Views from Medina Road

A friend at work, who only occasionally glances at Locus Online, posted an item about the 2003 Recommended Reading list on fark.com, one of his favorite sites. Here's the entire thread, with 100 some comments. Always interesting to see what people think are the obvious titles that Locus somehow overlooked.

The link brings some fresh eyes to the site--traffic the past 2 days has been about 250% of normal--but at a cost. The site has an unlimited bandwidth account, but it's not free; the spike in traffic last month after the Reading list and poll form went up brought me a surcharge of $150, and I can now expect a similar surcharge for the traffic from fark.com.

In other news, it seems that negotiations between Locus Publications and Westercon fell through, and the Locus Awards will now *not* be presented at Westercon 57 (July 4th weekend near Phoenix). Where they will be presented has not been determined. I've asked Locus HQ if any other details can be released; depending on what I hear, I may post an item on the Locus Online homepage.

And Jonathan Strahan has heard that s1ngularity::criticism is folding, though there's nothing about that yet on the site itself.