brooke's winner from last year -- I refuse to go look up the correct title so I can type it accurately :) -- is still on the list this year. :) )

A different brainstorming list is now up for Best Filk Song

http://www.ovff.org/pegasus/2010/brainstorm/bestsong.html#title

While we're at it — someone suggested a song entitled "What If?" by me in the Best Magic Song category, which is odd because I don't believe I've written such a song. I've recorded a song with that title, on the album Mr. Smith Goes to the Hospital, which is a bit of a clue as to who did write it!

akawil pointed out to me last night that this is the sort of discourse that we lost when rec.music.filk stopped being the one-stop shop for filk on the internet. We may want to think about emulating the Hugo awards recommendation communities on LJ, and setting up something for brainstorming, with say, a thread each for each of the categories. That way things like this can be caught early and not make it to the brainstorming list with errors.

The compilation of the lists could even be crowd-sourced, which would take a lot of the pressure off the Pegasus committee. It would certainly streamline things like catching errors and duplicates.

I was pointed at this thread and received an explicit query, so I wanted to address the question of Juliane Honisch's eligibility in the category of Best Writer/Composer.

The Pegasus Committee has ruled that she is, indeed, eligible this year. Essentially, when you have someone who is a joint-nominee in a category, we do not penalize that person unless they have basically no solo identity. However, what she writes solo is sufficiently different than what she writes with Kerstin. (Admittedly, in the US we tend to see her more performing jointly and joint material, but that is not Juliane's fault.)

We made a similar ruling by not penalizing people in the N'Early Music Consort and by distinguishing Playing Rapunzel from Mich Sampson solo or Marilisa Valtazanou. Similarly, I would not consider a performance nomination for Lady Mondegreen to be the same as a performance nomination for Merav Hoffman; there is sufficient difference to make it distinct.

I will cross-post this to the Pegasus Awards community; please feel free to ask any questions there.

Erica Neely
Pegasus Evangelista

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Pegasus Nomination Reminders

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Eligibility Ruling: Juliane Honisch