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Tag Archives: Scott Edelman
Pixel Scroll 1/7/22 It's All Fun And Games Till Someone Pixels A File
(1) WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE DEPLOYMENT WILL AIR. "NASA to Host Coverage, Briefing for Webb Telescope's Final Unfolding" the space agency announced.
NASA will provide live coverage and host a media briefing Saturday, Jan. 8, for the conclusion of the James Webb Space Telescope's major spacecraft deployments.
Beginning no earlier than 9 a.m. EST, NASA will air live coverage of the final hours of Webb's major deployments. After the live broadcast concludes, at approximately 1:30 p.m., NASA will hold a media briefing. Both the broadcast and media briefing will air live on NASA TV, the NASA app, and the agency's website.
As the final step in the observatory's major deployments, the Webb team plans to unfold the second of two primary mirror wings. When this step is complete, Webb will have finished its unprecedented process of unfolding in space to prepare for science operations.
(2) KETTER INTERVIEWED ABOUT DREAMHAVEN BREAK-IN. The DreamHaven Books break-in reported in yesterday's Scroll made local news on the Fox affiliate, who interviewed owner Greg Ketter: "Minneapolis comic store owner frustrated after continued robberies".
(3) BEHIND CLOSED DOORS. "Golden Globes Will Not Be Livestreamed This Weekend" reports Deadline.
The controversy-plagued Golden Globes looks set to return this weekend, but no one will see it online or otherwise. "This year's event is going to be a private event and will not be livestreamed," an HFPA spokesperson said. "We will be providing real-time updates on winners on the Golden Globes website and our social media."
…NBC revealed on May 10 that it would not air the Golden Globes this year due to the diversity issues involving the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
The network, in a statement at the time, said it continues to believe that the HFPA is "committed to meaningful reform" but "change of this magnitude takes time and work, and we feel strongly that the HFPA needs time to do it right."
(4) LEVAR BURTON. A reminder that the LeVar Burton Reads podcasts are also available on Stitcher. The latest is "To Jump is to Fall" by Stephen Graham Jones.
"To Jump is to Fall" by Stephen Graham Jones
A spy narrates his thoughts as he jumps from an airplane and freefalls toward his government target.
(5) DISCON III PANEL VIDEOS. The recorded panels of the 2021 Worldcon, DisCon III, are now available to attending members and virtual members. The recordings should remain available through the month of January 2022.
1. Go to the DisCon III schedule page:
https://discon3.org/schedule/
2. Use the Log In button in the top left corner of the page.
3. On the convention schedule, look for items with a View Replay button.
(6) DISCON III ART SHOW. Lisa Hertel reported on Facebook that DisCon III's art show sales were approximately $32,000 across 33 artists.
(7) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman worries that the Omicron surge will keep him away from future conventions, but that doesn't erase the fun he had in D.C. where he recorded five episodes of his podcast, including "Breakfast on Eggs Benedict with Fonda Lee".
Fonda Lee
Fonda Lee won both a World Fantasy Award and an Aurora Award for her novel Jade City, which was also nominated for Nebula, Seiun, and Sunburst Awards. That first installment of her Green Bone Saga, an epic urban fantasy, was followed by Jade War, which was nominated for both the Dragon and Aurora Awards. Jade Legacy, the third book in her series, was released in November of 2021. Her young adult novels Zeroboxer and Exo were both Andre Norton Award finalists. She holds black belts in karate and kung fu, which probably came in handy when it was time for her to write Shang-Chi for Marvel Comics.
Because Fonda is a fan of Eggs Benedict, we headed to the Lafayette restaurant in the Hay Adams Hotel, where I'd been informed by Tom Sietsema of the Washington Post we could find an excellent incarnation of that dish.
We discussed what it was like finishing the final book in her Green Bone Saga trilogy during the pandemic, her secret for keeping track of near 2,000 pages of characters and plot points, why every book project is terrifying in its own way, how much of the ending she knew at the beginning (and our opposing views on whether knowing the ending helps or hurts the creative process), the warring wolves inside her as she writes the most emotionally difficult scenes, why she starts to worry if her writing is going too smoothly, the framing device that became far more than a framing device, why her natural length for processing ideas is the novel rather than the short story, and much more.
(8) BEBOP PETITION REACHES 100K. [Item by Ben Bird Person.] According to Dazed's Günseli Yalcinkaya, the Change.org petition "Save the live action cowboy bebop" has now garnered over 100,000 signatures.
Following news of the cancellation, co-executive producer Javier Grillo-Marxuach took to Twitter to voice his disappointment: "I truly loved working on this. It came from a real and pure place of respect and affection. I wish we could make what we planned for a second season, but you know what they say, men plan, God laughs."
…As petition numbers grow by the minute, perhaps it won't be long until Netflix takes note and we can confidently say: See you soon, space cowboy.
(9) THE BOYS. Amazon Prime dropped a teaser trailer for The Boys – Season 3. Coming June 3.
The Boys is an irreverent take on what happens when superheroes, who are as popular as celebrities, as influential as politicians and as revered as Gods, abuse their superpowers rather than use them for good. It's the powerless against the super powerful as The Boys embark on a heroic quest to expose the truth about "The Seven", and their formidable Vought backing.
(10) MILLER OBIT. Wild Cards author John Joseph Miller died January 5 announced DreamForge Magazine.
We are deeply saddened to hear that John Jos. Miller passed away yesterday. Our deepest sympathies to John's wife, family, and friends. We were fortunate to work with John on Ghost of a Smile in 2019 and Don't Look Back in the recently released DreamForge Anvil Issue 6. He's best known for his work in the Wildcard Series edited by George RR Martin. His last story with us, Don't Look Back, is a Satchel Paige baseball story. John was a Fellow of the Society for American Baseball Research and was an authority on America's Negro league baseball of the 20th Century. In his honor, read "Don't Look Back" in Dreamforge Anvil Issue 6.
(11) WILLIAM CONTENTO (1947-2021). William G. Contento known for his annual bibliographical roundups of sff in the Eighties and Nineties (originally with Locus' Charles N. Brown), died December 13, 2021. His family obituary is here.
…Bill retired in 2012. Bill's obsession besides his family, was science fiction, a collector, an author and authority on anthologies and source material. Using his cataloging mind, his home computer and working with other collaborators who shared his passion Bill authored and coauthored at least 14 titles. Some of his reference works were more than 500 pages. Eventually he was able to put them on CDs. His indexes are linked by the Library of Congress, The British Library, MIT's library to name a few. Google his name to see a list of all his labors of love….
1961 — [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Sixty-one years ago, ITV first aired The Avengers. Original cast was Ian Hendry and Patrick Macnee. Hendry left after the first series; Steed than became the primary male character, partnered with a succession of female partners. The series would last for six seasons and one hundred and one episodes. We of course have our favorite female partner but that's not for us to say here. After it ended in 1969, John Steed would be paired with two new partners on The New Avengers, a series that ran for two seasons in the mid-Seventies.
Born January 7, 1899 — F. Orlin Tremaine. He was the Editor of Astounding from 1933 to 1937. It's said that he bought Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness without actually reading it. Later as Editor at Bartholomew House, he brought out the first paperback editions of Lovecraft's The Weird Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Dunwich Horror. He wrote a dozen or so short stories that were published in the pulps between 1926 and 1949. (Died 1956.)
Born January 7, 1912 — Charles Addams. Illustrator best known for the Addams Family which he first drew in 1932 and kept drawing until his death. Needless to say there have been a number of films using these characters of which The Addams Family is my favorite. Linda H. Davis' Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life is well worth seeking out and reading. (Died 1988.)
Born January 7, 1913 — Julian S. Krupa. Pulp cover and interior illustrator from 1939 to 1971 who graced Amazing Stories and Fantastic. In the Thirties, he also contributed art to fanzines, including Ad Astra. His grandson said that "his Grandfather did all the illustrations for the training films for the first Nuclear Submarines and was a friend to Admiral Rickover. And then continued to do early training films for NASA." (Died 1989.)
Born January 7, 1928 — William Peter Blatty. Novelist and screenwriter best known for The Exorcist though he was also the same for Exorcist III. The former is by no means the only genre work that he would write as his literary career would go on for forty years after this novel and would include Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing: A Fable which he renamed Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing: A Hollywood Christmas Carol and The Exorcist for the 21st Century, his final work. (Died 2017.)
Born January 7, 1955 — Karen Haber, 67. Wife of Robert Silverberg. I fondly remember reading her Hugo-nominated Meditations on Middle Earth anthology, not to mention the three Universe anthologies she did with her husband which are most excellent. I don't remember reading any of her novels but it's hardly a certainty that I didn't as even when my memory was a lot better than is now, I hardly remembered all the genre fiction I've read. So those you've read her, please tell me what she's like.
Born January 7, 1957 — Nicholson Baker, 65. Ok ISFDB lists him as having two SFF novels, The Fermata and House of Holes. The Wiki page him lists those as being two out of the three erotic novels that he's written. Not having read them, are they indeed erotic SFF? I see that ESF say they're indeed SFF and yes are erotic. H'h.
Born January 7, 1961 — Mark Allen Shepherd, 61. Morn, the bar patron on Deep Space Nine. Amazingly he was in Quark's bar a total of ninety-three episodes plus one episode each on Next Gen and Voyager. Technically he's uncredited in almost all of those appearances. That's pretty much his entire acting career. I'm trying to remember if he has any lines. He's also an abstract painter whose work was used frequently on DS9 sets. For all practical purposes, this was his acting career.
Lio might be a young Harryhausen.
(15) GET VACCINATED. GeekWire witnesses when "Mr. Spock beams down for vaccine-boosting billboard campaign".
…The first round of the campaign, organized by Nimoy's family and L.A. Care Health Plan with the blessing of ViacomCBS, has been in the works in Los Angeles since last May…
My Dad believed strongly in creating awareness for respiratory disease, he would have loved this billboard! #covid19 #covidvaccine #LLAP @nimoycopdfilm @StarTrek @LACareHealth pic.twitter.com/RjGDeanZiT
— Julie Nimoy (@JulieNimoy) November 1, 2021
(16) BOWIE THE ACTOR. [Item by Alan Baumler.] BBC's appreciation of the film roles of Davie Bowie, almost all genre. "The underrated genius of David Bowie's acting". For some reason, can't quite put my finger on it, they kept casting him for roles playing someone out of place who did not quite fit in.
… It's unsurprising that this most mercurial of artists, with his visual sensibility and many alter-egos, would be drawn to film. Yet, while Bowie's legendary status in music is beyond question, quantifying his contribution to cinema as an actor is more complicated. In the three decades between The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and The Prestige (2006), Bowie appeared in dozens of films but – despite that span of credits – only a few of these roles came close to making the most of his talent. When we leave aside the many cameos – of which the uncontested crème de le crème is Bowie solemnly adjudicating a runway walk-off in Zoolander – and the forgettable flops – the less said about Just a Gigolo, the better – we are left with only a handful of performances. Yet those acting roles that did manage to effectively exploit Bowie's gifts are easily enough to secure his status as a cinema icon. When matched with an inventive director, Bowie could be an unforgettable screen presence….
(17) DEER DEPARTED. RedWombat's Bambi rewatch thread starts here.
(Okay, yes, obviously I knew that Grandma, have had two children, had done it twice, but it would have been in the Fifties and sex was clearly very different then and involved vacuuming the house in pearls until you caught pregnant.)
— Kingfisher & Wombat (@UrsulaV) January 7, 2022
(18) WAVES OF SFF. Ron Jacobs reviews Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction 1950-1985 in "Some Hazy Cosmic Jive" at CounterPunch.
…If the reader previously dismissed science fiction as juvenile or foolish, this introductory survey of its radical possibilities is heartily recommended. It could easily change your mind. If the reader is already familiar with this genre, this text will come as an intelligent and inspired discussion of the genre during one of its most creative and fertile periods. Visually delightful and intellectually astute, it should provide each and every reader with a list of books to add to their to-read queue.
(19) NOT JUST A PHASE. [Item by Ben Bird Person.] Artist/illustrator Will Quinn did this piece based on the Saul Bass movie Phase IV (1974). It was riffed by Joel and the Bots in the television series Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988-) in its KTMA season (1988-1989).
Daily bunny no.1628 is feeling antsy
(A Patreon reward for @DrWho42!) pic.twitter.com/DBVsRGBfr5
— Will Quinn (@willquinnart) January 7, 2022
(20) WHERE IT'S AT. I always like to have a science item towards the end of the Scroll.
well everyone knows the heart is located in the butt thats just science so take your pick bud https://t.co/vIw2tBEyic
— Chuck Tingle (@ChuckTingle) January 3, 2022
(21) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Live from 2011, "'Doctor Who on Holiday' by Dean Gray".
It combines Green Day's "Holiday" with Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll Part 2" and "Doctorin' The TARDIS" by The Timelords (better known as The KLF). "Doctorin' The TARDIS" itself takes a sample from "Rock and Roll Part 2″." From Wikipedia: "Dr Who on Holiday is the second track from the mash up album, American Edit created by Dean Gray (a collaboration of Party Ben and Team 9).
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Alan Baumler, Ben Bird Person, Scott Edelman, Will R., Rich Lynch, Nicki Lynch, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]
Posted in Pixel Scroll	| Tagged Chuck Tingle, Cowboy Bebop, David Bowie, DisCon III, Doctor Who, DreamForge Magazine, DreamHaven Books, Fonda Lee, Golden Globes, Greg Ketter, James Webb Space Telescope, John Joseph Miller, Julie Nimoy, Leonard Nimoy, LeVar Burton, Lisa Hertel, NASA, Scott Edelman, Stephen Graham Jones, Ursula Vernon, Wild Cards, Will Quinn, William G. Contento	| 32 Replies
Pixel Scroll 12/26/21 Recycled Like A Deposit Glass Goblin
(1) EXTRA EXPANSE. The Verge warns, "PSA: You'll miss 25 minutes of The Expanse's final season if you don't pause it", and tells you where to find it.
If you're a fan of The Expanse, like me, you're probably wondering whether its final six episodes — currently airing each Friday through January 14th — are enough to wrap up its epic story. What you're probably not wondering: whether Amazon has buried nearly one-tenth of the show's final season in a place you might not think to look, and can't even find on your TV.
But it's true. The Expanse's production company filmed an additional 25 minutes of story across five vignettes, which you can only access through Amazon's X-Ray service by pausing the show and scrolling through otherwise hidden menus. (They're under Bonus Content.) But I couldn't find them on Apple TV or Google TV, and the showrunners have confirmed that's because Amazon hasn't made them available there yet. They're only on phones, tablets, and computers for now….
(2) WEBB TELESCOPE ON ITS WAY. The James Webb Space Telescope was successfully launched on December 25.
Here it is: humanity's final look at @NASAWebb as it heads into deep space to answer our biggest questions. Alone in the vastness of space, Webb will soon begin an approximately two-week process to deploy its antennas, mirrors, and sunshield. #UnfoldTheUniverse pic.twitter.com/DErMXJhNQd
— NASA (@NASA) December 25, 2021
Before the JWST left the pad, the New York Times looked back on "How NASA's Biggest Telescope Beat Loose Screws, Loose Budgets and Loose Clamps".
… The Webb telescope is the biggest observatory built for launch into space. Its 18 gold-plated mirrors make for a system that is far more sensitive than the Hubble Space Telescope, which it will succeed as humanity's most powerful scientific instrument for studying the formation of our universe and distant worlds in our galaxy.
But the Webb, with a price tag of some $10 billion, has trudged through one of the most fraught development timelines of any space program, lasting over two decades and costing billions more than its original estimate.
"The stuff they faced was what a lot of space programs face, because everything has to be perfect on a spacecraft like that — you can't go fix it after launch," said Cristina Chaplain, who for roughly a decade led audits of the James Webb Space Telescope at the Government Accountability Office, Congress' watchdog agency….
(3) JRR AND JK GO TO THE MOVIES. The Guardian's Guy Lodge doesn't really long for the old days, but it would never do to be too pleased with the present: "Fellowship of the Ring at 20: the film that revitalised and ruined Hollywood".
…It might be unfair to draw a straight causal line between Jackson's project and the glumly corporatised franchise culture that overwhelms Hollywood cinema culture today. For one thing, it shares either the credit or the blame with Christmas 2001's other colossal fantasy-film event: Chris Columbus' pedestrian but immediately obsession-inspiring Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the first move in a more conservative strategy – only one film made at a time, at least to begin with – that nonetheless worked like gangbusters. Columbus' film might not have had its follow-ups ready to go the way Jackson's did, but its scene-setting narrative and ellipsis of an ending as good as promised them, pending the audience's thumbs-up….
(4) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to nibble Neapolitan pizza with José Pablo Iriarte in Episode 161 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.
José Pablo Iriarte
My dinner companion the first night of the D.C. Worldcon was José Pablo Iriarte, a Cuban American author of science fiction, fantasy, and children's fiction. Their novelette, "The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births," was a finalist for the Nebula Award and was long-listed for the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award. Their short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Fireside Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, and many other venues, stories which have then been spotlighted on best-of lists assembled by Tangent Online, iO9, and others.
When Jose told me one of his favorite foods was pizza, I knew I had to feed them D.C.'s best, leading me to 2Amys, which Thrillist says prepares "near-perfect, delicate pies with bubbly crusts, fresh mozzarella, and fragrant basil. The Margherita is the baseline against which all Neapolitan pies in DC are judged."
We discussed their go-to karaoke song, why being a math teacher makes it even harder to write about math, what they learned from Speaker for the Dead, how their feelings about Orson Scott Card help them empathize with those struggling over J.K. Rowling today, why they trunked their favorite story until a friend convinced them to send it out, their method for writing successful flash fiction, why they had no problem keeping their Nebula nomination a secret, how to create a good elevator pitch, and much more.
(5) DORIS PISERCHIA (1928-2021.) Author of thirteen science fiction novels and multiple short stories, Doris Piserchia died September 15 at the age of 92. The family obituary is here.
She published her first short story, the humorous "Rocket to Gehenna," in 1966. In Orbit 12, in which her story "Half the Kingdom" was reprinted, she wrote, "I live in a madhouse and my nerves are shot. Perhaps this is the reason why I rarely attempt a serious story. Such an attempt would be very easy for me, but I'm afraid to tap the vein right now." An unpublished story of hers was acquired for Last Dangerous Visions.
(6) MARK TAYLOR OBIT. Toy designer Mark Taylor died December 24 reports Bleeding Cool: "Legendary Toy Designer Mark Taylor Passes Away at Age 80".
…Mark Taylor was one of the biggest reasons that Masters of the Universe has become what it is, with his incredible designs that came to life right off the paper. Even in 2021, Mattel is still dishing out some absolutely fantastic Masters of the Universe collectibles, including their highly recommended Origins line. He-Man has only expanded his reach outside of Eternia, and it was Mark who helped him get there, and we will continue to admire all the work he has done. Be sure to keep your eyes out for the Lord of Power lines coming from Formo Toys that will give us some original MOTU designs that Mark Taylor has created….
2001 — [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Twenty years ago, Gosford Park premiered. It was directed by Robert Altman from the script by Julian Fellowes, who went on to be the driving force behind the Downton Abbey series. It came together when Director Balaban suggested an Agatha Christie-style whodunit to Altman and introduced him to Julian Fellowes, with whom Balaban had been working on a different project. It is a country manor house mystery in the style that Hercule Poirot's Christmas was, and in keeping with that kind of mystery had a very large ensemble case: Eileen Atkins, Bob Balaban, Alan Bates, Charles Dance, Stephen Fry, Michael Gambon, Richard E. Grant, Derek Jacobi, Kelly Macdonald, Helen Mirren, Jeremy Northam, Clive Owen, Ryan Phillippe, Maggie Smith, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Emily Watson.
It was filmed mostly on location using three different manor houses, though sound stages were built to film the scenes of the manor's downstairs area. Apparently it was also filmed in three different countries — the United Kingdom, the United States and Italy with production costs of nearly twenty million in total. It did very well at the box office with it bringing in nearly ninety million. It was Altman's second most successful film after M*A*S*H.
Critics truly loved it with Roger Ebert wringing for the Chicago Sun-Times said it was "such a joyous and audacious achievement it deserves comparison with his very best movies." And Nell Murray at the Verge summed it up perfectly noting that "For a film about homicide and class conflict, Gosford Park is surprisingly congenial." Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a most excellent rating of eighty-eight percent.
Born December 26, 1903 — Elisha Cook Jr. On the Trek side, he shows up as playing lawyer Samuel T. Cogley in the "Court Martial" episode. Elsewhere he had long association with the genre starting with Voodoo Island and including House on a Haunted Hill, Rosemary's Baby, Wild Wild West, The Night Stalker and Twilight Zone. (Died 1995.)
Born December 26, 1911 — Milton Luros. Illustrator during the Golden Age of pulp magazines from 1942 to 1954 (yes I'm expansive on what I consider to be to the Golden Age). His work graced Science Fiction Quarterly, Astounding Stories, Future Combined with Science Fiction Stories, Future Science Fiction Stories, Dynamic Science Fiction and Science Fiction Quarterly. He had an amazing ability to illustrate women in outfits in hostile environments that simply were impractical such as one for Science Fiction Quarterly (UK), October 1952 cover had a cut out in her spacesuit so her décolletage was bare. (Died 1999.)
Born December 26, 1951 — Priscilla Olson, 70. She and her husband have been involved with NESFA Press's efforts to put neglected SF writers back into print and has edited myriad writers such by Chad Oliver and Charles Harness, plus better known ones like Jane Yolen. She's chaired a number of Boskones, and created the term "prosucker" which I must admit is both elegant and really ugly at the same time.
Born December 26, 1953 — Clayton Emery, 68. Somewhere there's a bookstore that exist of nothing but the franchise novels and collections that exist within a given franchise. No original fiction whatsoever. This author has novels in the Forgotten Realms, Shadow World, The Burning Goddess, City of Assassins, The Secret World of Alex Mack, Magic: The Gathering and Runesworld franchises, plus several genre works including surprisingly Tales of Robin Hood on Baen Books. Must not be your granddaddy's Hood.
Born December 26, 1960 — Temuera Morrison, 61. Ahhhh clones. In Attack of the Clones, he plays Jango Fett and a whole bunch of his clone troopers, and in Revenge of the Sith, he came back in the guise of Commander Cody. He goes on to play him in the second season of The Mandalorian. Crossing over, he plays Arthur Curry's father Thomas in Aquaman.
Born December 26, 1961 — Tahnee Welch, 60. Yes, the daughter of that actress. She's in both Cocoon films, as well in Sleeping Beauty which was filmed at the same time. Black Light and Johnny 2.0 in which she's in might qualify as genre in the way some horror does. She stopped acting twenty years ago.
Born December 26, 1970 — Danielle Cormack, 51. If it's fantasy and it was produced in New Zealand, she's might have been in it. She was in Xena and Hercules as Ephiny on a recurring role, Hercules again as Lady Marie DeValle, in Jack of All Trades, one of Kage Baker's favorite series because, well, Bruce Campbell was the lead. She was Raina in a recurring role, and Samsara on Xena in another one-off and Margaret Sparrow in Perfect Creature, an alternate universe horror film.
(9) LEGO BEATS INFLATION. "Those Legos under the tree might be worth more than gold one day" – so long as you don't take them out and play with them. NPR tells why.
Researchers from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow found that select unopened Lego sets on the secondary market saw an average annual return of 11% — that's higher than gold and shares of some large companies….
(10) HAPPY BOXING DAY. This gift was under somebody's tree in the Sixties.
(11) NOW YOU KNOW. There are some interesting background stories to seasonal music: "How a French Atheist and an American Abolitionist Ended Up Creating a Christmas Classic" at Yahoo!
…For example, did you know the guy who wrote 1857's "Jingle Bells," James Pierpont, despite being from a well-known family of Boston-based Unitarian abolitionists, grew up to become an ardent secessionist and Confederate soldier—and that the first live performance of "Jingle Bells" may have been by a white performer in blackface? (Also, Pierpont's nephew was J.P. Morgan, so he's also kinda-sorta to blame for your checking late fees.) Contrast that guy with Ohio's Benjamin Hanby, also the offspring of abolitionists, who was active alongside his family in the Underground Railroad, and who penned "Up on the Housetop" in 1864….
(12) DEATH AND TAXIDERMY. Somewhere here in Los Angeles County is Bigfoot Lodge.
Bigfoot Lodge Billows With Mountainous Roadhouse Comforts That Remind You Of A Simpler Time And Place. Truly, A Retreat Chock-Full Of Fireside Pleasures Like Heavy Drinking, Bingo, Trivia, Live Music, And More. Bigfoot Lodge Has Poured For Its Community And Partied Like It's 1999 Since 1999. It Invites City-Dwellers To Snuggle Up Next To Bigfoot, Smokey The Bear, Other Charming, Yet Sometimes Frightening Taxidermy, And Of Course, Their Favorite Bartender. Bigfoot Lodge Is Always Smiling.
A post shared by Bigfoot Lodge (@bigfootlodge)
[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Olav Rokne, Steven H Silver, Rich Lynch, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
Posted in Pixel Scroll	| Tagged Bigfoot, Doris Piserchia, J.R.R. Tolkien, James Webb Space Telescope, José Pablo Iriarte, Lego, Scott Edelman, The Expanse	| 27 Replies
Pixel Scroll 12/10/21 That's No Moon – It's A Harsh Scrollstress
(1) FOR US, THE LIVING. The announcement that Cowboy Bebop won't get a second season prompted Ryan Proffer to start a "Save the live action cowboy bebop" petition at Change.org.
"For those people who want a second (or more) of the live action cowboy bebop. It wasn't a direct copy of the anime but the world they put together was amazing and deserve a second season."
It had almost reached its goal of a thousand signatures when checked this afternoon.
(2) ANALOG AWARD FOR EMERGING BLACK VOICES. Kedrick Brown's story is the winner of the inaugural Analog Award for Emerging Black Voices reports Locus Online. The award was announced yesterday during the Sixth Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium. The other finalists were Yazeed Dezele, Erika Hardison, and Jermaine Martin. (Locus did not report the story titles.)
The winning story will be purchased and published in Analog, and the author receives one year of monthly mentorship sessions. The finalists receive one mentorship session with Analog editors including a critique of their submission and a chance to ask questions about the field.
The members of the judging panel for 2021 were Steven Barnes, Nisi Shawl, Kim-Mei Kirtland, Trevor Quachri, and Emily Hockaday.
(3) CITY TECH SF SYMPOSIUM. Gillian Polack, who spoke at yesterday's Symposium, presents an expanded version of her paper, "The Problem of Susan Australia, or, The Tyranny of Distance" in this video.
(4) SECOND FIFTH. John O'Neill analyzes "The Controversy over Nebula Awards Showcase 55, edited by Catherynne M. Valente" at Black Gate.
I'm hearing grousing about the latest Nebula Awards Showcase, edited by the distinguished Catherynne M. Valente.
This is the 55th volume in the long-running series, and the second to be published directly by SFWA, the Science Fiction Writers of America. As is customary, it contains the complete Nebula award-winning stories, as selected by that august body, as well as a tasty selection of the other nominees, as selected at the whim of the editor.
Well — not exactly. And that seems to be the crux of the problem. For the first time I can remember, the Nebula Awards Showcase contains only one of the winners from last year, A. T. Greenblatt's short story "Give the Family My Love," originally published in Clarkesworld. All the others — including the winners in novelette, novella, and novel category — are represented only by brief excerpts….
(5) AFROFUTURISM. At the SFWA Blog, Maurice Broaddus says adults "notoriously underestimate middle school students" and talks about "writing stories more through the lens of Black joy rather than Black trauma" in "Black Joy and Afrofuturism for Young Readers".
…One way to define Afrofuturism is that it centers joy and hope. Black joy is the tenacity and audacity of Black culture. It exists outside and indifferent to the gaze of dominant culture. It recalls that Black people had life, history, and culture before, during, and outside of the dominant culture's racial caste system. It basks in the beauty of what it means to be a people and a culture.
It is Black art that centers ourselves, who we are, who we could be, enjoying that totality without guilt….
(6) STATE LAWS TO AID LIBRARY ACCESS TO EBOOKS TARGETED BY PUBLISHERS GROUP SUIT. "AAP Sues to Block Maryland, New York Library E-book Laws" reports Publishers Weekly.
The Association of American Publishers filed suit December 9 to stop a new library e-book law in Maryland from taking effect on January 1, claiming that the law, which would require publishers who offer to license e-books to consumers in the state to also offer to license the works to libraries on "reasonable" terms, is unconstitutional and runs afoul of federal copyright law…
The Association of American Publishes explained the reasons for their suit in a statement on their website:
…"Maryland does not have the constitutional authority to create a shadow copyright act or to manipulate the value of intellectual property interests," commented Maria A. Pallante, President and CEO of the Association of American Publishers and former head of the United States Copyright Office. "It is unambiguous that the U.S. Copyright Act governs the disposition of literary works in commerce—and for that matter, all creative works of authorship. We take this encroachment very seriously, as the threat that it is to a viable, independent publishing industry in the United States and to a borderless copyright economy."
The complaint, filed in federal court in Maryland, argues that the Maryland law is preempted by the United States Copyright Act, unconstitutionally interferes with interstate commerce, and violates the Constitution's Due Process clause by mandating vague and unspecified licensing requirements….
(7) WALKING THE RED CARPETS OF MIDDLE-EARTH. Twenty years sure went by fast! Polygon says "The Lord of the Rings cast premiere photos are priceless 2001 nostalgia". They're really good photos in any event.
…The hype was already real by the time promotion for The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring ramped up. In April 2000, the internet-exclusive trailer for Fellowship was downloaded from Apple Trailers 1.7 million times in its first 24 hours, breaking a record set by Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace. (Compare that, though, to the present-day record: Spider-Man: No Way Home's first trailer, released in August and viewed 355.5 million times in the first 24 hours.) But by May 2001, the time had come to reassemble the fellowship … for many, many, many step-and-repeat red carpet opportunities.
Photographic evidence of the high-stakes press gauntlet for Fellowship suggests that Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, Sean Bean, Orlando Bloom, John Rhys-Davies, and Liv Tyler (bringing some much-needed femininity to the red carpet bro-out) had a decent time flying around the world to preach the blockbuster word…
(8) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to eavesdrop on a mid-'70s Marvel Bullpen reunion with Bob Budiansky in episode 160 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.
This episode's guest, Bob Budiansky, is a old Marvel Bullpen pal… When I was working at mid-'70s Marvel Comics and decided I no longer wanted to edit their line of British reprint books, I got yet another SUNY Buffalo student and newspaper coworker, Jay Boyar, to take my place, and then when he moved on, he recommended Bob. And that serendipity is how his 20-year career at Marvel Comics was born.
Bob's led a multifaceted comics career as a writer, artist, and editor. He's written (among other things) The Avengers and all 33 issues of Sleepwalker, a character he co-created, plus most of Marvel's run of The Transformers, for which he came up with the names of most of the original Transformers, including Megatron. In fact, his contributions to that franchise were so great that in 2010 he was inducted into the Transformers Hall of Fame.
…We discussed the vast differences between the hoops we each had to jump through to get hired back then, why the Skrulls were responsible for him liking DC better than Marvel as an early comics fan, the serendipitous day he attended a wedding and learned the origin of the Golden Age Green Lantern from its creator, why he stopped reading comics in high school … and how Conan the Barbarian got him started again, which Marvel Bullpen staffer saw his art portfolio and suggested he consider a different career, what it was like to witness the creation of Captain Britain, how got his first regular gig drawing covers for Ghost Rider, his five-year relationship developing 250 Transformers characters for Hasbro, and much more.
(9) EATING ONLY SOME OF THE FANTASTIC. The Offing posted G.G. Russey's grimm but grotesquely funny "Hansel & Gretel: The Fully-Restored Vegan Version".
… After three days of wandering, the hungry children came upon a gingerbread house mortared with frosting. Hansel rushed over to take a bite.
"Stop, Hansel! You can't just eat a stranger's house! It could contain animal products!"…
(10) TWO-PART HARMONY. Now on Fanac.org's YouTube channel: Wrong Turns on the Wallaby Track: Australian SF Fandom 1936-60, Leigh Edmonds, Perry Middlemiss in 2 parts.
In this delightful Fan History Zoom (Dec 2021), historian Leigh Edmonds provides both context and details of Australian Science Fiction Fandom in the early days. Beginning with an introduction to Australian history of the period by Perry Middlemiss, the session entertainingly describes the important fans, and clubs from the beginnings in Sydney with a Science Fiction League branch, to the Futurian Society of Sydney and the Thursday night group. Leigh provides both entertaining and instructive insights, from the parallels to US fannish history, to the Australian group whose "main form of entertainment was feuding", and the impact on science fiction readers of the Australian wartime embargo on the import of unnecessary items. He discusses the uniquely Australian barriers to becoming a professional writer in the field, the banning of Weird Tales on moral grounds and more….
Leigh Edmonds is an Australian historian, and honorary research fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre in Australian History (CRCAH) at Federation University in Ballarat, Australia. He is also a very long term science fiction fan. Perry Middlemiss is a fanwriter and editor as well as a former Worldcon chair.
Note: To begin Leigh had technical difficulties for the first 10 minutes so his portion begins after an excellent, but slightly long, introduction by Perry Middlemiss.
(11) CHRIS ACHILLEOS (1947-2021). Artist Chris Achilleos died December 6. His work has appeared in Heavy Metal, on book covers including series based on Conan the Barbarian, Doctor Who and Star Trek, as well as collections of his own work. Collections of his art include Amazona, Sirens, and Beauty and the Beast. Since 1990 he has mostly worked in designing fantasy trading cards as well as selling prints and original works of art.
2003 — [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Eighteen years ago, Big Fish premiered. It was directed by Tim Burton from the screenplay by John August which he did off of Daniel Wallace's Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions. The cast is, if I must say so myself, amazing: Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange, Helena Bonham, Carter Alison Lohman, Robert Guillaume, Marion Cotillard, Steve Buscemi and Danny DeVito. Did critics like it? Generally quite so. ReelThoughts said of it, "Big Fish is a clever, smart fantasy that targets the child inside every adult without insulting the intelligence of either." The box office was modest at best, making just under one hundred twenty-five million against seventy million in production costs not counting marketing. Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a most excellent rating of ninety percent.
Born December 10, 1815 — Ada Lovelace. Lovelace was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron and his wife Lady Byron. She was an English mathematician and writer, principally known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Genre usage includes Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine, Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers and Crowley's Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land. (Died 1852.)
Born December 10, 1903 — Mary Norton. Author of The Borrowers which won the 1952 Carnegie Medal from the UK's Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals recognizing the novel as the year's outstanding children's book by a British author. She would continue to write these novels for three decades. Hallmark turned one into a film in the early Seventies. Her novels The Magic Bed Knob; or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons which was nominated for a Retro Hugo at Dublin 2019, and Bonfires and Broomsticks would be adapted into the Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks in the same period. (Died 1992.)
Born December 10, 1927 — Anthony Coburn. Australian writer and producer who spent most of his career living and working in the U.K. He was closely involved in the earliest days of Who to the extent that it's believed it was his idea for the Doctor's travelling companion, Susan, to be The Doctor's granddaughter. He wrote four scripts for the show, of which Only An Unearthly Child was used. His never produced "The Masters of Luxor" Who script was released by Big Finish Productions as adapted by Nigel Robinson. Titan Books has previously released it as a novel. (Died 1977.)
Born December 10, 1928 — John Colicos. You'll remember him as being the first Klingon ever seen on Trek, Commander Kor in the "Errand of Mercy" episode. (He'd reprise that role as the 140-year-old Kor in three episodes of Deep Space Nine.) He'll next show up as Count Baltar in the original Battlestar Galactica continuity throughout the series and film. He'll even show up as the governor of Umakran in the Starlost episode "The Goddess Calabra". He also played three roles on the original Mission: Impossible. (Died 2000.)
Born December 10, 1946 — Douglas Kenney. He co-founded National Lampoon in 1970 along with Henry Beard and Robert Hoffman. With Beard alone in 1969, he wrote Bored of the Rings. Kenney died after falling from a 35-foot cliff called the Hanapepe Lookout in Hawaii. It was ruled accidental. Chris Miller, co-writer of Animal House with him and Harold Ramis, paid homage to him by naming the main character in Multiplicity Doug Kinney, a variation on his name. (Died 1980.)
Born December 10, 1953 — Janny Wurts, 68. Illustrator and writer. She's won three Chesley Awards, plus a HOMer Award for her Servant of the Empire novel. I strongly recommend the Empire trilogy that she co-authored with Raymond E. Feist, and her excellent That Way Lies Camelot collection was nominated for a BFA.
Born December 10, 1960 — Kenneth Branagh, 61. Branagh's better genre work includes his roles as Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Gilderoy Lockhart in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. As a Director, I'm only seeing Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Thor — anyone know of anything else genre related? Is Hercule Poirot genre adjacent? I think so.
Born December 10, 1984 — Helen Oyeyemi, 37. I like it when a birthday results in my adding to my audiobook listening list. She's resident in Prague now and her take on European folktales that surround her there is particularly sharp in Mr. Fox, which was nominated for an Otherwise Award, off that well known tale. And White is for Witching has all the makings of a damn fine haunted house story. Now one should not overlook her Icarus Girl, her first novel, which is fascinating. I've not encountered Gingerbread, her latest novel.
Yes, science fiction and crime fiction can be combined: The Far Side.
@AdamSacks explains NFTs:
If I gave this neon colors and drew Frodo holding a bong, could I get rich selling it as an NFT? pic.twitter.com/j08BGNBOkq
— Adam Sacks (@AdamSacks) October 18, 2021
(15) WHAT IF? SPINOFF. Captain Carter, recently featured in Marvel Studios' What If, will report for duty in her very own comic series this March. Jamie McKelvie will write the series and design the character's brand-new look. McKelvie will be joined by rising star artist Marika Cresta, known for her recent work on Star Wars: Doctor Aphra.
The five-issue limited series introduces Captain Carter in an adventure that will find Peggy Carter as a woman out of time, facing the reappearance of an old foe in modern day and deciding what she stands for as the wielder of the shield.
A reality where Agent Peggy Carter took the Super-Soldier Serum instead of Steve Rogers is turned upside down when the World War II hero is pulled from the ice where she was lost in action decades before. Peggy struggles to find her footing in a modern world that's gotten a lot more complicated – cities are louder, technology is smarter and enemies wear friendly faces. Everyone with an agenda wants Captain Carter on their side, but what does Peggy want? And will she have time to figure it out when mysterious forces are already gunning for her?
(16) VOLUNTEER FOR DISCON III. Here is another reason to become a virtual volunteer for next week's Worldcon.
12+ hours of virtual volunteering gets you an unpublished novel by me in addition to a free virtual pass to the convention!
Worldcon is less than a week away – don't forget to sign up. https://t.co/gZcFv21QOM
— Mary Robinette Kowal@? (@MaryRobinette) December 9, 2021
(17) CARBON-BASED UNITS. The Guardian's Daniel Aldana Cohen hopes Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Ministry for the Future, has the answer: "How will humanity endure the climate crisis? I asked an acclaimed sci-fi writer".
…The first lesson of his books is obvious: climate is the story. Compared with the magnitude of the crisis, this year's United Nations climate summit, Cop26, was a poorly planned pool party where half the guests were sweating in jeans, having forgotten their swimming suits. If you're reading this, you probably know what climate science portends – and that nothing discussed in Glasgow was within rocket range of adequate. What Ministry and other Robinson books do is make us slow down the apocalyptic highlight reel, letting the story play in human time for years, decades, centuries. The screen doesn't fade to black; instead we watch people keep dying, and coping, and struggling to shape a future – often gloriously.
I spoke to Robinson recently for an episode of the podcast The Dig. He told me that he wants leftists to set aside their differences, and put a "time stamp on [their] political view" that recognizes how urgent things are. Looking back from 2050 leaves little room for abstract idealism. Progressives need to form "a united front," he told me. "It's an all-hands-on-deck situation; species are going extinct and biomes are dying. The catastrophes are here and now, so we need to make political coalitions."…
… Robinson's elegant solution, as rendered in Ministry, is carbon quantitative easing. The idea is that central banks invent a new currency; to earn the carbon coins, institutions must show that they're sucking excess carbon down from the sky….
(18) JEOPARDY! Andrew Porter witnessed tonight's Jeopardy! contestants overlooking the author of Frankenstein.
Final Jeopardy: 19th Century British Authors.
Answer: She called herself "the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity" in an introduction to one of her novels.
Wrong questions: Who is George Elliot? and Who is Emily Bronte?
Correct question: Who is Mary Shelley?
(19) ENTERPRISING ARTIST. [Item by Ben Bird Person.] Artist Alain Gruetter did this piece based on Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-2005) featuring the Xindi-Aquatics and Xindi-Insectoids from their third season (2003-2004).
Xindi Insectoids from star trek enterprise… a recent commission. pic.twitter.com/xSzY7ghQHb
— Bagboss (@Alaingruetter) December 10, 2021
(20) IT WILL TAKE MORE THAN A BELL. Wings now, but pixels in the future. More than a dozen people, including William Shatner, are being awarded their astronaut wings by the US government, however, they may be among the last. "First on CNN: The US gives Bezos, Branson and Shatner their astronaut wings" at CNN.
…The Federal Aviation Administration will […] award Commercial Space Astronaut Wings to […] eight people who flew on Blue Origin's New Shepherd spacecraft, three who flew on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, and to the four members of the SpaceX crew who spent three days in space in September, CNN has learned.
But the space tourism industry shouldn't get used to this generous allocation of wings from the federal government. In a twist, the FAA has decided to end the entire Commercial Space Astronaut Wings program on January 1. After that, the FAA will simply list the names of everyone who flies above the 50-mile threshold, the US-recognized boundary of space, on a website….
(21) STICKY SUBJECT. CBR presents an extended look at Spider-Man and Doc Ock's first fight from No Way Home.
Much to Peter Parker's confusion, Otto Octavius appears on an overpass bridge and demands to know what has happened to his machine. When Peter doesn't have any answers, Doctor Octopus begins throwing cars, endangering the lives of the civilians nearby.
(22) SECOND SERVING OF HEDGEHOG. Could Jim Carrey's mustache here be the phoniest of all time?
(23) HALO THE SERIES. This first-look trailer for Halo was shown during The Game Awards last night. Halo the series will be streaming in 2022 on Paramount+.
Dramatizing an epic 26th-century conflict between humanity and an alien threat known as the Covenant, Halo the series will weave deeply drawn personal stories with action, adventure and a richly imagined vision of the future.
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Mike Kayinsky, Ben Bird Person, Lise Andreasen, Jennifer Hawthorne, Chris Barkley, Jeffrey Smith, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna), part of "The Hugo Pixel Scroll Winners" series.]
Posted in Pixel Scroll	| Tagged Afrofuturism, Alain Gruetter, Analog Award for Emerging Black Voices, Bob Budiansky, Catherynne M. Valente, Chris Achilleos, City Tech Science Fiction Symposium, Cowboy Bebop, DisCon III, Fanac.org, Gillian Polack, Jeopardy!, John O'Neill, Kim Stanley Robinson, Leigh Edmonds, Lord of the Rings, Mary Robinette Kowal, Maurice Broaddus, Nebula Awards, Perry Middlemiss, Scott Edelman, Spider-Man, William Shatner	| 21 Replies
Pixel Scroll 11/26/21 Tinker, Tailor, Pixel, Scroll
(1) WILL YOU GIVE THANKS FOR COMIC-CON? Did you know San Diego Comic-Con Special Edition is happening this weekend? It was news to me, too. And tickets are still available. The Times of San Diego tells what this streamlined version will be like: "Virus-Safe, Stripped-Down Comic-Con Opens Friday After 2-Year COVID Hiatus".
Superheroes won't be the only ones wearing masks in downtown San Diego this weekend.
After a two-year absence, Comic-Con International returns to San Diego on Friday to entertain, inform and tantalize pop culture fans the world over.
But this won't be the Comic-Con you remember. This is Comic-Con Special Edition, a stripped-down, three-day event being held over a holiday weekend to limit crowds during an ongoing pandemic that has forced online-only versions of the last two conventions.
Comic-Con organizers said they wanted to hold an in-person event but do it safely. So, that meant fewer days, smaller scope and a return to the intimate gathering that longtime attendees fondly remember.
And it means attendees will be asked to show proof of vaccination or recent negative COVID-19 tests. They will also have to wear masks or face coverings regardless of vaccination status….
(2) SQUID GAME CONSEQUENCES. "North Korean sentenced to death after students caught watching Squid Game" according to Radio Free Asia, a United States government-funded private non-profit news service.
North Korea has sentenced to death a man who smuggled and sold copies of the Netflix series "Squid Game" after authorities caught seven high school students watching the Korean-language global hit show, sources in the country told RFA.
The smuggler is said to have brought a copy of Squid Game into North Korea back from China and sold USB flash drives containing the series. Sources said his sentence would be carried out by firing squad.
A student who bought a drive received a life sentence, while six others who watched the show have been sentenced to five years hard labor, and teachers and school administrators have been fired and face banishment to work in remote mines or themselves, the sources said.
RFA reported last week that copies of the violent drama had arrived in the reclusive country despite the best efforts of authorities to keep out foreign media. They began spreading among the people on flash drives and SD cards.
… "This all started last week when a high school student secretly bought a USB flash drive containing the South Korean drama Squid Game and watched it with one of his best friends in class," a source in law enforcement in North Hamgyong province told RFA's Korean Service Monday.
"The friend told several other students, who became interested, and they shared the flash drive with them. They were caught by the censors in 109 Sangmu, who had received a tipoff," said the source, referring to the government strike force that specializes in catching illegal video watchers, known officially as Surveillance Bureau Group 109.
The arrest of the seven students marks the first time that the government is applying the newly passed law on the "Elimination of Reactionary Thought and Culture," in a case involving minors, according to the source….
(3) SMOFCON PROGRAM AVAILABLE TO MEMBERS. SMOFcon Europe (December 3-5 in Lisboa, Portugal) has announced their program schedule. They say one must be a member to access program — purchase memberships here.
We are thrilled to announce our programme schedule and workshop sign ups are now available on our website at https://www.smofconeurope.com/whats-on/programme/! The programme grid shows not only time zones but whether items are in person or streaming. Also on this page are the descriptions of our Workshops and links to sign up for them. Workshop space is limited and requires advance signup so don't delay!
You'll need to be a member to access programme, so if you still need one you can purchase your membership here: https://www.smofconeurope.com/membership/
(4) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to pig out on Peruvian with Lawrence M. Schoen in episode 159 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.
Lawrence M. Schoen
Lawrence M. Schoen was a finalist for the 2007 Astounding Award for Best New Writer, and in the years since has been nominated for the Hugo Award (once), the Washington Science Fiction Association Small Press Award (twice), and the Nebula Award (six times). He's twice won the Cóyotl award for Best Novel — for two books in his critically acclaimed Barsk series: The Elephants Graveyard (2015) and The Moons of Barsk (2018). He also was the 2016 winner of the Kevin O'Donnell Jr. Service to SFWA Award.
His most well-known creations are the space-faring stage hypnotist, the Amazing Conroy, and his alien animal traveling companion, a buffalito named Reggie who can eat anything — which he then converts into oxygen via … flatulence. For more than 10 years, he's hosted the Eating Authors series, which has shared the most memorable meals of more than 500 writers. In addition to all that, he founded the Klingon Language Institute, plus is a hypnotherapist specializing in authors' issues.
We discussed how he was able to release 12 books in a difficult year affected by both a pandemic and chemo, the pseudonym he was relieved he never had to use, what caused him to say "you find the answers to the problems of your life by writing a story about it," the RPG improv which led to the creation of his Barsk universe, what he learned at the Taos Toolbox workshop which caused him to completely rewrite one of his books, the all-important power of the subconscious, how transcription software affected his style, why he doesn't want people to read the final paragraph of his second Barsk novel, his relationships with the indie side of publishing, the many joys of mentoring, how he uses hypnotism to help other writers, and much more.
(5) JACKSON'S BEATLES DOCUMENTARY. I'm going to yank this item right out of the Scroll as soon as I confirm it has no genre connection. So far, all I've located in respect to genre is reporters mentioning that Peter Jackson previously directed Lord of the Rings before working on this Beatles documentary. For example, look at this San Diego Union-Tribune headline: "The Beatles meet 'The Lord of the Rings' in 'Get Back': 'It'll blow your mind,' says director Peter Jackson".
Just as The Beatles used their timeless songs in the 1960s to take millions of listeners across the universe on a magical musical mystery tour, Oscar-winning "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy director Peter Jackson has taken millions of viewers worldwide on a magical cinematic mystery tour in this century.
So what happens when these two worlds and creative forces intersect, 51 years after The Beatles acrimoniously split up in 1970?
"It'll blow your mind!" said Jackson, a lifelong fan of the most famous and influential band in rock 'n' roll history.
And what happens when that unlikely intersection — which has resulted in Jackson's engrossing new film documentary, "The Beatles: Get Back" — comprehensively chronicles the month of January 1969?
… Jackson culled "Get Back" from nearly 60 hours of previously unseen footage that was shot in January 1969 for director Michael Lindsay-Hogg's briefly released and widely criticized "Let It Be" documentary.
Steven Colbert also had the director on The Late Show and made a point of saying this would be the only interview he ever did with Jackson that didn't mention Lord of the Rings. Well, except to say he wasn't mentioning it. "'We Shed Tears That Night' – Peter Jackson And Stephen Wept Watching Footage Of The Beatles". Yep, so this Scroll item might end up failing the Obligatory SF Reference requirement. Read fast.
In part one of this multi-part interview, Stephen welcomes Sir Peter Jackson and sets the stage for their in-depth discussion of Jackson's work directing the incredible Disney+ documentary, "The Beatles: Get Back," which is set to change the public's perception of the relationship between John, Paul, George and Ringo in their final years as bandmates.
But wait! Steven H Silver says, "During the first episode of The Beatles Get Back, there is a section about 1:29 in where George is describing watching the Into the Unknown adaptation of Robert Sheckley's Immortality, Inc on the BBC." Okay, we're covered!
(6) IMAGINE THAT. At Stone Soup, Sarah Gailey's "Building Beyond" is an ongoing series of conversations about how much fun worldbuilding can be. In the latest installment — "Building Beyond: Unfathomable Depths" – Gailey is joined by Suzanne Walker, Hunter Ford, and Natalie Zina Walschots to play with the prompt —
A deep sea diving expedition finds a long-abandoned dome.
(7) TO AFFORDABLY GO AND WATCH. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Amazon Prime Video is (currently) offering (to Amazon Prime members, in case that doesn't go without saying) Paramount+ (Star Trek shows, etc) (and some other channels) for $0.99/month for up to two months.
(8) WILLIS AND HOPKINSON ON LOA LIVE. The Library of America's "LOA Live" will have a video session about American Christmas Stories on December 15 featuring editor Connie Willis and novelist Nalo Hopkinson. It looks like registration to create an LOA account is required for the live Zoom event, however, afterwards the video will be posted to the Library of America's YouTube channel.
American Christmas Stories
Acclaimed bestselling SF and fantasy writer Connie Willis, editor of the just-released American Christmas Stories, joins LOA LIVE for a merrily unconventional yuletide conversation about the uniquely American literature inspired by this most magical time of the year. With Jamaican-born speculative novelist Nalo Hopkinson, who contributes a story to the collection, and historian Penne Restad (Christmas in America: A History.)
Registration link TK
(9) MEMORY LANE.
1865 — One hundred fifty-six years ago, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (commonly referred to as Alice in Wonderland) was first published by Macmillan in London. It was the first work of Lewis Carroll, the alias of pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. It had illustrations by John Tenniel.
The text blocks of the first printed edition were removed from the binding and sold with Dodgson's permission to the New York publishing house of D. Appleton & Company, after Tenniel objected to the quality of the illustrations. So this was actually the second printed edition. The entire print run sold out quickly. It has a sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. It has been continuously in-print including writer Martin Gardner's exemplary The Annotated Alice.
I count at least fifty video riffs off of it so far including of course Star Trek's "Shore Leave" with the white rabbit and Alice. A number of genre works have riffed off it as well including Otherland by Tad Williams, The Looking Glass Wars, and its sequel, Seeing Redd by Frank Beddor, Automated Alice by Jeff Noon and After Alice by Gregory Maguire.
Born November 26, 1897 — Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison, Baroness Mitchison, CBE (née Haldane). Author of many historical novels with genre trappings such as The Corn King and the Spring Queen and The Bull Calves but also new wave SF such as Memoirs of a Spacewoman, pure fantasy Graeme and the Dragon and an Arthurian novel in Chapel Perilous. (Died 1999.)
Born November 26, 1910 — Cyril Cusack. Fireman Captain Beatty on the classic version of Fahrenheit 451. He's Mr. Charrington, the shopkeeper in Nineteen Eighty-four, and several roles on Tales of the Unexpected rounds out his genre acting. Well, and what looks like an absolutely awful Tam-Lin… (Died 1993.)
Born November 26, 1919 — Frederik Pohl. Writer, editor, and fan who was active for more seventy-five years from his first published work, the 1937 poem "Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna" to his final novel All the Lives He Led. That he was great and that he was honored for being great is beyond doubt — If I'm counting correctly, he won three Hugos and three Nebula Awards for his fiction, three Hugos as Best Professional Editor, and one as Best Fan Writer (2010). His 1979 novel Jem, Pohl won a U.S. National Book Award in the one-off category Science Fiction. SWFA made him its 12th recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in 1993 and he was inducted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1998. Ok setting aside Awards which are frelling impressive, there's the matter of him editing Astonishing Stories, Galaxy Science Fiction and Galaxy Science Fiction UK, If, Star Science Fiction Magazine (which I've never heard of), Super Science Stories which were a companion to Astonishing Stories and well let's just say the list goes on. I'm sure I've not listed something that y'all like here. As writer, he was amazing. My favorite was the Heechee series though I confess some novels were far better than others. Gateway won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the 1978 Locus Award for Best Novel, the 1977 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the two John W. Campbell Memorial Awards for Best Science Fiction Novel. Very impressive. Man Plus I think is phenomenal, the sequel less so. Your opinion of course will no doubt vary. The Space Merchants co-written with Cyril M. Kornbluth in 1952 is, I think, damn fun. He wrote a lot of short fiction, some I think brilliant and some not but that was true of most SF writers of the time. (Died 2013.)
Born November 26, 1936 — Shusei Nagaoka. Artist and Illustrator from Japan who is best known for his music album cover art in the 1970s and 1980s. He designed covers for many of Earth, Wind and Fire's albums, and many of his covers were very distinctively SFFnal; especially notable are Out of the Blue by Electric Light Orchestra, and When We Rock, We Rock, and When We Roll, We Roll by Deep Purple. His art also graced numerous genre books, including Tepper's After Long Silence, Attanasio's The Last Legends of Earth, and Reed's Down the Bright Way. He helped to design the 1970 Osaka World's Fair Expo, and had one of the first artworks launched into outer space and attained orbit, via the Russian Mir Space Station, in 1991. He won a Seiun Award for Best Artist in 1982. (Died 2015.)
Born November 26, 1945 — Daniel Davis, 76. I'm singling him out for Birthday Honors for his two excellent appearances as Professor Moriarty on Next Gen. He has one-offs on MacGyver, Gotham and Elementary. He played The Judge in The Prestige film. He also voiced several characters on the animated Men in Black series.
Born November 26, 1949 — Victoria Poyser-Lisi, 72. Artist, Illustrator, Teacher, and Fan who was inspired at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention to become a genre artist. She did more than a hundred covers and interior illustrations for fanzines, magazines, and books, and won two Best Fan Artist Hugos, one at Denvention Two and the next at Chicon IV. She now works in collaborative children's book illustration and instructional painting books, and teaches drawing and painting courses in Colorado.
Born November 26, 1961 — Steve Macdonald, 60. A fan and longtime pro filker ever since he first went to a filk con in 1992. In 2001, he went on a "WorlDream" tour, attending every filk con in the world held that year. He's now resident in Germany where he moved to marry fellow filker Kerstin (Katy) Droge. He was inducted into the Filk Hall of Fame in 2006.
Born November 26, 1988 — Ben Bird Person, 33. A Filer who writes "silly" Wikipedia articles and commissions art of his cat Snow. As DoctorWho042 is in the top 2000 on the list of Wikipedians by number of edits.
Born November 26, 1988 — Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, 33. He played Gregor "The Mountain" Clegane on the Game of Thrones for five seasons. That's it for his genre acting, but he co-founded Icelandic Mountain Vodka whose primary product is a seven-time distilled Icelandic vodka. Surely something Filers can appreciate! At the first Philadelphia Ren Faire he appeared as King Thor, the leader of a Viking raiding party.
Heathcliff – Is this Asimov's next law of robotics?
xkcd confronts the challenge bookstores face in sorting fiction from nonfiction.
(12) BEWARE SPOILERS. And I mean it this time! BEWARE SPOILERS. Vanity Fair's "Ghostbusters: Afterlife—The Day Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Ernie Hudson Reunited" is one big spoiler about the actors' return as Venkman, Stantz, and Zeddemore, and how they handled the loss of Harold Ramis and Egon Spengler. NO EXCERPT!!
(13) OCTOTHORPE. John Coxon, Alison Scott, and guest Marguerite Smith are live from Novacon 50! We discuss DisCon III, Glasgow in 2024, and Dublin in 2029 before diving into actual science fiction and live letters of comment. Listen here: "A Fistful of Dongles".
Below, Sue Mason illustrates guest Marguerite Smith and not-a-guest Meg MacDonald from the Glasgow in 2024 bid.
(14) OPEN SESAME. Street Gang, an HBO original documentary about the most impactful children's program in television history, Sesame Street, premieres December 13 on HBO Max.
(15) USE YOUR IMAGINATION. "Santas are in short supply, which leads to intriguing alternatives" reports the Washington Post.
…"Across the board I've seen an uptick in number of requests, but once I'm full, I'm full," says Doug Eberhardt, a Santa based in Charlotte. "I've got 92 gigs booked between now and Christmas."
HireSanta, an agency for Santas and Mrs. Clauses, has been turning down requests for weeks.
"Hundreds of people a day have been reaching out to us," founder Mitch Allen says. "We always sell out on weekends, but normally it's after Thanksgiving." This year, his Santas were all fully committed for every weekend by the first week of November.
… Perhaps the shortage is an opportunity to rethink what makes a Santa "believable." For most of the past century, that has meant a St. Nick who is chubby, white-bearded, old, and usually Caucasian. Maybe a gap in the marketplace will open up opportunities for Santas who don't fit the mainstream mold: Black Santas. Deaf Santas. Spanish-speaking Santas. Connaghan is trying to develop a talent pipeline through an initiative called Santa Bootcamp, sponsored by Old Navy, which recruits Santas with diverse backgrounds. Because there are so few of these Santas — only 5 percent of Santas identify as non-White by industry estimates — they are even harder to find this year than usual, says HireSanta's Allen….
(16) ALBUM BASED ON DARK STAR. "Phenomenology is a concept album of sorts, the central protagonist Talby was the lead character of the 1974 cult sci-fi film Dark Star by John Carpenter and the album depicts a metaphorical journey into the unknown where one has no choice but to face one's fears, a hero's journey indeed." — Phenomenology at Bandcamp.
(17) LOADED CHIPS. "First quantum computer to pack 100 qubits enters crowded race" – Nature has the story.
But IBM's latest quantum chip and its competitors face a long path towards making the machines useful.
IBM's newest quantum-computing chip, revealed on 15 November, established a milestone of sorts: it packs in 127 quantum bits (qubits), making it the first such device to reach 3 digits. But the achievement is only one step in an aggressive agenda boosted by billions of dollars in investments across the industry.
The 'Eagle' chip is a step towards IBM's goal of creating a 433-qubit quantum processor next year, followed by one with 1,121 qubits, named Condor, by 2023. Such targets echo those that for decades the electronics industry has set itself for miniaturizing silicon chips, says Jerry Chow, head of IBM's experimental quantum-computing group.
(18) HOW HARD CAN IT BE? Nature discusses "How to make macroscale non-crystalline diamonds". A diamond shatters easily, despite it being the hardest natural material. Atomically disordered forms of diamond made from buckyballs might not only overcome this problem, but also allow other properties to be optimized.
The brilliant facets of diamonds have entranced people throughout history and are a result of the ordered atomic structure of these gemstones. But this order comes at a cost: it makes diamonds fragile. In contrast to quartz and many other crystalline materials that produce atomically disordered forms, a disordered — and potentially less fragile — form of diamond has not been available. Writing in Nature, Shang et al. and Tang et al. report how to produce atomically disordered diamond-like materials with millimetre-scale dimensions, constituting a breakthrough for materials science.
(19) THREESCORE AND TEN. Phil Nichols' talk "Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man at Seventy", given during ArtsFest Online, can now be viewed on YouTube.
Ray Bradbury's book The Illustrated Man – a short story collection very loosely woven together with a fantastical framing narrative – is now seventy years old, and yet it remains a greatly influential work. Dealing with ideas around virtual reality, civil rights, the end of the world, and body art, it has managed to sustain a resonance through to the twenty-first century, despite its 1950s trappings. Individual stories from the collection have been adapted for film, television, radio and stage on multiple occasions, confirming Bradbury's position as one of the most significant writers of science fiction even as the author tried to escape from the "ghetto" of genre fiction. In this illustrated talk, Dr Phil Nichols will show how Bradbury's short-story collection both defines and confines the author.
[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Steven French, Dann, Daniel Dern, Steven H Silver, John Coxon, SF Concatenation's Jonathan Cowie, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]
Posted in Pixel Scroll	| Tagged Alison Scott, Connie Willis, Ghostbusters, Glasgow in 2024, John Coxon, Lawrence Schoen, Marguerite Smith, Nalo Hopkinson, Octothorpe, Peter Jackson, Phil Nichols, Ray Bradbury, San Diego Comic-Con, Sarah Gailey, Scott Edelman, Smofcon, Stephen Colbert, The Illustrated Man	| 38 Replies
Pixel Scroll 11/12/21 She Scrolls In Pixels Like The Flight, Of Rocketships In Starry Skies
(1) PLANE CRASH CLAIMS BLUE ORIGIN TRAVELER. Just last month he was part of the foursome with William Shatner who rode Blue Origin to the edge of space: "Blue Origin astronaut Glen de Vries dies in plane crash" reports CNN.
One of Blue Origin's newest astronauts, 49-year-old Glen de Vries, survived a ride to space in October alongside actor William Shatner. But less than a month later, he was killed in a small plane crash on Thursday in New Jersey.
…De Vries never disclosed how much he paid for a seat on the New Shepherd spacecraft. But whatever the amount was, after returning to Earth, de Vries told CNN it was worth it.
"We are devastated to hear of the sudden passing of Glen de Vries," a spokesperson for Blue Origin said. "He brought so much life and energy to the entire Blue Origin team and to his fellow crewmates. His passion for aviation, his charitable work, and his dedication to his craft will long be revered and admired."
Also on last month's flight was Chris Boshuizen, a co-founder of satellite company Planet Labs, and Audrey Powers, Blue Origin's vice president of mission and flight operations.
(2) LITERARY ARTS EMERGENCY FUND. Applicants can apply for funds administered by the American Academy of Poets, National Book Foundation, and Community of Literary Magazines and Presses until January 6, 2022: see the Literary Arts Emergency Fund Submission Manager.
Literary arts organizations and publishers* AND
Incorporated nonprofits with 501(c)3 status OR a fiscal agent AND
Based in the United States, U.S. territories, or Tribal lands
*Because recent financial losses experienced by nonprofit literary arts organizations and publishers have been substantial and emergency relief is limited, libraries, museums, book arts organizations, humanities councils, centers for the book, residencies, playwriting organizations, author's homes, and organizations devoted to championing the legacy of an individual writer are ineligible.
(3) COME EXPERIENCE NONVIRTUAL REALITY. "Iceland Skewers Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse With New Tourism Ad" – Gizmodo sets the frame for this wonderful send-up:
Iceland released a new tourism ad on Thursday, poking fun at Facebook's (sorry, Meta's) recent promises for how we're all going to live in the future. But Iceland's version of Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want to sell you on visiting the sci-fi dystopia that we were all warned about for decades. No, Iceland just wants you to see its geysers and stuff.
… Iceland is desperate to get tourists back into the country, with tourism accounting for almost 9% of the nation's GDP before the pandemic and employing roughly 30,000 people. But covid-19 obviously put the brakes on tourists visiting its scenic vistas—though Iceland is looking to lure those people back with clever ads.
(4) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to Take a break for baklava with Suzanne Palmer in episode 158 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.
Suzanne Palmer
…Ay last month's Capclave in Rockville, Maryland. I was able to harvest two con conversations for you there, something I haven't been able to do in far too long — the first, this episode's lunch at Mykonos Grill with Suzanne Palmer.
Suzanne Palmer is a multi-award-winning science fiction writer. Her novelette "The Secret Life of Bots" won a Hugo Award in 2018, as well as the Washington Science Fiction Association Small Press Award, plus her story "Waterlines" won the 2020 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. She's published three novels with DAW Books about an interstellar repo man — her debut novel Finder in 2019, followed by Driving the Deep (2020) and The Scavenger Door (2021).
Her love of narrative science fiction extends beyond the written word, for when she was obtaining her Bachelors degree of Fine Arts in sculpture from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, her thesis exhibition consisted of an entire museum of artifacts from a fictional world, including clothing, coins, furniture, manuscripts — and an 8? tall horned creature covered with fur. I found that part of her background, unknown to me until I started preparing for my conversation, fascinating, since as longtime listeners know from my interview with the team at Submersive Productions in Episode 86, I love immersive theater.
We discussed her recurrent dreams of accidentally impaling someone with her Hugo Award trophy during the ceremony, the Ray Bradbury story she copied out of a library book by hand word for word as a child, the differences between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (and why some readers have difficulties with the latter), the way a friend's urgings she do NaNoWriMo caused her to take her writing more seriously, the spark that gave birth to her interstellar repo man Fergus Ferguson, how the pandemic affected the writing of her latest novel, and much more.
(5) ON THE MOVE. A new quarterly magazine of speculative fiction by immigrant and diaspora writers has produced its third issue. Click here.
We are dedicated to diversity and elevating the voices of immigrant and diaspora authors.
We publish fiction, genre non-fiction, and art; our stories include fantasy, sci-fi, horror, and any genre in between or around it — as long as there's a speculative element. We're especially interested in writing and art that explores migration. Examples include themes of immigration, diaspora, and anti-colonialism, as well as more metaphorical interpretations of the term.
Any act of migration, whether voluntary or forced, requires a recalibration of self-identity. We are defined, after all, by the environment that surrounds us: people, language, food, smell, sound. To change any one of them may be disorienting; to change them may leave us adrift. What better medium to explore this sensation than speculative fiction, where the author must create a new world for the reader to inhabit?
(6) GAINING MOMENTUM. Fusion Fragment was relaunched in March 2020 as a semi-pro SF market. Issue #8 is already here, and issue #9 is coming soon.
The publisher tweeted about #9: "Also did I imagine that this is the biggest issue ever? And also that it has a new layout? And also that it has a new short fiction review column? I'm super excited and gonna start proofreading immediately to get this issue out to everyone soon!"
(7) BAYMAX! The trailer for a Disney Plus series in the Big Hero 6 universe dropped today.
1961 — Fifty years ago at Seacon with the Toastmaster being Harlan Ellison, Poul Anderson wins the first of what eventually will be seven Hugos, for "The Longest Voyage." It was first published in Analog Science Fact -> Fiction in the November 1960 edition. The other nominated works that year were Pauline Ashwell's "The Lost Kafoozalum", Philip José Farmer's "Open to Me, My Sister" and Theodore Sturgeon''s "Need". It's in The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson, Volume Two: The Queen of Air and Darkness that NESFA published.
Born November 12, 1917 — Dahlov Ipcar. Though primarily an artist and you really should go visit her website, she wrote three amazing young adult novels between 1969 and 1978 which are The Warlock of Night, The Queen of Spells and A Dark Horn Blowing. She lived but thirty miles north of here and I was privileged to meet her a few times. Lovely lady! (Died 2017.)
Born November 12, 1922 — Kim Hunter. She portrayed the chimpanzee Zira in the Planet of the Apes films For the first three outings. Her first genre roles was her first film role as Mary Gibson in the early Forties, The Seventh Victim. She's June in A Matter of Life and Death, and Amanda Hollins in The Kindred. She has one-offs on Project U.F.O., Night Gallery, Mission Impossible and even appeared on The Evil Touch, an Australian horror anthology series. (Died 2002.)
Born November 12, 1929 — Michael Ende. German author best known for The Neverending Story which is far better than the film which only covers part of the novel. Momo, or the strange story of the time-thieves is a charming if strange novel worth your time. The rest of his children's literature has been translated from German into English mostly by small specialist presses down the years. Unlike The Neverending Story and Momo which I've delightfully encountered, I've not read any of these. (Died 1995.)
Born November 12, 1943 — Wallace Shawn, 78. Probably best remembered as the ferengi Grand Nagus Zek on Deep Space Nine, a role he only played seven times. He was also Vizzini in the beloved Princess Bride, and he played Dr. Elliott Coleye in the My Favorite Martian film. He also was the voice of Rex in the Toy Story franchise.
Born November 12, 1945 — Michael Bishop, 75. David Pringle included his Who Made Stevie Crye? novel in Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels, An English-Language Selection, 1946-1987, high praise indeed. Though it feels slightly dated now, I'm fond of his Urban Nucleus of Atlanta series. And Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas is simply amazing. He's nominated for far too many Hugos to recount here. His major Award is a Nebula for his No Enemy but Time novel.
Born November 12, 1952 — Max Grodenchik, 69. He's best known for his role as Rom, a recurring character on Deep Space Nine. He has a long genre history with appearances in The Rocketeer, Here Come The Munsters, Rumpelstiltskin, Star Trek: Insurrection (scenes as a Trill were deleted, alas), Tales from The Crypt, Sliders, Wienerland, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Bruce Almighty.
Born November 12, 1982 — Anne Hathaway, 39. She starred as Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises, the final installment in The Dark Knight trilogy. More impressive she was The White Queen In Alice Through the Looking Glass, and she was Agent 99 in the remake of Get Smart! No, not as good as the original but fun nonetheless.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal "Norms": The times they are a'changing? Yes? No?
(11) BOOZE WITH A VIEW. Untapped New York takes you to the "7 Best Bars in NYC Where a Drink Is Served with a Work of Art". Only one or two are in the genre of fantastic art, still, it's a very interesting article.
7. Marie's Crisis
Located at 59 Grove Street, Marie's Crisis is housed in an 1839 building. Its name is derived from Thomas Paine's essay, The American Crisis, since Paine died on the site in 1809, and from Romany Marie, who was the proprietor of several tearooms in Greenwich Village at the turn of the century. Today, Marie's Crisis is a piano bar where a showtune is never far away and was a former haunt of Eugene O'Neill and Edward VIII. The ambiance is aided by a WPA mural, whose origins are unknown. The mural behind the bar depicts the French and American revolutions and another mural entitled La Convention depicts Robespeirre, Danton, and Paine.
(12) SECOND WORLDSHAPERS ANTHOLOGY. Edward Willett's Shapers of World Volume II, a sequel to last year's Shapers of Worlds, was released November 2, featuring new stories from Kelley Armstrong, Marie Brennan, Garth Nix, Candas Jane Dorsey, Jeremy Szal, Edward Willett, Bryan Thomas Schmidt, Lisa Foiles, Susan Forest, Matthew Hughes, Heli Kennedy, Helen Dale, Adria Laycraft, Edward Savio, Lisa Kessler, Ira Nayman, James Alan Gardner, and Tim Pratt, plus reprints from Jeffrey A. Carver, David D. Levine, Carrie Vaughn, Nancy Kress, Barbara Hambly, and S.M. Stirling. Both books were Kickstarted, with each raising approximately $16,000 CDN in pledges. The book is available from Shadowpaw Press and other retailers.
All of the authors were guests during the second year of Willett's Aurora Award-winning podcast, The Worldshapers.
Willett is himself an award-winning author of more than sixty books of fantasy, science fiction, and non-fiction for readers of all ages, including eleven novels for New York's DAW Books. His twelfth novel for DAW, the humorous space opera The Tangled Stars, will be out in 2022.
(13) IT IS THE END MY FRIEND. The Guardian profiles a band that draws on sff as one of its inspirations: "Placebo: 'It's not the end of the world. It's just the end of the human species'".
… While writing the album, Molko returned to the sci-fi films he had loved as a child – psychedelic ruminations on technology and power from the 1970s, such as Fantastic Planet and Silent Running. "I'm very interested in creating, with each song, an alternative universe where the laws of physics don't necessarily apply," he says. "Each song really does exist in its little parallel universe. If we're not tied down to the laws of physics that are generally accepted in the universe we see, then certainly emotion will follow. Certainly anything is possible in another reality. It allows me to speak freely about what bothers me. I try to exaggerate things to increase dramatic effect, to highlight how ridiculous our reality is."…
(14) INGENUITY INDEED. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] It's Summer on Mars where the Ingenuity helicopter is, and this is an issue. The atmosphere is significantly thinner in the Martian Summer's relative warmth, which cuts down on the lift the rotors can generate.
Not wanting to give in to the mere fact of trying to operate a helicopter remotely in conditions it was never designed to accommodate, NASA engineers used a little ingenuity of their own.
By sharply upping the rotors' RPM, then remotely diagnosing a problem with the flight control motors, NASA took Ingenuity for a short test hop then a longer checkout flight. This sets the scene to resume using Ingenuity to scout locations for the Perseverance rover. Ars Technica reassures us that "NASA's stalwart Mars helicopter is back and better than ever".
…Cumulatively, Ingenuity has now flown more than 3 km across the surface of Mars—more than five times farther than NASA had hoped to demonstrate with this technology. It's safe to say that flying on other worlds, with atmospheres, will be more than just a passing fad for future exploratory missions. Rather, it likely represents the future.
(15) INTELLIGENT LIFE – ON EARTH? [Item by SF Concatenation's Jonathan Cowie.] Nature reports on papers that show "Mysterious 'alien beacon' was false alarm" — "Radio signal seemed to originate from the star Proxima Centauri, and provided a helpful drill for future searches."
A radio signal detected by an Australian telescope in 2019, which seemed to be coming from the star closest to the Sun, was not from aliens, researchers report today in two papers in Nature Astronomy [here and here];
"It is human-made radio interference from some technology, probably on the surface of the Earth," says Sofia Sheikh, an astronomer at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, and a co-author of both papers.
But the disturbance, detected by Breakthrough Listen — an ambitious and privately funded US$100-million effort in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) — looked intriguing enough at first that it sent astronomers on a nearly year-long quest to understand its origins. It was the first time that data from Breakthrough Listen triggered a detailed search, and the experience puts scientists in a better position to study future candidate detections.
"It's really valuable for us to have these dry runs," says Jason Wright, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. "We need these candidate signals so we can learn how we will deal with them — how to prove they are extraterrestrial or human-made."
Mysterious blips
Since 2016, Breakthrough Listen has used telescopes around the world to listen for possible broadcasts from alien civilizations. The programme has picked up millions of radio blips of unknown origin, nearly all of which could be swiftly classified as coming from radio interference on Earth, from sources such as mobile-phone towers or aircraft radar.
The 2019 signal was different. It was detected by the 64-metre Parkes Murriyang radio telescope in southeastern Australia and came from the direction of Proxima Centauri — the nearest star to the Sun, just 1.3 parsecs (4.2 light years) away. Proxima Centauri is of intense interest to SETI researchers, not just because it is nearby. The star has at least two planets, one of which orbits at the right distance for liquid water to be present on its surface — a prerequisite for life as it exists on Earth…
…"The Universe gives us a haystack," says Ravi Kopparapu, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "It is our need to find the needle in it, and make sure that it is actually a needle that we found."…
(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In Ryan George's "James Bond: Skyfall" on Screen Rant, Bond gets shot, falls off a high bridge, and his semi-conscious body plunges down a giant waterfall. But why didn't he die? We don't know, but there's a cool opening song by Adele to cover up the handwaving!
[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Lise Andreasen, Scott Edelman, SF Concatenation's Jonathan Cowie, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]
Posted in Pixel Scroll	| Tagged Blue Origin, Edward Willett, Fusion Fragment, Glen de Vries, Ingenuity, Mars, Mars Exploration Rovers, Perseverance, Poul Anderson, Scott Edelman, Suzanne Palmer	| 22 Replies
Pixel Scroll 10/29/21 On The Screen My Pixel Files, Streaming, Scrolled And Read
Posted on October 29, 2021 by Mike Glyer
(1) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to feast on kabobs with E. Lily Yu in episode 157 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.
E. Lily Yu
[Because Readercon went virtual] the award-winning E. Lily Yu and I each ordered kabob from local restaurants, and nibbled our take-out remotely as I questioned her about how she spins magic out of her words.
E. Lily Yu won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer in 2012. Her short story "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" was published in Clarkesworld in 2011, and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story and the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction, Uncanny, Apex, Lightspeed, and many other venues. Her work has been reprinted in twelve best-of-the-year anthologies, including The Year's Best Science Fiction, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, The Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her first novel, On Fragile Waves, was published in February by Erewhon Books.
We discussed why she was glad that when she first came up with the idea for her novel On Fragile Waves she had no idea how long it would take to complete, what she learned through each successive draft of the novel before she was satisfied, why it can be exhausting to see people as they are rather than as you want them to be, the effort required to make the effortful appears effortless, the reasons rejection can be a blessing (especially during the early part of your career), what she learned reading slush for Fantasy magazine, how writing interactive video games helped her write better short stories, and much more.
(2) MONEY TO BURN. GQ invites fans "Inside 'Wheel of Time,' Amazon's Huge Gamble on the Next 'Game of Thrones'", where each episode has a $10M budget.
… The town's inn, an intricately rendered two-story building, is now blackened, its left side plunged into spiky rubble: Smoke machines give the impression that it is still smoldering. There are holes in roofs, artfully destroyed beams. Every house—interior and exterior—has been charred enough so that it shows on camera. The actors who wander the Two Rivers are made up to match. Rosamund Pike, who starred in Gone Girl, is smudged with soot….
…It's November 2019, and the production—comprising hundreds of, and on some days nearly a thousand, people—is filming the end of the first episode of what everyone hopes will be a television show that runs for, well: six seasons? Eight? A show that will be as epic and sensational and ubiquitous as Game of Thrones once was. On one side of the green, a camera sits on a long dolly track; another camera operator stalks the scene, taking various close-ups. The episode's veteran television director, Uta Briesewitz, is arranging four of the show's main cast of relatively unknown young actors in a moment of reckoning: Pike's character, a woman with mysterious powers, has arrived to awaken them and set them on their way. "Your life isn't going to be what you thought," Pike intones, as various cameras circle her. Pike runs through her speech, which is heavy with exposition for both the characters and the audience, a few times. "Can I do one more?" she asks Briesewitz, while apologizing to the extras scattered about. "I think that one got a bit phony."
Finally, Briesewitz calls "cut." Pike retreats from the weather into a nearby tent. "It's not like working with David Fincher," she says to me, referring to the Gone Girl director's penchant for shooting 70 takes of a scene. The production is huge and moving at warp speed. Pike has to know things backward and forward. She has to get her lines out as dozens of crew members and background actors get soaked in the cold rain and actual living horses wander around while makeup women with transparent plastic bags dart in and out to touch up extras and guys with smoke canisters paddle mist into the edges of shots. This set they're on—not just a few hollow façades set up to create the impression of reality, but real buildings, in every direction—is giant, immersive, and won't last past this episode….
(3) SPACE FOR EVERYONE. UCSD's article "Making Space Travel Inclusive for All" reports on the initial zero-gravity flight of disabled volunteers.
In a weightless, microgravity environment like space, what do ability and disability look like? How can someone with partial sight or impaired mobility navigate in a confined space like the space station? As scientists and innovators continue to push the boundaries of spaceflight and the possibility of human life on other planets, how can we build space infrastructure that is inclusive of all humans?
The Mission: AstroAccess project aims to answer these questions, starting with a historic parabolic flight that took off from Long Beach on Oct. 17, 2021. A group of 12 disabled scientists, veterans, students, athletes and artists launched into a zero-gravity environment as a first step toward understanding what is needed to make space inclusive for all.… The 12 AstroAccess Ambassadors selected for this first microgravity flight included four blind or low-vision Ambassadors; two deaf or hard-of-hearing Ambassadors; and six Ambassadors with mobility disabilities, all carrying out a variety of tasks and challenges in the weightless environment. One of the challenges was seeing whether all crew members could perform basic safety and operational tasks, like navigating to oxygen masks. The crew also tested a procedure to see whether sound beacons can be used for blind members to orient themselves, and the effectiveness of haptic devices in communicating commands. They're also investigating how American Sign Language will be impacted by microgravity….
(4) NASA ANALYSIS. University of Arizona English professor Christopher Cokinos calls for artists to work with NASA to celebrate spaceflight. "Engineering the arts for space: developing the concept of 'mission laureates'" at The Space Review.
…In the coming months, I hope to address more aspects of a vigorous, wide, multidisciplinary arts/space effort, including a call for all-artist analogue missions. (I've even submitted, and received an enthusiastic reply, for just such a mission proposal to an analogue facility being developed at Biosphere 2.) But here I want to concentrate on one specific suggestion for increased systematic arts engagement in space activities: mission laureates.
Mission laureates
The term "laureate," of course, refers to someone who receives an honor, deriving from the ancient Greek tradition of placing a laurel wreath on the head of the honoree. The laurel tree was sacred to the god Apollo, patron deity of poets. In more recent history, countries such as Great Britain and the United States have had offices of poet laureates, a tradition that has spread to states, cities, and towns. The poets are asked to engage the public by presenting outward-facing work for non-literary audiences.
Here I want to argue for a new kind of laureate, one attached not to a region but to a mission, specifically missions to space. In brief, mission laureates would create work inspired by missions—robotic and crewed—for wider public engagement.
I am not calling for art that is propaganda—a danger with laureates in the past—but, rather, work that provides new and exciting perspectives that can link a mission to wider currents in human affairs. It's likely that artists interested in this opportunity will be pro-space but they surely will bring the nuance and complexity that we all need in confronting the paradoxes, promises, and perils of the human endeavor in space….
(5) THEY TOOK A SHINE TO IT. This product is cleaning up in the marketplace: "Apple's Most Back-Ordered New Product Is Not What You Expect" says the New York Times. "It's a $19 cloth."
…Charging $19 for a piece of cloth about the size of two stacked dollar bills is bold even by Apple's standards, a company whose legions of loyal customers are conditioned to stomach steep prices. An Apple-branded set of four wheels to "improve mobility" for the Mac Pro, the company's most expensive desktop computer, is priced at $699, for instance.
But the Polishing Cloth stands out because it is far more expensive than widely available alternatives. MagicFiber, a popular brand of microfiber cloth that uses ultrafine fibers to clean glass without scratching the surface, offers a pack of six for $9 on Amazon.
"You have to give them credit for the chutzpah to charge $19," Walter Gonzalez, president and founder of Goja, the parent company of MagicFiber, said of Apple….
(6) SJW CREDENTIAL OWNERS ALERT. New York Review of Books is marketing On Cats with a Margaret Atwood introduction.
In 2019, Notting Hill Editions published an anthology about canines, On Dogs. Now on its tail comes a companion edition for ailurophiles, On Cats, which includes an introduction by Margaret Atwood and more than two dozen essays, stories, and excerpts about the peculiar, sometimes affectionate, and often fickle character of our feline friends.
(7) FINE-GRAINED SIMULATION. A meteorologist and some climate modelers decided to find out if Frank Herbert's imagined world was plausible, and for a change were not party poopers: "The climate on the Dune world of Arrakis, simulated" in Popular Science. The accompanying graphics are stellar.
Dune, the epic series of sci-fi books by Frank Herbert, now turned into a movie of the same name, is set in the far future on the desert planet of Arrakis. Herbert outlined a richly-detailed world that, at first glance, seems so real we could imagine ourselves within it.
However, if such a world did exist, what would it actually be like?
We are scientists with specific expertise in climate modelling, so we simulated the climate of Arrakis to find out. We wanted to know if the physics and environment of such a world would stack up against a real climate model.
(9) IMAGINARY FRIENDS. Screen Rant wrote up the "8 Best Fictional Bookstores We Wish Were Real". There were a couple here that were new to me.
…Be it magical stores with books floating from shelf to shelf, comic book stores owned by supernatural beings, or picturesque but ordinary little shops, fictional bookstores like these make fans and viewers wish that they were real….
1993 – Twenty-eight years ago, The Nightmare Before Christmas premiered. It was directed by Henry Selick (in his feature directorial debut), and produced by Denise Di Novi and Tim Burton. The screenplay by Caroline Thompson from the poem by Tim Burton. Yes, poem. Danny Elfman wrote the songs and score, and provided the singing voice of Jack. The principal voice cast also includes Ed Ivory, Chris Sarandon, Catherine O'Hara, William Hickey, Ken Page, Paul Reubens and Glenn Shadix. Critics loved it though the NAACP condemned Oogie Boogie as a racist stereotype. The Box Office was excellent for it as it earned over a hundred million on a budget of eighteen million. And it has a stellar ninety-one percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. It was nominated for a Hugo at ConAdian, the year that Jurassic Park won.
Born October 29, 1906 — Fredric Brown. Author of Martians, Go Home which would made into a movie of the same name. He received compensation and credit from NBC as their Trek episode "Arena" had more than a passing similarity to his novelette which was nominated for Retro Hugo at CoNZealand. Interestingly, a whole lot of his Edgar Award-winning mysteries are being released on the usual suspects in December. (Died 1972.)
Born October 29, 1928 — Benjamin F. Chapman, Jr. He play the Gill-man in the land takes in Creature from the Black Lagoon. Ricou Browning did the water takes. His only other genre appearance was in Jungle Moon Men, a Johnny Weissmuller film. His entire acting career was only eleven years long and had but eight acting credits. (Died 2008.)
Born October 29, 1935 — Shelia Finch, 86. She is best remembered for her stories about the Guild of Xenolinguists which aptly enough are collected in The Guild of Xenolinguists story collection. She first used it her 1986 Triad novel. The term would later be used to describe the character Uhura in the rebooted Trek film. Her Reading the Bones novel, part of the Guild of Xenolinguists series would win a Nebula.
Born October 29, 1938 — Ralph Bakshi, 83. Started as low-level worker at Terrytoons, studio of characters such as Heckle and Jeckle and Mighty Mouse which I adore. His first major break would be on CBS as creative director of Mighty Mouse and the Mighty Heroes. Fast forwarding to Fritz the Cat which may or may not be genre but it's got a foul-mouthed talking cat when should make it genre, yes? Genre wise, I'd say Wizards which features voice work by Mark Hamill and whose final name was Wizards so it wouldn't be confused with you know what film. It was nominated for a Hugo at IguanaCon II when Star Wars won. Next up was The Lord of the Rings, a very odd affair. That was followed by Fire and Ice, a collaboration with Frank Frazetta. Then came what I considered his finest work, the Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures series! Then there's Cool World…
Born October 29, 1947 — Richard Dreyfuss, 74. Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And The Player in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Not to mention the voice of Mister Centipede in the ever so James and the Giant Peach. And yes, he's Hooper in Jaws that we declared was genre sometime back.
Born October 29, 1954 — Kathleen O'Neal Gear, 67. Archaeologist and writer. I highly recommend the three Anasazi Mysteries that she co-wrote with W. Michael Gear. She's a historian of note so she's done a lot of interesting work in that area such as Viking Warrior Women: Did 'Shieldmaidens' like Lagertha Really Exist? And should you decide you want to keep buffalo, she's the expert on doing so. Really. Truly, she is.
Born October 29, 1954 — Paul Di Filippo, 67. Ciphers: a post-Shannon rock-n-roll mystery was his first work. He is, I'd say, an acquired taste. I like him. I'd suggest first reading you don't know him should be The Steampunk Trilogy and go from there. His "A Year in the Linear City" novella was nominated at Torcon 3 for Best Novella, and won the 2003 World Fantasy Award and the 2003 Theodore Sturgeon Award. Oh, and he's one of our stellar reviewers having reviewed at one time or another for Asimov's Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Science Fiction Eye, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Interzone, Nova Express and Science Fiction Weekly.
Born October 29, 1971 — Winona Ryder, 50. Beetlejuice of course but also Edward Scissorhands and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Not to mention Alien Resurrection and Star Trek as Spock's human mother Amanda Grayson. Which brings me to Being John Malkovich which might be the coolest genre film of all time if not the strangest one.
Questionable Content this week has been guest-starring (or would this be a cameo) a familiar, um, figure (all week, so click some "Next"s). Note, QC already has its share of SF-y characters, namely robots and AIs, along with one character's mom living in an orbital space station.
Over in Dustin, the titular teenager and one of the younger kids — presumably (info via Wikipedia) "Hayden, a precocious seven-year-old kid and next-door neighbor," have chosen familiar and we-still-miss-'em Halloween costumes this week.
Sally Forth hints at another reason to wear Halloween costumes.
(13) WONG TAKES ON IRON FIST. Writer Alyssa Wong and artist Michael YG introduce a new Iron Fist to the Marvel Universe on February 16 when a new hero claims the power of K'un-Lun.
Award winning writer Alyssa Wong, known for her outstanding work on Doctor Aphra, will team up with artist Michael YG, an extraordinary artist making his Marvel Comics debut, in Iron Fist. The five-issue limited series will see the legendary mantle of Iron Fist passed on to a new hero in a revolutionary transformation of one of Marvel's most fascinating mystical mythologies.
After giving up his power to save the world earlier this year in IRON FIST: HEART OF THE DRAGON, Danny Rand believes he's seen the last of the Iron Fist. But when demons begin to attack cities around the world, a new hero appears, hands blazing with the Chi of Shou-Lao the Undying! Who is this new Iron Fist? And does his power really come from the Dragon of K'un-Lun… Or from something far more sinister? Fans will have to wait until the first issue to discover his identity but they can see him now on the stunning cover for IRON FIST #1 showcasing a brand-new costume design by superstar artist Jim Cheung!
Here's what Wong had to say this upcoming series:
"It's an incredible honor to introduce a new Iron Fist to the Marvel Universe. I'm excited to delve into the comic's rich mythos and build on it. What does it mean for someone to take up the mantle of the Iron Fist right now, today? As a newcomer, how does one interact with legacy, and how does one honor it while forging a new path?"
(14) THE GAME'S AFOOT. "Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy Rickrolls Players With Rick Astley" at Screen Rant.
A new promotional video for Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy sees various streamers getting "rickrolled," with singer Rick Astley himself joining in on the fun. The recently-released sci-fi superhero title, developed by Eidos-Montreal, seeks to capture the spirit of the team's live-action films while also embracing the characters' comic book roots. Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy's 80's soundtrack helps to inform the backstory of protagonist Star-Lord while also playing a role in combat.
Rickrolling goes cosmic with the man himself @RickAstley
Sorry @DrLupo @PaladinAmber @dantdm ? #GOTGgame #RickRoll pic.twitter.com/7BggmSEnix
— Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy (@GOTGTheGame) October 28, 2021
Hear from the legend himself ?@RickAstley shares his thoughts on having his iconic track Never Gonna Give You Up part of the #GOTGgame soundtrack! pic.twitter.com/Wr46dI74Gl
(15) FOR THE RECORD. The old crew's sign-off strip is followed by the announcement that "Dick Tracy comic strip to have first female lead artist in 90 years".
… The latest artist, Joe Staton along with the entire Dick Tracy team has brought innovation to the Dick Tracy world, incorporating a bevy of crossovers such as The Green Hornet, The Spirit and a villain named the Jumbler, who gives Jumble puzzles as clues to the police.
Now Staton has passed his two-way wrist radio, Detective Tracy's trademark yellow trench coat and fedora over to his long-time Dick Tracy teammate, Shelley Pleger.
For the last 10 years, Pleger has inked and lettered Dick Tracy. Now she takes the helm as the first female lead artist Dick Tracy has ever had….
(16) NOT THE END, MY FRIEND. Netflix dropped this trailer for season 2 of The Witcher today.
(17) SPEAKING OF WITCHES. This Twix commercial has caused major conniptions on the right. RT USA News' overview of the commercial is followed by a roundup of social media reactions: "The Witch & the Wardrobe change: Twix blasted for 'woke' Halloween ad with boy wearing princess dress, but no holiday… or candy". "'New Nanny' is part of a collection of short films created by 18 young filmmakers from various backgrounds, produced by 20th Digital Studio."
A Halloween-themed ad from Twix has critics accusing the candy manufacturer of 'ruining' the holiday with a woke and confusing message on boys wearing dresses that has little to do with the celebration – or the product advertised.
In the 'bite-size Halloween' commercial, a young boy wearing a princess dress is defended from bullies by a witch nanny, who arrives at his house unannounced in a minivan while the child appears to be unattended. The nanny says she was hired by the child's parents and she goes on to casually threaten two children questioning why the boy is dressed up when it's not Halloween. In the last scene of the ad, a boy is making fun of the princess-dress-wearing boy at a park – the synopsis for the ad refers to him as 'non-binary' – and the witch makes him disappear. She says he will "probably" come back….
(18) DEAR DEPARTED. Cat Eldridge recommends the article's photo gallery: "Ben & Jerry's Flavor Graveyard" at Gastro Obscura.
BEN & JERRY MIGHT BE a couple of ice cream tycoons, but they've remained true to their roots. Case in point: the deliciously somber Flavor Graveyard located on the grounds of their factory in Waterbury, Vermont.
Opened in 1997, the memorial to bygone flavors was originally an online-only affair, until a handful of resin headstones were mocked up and planted on a hill behind the factory….
[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Daniel Dern, Chris Barkley, Jennifer Hawthorne, StephenfromOttawa, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]
Posted in Pixel Scroll	| Tagged Alyssa Wong, Apple, Dick Tracy, Dune, E. Lily Yu, Guardians of the Galaxy, Iron Fist, Margaret Atwood, NASA, Scott Edelman, The Witcher, Wheel of Time	| 43 Replies
Pixel Scroll 10/16/21 Escape From Pixel Scroll
(1) SUPERMAN MOTTO CHANGED. The motto associated with Forties radio Superman, and the George Reeves TV show, and sporadically used since then, has been swapped for something else. The Daily Beast has the story: "DC Comics Changes Superman Motto, Swaps 'American Way' With 'Better Tomorrow'". Normally one would say "something new", except this sounds like it was lifted from old GE advertising.
After more than 50 years of upholding "truth, justice, and the American way," Superman is changing his motto.
The superhero will now stand for "truth, justice, and a better tomorrow," DC Comics announced during its DC FanDome event Saturday. In a press release, the company said the motto will "better reflect the global storylines that we are telling across DC."
"Superman has long been a symbol of hope who inspires people from around the world, and it is that optimism and hope that powers him forward with this new mission statement," Jim Lee, the company's publisher and chief creative officer, said….
Hard as it is to believe, alt-right Bounding Into Comics does not yet have a post up about the change.
(2) HOLLYWOOD AGREEMENT AVERTS STRIKE. AP reports "Strike dodged with deal between film and TV crews, studios". Details of the new contracts were not immediately revealed.
An 11th-hour deal was reached Saturday, averting a strike of film and television crews that would have seen some 60,000 behind-the-scenes workers walk off their jobs and would have frozen productions in Hollywood and across the U.S.
After days of marathon negotiations, representatives from the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and from the studios and entertainment companies who employ them reached the three-year contract agreement before a Monday strike deadline, avoiding a serious setback for an industry that had just gotten back to work after long pandemic shutdowns.
Jarryd Gonzales, spokesman for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios and other entertainment companies in negotiations, confirmed the agreement to The Associated Press.
The union's members still must vote to approve the tentative agreement….
(3) THE JURY IS IN. In the "2021 Hugo Short Story Panel of Awesomeness", Hugos There podcaster Seth Heasley is joined by Cora Buhlert, Ivor Watkins, Alan Bailey, Lise Andreasen, Sarah Elkins, JW Wartick, Lori Anderson, Haley Zapal, and Amy Salley to discuss the 2021 nominees for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story. (The podcast version is here.)
(4) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to join the marvelous Sam Maggs for drinks on episode 156 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.
Sam Maggs
This time around, you'll get to eavesdrop on my chat with Sam Maggs, a writer with whom I share an artistic bond, even though we're from entirely different generations of comic book creators.
That's because Sam wrote the adventures of the she/her Captain Marvel in 2019 — 42 years after I wrote about he/him Captain Marvel in 1977. She's also written comics about Jem and the Holograms, Rick & Morty, My Little Pony, Transformers, and Invader Zim. She's published pure prose as well, including her first book The Fangirl's Guide to the Galaxy, and the young adult novel The Unstoppable Wasp: Built on Hope. Her games writing includes Spider-Man: The City that Never Sleeps, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, and many others.
We discussed the Stargate SG-1 convention that was her gateway drug for fandom, why her debut comic book story turned out to be a Star Trek tale, the way the arcs of our careers ran in completely opposite directions, what it was like releasing six books during a pandemic, how The Fangirl's Guide to the Galaxy was born though complete serendipity, the audition that got her the gig to write an Unstoppable Wasp novel, how she dreamed up her pitch for Captain Marvel, and much more.
(5) OFFICE IN THE OBSERVATORY. Brother Guy Consolmagno appears this week in Nature's "Where I work" feature, including a photo of him peering through an antique telescope.
SF Concatenation's Jonathan Cowie sent the link, proud to remember Brother Guy is someone with whom he'd in the past (years ago) appeared with on a Worldcon panel:
Paul McAuley, Jonathan Cowie, Br. Guy Consolmagno
(6) RUN THE NEBULA CONFERENCE. SFWA says "We Need You! SFWA is Hiring a Nebula Conference Manager!". Full guidelines at the link.
The SFWA Nebula CPM would be responsible for all project management activities associated with the annual SFWA Nebula Conference. In 2022, the organization will be offering a hybrid model of the conference, with both an online component and in-person event. The CPM would be leading the entire 2022 Conference, supervising and working closely with the online conference project manager.
(7) NO HOLDING BACK. Tim Kirk shared Harlan Ellison's special coffee recipe in a public post on the Harlan Ellison Facebook Fan Club page.
Back in the 1970s I made numerous trips up to Ellison Wonderland. Harlan had asked me to illustrate "The Last Dangerous Visions," and I spent many Saturdays reading manuscripts in his living room; and I drank many cups of a delicious coffee mixture Harlan had concocted himself: "Cafe' Ellison Diabolique." This recipe was published in Anne McCaffrey's very entertaining collection of recipes by SF and fantasy authors, "Cooking Out of This World" (Ballantine Books 1973). Harlan left out one Mystery Ingredient, which he later revealed to me: Ovaltine. Pictured here is the official Little Orphan Annie Ovaltine Mug that Harlan gave me….
(8) SPEAKEASY. In the Washington Post, Steven Zeitchik says that AI has advanced to the point that instantaneous translation of films is possible leading to a future without dubbing and subtitles. "Every movie and TV show could soon be dubbed into any language you want".
… Traditional dubbing often works like this. A studio or local distributor, having decided it wants a local-language release, pays to translate a script, hire a set of voice actors to play the characters, rent out engineering equipment, put the actors through numerous voice takes, record them and then splice their readings back into the original video — a mighty grapple to achieve a smooth final product. The whole process can take months.
Auto-dubbing can work like this. The original actor records five minutes of random text in their own language. Then the machines take over: A neural network learns the actor's voice, a program digests that vocal information and applies it to a digital translation of the script, then the AI spits out perfectly timed lines from the film in the foreign language and drops them into the action. The whole process could take weeks…
(9) RECLASSIFIED? [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] The first argument I've seen that Dhalgren is a horror novel. Andy Marino in "Under Your Skin: The Horror of the Inexplicable" on CrimeReads.
Consider the moment you wake from a nap into disorientation so pure, the first thing you see when you open your eyes—a lamp, a windowsill—is distorted and unfamiliar. You glitch. Draw a blank.
Imagine a distillation of this perception as an elusive high. I'd argue that the kind of fiction that bottles up this feeling and pours it down your throat is more terrifying than any haunted house, vengeful ghost, or Little Kid Who Sees Things.
That's not to say that the time-honored elements of horror can't be used to great and satisfying effect, or reconfigured into something wholly fresh. I'm not one to mess with the staples that make up so much of the horror I love. But it's the off-kilter portrayal of the mundane, where reality comes unstitched in a vaguely sickening way, that really gets under your fingernails and lays its quivering eggs….
(10) MOUDRY OBIT. Southern fan Joe Moudry died October 15 reports Guy H. Lillian III. Moudry was a member of many amateur press associations (apas) over the years – the Southern Fandom Press Alliance (SFPA, where he once served as Official Editor), PAAPA, the Hyborian Legion, PEAPS, and was a member of the Esoteric Order of Dagon and its Official Editor in 1981.
1950 – Seventy-one years on this day, C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was first published in the United Kingdom by Geoffrey Bles who would publish the first five of this series. It is the first published and best known of seven novels in The Chronicles of Narnia. Among all the author's books, it is also the most widely held in American and British libraries. It would be illustrated by Pauline Baynes who would later do the artwork for some of Tolkien's work. It was extremely popular, despite the fears of the publisher that it wouldn't be, from the moment it was published, and has remained so to this day. The movie of sixteen years vintage also enjoys an equally popular reception with a box office just behind Revenge of the Sith, and audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently giving it an eighty percent rating.
Born October 16, 1854 — Oscar Wilde. Writer, Journalist, Playwright, and Poet from Ireland whose only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, has been translated into more than a dozen languages, made into countless radio plays, musicals, TV films and movies — the 1945 version of which was awarded a Retro Hugo at CoNZealand — and had enduring influence on modern popular culture as an examination of morality. His long list of short fiction credits includes some fairy tales and genre stories, of which the best known is "The Canterville Ghost", which has likewise undergone a copious number of translations and adaptations into various media. (Died 1900.)
Born October 16, 1925 — Dame Angela Brigid Lansbury, 96. She first shows up in a genre work as Sibyl Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray. A few years later, she's Queen Anne of France in The Three Musketeers. Somewhat later, she's Miss Eglantine Price in Bedknobs and Broomsticks. She voices Mommy Fortuna in The Last Unicorn, and is Granny in A Company of Wolves which won the BSFA Award for Best Film and it's based off Angela Carter's A Company of Wolves. And yes she's in Mary Poppins Returns as The Balloon Lady. And I'll toss in the stage production of The King and I where she was Anna Leonowens as that was at least genre adjacent.
Born October 16, 1940 — Barry Corbin, 81. Actor whose face will be familiar from his many character roles — frequently as gruff military officers or crusty eccentrics — including those in genre movies WarGames, My Science Project, Ghost Dad, Race to Space, Dawn of the Crescent Moon, Curdled, Critters 2, and Timequest, which appears to be an uncredited version of Greg Benford's Timescape (which provided the name for the Pocket Books line of science fiction novels helmed by David G. Hartwell in the early 1980s). He narrated Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon, based on the book by Mercury Seven astronaut Alan Shepard.
Born October 16, 1956 — Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, 65. Aside from appearing on Xena: Warrior Princess, Star Trek: Voyager, and Quantum Leap, she's lent her voice acting to The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Naruto, X-Men, and Bleach to name but a few of her roles. She was a Guest of Honor at Anime Expo 2007, Long Beach.
Born October 16, 1963 — Glenn Glazer, 58. Conrunner and Fan who has been on the concoms for many Worldcons and regional conventions, chaired a Smofcon and a Westercon, and was one of three vice-chairs for Sasquan, the 2015 Worldcon. He has been involved in a number of APAs, including SWAPA, Mutations, The Calling, LASFAPA, APA-69, and APA-FNORD.
Born October 16, 1971 — Lawrence Schimel, 50. Writer, Editor, Poet, and Translator. He is a founding member of The Publishing Triangle, an organization promoting fiction by LGBTQ authors and/or with LGBTQ themes, which inform many of his short fiction works. He has edited, mostly in collaboration with Martin H. Greenberg, at least 10 anthologies. His solo anthology, Things Invisible to See, and one of his short fiction collections were both recognized with Lambda Award nominations, and his speculative poetry has garnered a Rhysling Award nomination and a win.
Born October 16, 1917 — Claire Necker. This might be going a little astray from genre birthdays but I think not, given most of us have SJW creds. A librarian by trade, she wrote a number of feline related academic works including The Natural History of Cats, Supernatural Cats: An Anthology which includes writers such as Fritz Lieber and H.P. Lovecraft , Four Centuries of Cat Books and Cat's Got Our Tongue which is are feline cantered proverbs. She unfortunately has not made into the digital realm. (Died 2010.)
Born October 16, 1973 — Eva Röse, 48. Most likely best known for her role as the android Niska in Season 1 of the Swedish Äkta människor (Real Humans) upon which AMC's Humans was based. She also was one of the voice cast for the animated Creepschool series, and was Jasmie on The Befallen, a supernatural series that lasted one season there.
Speed Bump shows a famous monster with a terrible problem.
(14) GACHAPON. "A Tiny Gas Meter? The More Mundane the Better for Japan's Capsule Toys" says the New York Times.
… Isolated in their plastic spheres, the tiny reproductions feel like a metaphor for Covid-era life. On social media, users — as gachapon designers insist on calling their customers — arrange their purchases in wistful tableaus of life outside the bubble, Zen rock gardens for the 21st century. Some have faithfully recreated drab offices, outfitted with whiteboards and paper shredders, others business hotel rooms complete with a pants press.
For Mr. Yamanishi, whose company, Toys Cabin, is based in Shizuoka, not far from Tokyo, success is "not about whether it sells or not."
"You want people to ask themselves, 'Who in the world would buy this?'" he said.
It's a rhetorical question, but in recent years, the answer is young women. They make up more than 70 percent of the market, and have been especially active in promoting the toys on social media, said Katsuhiko Onoo, head of the Japan Gachagacha Association. (Gachagacha is an alternative term for the toys.)…
The products are not particularly profitable for most makers, but they offer designers a creative outlet and find a ready customer base in a country that has always had a taste for whimsy, said Hiroaki Omatsu, who writes a weekly column about the toys for a website run by the Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper.
"Creating gachapon for adults is all about devoting yourself to making something that's worthless," he said. "'This is ridiculous' is the highest form of praise."
(15) TODAY'S TIME TRAVEL FAQ. Courtesy of Keaton Patti.
This is why I always read the FAQs on Amazon. pic.twitter.com/Rt3Oapd2l1
— Keaton Patti (@KeatonPatti) September 23, 2021
I was going to have to revoke the previous joke til I confirmed he wasn't talking about Gene Wolfe in this tweet —
how is this not bigger news?????? pic.twitter.com/8T7bAyfyCg
— Keaton Patti (@KeatonPatti) August 21, 2021
(16) ZERO SUM GAME. Eater reports on how a "Robot Cafe Considers Itself Pro-Worker by Not Hiring Any Workers".
Despite fully automated luxury communism sounding pretty sweet, Western workers have mostly felt haunted the specter of our jobs being taken by robots. Take RC Coffee, Canada's first "robotic cafe," aka an "unattended espresso machine," which is basically a glorified version of whatever spat sludge and foam into a cup for five quarters in your college dorm's lounge. But it is probably aware of that association, and the fear that kiosks like it could actually replace a barista, so it's trying a new tactic; robots as pro-worker….
(17) FESS UP. They'd still like to get it back. "Rock. Paper. Pranksters." At University of Oregon's "Around the O."
OK, mystery pranksters. It's been 43 years since the Great Halloween Meteorite Caper of '78. Your identities have never become widely known. Time to come forward.
Halloween night that year, a group calling itself the Meteorite Cleaning Service staged a distraction at Prince Lucien Campbell Hall. "A strangling man appeared to be hanging from a window of PLC. Campus security went to investigate only to discover the man was in fact a balloon, a shirt, and some pants," student reporter Jock Hatfield wrote in the Oregon Daily Emerald.
While campus security responded to PLC, the pranksters headed to the Museum of Natural History, then located in what is now Pacific Hall. Their target was on display out front: a life-size, plaster-and-chicken-wire replica of the sixth-largest meteorite found on Earth, the Willamette Meteorite or "Tomanowos," as named by the Clackamas people.
The next day, "it was immediately evident the meteorite replica was gone," remembers Alice Parman, then the museum director. Eight hundred pounds of mock rock, 12 feet wide and 6 feet tall, gone, leaving nothing but questions: Why? How? And who?…
(18) CHINA SENDS CREW TO THEIR SPACE STATION. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] "China launches 6-month crewed mission as it cements position as global space power" reports CNN. Crew includes Wang Yaping, first female taikonaut on the station and first scheduled to do a spacewalk.
China launched a three-person crew into space in the early hours of Saturday — a major step for the country's young space program, which is rapidly becoming one of the world's most advanced.
The three astronauts lifted off on the Shenzhou-13 spacecraft just past midnight local time, launched by a Long March 2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert, located in Inner Mongolia.
They will dock at China's new space station, Tiangong (which means Heavenly Palace), six and a half hours after launch. They will live and work at the station for 183 days, or just about six months — the country's longest mission yet….
(19) WOOF, WOOF, BANG, BANG. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] While they look like cousins, don't confuse this robodog with Boston Dynamics' Spot. The much-less-aptly-named canid-like bot Vision 60 is made by Ghost Robotics out of Philly. A version of Vision has been demonstrated carrying a sniper rifle, albeit one that is aimed and fired by a remote operator. Unarmed versions of Vision 60 have been used in military exercises. The article doesn't address whether Ghost Robotics has any customers for the armed version. "Welp, Now We Have Robo-Dogs With Sniper Rifles" at Popular Mechanics.
Science fiction has seeped into science reality this week, as a robotics company showed off its sniper rifle-equipped robo-dog at the Association of the U.S. Army's annual convention in Washington, D.C.
Sure, the quadruped robot might resemble a good boy, but it's packing a built-in sniper rifle capable of engaging targets from three-quarters of a mile away. The service could operate this robotic weapon system remotely. Importantly, it would only engage targets with permission from a human being….
(20) VIDEO OF THE DAY. "Extent" is an sff short film distributed by DUST.
Time stands still as two old friends attempt to grapple with a question that defines their very existence. If you could live forever, would you?
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Rich Lynch, Cora Buhlert, SF Concatenation's Jonathan Cowie, Jeffrey Smith, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Rob Thornton.]
Posted in Pixel Scroll	| Tagged Alan Bailey, Amy Salley, artificial intelligence, Brother Guy Consolmagno, Chronicles of Narnia, Cora Buhlert, gachapon, Haley Zapal, Harlan Ellison, Ivor Watkins, Joe Moudry, Jonathan Cowie, JW Wartick, Lise Andreasen, Lori Anderson, Nebula Conference, robots, Sarah Elkins, Scott Edelman, Seth Heasley, SFF in Translation, SFWA, Superman, taikonaut, Tim Kirk	| 38 Replies
Pixel Scroll 10/1/21 Ask Not For Whom The Pixel Scrolls
Posted on October 1, 2021 by Mike Glyer
(1) WFC 2021 NEWS. World Fantasy Con's new Progress Report is a free download available here.
WFC 2021 in Montreal – taking place November 4-7 — will be a hybrid convention, with both in-person and virtual elements. Virtual memberships are $75(US)/$100(CAD) and can be obtained through the con's registration and memberships page.
Guests of honor Nisi Shawl and John Picacio will not be attending in person but will participate virtually.
WFC 2021 has added Julie Czerneda as a Special Guest.
A communication sent to members also reminds them to adhere to the Canadian (and airline) requirements in respect to COVID vaccination and testing.
Lastly, we want to point out that if you are coming to Montreal from outside Canada, please ensure that you meet all requirements for entry into Canada. This includes being fully vaccinated and having a negative PCR test within 72 hours of the scheduled departure time of your flight to Canada. You can find more information on the Government of Canada website. (Don't forget the other requirements too!) Your airline may have its own requirements.
We are planning on having on-site testing for travellers leaving Canada. The final price (between C$70 and C$90) will depend on the number of tests to be performed. If you are interested in on-site testing during the convention, please send a short email to covid-test@wfc2021.org. Indicate how many people would be taking the test and which day you plan to leave the country. If the antigen test is insufficient, let us know the type required, and we will see if the testing company can handle the request. We will contact interested parties when we have finalized the arrangements.
(2) BEAR MEDICAL UPDATE. Elizabeth Bear made a public post about her cancer surgery at her Throwanotherbearinthecanoe newsletter.
… So that I don't bury the lede too much, I got my pathology report back this afternoon, and I've got clear margins and no signs of metastasis into the lymph nodes. Which is an enormous crying-in-my-tea relief and as soon as I am not on opiates anymore I'm going to have myself a very very fancy glass of Scotch to celebrate….
(3) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to snack on shredded jellyfish with Renée Witterstaetter in episode 155 p his Eating the Fantastic podcast.
Renée Witterstaetter
Come along with me to D.C.'s AwesomeCon for dinner with writer, editor, and colorist Renée Witterstaetter at Chinatown's New Big Wong restaurant.
Witterstaetter started her comics career as an assistant editor at DC Comics working on the Superman books. She later worked at Marvel Comics on Silver Surfer, Conan, Guardians of the Galaxy, and other titles. In addition, she spearheaded the reintroduction of She-Hulk at Marvel, where she actually appeared in the comic!
But she's much more than only comics, as you'll soon learn.
We discussed how Jerry Lewis launched her interest in comics, the way science fiction fandom led to her first job at DC Comics, the differences between the Marvel and DC offices of the '70s and '80s, what made Mark Gruenwald such an amazing editor, her emotional encounter with Steve Ditko, the inflationary info we learned about the writing of letter columns during the '70s and '80s, her work with John Byrne on She-Hulk, how Jurassic Park caused her to leave Marvel, the prank Jackie Chan asked her to help pull on Chris Tucker, and much more.
(4) PASSING OUT. Yahoo! consults an expert – former HWA President Lisa Morton — to find out "Why Do We Pass Out Candy on Halloween?"
…"Up until the 1930s, Halloween was largely the dominion of young male pranksters; candy—in the form of mainly candy corn, tiny sugar pellets, or taffy—might be offered at parties, but it wasn't a particularly important part of the holiday," says Lisa Morton, an author, screenwriter, and Halloween historian. "Then, in the '30s, prank-playing moved out of rural areas and into cities, where it became very destructive and cost millions in damages. Rather than simply ban the holiday altogether (which some cities considered), civic groups came up with the idea of buying kids off with treats, costumes, and parties. It worked, and by 1936 we have the first mention of 'trick-or-treat' in a national magazine."…
(5) CHESLEY NEWS. ASFA members (the only people who can vote) have been notified the 2021 Chesley Award Suggestions List (for 2020 Works) is live. The introduction explains:
This listing constitutes the suggestions of the Chesley Nominating Committee plus suggestions received from the community. This is NOT the final ballot; it is only an example of what the community considers worthy of nominating for the Chesley Awards. These suggestions are provided to show you the kind of information we want from you on your ballot, and to maybe help jog your memory of other worthy works of art you saw in 2020. You are encouraged to look beyond this listing when making your nominations; any works published for the first time in 2020 or if unpublished, displayed for the first time in 2020, are eligible. Check out your local bookstore, gaming shop, or knock yourself out visiting various artist's websites … lots of wonderful art out there. You may make up to five nominations in each category.
(6) I'M YOUR MAN WINS. The winners of the 2021 German film award Lola have been announced. Normally, this is of zero genre interest, but this year's big winner, taking Best Screenplay, Best Director, Best Actress and Best Film is the science fiction romantic comedy I'm Your Man: "Lolas 2021 German Film Awards Winners List" from The Hollywood Reporter.
I'm Your Man, a sci-fi rom-com from director Maria Schrader, featuring Downton Abbey star Dan Stevens as a German-speaking romance robot, has won the Lola in Gold for best film at the 2021 German Film Prize, Germany's top film awards.
Schrader, fresh off her Emmy win (for best directing for a limited series in Netflix's Unorthodox), picked up the best director Lola for I'm Your Man. Schrader and co-screenwriter Jan Schomburg took the best screenplay honor for their I'm Your Man script, an adaptation of a short story by German writer Emma Braslavsky. Maren Eggert, who plays the robot's no-nonsense human love interest, won the best actress Lola for her performance, a role that has already earned her the best actress Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, where I'm Your Man premiered earlier this year….
(7) MAIL CALL. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] Bobby Derie, who's one of those unsung fan writers I wish more people would know, takes a look at the correspondence between C.L. Moore and Robert E. Howard: "Her Letters to Robert E. Howard: Catherine Lucille Moore" at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein.
… Catherine Lucille Moore burst into the pages of Weird Tales with "Shambleau" (Nov 1933). She was a secretary at the Fletcher Trust Company in her native Indianapolis, Indiana, and engaged to a bank teller named Herbert Ernest Lewis. During the Great Depression, jobs were scarce and her $25 a week was needed to support her family; married women were often expected to be homemakers, and this may be why Moore and her fiance had a long engagement—and it is why, when she began to sell her stories to the pulps for extra cash, she used her initials "C. L." so that her employers would not discover she had an extra source of income….
Derie also examined the correspondence and relationship in general between H.P. Lovecraft and his wife Sonia H. Greene: "Her Letters To Lovecraft: Sonia H. Greene".
(8) A SINGULAR SENSATION. The Guardian published an article by Stephen Fry about a non-genre writer popular with some fans: "Stephen Fry on the enduring appeal of Georgette Heyer".
From the absolutely appalling cover art that has defaced her books since she was first published, you would think Georgette Heyer the most gooey, ghastly, cutesy, sentimental and trashy author who ever dared put pen to paper. The surprise in store for you, if you have not encountered her before, is that once you tear off, burn or ignore those disgusting covers you will discover her to be one of the wittiest, most insightful and rewarding prose writers imaginable. Her stories satisfy all the requirements of romantic fiction, but the language she uses, the dialogue, the ironic awareness, the satire and insight – these rise far above the genre….
(9) A CLEVER CANARD. Evelyn C. Leeper drew attention to this W. Somerset Maugham quote in the weekly issue of MT Void:
"After mature consideration I have come to the conclusion that the real reason for the universal applause that comforts the declining years of the author who exceeds the common span of man is that intelligent people after the age of thirty read nothing at all. As they grow older the books they read in their youth are lit with its glamour and with every year that passes they ascribe greater merit to the author that wrote them."
(10) RICHARD CURTIS Q&A. A famous literary figure shares a wealth of knowledge.
Watch & listen to author, playwright, literary agent and former publisher Richard Curtis talk about writing, publishing and many things that will interest writers and the general public. Richard gives tips, advice and a bit of a history of publishing and how it has changed over the years in his conversation with author Rick Bleiweiss.
1950 – Seventy-one years ago, the first issue of Galaxy Science Fiction dated October 1950 was published. It was founded by a French-Italian company, World Editions, who hired as editor H. L. Gold who was both an established SF author and editor since the Thirties having made his first sale to Astounding in 1934. There was fiction by Clifford Simak, Theodore Sturgeon, Katherine MacLean, Issac Asimov, Fredric Brown and Fritz Leiber, as well as lots of reviews, mainly by Groff Conklin, but one each by Fredric Brown and Isaac Asimov as well. Gold contributed several essays too. The 1952 run of the magazine would be get a Hugo for Best Professional Magazine at Philcon II. Gold would later be inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame.
Born October 1, 1930 — Richard Harris. One of the Dumbledores in the Potter film franchise. He also played King Arthur in Camelot, Richard the Lion Hearted in Robin and Marian, Gulliver in Gulliver's Travels, James Parker in Tarzan, the Ape Man and he voiced Opal in Kaena: The Prophecy. His acting in Tarzan, the Ape Man got him a nomination for the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actor. Anyone see that film? It earns a ten percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. (Died 2002.)
Born October 1, 1935 — Dame Julie Andrews, DBE, 86. The original Mary Poppins! I could have stopped there but I won't. (Hee.) She had a scene cut in which was a maid in The Return of the Pink Panther, and she's uncredited as the singing voice of Ainsley Jarvis in The Pink Panther Strikes Again. Yet again she's uncreated as in a Panther film, this time as chairwoman in Trail of the Pink Panther. She voices Queen Lillian in Sherk 2, Shrek the Third and Shrek Forever After. And she's the voice of Karathen in Aquaman.
Born October 1, 1940 — Richard Corben. Comic book artist best remembered for his work in Heavy Metal magazine. His work also appeared in Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella. All the stories and covers he did for Creepy and Eerie have been reprinted by Dark Horse Books in a single volume: Creepy Presents Richard Corben. Corben collaborated with Brian Azzarello on five issues of Azzarello's run on Hellblazer, Hellblazer: Hard Time. (Died 2020.)
Born October 1, 1948 — Mike Ashley, 73. Anthologist, and that is somewhat of an understatement, as the Mammoth Book series by itself ran to thirty volumes including such titles as The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy and The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures. He also did The History of the Science Fiction Magazine which features commentary by him. He's did a number of genre related studies including The History of the Science Fiction Magazine with Robert A. W. Lowndes and Out of This World: Science Fiction But Not As You Know It.
Born October 1, 1950 — Natalia Nogulich, 71. She's best remembered as being on The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine as Vice Admiral/Fleet Admiral Alynna Nechayev. Interestingly, though Serbian, they gave her a Russian surname. She was the voice for Mon Mothma for the radio adaptation of Return of the Jedi. She had one-offs on Dark Skies, Prey, Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and Charmed.
Born October 1, 1953 — John Ridley, 68. Author of Those Who Walk in Darkness and What Fire Cannot Burn novels. Both excellent though high on the violence cringe scale. Extremely high. Writer on the Static Shock and Justice League series. Writer, The Authority: human on the inside graphic novel. And apparently he was the writer for Team Knight Rider, a female version of Knight Rider that lasted but one season in the Nineties. I've never even heard of it until now. In 2021, Ridley began writing a number of series for DC Comics Including a future Batman story.
Born October 1, 1973 — Rachel Manija Brown, 48. Co-writer of the Change series with Sherwood Smith; Laura's Wolf, first volume of the Werewolf Marines series. She wrote an essay entitled "The Golden Age of Fantasy Is Twelve: SF and the Young Adult Novel" which was published in Strange Horizons. She's well stocked at the usual digital suspects.
Born October 1, 1989 — Brie Larson, 32. Captain Marvel in the Marvel film universe including of course the most excellent Captain Marvel which was nominated for a Hugo at CoNZealand. She's also been in Kong: Skull Island as Mason Weaver, and plays Kit in the Unicorn Store which she also directed and produced. Her first genre role was Rachael in the "Into the Fire" episode of the Touched by an Angel series; she also appeared as Krista Eisenburg in the "Slam" episode of Ghost Whisperer. I wrote up a review of her Funko Rock Candy figure at Green Man.
The Argyle Sweater shows what Dracula found at the joke shop.
(14) SUIT SETTLED. Everybody's now "proud" and "pleased", but as one might expect terms of the settlement were not released. "Scarlett Johansson, Disney Lawsuit Settled Over 'Black Widow'" says The Hollywood Reporter.
"I am happy to have resolved our differences with Disney," stated Johansson. "I'm incredibly proud of the work we've done together over the years and have greatly enjoyed my creative relationship with the team. I look forward to continuing our collaboration in years to come."
Disney Studios chairman Alan Bergman added: "I'm very pleased that we have been able to come to a mutual agreement with Scarlett Johansson regarding Black Widow. We appreciate her contributions to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and look forward to working together on a number of upcoming projects, including Disney's Tower of Terror."…
The New York Times adds:
… Ms. Johansson would have made tens of millions of dollars in box office bonuses if "Black Widow" had approached $1 billion in global ticket sales; "Captain Marvel" and "Black Panther" both exceeded that threshold in prepandemic release, so similar turnout for "Black Widow" was not out of the question.
The Wall Street Journal reported this month that Creative Artists had privately asked Disney to pay Ms. Johansson $80 million — on top of her base salary of $20 million — to compensate for lost bonuses. Disney did not respond with a counteroffer, prompting her to sue….
(15) JEOPARDY! While watching last night's Jeopardy!, Andrew Porter's jaw dropped when a contestant came up with this response.
Final Jeopardy: Children's Literature
Answer: A 2000 Library of Congress exhibit called this 1900 work "America's greatest and best-loved homegrown fairytale."
Wrong question: What is "Shrek"?
Right question: What is "The Wizard of Oz"?
(16) JUSTWATCH – SEPTEMBER TOP 10S. Here are the top sff movies and streaming shows of September 2021 according to JustWatch. (Click for larger images.)
(17) WEEKS LATER, THESE ESCAPEES ARE STILL WEARING STRIPES. I'm having trouble thinking of a way to connect this to science fiction, thereby justifying the presence in the Scroll of an item that amuses me. Any suggestions? "A Month Later, Five Zebras Are Still on the Run in Maryland" from the New York Times.
…A month after they escaped from a farm in Maryland, five zebras have evaded capture and are continuing to ramble across the wilds of suburban Prince George's County, eking out a living on territory far from the grasslands of East Africa.
… Daniel I. Rubenstein, a professor of zoology at Princeton University, said he was not surprised that the zebras had proved so elusive.
Unlike domesticated horses that will return to a barn after they've gotten loose, zebras are wild animals and "don't like people generally," he said. And they may not have any need to feed on the grain set out for them as bait, if they can find enough food to munch elsewhere.
If the zebras continue to elude capture, "they should be able to do just fine" in Prince George's County, Dr. Rubinstein said.
The county has plenty of lawns, fields and pastures where the zebras can graze, as well as streams and other places for them to drink water, which they need to do once a day, he said.
And with the dearth of lions in the Greater Washington area, they have no natural predators, he said, adding, "coyotes they can deal with."
While zebras "won't like snow," they may be able to survive colder weather in the fall and winter. Zebras, he said, live on the slopes of Mount Kenya, at 13,000 feet, where temperatures at night dip into the 30s.
"They should be able to thrive quite nicely," Dr. Rubinstein said. "They will be able to sustain themselves naturally on that landscape."…
(18) NOW AT BAT. Possibly too sciency but then many are interested in SARS-CoV-2 source…. "Laos Bats Host Closest Known Relatives Of Virus Behind Covid" in Nature.
Studies show southeast Asia is a hotspot for potentially dangerous viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2. Scientists have found three viruses in bats in Laos that are more similar to SARS-CoV-2 than any known viruses. Researchers say that parts of their genetic code bolster claims that the virus behind COVID-19 has a natural origin — but their discovery also raises fears that there are numerous coronaviruses with the potential to infect people.
(19) CHERNOBYL BACK IN NEWS. This is worrying: Radiation levels are rising around reactor 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which suffered the catastrophic meltdown in 1986: "Chernobyl's Blown Up Reactor 4 Just Woke Up" in History of Yesterday. The article explores several hypothetical explanations why this could happen.
… Scientists from Ukraine have placed many sensors around reactor 4 that constantly monitor the level of radioactivity. Recently those sensors have detected a constant increase in the level of radioactivity. It seems that this radioactivity is coming from an unreachable chamber from underneath reactor 4 that has been blocked since the night of the explosion on the 26th of April, 1986….
(20) TINGLE TALK. Dominic Noble decided to answer the question "Is Chuck Tingle A Good Writer?" and reviewed 25 of Tingle's books.
…A question kept occurring to me over and over again that no one seemed to be addressing. Chuck Tingle is a pretty cool guy. Chuck Tingle is great at titles and covers. But are his books actually any good? Is chuck tingle a good writer? Now I feel the need to immediately qualify this. I am aware that it doesn't matter. His books make people happy even if they've not read them which is quite an achievement. His inclusivity means a lot to people and his general behavior be it amusingly bizarre or the unashamedly progressive matters more in this crazy world we're living in than if he can rock a good three-act structure…
(21) YA COMMENTARY. YouTuber Sarah Z analyzes "The Rise and Fall of Teen Dystopias".
[Thanks to, John King Tarpinian, Michael Toman, Mike Kennedy, Jennifer Hawthorne, SF Concatenation's Jonathan Cowie, Cora Buhlert, Paul Di Filippo, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Cat Eldridge, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cliff, with an assist from OGH.]
Posted in Pixel Scroll	| Tagged ASFA, C. L. Moore, Chernobyl, Chesley Awards, Chuck Tingle, Disney, Dominic Noble, Elizabeth Bear, Evelyn C. Leeper, Galaxy, Georgette Heyer, Halloween, Jeopardy!, John Picacio, Lisa Morton, Lovecraft, Nisi Shawl, Renée Witterstaetter, Richard Curtis, Robert E. Howard, Scarlett Johansson, Scott Edelman, Sonia H. Greene, Stephen Fry, World Fantasy Convention	| 52 Replies
Pixel Scroll 9/17/21 I Want To Scroll What The Pixel On The Table Number 5 Is Scrolling
Posted on September 17, 2021 by Mike Glyer
(1) STATUES OF LIMITATIONS. After much consideration, Constance Grady says overthinking the book was a mistake: "The meditative empathy of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi" at Vox.
…The first time I read Piranesi, I scribbled notes about each statue. The minotaurs by the entrance to the House evoke the myth of the labyrinth, which is what the wicked Laurence Arne-Sayles calls the House. An elephant carrying a castle puns on the famous Elephant and Castle inn in London. A woman carrying a beehive — well, certainly that could be a reference to any number of classical myths, which tend to feature bees as a chthonic symbol for life, death, and the soul.
But early on, Clarke makes a point of aiming her readers away from such mechanical, goal-oriented reading.
Piranesi knows of only one other living human, a man he calls the Other who visits the House every so often. The Other believes that the House contains the key to some secret Knowledge that mankind used to possess but has now lost. Once he gets it back, the Other believes, he'll have the power of flight, immortality, and control over weaker souls.
Piranesi dutifully searches the House for the Knowledge the Other is seeking, but without all that much interest. Eventually, he is struck by an epiphany: The Knowledge, he realizes, is not the point of the House….
(2) LET'S HEAR FROM A PICKER OF LOW-HANGING FRUIT. The Atlantic's Ian Bogost demands to know "Why Are Ebooks So Terrible?"
…If you hate ebooks like I do, that loathing might attach to their dim screens, their wonky typography, their weird pagination, their unnerving ephemerality, or the prison house of a proprietary ecosystem. If you love ebooks, it might be because they are portable, and legible enough, and capable of delivering streams of words, fiction and nonfiction, into your eyes and brain with relative ease. Perhaps you like being able to carry a never-ending stack of books with you wherever you go, without having to actually lug them around. Whether you love or hate ebooks is probably a function of what books mean to you, and why…
(3) FOUNDATION BUILDERS. ComingSoon introduces a short video with quotes from the showrunner David Goyer:"Foundation Featurette: Apple Brings the Sci-Fi Masterpiece to the Screen" –
…The Foundation featurette highlights the massive influence it had on other popular sci-fi stories including Dune and Star Wars. They also talked about the process of finally adapting the novel to the screen after several decades since it was first published. They also went on to tease the series' epic scale in terms of storytelling, ambitious story, characters, and world-building….
(4) HEADLEY'S BEOWULF TRANSLATION WINS AWARD. The Academy of American Poets announced that Maria Dahvana Headley's Beowulf: A New Translation has won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, a $1,000 prize recognizing a published translation of poetry from any language into English that shows literary excellence. Indran Amirthanayagam judged.
(5) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman posted a bonus episode of Eating the Fantastic podcast to let you listen to four comic book cognoscenti celebrate Steve Ditko.
Javier Hernandez, Zack Kruse, Carl Potts, and Arlen Schumer
Last Saturday, something magical happened at the Bottle Works Ethnic Arts Center in Johnstown Pennsylvania — a one-day mini-convention was held to honor a hometown hero, the legendary Steve Ditko. And because the event was organized with the cooperation of his family, I was not only able to spend time with other comic fans and creators, but was privileged with the presence of Ditko's nephews and brother as well.
Since you couldn't be there with me, I decided to get some of the mini-con's special guests to share their stories here about Steve Ditko's life and legacy. Because this is a podcast which uses food to loosen the tongues of its guests, and since there was no time during the short one-day event to head out for lunch or dinner, I brought along a Spider-Man PEZ dispenser so I could offer my guests candy. Plus I ran over to Coney Island Johnstown — in business for more than a century — and picked up some gobs — think of them as a regional variation of whoopee pies — which I handed out to some of my guests before we began chatting.
As I wandered the exhibitors area, I was able to grab time with four guests — Javier Hernandez, Zack Kruse, Carl Potts, and Arlen Schumer — all of whom had taken part earlier that day on a panel about Steve Ditko.
(6) BOOK REVIEW OF VERY OLD RIDDLES. Paywalled at the New York Times, "What Has One Eye and 1,200 Heads? An Old English Riddle, That's What!", reviewing) The Old English And Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition (Harvard University, $35), a comprehensive new collection beautifully edited by the Oxford professor Andy Orchard, demonstrates, everything you need to know about crosswords you can learn from Anglo-Saxon riddles: Riddles are the ür-crossword puzzles.
Daniel Dern sent the link with these notes:
While probably most anybody these days, fan or otherwise, is familiar with the Bilbo/Gollum "Riddle" chapter in THE HOBBIT, ditto more generally with Batman's riddlemanic foe "The Riddler," how many fans instantly flash on (or more to the point, what's the rough age threshhold below which fans don't) the (sf) book citation for "What city has two names twice?"), or simply "Do you like riddles? Raetseln?" [Dutch, spelling here from memory, but that I could look up in my copy of the book if need be ]
Answer (rot13'd)
"Rneguzna, Pbzr Ubzr" — Ibyhzr 3 bs Wnzrf Oyvfu'f PVGVRF VA SYVTUG grgenybtl
That said, the essay/review itself is somewhat dry — it doesn't even offer a sample riddle until at least halfway through. Probably worth at least library-borrowing, though.
(7) FIYAHCON 2021. The online con is in full swing and the committee is making available videos of some of its panels here.
(8) BASEDCON. Rob Kroese's BasedCon starts today.
I'm told it's unheard of for a con to be in the black its first year — and I've been literally giving away tickets to anyone who said they couldn't afford it. The amount of enthusiasm for this kind of event is incredible
— Robert Kroese (@robkroese) September 12, 2021
Well, the cons I'm familiar with, if they hadn't stayed in the black the first year there'd have been no second year. Surprising to hear there's another kind.
(9) EARLY TREKZINES. The Internet Archive includes a "Media Fanzine Collection". Skipping past the intro, I was intrigued to see some of the well-known early Trek fanzines displayed, such as Spockanalia. The cover on the example here boasts "Third Printing." Holy cow – a fanzine with a demand that took multiple editions to satisfy! I blush to admit I still haven't unloaded all the copies of the early mimeo issues of File 770.
The practice of making media print zines began in the late 1960s via science fiction fandom where fanzines had been a popular fan activity since the 1930s. However, the content of science fiction zines is very different, consisting mostly of non-fiction and discussion about a variety of fannish topics, whereas media fanzines include, or consist solely of, fanfiction, art, poetry, as well as discussion, usually about television shows, films, and books.
(10) EMMY BRACKETS. JustWatch.com, the streaming guide, sent along this set of Emmy nominee brackets, based on the audience approval scores their users have given them. Unfortunately, the only genre show that doesn't get its ass kicked is The Underground Railroad. Even a phenomenonally popular show like The Mandalorian can't get out of the first round. It is to weep. [Click for larger image.]
1964– Fifty-seven years ago this evening on ABC, a certain witch charmed her way into American homes as Bewitched first aired. It was created by Sol Saks who had done nothing notable before this and departed the show after the pilot was shot. It starred Elizabeth Montgomery as the good witch Samantha Stephens and two different men as her husband, Dick York for the first five before he became very ill, and Dick Sargent for the final three seasons. It did phenomenally well in the ratings early on but sagged later and eventually was cancelled. Hanna-Barbera produced the opening animation credits which you can see here.
It got remade as a film with Nicole Kidman which was not at all beloved by the audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes who currently give it a twenty five percent rating and it faired quite poorly at the box office, not breaking even. Oh, and there was a Seventies spin-off involving her daughter called Tabitha that had two pilots (the first tested quite badly) and lasted just eleven episodes.
Born September 17, 1885 — George Cleveland. Actor who filmed scenes as Professor Hensley in a pair of Thirties Flash Gordon serials, Flash Gordon and Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (the latter saw his scenes get deleted). He later shows up as in the Drums of Fu Manchu serial as Dr. James Parker. (Died 1957.)
Born September 17, 1908 — John Creasey. English crime and SF writer who wrote well over than six hundred novels using twenty-eight different names. His SF writings were mostly in the Dr. Palfrey series, a British secret service agent named Dr. Stanislaus Alexander Palfrey, who forms Z5, which definitely has elements of SF. (Died 1973.)
Born September 17, 1917 — Art Widner. Editor of three well-known fanzines (Fanfare, Bonfire and YHOS). He'd eventually publish some one hundred sixty zines. He was one of the founding members of The Stranger Club, the pioneers of Boston fandom. He chaired Boskone I and Boskone II, the first two Boston SF conventions. He would be nominated for four Retro Hugos, and become a First Fandom Hall of Fame member. (Died 2015.)
Born September 17, 1920 — Dinah Sheridan. She was Chancellor Flavia in "The Five Doctors", a Doctor Who story that brought together the First, Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth Doctors. Richard Hurndall portrayed the First Doctor, as the character's original actor, William Hartnell, had died. If we accept Gilbert & Sullivan as genre adjacent, she was Grace Marston in The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan. (Died 2012.)
Born September 17, 1928 — Roddy McDowall. He is best known for portraying Cornelius and Caesar in the original Planet of the Apes film franchise, as well as Galen in the television series. He's Sam Conrad in The Twilight Zone episode "People Are Alike All Over" and he superbly voices Jervis Tetch / The Mad Hatter in Batman: The Animated Series. And for your viewing interest, a clip from the Carol Burnett Show with Roddy McDowall wearing Planet of the Apes makeup here. (Died 1998.)
Born September 17, 1939 — Sandra Lee Gimpel, 82. In Trek's "The Cage", she played a Talosian. That led her to being cast as the M-113 creature in "The Man Trap", another first season episode. She actually had a much larger work history as stunt double, though uncredited, showing up in sixty-eight episodes of Lost in Space and fifty-seven of The Bionic Woman plus myriad genre work elsewhere including They Come from Outer Space where she was the stunt coordinator.
Born September 17, 1951 — Cassandra Peterson, 70. Yes, she's Elvira, Mistress of The Dark, a character she's played on TV and in movies before becoming the host of Elvira's Movie Macabre, a weekly horror movie presentation show in LA forty years ago. She's a showgirl in Diamonds Are Forever which was her debut film, and is Sorais in Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold.
Born September 17, 1996 — Ella Purnell, 25. An English actress best remembered as Emma in the Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children film. She's also in Kick-Ass 2 as Dolce, she's Natalie the UFO film that stars Gillian Anderson, and she was the body double for the young Jane Porter in The Legend of Tarzan. In a genre adjacent role, she was Hester Argyll in Agatha Christie's Ordeal by Innocence.
In The Far Side, a monster almost gets clean away.
(14) WARP DRIVER. Laughing Squid draws attention to "A Campy Mercedes-Benz Ad That Inserts Their New 2021 Electric Vehicle Into a 1979 Science Fiction Film". And remember – you can never have too many tentacles.
"Mercedes-Benz "Future 2021" is a wonderfully campy ad by Nina Holmgren that inserts their new Mercedes-Benz electric G-Wagen vehicle for 2021 into a very over-the-top science fiction film of the late 1970s. This future, which could ever only be dreamed of back in 1979, has finally come true today.
(15) MAYBE HE WAS ASKING THE WRONG QUESTION? In The Hollywood Reporter "LeVar Burton Says He's Over 'Jeopardy!' Debacle". Now, he told the host of The Daily Show, he's thinking of developing his own game.
…Through the host replacement mess, Burton admitted to [Trevor] Noah he discovered he was not that interested in the gig after all.
"The crazy thing is that when you set your sights on something, you know, they say be careful of what you wish for, because what I found out is that it wasn't the thing that I wanted after all," said Burton. "What I wanted was to compete. I mean, I wanted the job, but then when I didn't get it, it was like, 'Well, OK, what's next?' And so, the opportunities that have come my way as a result of not getting that gig, I couldn't have dreamt it up. If you had given me a pen and paper and said, 'Well, so what do you want this to really look like?' If it doesn't include Jeopardy! I wouldn't have been this generous to myself."
Not going into too much detail, Burton said he had something in the works he was sure his fans were going to enjoy, saying, "I never thought about hosting any other game show outside of Jeopardy! But now, they went in a different direction with their show, which is their right, and now I'm thinking, 'Well, it does kind of make sense, let me see what I can do.' So we're trying to figure out what the right game show for LeVar Burton would be."…
(16) CORRECTED EDITION. The NESFA Press is letting everyone know they put out a new edition of their ebook Ingathering by Zenna Henderson that fixes the problems mentioned in a Tony Lewis quote run in a recent Scroll.
We have updated the contents of the NESFA Press eBook of Ingathering by Zenna Henderson. This second edition was necessary due to several OCR issues. NESFA Press is committed to the highest quality in the content of our books and will aggressively address any typos or other problems with the text of our eBooks.
To purchase the new version of Ingathering, go to the NESFA Press online store: http://nesfapress.org/, and search for "Ingathering". People who have purchase the previous version of Ingathering, can download the new version using the link they received. Please direct any problems or questions to the email address below.
(17) UNDER THE NAME OF SANDERS. Inside the Magic tells how "YOU Can Stay at Winnie the Pooh's House in the Hundred Acre Wood". Photo gallery at the link.
If you love Winnie the Pooh characters — and, really, who doesn't adore A.A. Milne's "Silly Ol' Bear" and all of his friends? — you're going to want to bounce like Tigger when you see Airbnb's latest offering, designed especially for the 95th Anniversary of the Hundred Acre Wood pals….
(18) WHY AM I BACK? SYFY Wire introduces a "Robot Chicken clip with Seth MacFarlane as Palpatine".
…Now into its 11th season, Adult Swim's longest running series is currently airing new episodes daily at midnight ET/PT. Among all the madness, there's a sketch that confronts that really confounding plot point in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker that finds Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) suddenly returning from The Return of the Jedi dead… just because. Ahead of its upcoming debut, SYFY WIRE has an exclusive look at the sketch, which features Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy, The Orville) voicing the mechanically challenged Palps….
(19) HARRY POTTER'S FLAGSHIP. Is it a store? A theme park? It's whatever you need it to be to separate you from your cash! The Drum takes us on a tour: "Inside Warner Bros' spellbinding retail experience Harry Potter New York".
…All of these elements create a retail experience that speak to consumers' growing demands for experience-infused shopping, says Warner Bros's vice president and general manager of retail experiences Karl Durrant. "There is no doubt that consumer behavior has changed. Digital retail was becoming popular even before the pandemic hit. It's more important than ever to give consumers a reason to visit a store and to make it an event."
And to bring the immersive feeling to another level, Warner Bros, in partnership with Dreamscape Immersive, developed two unique VR experiences that bring visitors into the action. In 'Chaos at Hogwarts', users join Dobby in an adventure around Hogwarts to immobilize and collect pixies that the house elf accidentally released. The second VR experience, 'Wizards Take Flight', invites users to zoom around the skies above London via broomstick, warding off evil Death Eaters alongside Hagrid….
(20) ROBOCOP, TAKE TWO. "Singapore has patrol robots now! This should be fine" says Mashable. I like to think they will be programmed to keep making mad R2-D2 chirps at smokers til they snuff those ciggies.
Some robots were made to be your best friend. Some to unload 1600 boxes an hour. Some to do backflips, paint masterpieces. Some to inspect crime scenes. Others will tell you to quit smoking in prohibited areas and stop riding your motorbike on the footpath.
Singapore has started testing patrol robots that survey pedestrian areas in the city-state, where surveillance is a top and often controversial priority….
Named Xavier, the mall-cop robots will be autonomously rolling through the Toa Payoh Central district for three weeks from Sept. 5, scanning for "undesirable social behaviours" according to a press release (via Engadget) from the government's Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX)….
(21) SIXTEEN SCROLLS. "Tennessee Cora" Buhlert was inspired by the title of yesterday's Scroll to drop an instant classic in the comments.
Sixteen Scrolls
(with apologies to Merle Travis and Tennessee Ernie Ford)
Some people say a man is made outta mud.
A Filer's made outta books, cons and blood,
Books and blood and films and cons.
We may look weak, but our minds are strong
You read 16 scrolls, what do you get?
Another day older and more books unread.
St. Leibovitz, don't call me 'cause I can't go,
I owe my soul to the Mount Tsundoku.
I was born one morning when the sun didn't shine
I picked up a novel and said, "This looks fine."
I read 16 pixels of number nine scroll
and the straw puppy said, "Well, a-bless my soul"
I owe my soul to the Series Hugo.
I was born one mornin', it was drizzlin' rain.
Reading and writing are my middle name.
I was raised in the library by an old mama lion
and no rabid puppy will make me walk the line
I owe my soul to the Novel Hugo.
If you see us comin', better step aside.
A lotta dogs didn't, a lotta dogs cried.
One fist science fiction, the other fantasy.
If the right one don't get you
Then the left one will.
(22) WEBINAR WITH BROTHER GUY. Brother Guy Consolmagno will be doing a Zoom event on October 1. "Your God Is Too Small: Vatican Observatory Director to offer a cosmic point of view in upcoming webinar". Register to receive the link and a reminder. [Via Susan Schwartz.]
Brother Guy Consolmagno SJ is speaking on the contrast between the world and the cosmos that is becoming blurred as we begin to learn of the vastness of the cosmos in an upcoming Zoom event.
The free webinar, "Your God is Too Small," will be hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in Religion and Science (CASIRAS) and Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (LSTC) on Friday, October 1, at 5 p.m. CDT. Those interested in attending can register here. Also the event will be livestreamed on LSTC's Facebook page.
"We need to understand that all those other planets are real places, part of the same universe created by God and redeemed by the Incarnation," writes Consolmagno. "And God is Creator not only of other places but other times, before and beyond the time when we exist here on Earth."
His presentation will dive into the meaning of being redeemed by the risen Christ in light of the immensity of time and space.
Br. Guy received the 2014 Carl Sagan Medal for outstanding communication by an active planetary scientist to the general public from the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences. He is the author or co-author of four books exploring faith and science issues, including, Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? (with Paul Mueller), God's Mechanics, Brother Astronomer, and The Way to the Dwelling of Light.
"It is rare to find someone so accomplished in science, theology, and philosophy, who can also communicate complex topics clearly to a general audience. Br. Guy is one of the best story-tellers I've ever known," said Grace Wolf-Chase, senior scientist and senior education and communication specialist at the Planetary Science Institute.
(23) HONESTLY. In "Honest Game Trailers: Psychonauts 2" on YouTube, Fandom Games says this game features weird worlds, and characters whose heads weigh as much as their bodies. But don't expect any action, because 'playing Psychonauts for the combat is like eating at Taco bell for the diarrhea."
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, N., Daniel Dern, Rick Kovalcik, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Peer.]
Posted in Pixel Scroll	| Tagged Adult Swim, BasedCon, Brother Guy Consolmagno, Devra Langsam, ebooks, Emmy Awards, FIYAHCON, Foundation, Harry Potter, Honest Trailers, Jeopardy!, LeVar Burton, Maria Dahvana Headley, NESFA Press, robots, Scott Edelman, Spockanalia, Susanna Clarke, Winnie-the-Pooh	| 39 Replies
Pixel Scroll 9/10/21 It Was A Pixel Scroll Of Rare Device
(1) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman offers listeners a chance to feast on Indian food with Veronica Schanoes in episode 153 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.
Veronica Schanoes
Award-winning writer Veronica Schanoes and I shared Indian food though there were hundreds of miles between us — hers from Brooklyn, New York's Masala Grill, me from Hagerstown, Maryland's Sitar of India.
Veronica Schanoes has published fiction in the magazines Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Sybil's Garage, and Fantasy; the anthologies The Doll Collection, Queen Victoria's Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy, The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction; and online at Strange Horizons and Tor.com. Her novella "Burning Girls" was nominated for the Nebula Award and the World Fantasy Award, and won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella in 2013. Her first scholarly monograph, Fairy Tales, Myth, and Psychoanalytic Theory: Feminism and Re-telling the Tale, was published by Ashgate in 2014. Her collection Burning Girls and Other Stories was published earlier this year.
We discussed what it's been like trying to write her first novel during a pandemic, why she can only read Jane Yolen's intro to her new collection half a page at a time, how she makes sure her fairy tale-inspired fiction works even for those who don't catch the allusions, the joy which comes from putting the right words in the right order, how Kelly Link convinced her she should take herself seriously as a writer, whether research inspires stories or stories inspire research (and how writers make sure they don't force readers to suffer for that research), the way fairy tales take place "outside of historical space-time," the importance of Joe Strummer and the Clash, and much more.
(2) MODERN THOUGHT. S.E. Lindberg interviews pulp scholar and sword-and-sorcery author and editor Jason Ray Carney at Black Gate. "Sublime, Cruel Beauty: An Interview with Jason Ray Carney".
What is this concept of Modernity, and why did it haunt/inspire you to write a thesis on it?
Modernity is one of those concepts with a rich intellectual history, and people spill a lot of ink over it, but it is not very complicated (in my opinion): sometimes around the 1780s, the world changed. Feudalism gave way to democracy. New technologies upset how human economies and cities were organized. Religious belief waned and changed. We stopped believing (for the most part) in the supernatural. Let me cite Max Weber again: with modernity, the world became "disenchanted." This, of course, is only part of the story. Though this story is myopic in its Eurocentrism, it is not less valid for its narrow purview. The story of modernization outside of Europe can be told, but it will be different, with maze-like branching conversations that posit multiple "modernities." Anyway, modernity really intrigues me.
(3) VINDICATION. In "confirmation", former Hugo Awards administrator David Bratman tells how he once found himself at loggerheads with Locus' Charles N. Brown.
When I was administrator for the Hugo Awards in 1996, one of the Best Novel finalists* was Remake by Connie Willis. By that time, SF novels were tending very long, but Remake was short. Though published as a standalone volume, it made a small one.
Charles Brown of Locus,** the newsletter of the SF field, insisted to me that Remake was under 40 thousand words and thus, by Hugo rules (which were shared in this respect by most other awards in the field), it fell in the Novella category, not Novel. And indeed, in the Locus awards it was put in the Novella category, which it won (not surprisingly, being one of the longest in the category as well as being by Connie Willis)….
The rest of the analysis is at the link.
(4) FICTION IN TRANSLATION. Jennifer Croft argues "Why translators should be named on book covers" in The Guardian.
"Translators are like ninjas. If you notice them, they're no good." This quote, attributed to Israeli author Etgar Keret, proliferates in memes, and who doesn't love a pithy quote involving ninjas? Yet this idea – that a literary translator might make, at any moment, a surprise attack, and that at every moment we are deceiving the reader as part of an elaborate mercenary plot – is among the most toxic in world literature.
The reality of the international circulation of texts is that in their new contexts, it is up to their translators to choose every word they will contain. When you read Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk's Flights in English, the words are all mine. Translators aren't like ninjas, but words are human, which means that they're unique and have no direct equivalents. You can see this in English: "cool" is not identical to "chilly", although it's similar. "Frosty" has other connotations, other usages; so does "frigid". Selecting one of these options on its own doesn't make sense; it must be weighed in the balance of the sentence, the paragraph, the whole, and it is the translator who is responsible, from start to finish, for building a flourishing lexical community that is both self-contained and in profound relation with its model….
(5) MARTIN ON MALTIN. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] I listened to this 2018 podcast Leonard and Jessie Maltin did with Floyd Norman, a pioneering Black animator and cartoonist (Maltin on Movies: Floyd Norman).
Norman started working for Walt Disney in the mid-1950s, and remembers being at Disneyland during its opening week (but not opening day, a legendary disaster). He recalls what it was like producing feature-length animation before computers and how everyone involved in animated film "worked like Marines" until the job was done, although Walt Disney insisted everyone leave the studio at 9 to spend some time with their families. People who remember the "string of pearls" sequence in Mary Poppins should realize that was a sequence that stressed out the animators.
Norman talked about how he was hired and quit Disney several times, and was involved in developing the stories for PIxar's Toy Story 2 and Monsters Inc. He also self-published his own books of cartoons, including one entirely devoted to making fun of Disney CEO Michael Eisner, who Norman thinks a major egotist. Norman says Eisner didn't mind the criticism, "as long as the book was about him."
This may be too DIsney-centric for some but I enjoyed this episode.
(6) CHECK IT OUT. The New Yorker's Daniel A. Gross analyzes "The Surprisingly Big Business of Library E-books".
The sudden shift to e-books had enormous practical and financial implications, not only for OverDrive but for public libraries across the country. Libraries can buy print books in bulk from any seller that they choose, and, thanks to a legal principle called the first-sale doctrine, they have the right to lend those books to any number of readers free of charge. But the first-sale doctrine does not apply to digital content. For the most part, publishers do not sell their e-books or audiobooks to libraries—they sell digital distribution rights to third-party venders, such as OverDrive, and people like Steve Potash sell lending rights to libraries. These rights often have an expiration date, and they make library e-books "a lot more expensive, in general, than print books," Michelle Jeske, who oversees Denver's public-library system, told me. Digital content gives publishers more power over prices, because it allows them to treat libraries differently than they treat other kinds of buyers. Last year, the Denver Public Library increased its digital checkouts by more than sixty per cent, to 2.3 million, and spent about a third of its collections budget on digital content, up from twenty per cent the year before….
(7) UP ALL NIGHT. It so happens the only time I ever watched Adult Swim was sitting in a hospital waiting room after driving someone to ER — but that's not a knock, what I saw was pretty amusing. The New York Times celebrated the program block's 20th anniversary with an oral history: "Adult Swim: How an Animation Experiment Conquered Late-Night TV".
By all accounts, it was a minor miracle that Adult Swim ever made it off the drawing board 20 years ago. Money was next to nonexistent. The editor of Cartoon Network's first original series worked from a closet. A celebrity guest on that series, unaware of the weirdness he had signed up for, walked out mid-taping.
In retrospect, it seems right that one of modern TV's most consistent generators of bizarro humor — and cult followings — had origins that were, themselves, pretty freewheeling.
…WILLIS The idea for "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" started with a [expletive] fast food restaurant that tried to use all the scraps of meat they weren't allowed by the F.D.A. to put into a hamburger, wadded together. We saw Meatwad as this poor, neglected creature — I think his line in his first script was like [in Meatwad voice], "Please, God, kill me." I did the voice, and I can't tell you how many times people said, "I don't understand what he's saying; you need to recast him." But we stuck to our guns. I always thought of it like Willie Nelson, who sings real quietly, and so everyone is on the edge of their seat trying to listen to what he's saying. As a result, you're more into it. At least, that was my excuse! [Laughs.]
(8) LIFE OF LEWIS. A trailer dropped for the C.S. Lewis biopic titled The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story Of C.S. Lewis that arrives in theaters November 3.
(9) TIME HAS BEEN BROKEN. So they tell us. The new season of Star Trek: Picard premieres February 2022 on Paramount+.
(10) BUCKS AND BUCK ROGERS. Think of it as the military-industrial-entertainment complex: "The making of an Enterprise: How NASA, the Smithsonian and the aerospace industry helped create Star Trek" in The Space Review.
…At the end of WWII, 60–70% of the American aerospace industry was based in Southern California. The good climate and open land that helped draw aviation to the region also helped lure the motion picture industry. When Roddenberry began developing Star Trek, 15 of the 25 largest aerospace companies were located in the greater Los Angeles area. Many were situated close to Paramount's Desilu Studios where the series was made.
Roddenberry drew upon the most current spaceflight technology then available to incorporate into Star Trek. He read, wrote, phoned and even dumpster-dived to get material for his new series.
A direct example of how the aerospace industry influenced Star Trek appears in the episode "The Trouble With Tribbles." In this episode furry little creatures that "coo" and have a tremendous desire for eating and breeding overrun the Federation's K-7 space station.
The principal elements of the K-7 as it is shown in the episode first appeared in a report done by Douglas Aircraft. The 1959 study outlined the operational requirements of an extendable orbiting space station. Constructed on Earth then launched atop a "Saturn-type missile," the station was designed to automatically unfold in space into a donut-shape with a conical reentry vehicle at its center.[3]
Richard Datin, a model maker who helped build the original production model Enterprise, described how the K-7 design materialized. "I was told upon viewing the original model, and maybe by Roddenberry, that he obtained it [the Douglas space station model] from Douglas Aircraft whose main office was in nearby Santa Monica. Apparently, Gene had a following from people in the space industry, particularly Caltech in Pasadena."
(11) MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS (1966-2021). Actor Michael K. Williams died September 6 at the age of 54 reports the New York Times. While famous for his work in cop and crime series including The Wire and Boardwalk Empire, sff fans knew him as the lead in Lovecraft Country, and saw him in the 2014 RoboCop remake, The Purge: Anarchy (2014), and Ghostbusters (2016).
1977 – Forty-four years ago this evening on CBS, Space Academy, a Filmation children's series, first aired. (Jason of Star Command would come out of it.) It was created by Allen Ducovny who previously only done such animated shows as The New Adventures of Superman and Aquaman. The program starred Jonathan Harris in the lead role; co-starring were Pamelyn Ferdin, Ric Carrott, Maggie Cooper, Brian Tochi, Ty Henderson, and Eric Greene. There was a cute robot as well named Peepo. Would I kid you? It would last for just fifteen half-hour episodes.
Born September 10, 1914 — Robert Wise. Film director, producer, and editor. Among his accomplishments are directing The Curse of The Cat People, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Haunting, The Andromeda Strain and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Though not at all genre, he also directed West Side Story and edited Citizen Kane, two exemplary accomplishments indeed. (Died 2005.)
Born September 10, 1937 — Spencer Milligan, 84. He's best known for playing Rick Marshall, the father of Will and Holly Marshall, on the first two seasons of Land of the Lost. (He left because he didn't get a cut of the merch sales.) Genre wise, he'd previously been in Woody Allen's Sleeper as Jeb Hrmthmg, and later appeared in an episode of The Bionic Woman. That's it.
Born September 10, 1952 — Gerry Conway, 69. He's known for co-creating the Punisher (with artists John Romita Sr. and Ross Andru) as well as the first Ms. Marvel and scripting the death of the character Gwen Stacy during his run on The Amazing Spider-Man. He shares the story credit for Conan the Destroyer with Roy Thomas. At DC, he created a number of characters including Firestorm, Count Vertigo and Killer Croc. Not genre at all, but he wrote a lot of scripts for Law and Order: Criminal Intent, one of my favorite series.
Born September 10, 1953 — Stuart Milligan, 68. He first shows up as Walters on the Sean Connery-led Outland and a few years later we see him as a Police Sergeant on Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. He'll play Richard Nixon in Doctor Who for two Eleventh Doctor stories, "The Impossible Astronuat" and "Day of The Moon". His latest genre role is in Wonder Woman 1984 as the U.S. President.
Born September 10, 1953 — Pat Cadigan, 68. Tea from an Empty Cup and Dervish is Digital are both amazing works. And I'm fascinated that she has co-written with Paul Dini, creator of Batman: The Animated Series, a DCU novel called Harley Quinn: Mad Love. Her only Hugo win was at LoneStarCon 3 for the "The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi" novelette. Her latest work is the novelization of the first-draft Alien 3 screenplay by William Gibson. She's well stocked at the usual suspects.
Born September 10, 1955 — Victoria Strauss, 66. Author of the Burning Land two novel series, and she should be praised unto high for being founder along with AC Crispin of the Committee on Writing Scams. She maintains the Writer Beware website and blog.
Born September 10, 1959 — Nancy A. Collins, 62. Author of the Sonja Blue vampire novels, some of the best of that genre I've ever had the pleasure to read. She had a long run on Swamp Thing from issues 110 to 138, and it is generally considered a very good period in that narrative. She also wrote Vampirella, the Forrest J Ackerman and Trina Robbins creation, for awhile.
Born September 10, 1968 — Guy Ritchie, 53. Director of Sherlock Holmes and its sequel Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, both of each I rather liked, and the live-action Aladdin. He did also directed / wrote / produced the rebooted The Man from U.N.C.L.E. which got rather nice reviews to my surprise as well as King Arthur: Legend of the Sword which apparently is quite excellent as audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it a seventy percent rating.
(14) FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD RECORD-SETTER. The Hollywood Reporter knows it's worth a headline when "First Spider-Man Comic Book Sets Record for Biggest Sale Ever".
The sale of Amazing Fantasy no. 15, featuring the first appearance of Spider-Man, has set the record for the most expensive comic ever sold.
The comic sold Thursday for $3.6 million as part of Heritage Auction's Signature Comics & Comic Art auction being held Sept. 8 to 12.
The senses-shattering sale beat out the previous record, Action Comics no. 1, published in 1938 and featuring the first appearance of Superman, which sold privately for $3.25 million earlier this year.
(15) A SLEIGHLOAD TO ADD TO YOUR MT. TBR. SF² Concatenation has posted its list of "Forthcoming SF books in the run-up to Christmas UK SF book releases September – 31st December 2021" from the major UK imprints (available/or on order elsewhere from specialist bookshops). This is an advance posting (6th September) of the 'forthcoming books' sections' of SF² Concatenation's autumnal news page whose full edition will be posted September 15.
With just 90, or thereabouts, shopping days to Christmas, time to see what SF will be published. The SF² Concatenation seasonal news page's forthcoming books listings are an amalgamation of the titles in the catalogues sent by major UK publishers.
As they these titles already in the catalogues, they can be ordered, or advance-ordered, now either from the publisher directly or – if you are outside the UK – from specialist SF bookshops and their related retail websites.
The books are listed alphabetically by author.
(16) SPEAKER FOR THE READ. The next episode of Essence of Wonder with Gadi Evron is "You're Not Ender Wiggins, and That's Okay – A Show on Strategy, Leadership, and Modern Conflict by Way of Scifi." Streams Saturday, September 11 at 3:00 p.m. Eastern via YouTube, Facebook Live, and Twitch.
Steven Leonard, Max Brooks, Major General Mick Ryan, and Jon Klug, join us to discuss strategy, leadership, and modern conflict from the perspective of science fiction.
One of the chapters in the book is called "You're Not Ender Wiggins, and That's Okay" (by Will Meddings). Be still, my heart.
(17) HUGE NEWS. A T-Rex might have made a nice snack for one of these: "Researchers Identify Dinosaur Species 5 Times Larger Than the T-Rex: 'This Is Very Exciting'" – Yahoo! News has the story.
Researchers have discovered a new species of dinosaur that loomed over Tyrannosaurus Rex.
The Calgary Herald reports that University of Calgary scientists helped identify the massive new species named Ulughbegasaurus, which roamed the earth as an apex predator 90 million years ago.
Researchers were able to identify the new species — which was five times bigger than the fearsome T-Rex — through the dinosaur's fossilized jaw, which was likely first found by a Russian paleontologist during a dig in the 1980s.
…The researchers found that the dinosaur was between 7.5 to eight meters (24 to 26 feet) in length and likely weighed over 1,000 kilograms (2,204 lbs). At the time Ulughbegasaurus roamed the earth, the T-Rex wasn't fully evolved and was much smaller in comparison, weighing less than 200 kilograms (440 lbs).
Comparing the two species, Zelenitsky said Ulughbegasaurus "was like a grizzly bear" if T-Rex had been a coyote….
(18) CUBE ROOTS. The New York Times shares scientists' curiosity about a relic that lends itself to alternate history: "Did Nazis Produce These Uranium Cubes? Researchers Look for an Answer."
The failure of Nazi Germany's nuclear program is well established in the historical record. What is less documented is how a handful of uranium cubes, possibly produced by the Nazis, ended up at laboratories in the United States.
Scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Maryland are working to determine whether three uranium cubes they have in their possession were produced by Germany's failed nuclear program during World War II.
The answer could lead to more questions, such as whether the Nazis might have had enough uranium to create a critical reaction. And, if the Nazis had been successful in building an atomic bomb, what would that have meant for the war?
Researchers at the laboratory believe they may know the origins of the cubes by the end of October. For the moment, the main evidence is anecdotal, in the form of stories passed down from other scientists, according to Jon Schwantes, the project's principal investigator.
The lab does not have scientific evidence or documentation that would confirm that Nazi Germany produced the black cubes, which measure about two inches on each side. The Nazis produced 1,000 to 1,200 cubes, about half of which were confiscated by the Allied forces, he said.
"The whereabouts of most all of those cubes is unknown today," Dr. Schwantes said, adding that "most likely those cubes were folded into our weapons stockpile."…
(19) THE TRUTH MAY BE OUT THERE, IT'S NOT HERE. Samantha Bee of Full Frontal shares"Sam Bee's Not-Solved Mysteriez: UFOs" on YouTube.
Sam once again dons her trench coat to take one small step for man and one giant leap for a late night television host with an "Unsolved Mysteries" obsession. That's right…she's trying to figure out WTF is up with UFOs!
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Cora Buhlert, SF Concatenation's Jonathan Cowie, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Jayn.]
Posted in Pixel Scroll	| Tagged Adult Swim, auction, C.S. Lewis, Charles N. Brown, David Bratman, dinosaurs, Disney, ebooks, Essence of Wonder with Gadi Evron, Floyd Norman, Jason Ray Carney, Leonard Maltin, Lovecraft Country, S.E. Lindberg, Scott Edelman, SF Concatenation, SFF in Translation, Spider-Man, Star Trek, Star Trek: Picard, UFO, Veronica Schanoes	| 38 Replies
Mark Pontin on Pixel Scroll 1/18/22
LARRY BRILL on "Don't Look Up" …Down …Or Around