Judging ------- The Essies will be judged by a seperate panel for each category. Each panel will be made up of no more than five (5) volunteers. No judge may submit an entry to the category or categories he or she is judging. Judges will submit reviews and scores, which will be debated in private amongst the judges until a consensus is reached. The reviews will be published alongside the entries. At present, the only certain judge is John Colagioia, who is organizing the Essies and participating as a judge for all three categories. If you would like to judge any of the categories, please email John Colagioia by 12:00 26 January 2002 UTC. Judges will be chosen at the sole discretion of the organizer (who is a bit sick of seeing his name in this document, over and over again). Esoteric? --------- That word gets bandied about quite a bit, doesn't it? Some definition may be in order. Alas, this is much like any art (or deviance): it's hard to define, but "we'll know it when we see it." Turns out, it is probably much easier to define what esoteric is *not*, and leave the rest to the enterprising imagination. Ben Olmstead, in the original Essie rules, put it like this: "...To qualify, the language must not be merely little-used, it must also have unusual features. (So XYZ (found somewhere in the DOS section of simtel.net, last I checked), while very little-used (due to being a poor 'serious' language with a homicidal license agreement), does not qualify.)" David Madore also once had this comment: "Gratuitous obfuscation may be acceptable when it's humorous, but otherwise, it's just, uh, well... *gratuitous*. (E.g. if I invent 'MaD5', the programming language which is exactly like C++ except that every line's MD5 fingerprint must end in '42' and the whole file's fingerprint must end in '1729', this isn't exactly intelligent obfuscation. In fact it's plain stupid.)" I think that says far more than any pseudo-rigorous definition with lots of vague terminology might. Prizes ------ Prizes have not yet been determined; however, possible prizes (to give entrants a flavor for what may be expected) include: - Mark Kurlansky's "The Basque History of the World" - A guaranteed-not-to-work "vintage" Commodore 64 - Larry Noonan's "Basic BASIC-English Dictionary for the Apple(tm), PET(R), & TRS-80(tm)" - A random sampling of comic books - The Mini-Bonsai Kit - Arbitrary bits of hardware from John's Basement of Doom(tm) - Random software (almost) guaranteed to predate your current active computer These are subject to change. Donations (corporate or private) of interesting prizes will be gratefully accepted. Donations (corporate or private) of not-so-interesting prizes will be less-gratefully accepted, and perhaps mocked, but gratefully accepted nonetheless. Final Notes ----------- Ben said it pretty well for the first Essies: "These rules are pretty formal and have lots of 'at the sole discretion of the judges'-type stuff. However, I, and hopefully the other judges I accept, will do our best to be fair and reasonable about all of it. (If the other judges don't, then I accepted the wrong people.) All of this is for good, clean, geek fun."