The 2011 Ursa Major Nominees Are Here!!!!

[Conan]

This year's Ursa Major nominees are out, and the choices are as terrible as expected.

First, you've got Buy our Product: Colored Horses Edition My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic nominated for "Best Dramatic Series or Short Work" and "Equestria Daily" nominated for "Best Website". Gee, I wonder how this could play out!

The only thing worse than Equestria Daily winning best website is the fact that means the other quality nominees won't. Sites like Inkbunny and WikiFur. And FurAffinity. Yes, enough people nominated FurAffinity as "best website" that it actually ended up on the ballot.

One more time: People nominated FurAffinity for Best Website. Best. Website. Best.

and finally, you have Bitter Lake nominated for "Best Motion Picture". They should really rename this category to "Movie We Like The Most" because if Bitter Lake wins this, it will be an insult to every other movie on the list, and every other movie ever made.

The rest of the nominations are what you'd expect when furries are left to nominate people for awards. Kyell Gold is nominated in three different categories because after winning two different categories 5 times each it's time he expanded his chances to win three Furry Circlejerk awards in a single show.

[ProvincialTwit]

I'd say this just proves 'bronies' are merely a subset of furries but that's pretty obvious to everyone anyway.

I do have to wonder just what meager percentage of furries even know of/care about these so-called 'awards'.  I don't even recall having heard about them until a few years ago; can't be bothered to see how long they've been around but they just smack of something by and for the old guard, as it were.

Also, frankly, I'm surprised Piche/FA haven't tried to launch their own sort of 'FA Awards' which would be even more of a popularity contest clusterfuck.  By which I mean hilarious.

[Jim Demintia]

Furries don't read. So you are at a serious disadvantage out of the starting gate, if you're the Ursa Major awards. I think that Kyell Gold's constant nominations say more about that fact and the fact that, as with everything furry, there's such a sea of half-assed and half-talented crap out there, that it's impossible to wade through it all to find anything worth your while, than it says about him. They don't really have much to work with, is the point.

At some point it becomes a farce.

I'm sorta surprised that they're still going after all this time. At one time, this might have been a respectable, if small, endeavor, back in the SF-fandom days. Science Fiction does it, so sure, why not. With the state of furry today, this really seems like something you could never do right. So they go for the safe choices.

The movie thing: what other furry movie was there in 2011? Stuff that no one even knows exists can't be nominated, and there's gotta be such a dearth of furry movies that people were like, "Bitter Lake and uh.......[long pause].....yeah, and Bitter Lake".

I wonder if there are formal nominating criteria, and if they expend enough effort to make people understand them before nominating them. Because that FA was nominated says to me that a lot of people understood the award as "This Furry Site I Like".

MLP, just...what.

[ColonThree]

I don't really get the "Best Website" category. 2 art sites, 1 wiki, 1 news/art/stuff site, and 1 site for writers and articles. What does "Best" translate to in this scenario? Well-written content? The most content? Competent staff? The site people visit the most often? It'd make more sense to me if there were different categories for art sites, resource sites, news sites, etc. It'd be like lumping the comic/short story/magazine/novel categories together, and then throwing in some drawing guides and encyclopaedias too.

I suppose there's no reason to worry about secret votes so I'm going to share mine.

Best Motion Picture
1. Bitter Lake
I haven't seen it but...

No. Shut up. There is no "but". You haven't fucking seen it. If Bitter Lake wins it wont be because it's good, it'll be because of morons like this who think it should win just for giving it a go, like giving prizes to everyone in the retard olympics even if they just fell over on the starting line and drooled on the floor.

[Jim Demintia]

As opposed to the furry masterpieces snubbed by the Academy? I dunno, given the level of accomplishment they're up against, "giving it a go" is better than anyone else. I don't think they should win; rather, Ursa Major shouldn't have categories for which you win simply because you exist.

[ColonThree]

Also, is it just me or does their mascot look more like a tanned eskimo wearing a woollen coat with a rotten aubergine stuck to their face?

[GreenReaper]

The Ursa Majors have been around for a decade or so - they started back at ConFurence (remember that?) and have been hopping between conventions since then.

No jury selects the nominees - they're picked in a round of open nomination before the vote (this year there were ~2,020 nominations from 316 nominators) - and "best" is undefined by the rules, although works must "include a non-human being given human attributes, which can be mental and/or physical" (WALL-E counts). As such, it ends up like a game of Brockian Ultra-Cricket - the best website/movie/whatever is the one that is the best, to the most people who care to vote. It is largely a popularity contest.

The idea is that popular works are worth telling others about as an example of cool furry stuff, and to give the people behind them a pat on the back. Unfortunately the awards ceremonies are held at conventions, which don't always like the idea of promoting material that has the potential to make them look bad; an issue when Softpaw was nominated (Eurofurence is no longer a member of the UMA committee).

You're right about it being confusing that (most) websites are lumped into one category, but it's a step up from not recognizing them at all. The Ursas have historically focussed on published works or well-defined series, and the concept of a continually updated website being recognized as a "work" is foreign to them. The category existed previously on their recommended reading list, but was turned into an award category after I argued that Flayrah should count as a magazine - they were probably thinking about it for a while, though. If it proves popular, we'll probably see it turn into subcategories like "best informational website" and "best art and story gallery/community", etc.

The idea that there is no nominee worthy of an award is not a new one; the Hugos have a "no award" option for this. I don't think abstaining has the same effect for the Ursas. Perhaps they'll add that in a future iteration.

[Pi]

The Ursa Majors have beenblah fucking blah blah blah

How many people actually care about this thing enough to register and vote, anyway?

The idea is that popular works are worth telling others about as an example of cool furry stuff, and to give the people behind them a pat on the back.

It's actually pretty refreshing that you admit that this thing is all about ass-pats. Good job!

[GreenReaper]

How many people actually care about this thing enough to register and vote, anyway?

From last year's results:

Between March 13 and April 17, 1,372 voters from countries as diverse as Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Laos, Mexico, New Zealand, Philippines, Russia, Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the USA selected the winners.

[ProvincialTwit]

So less than half the attendance of one of the major cons.

There's a joke here about the low voter turnout in the republican primaries but that's a whole 'nother can of sweetened, condensed santorum

[GreenReaper]

That's why these things are often held at conventions . . . but at the time there weren't any big enough to guarantee a good turnout, plus the organizers didn't just want it to be "a ConFurence award" - prescient in hindsight. You could probably run one at AC or FC nowadays, but we're a worldwide fandom, so it'd risk being unrepresentative. Plus, how'd you choose the nominees?

For comparison, the furry researchers got barely a quarter of attendees at Furry Fiesta, and they were offering a chance to get a $50 Amazon certificate plus the opportunity to tell your life story in survey form.

It'd be fun to see the voting breakdown, if only to judge whether a particular decision was statistically significant. For that matter, I'd like to see an award that gave a tie if the difference between the top n wasn't significant.

[rodox_video]

Honestly though, what's the point?

These "awards" are a tired, sad leftover of furry's "fandom" phase - when people genuinely tried to file anything with a talking animal in it as "furry". This was completely out of touch with how popular opinion continues to isolate works created by furries (that are usually intended for consumption by the furry subculture) from works created by mainstream artists, writers and producers (that are usually intended for consumption by the general public). Furry has little to do with mainstream cartooning/writing/what have you; it's it's own little thing.

You can say that furry draws it's inspiration from the mainstream, but you can't just appropriate things from the mainstream and call them furry. Granted, the line gets blurred sometimes, but that's a number of exceptions you can pretty much count on one hand.

[ProvincialTwit]

So an 'award' with limited interest among an already limited target audience, that cares more that certain things exist than whether or not they are any good, and has little to no actual bearing on the things it promotes since the rest of the target audience is too apathetic to know/care that the award exists.

My god, the furries have actually created their own oscars.

[rodox_video]

not even the oscars deserve a burn like that dude (not even after snubbing the social network last year)

[zed]

The fact that anybody would vote for FA as being the "best" of anything means the show is over. Sorry. Time to pack up. I am sure that the people running this have the best of intentions, and at one point it meant something... but that point has long passed.

Let's face it. The furry fandom is not the community to ask what matters. The furry fandom is a group of insecure closet fetishists, some of whom will part with their hard-earned money so others can masturbate to their fantasies, artists of varying skill who will discard their dignity if the pornography pays well, and drama hounds who can't keep shit from falling out of their mouth. And that's the part people are willing to talk about.

[Jim Demintia]

FA winning an award for best website would be a moment of discredibility not unlike Thomas Friedman's Pulitzer for commentary.

But seriously, echoing the last couple of posts - awards are always irrelevant and self-congratulatory like this. People pay attention to the Oscars (I guess), the Pulitzer has been kinda discredited by things such as the above...and the rest, eh, not so much. It shouldn't surprise anyone that furries have created an award that fails even to do the one constructive thing that these awards do - get attention.

[Pi]

To nobody's surprise, "Equestria Daily" won Best Website. I'm a bit surprised to see WikiFur of all things at #2, but FA is all the way down at #3, InkBunny right behind. The only person to go into any real sort of detail on this is GreenReaper, of course.

A Twitter search for "ursa major" shows a bunch of the winners patting themselves on the back, and a handful of furry aggregators picking up on the same Flayrah link, basically.

[GreenReaper]

To nobody's surprise, "Equestria Daily" won Best Website.

At least the ponies are happy.

I'm a bit surprised to see WikiFur of all things at #2, but FA is all the way down at #3, InkBunny right behind.

A few voters gave their reasoning in comments to the story about the nominations. Part of it may be that WikiFur mentioned its nomination; as far as I can tell, FA didn't. Our English edition gets ~200k visits a month, so you know some of those are going to vote.