Pixel Scroll 3/21/17 Pixels Are Not Looking Good For Mr. Scroll

(1) PICK YOUR OWN TALKING CATASTROPHE. After the SFWA Blog posted about Twine, the interactive game program, Camestros Felapton decided, “Because I had an important project at work to complete, I naturally ended up downloading Twine and playing with that instead of using my commute to work to get ahead with my deadlines. Here is a tourist guide to Timothy [the Talking Cat]’s home town.”

(2) CHOW TIME. “Binge on pork buns with Rosemary Clare Smith” in Episode 32 of Scott Edelman’s Eating the Fantastic podcast.

We discussed why she can’t seem to stop writing about dinosaurs, how her years as a lawyer helped her become a better writer, what caused an angry audience member to confront her after one of her readings, whether she’d be willing to risk Ray Bradbury’s butterfly effect by traveling back in time, if there are editorial differences between Analog editors Stanley Schmidt and Trevor Quachri, and much more.

 

Rosemary Claire Smith

(3) FELLOWSHIP. Sorry I wasn’t able to give advance warning on this – it airs Tuesday night — “D.C. Legends of Tomorrow features cameo by… J.R.R. Tolkien?”

On the upcoming episode of DC Legends of Tomorrow,  airing this Tuesday, March 21 at 9:00 p.m. EST on The CW channel, the team goes back to France during WWI and enlists the help of, yes,  J.R.R. Tolkien. The episode is titled “Fellowship of the Spear.”

From IMDB: “The Legends land in France during World War I and enlist the aid of J.R.R. Tolkien to retrieve the last pieces of the Spear of Destiny from the Legion of Doom.”

(4) INVENTED LANGUAGE. Atlas Obscura tells about the “Boontling Language of Booneville [California]”.

Anderson Valley, the logging region of California where Boontling got its start, was so isolated in those early years that the new language thrived, growing to 1,600 words. It never spread beyond the region. Part of the reason for this was a reluctance on the part of Boonville residents to share their language with visitors. What’s more, while the dialect is based on English, Scottish Gaelic, Irish, Spanish, and Pomoan (a Native Californian language), many of the Boontling words were inspired by Boonville residents, and are therefore more personal for people in the area.

For instance, the word zeese, for coffee, came from Zachariah Clifton, or “Z.C.,” who brewed a particularly strong cup of joe. A pay phone is called Buckey Walter; buckey means nickel, and Walter was the first guy in the valley to have a phone. The name of the language is a combination of the Boontling word Boont, for Boonville, and ling, short for lingo.

One summer is the Sixties my father took my brother and me to a dude ranch. Booneville was the nearest town so we were in there a couple times. We didn’t know anything about Boontling, unfortunately, or we probably could have got a demonstration.

(5) GAIL SIMONE. The comics writer Gail Simone was invited on the JoCo 2017 geek cruise where she was asked to write the worst first page to a SF/F novel and deliver it to the crowd. Her part starts at 8:20.

(6) ELECTRONIC PRIVACY FOR TRAVELERS. For those heading to Helsinki for the Worldcon, or leaving the U.S. for anywhere, Cory Doctorow recommends reading the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s comprehensive guide to protecting your electronic data: “Digital Privacy at the U.S. Border: Protecting the Data On Your Devices and In The Cloud”. (There’s also a print-and-fold version).

The U.S. government reported a five-fold increase in the number of electronic media searches at the border in a single year, from 4,764 in 2015 to 23,877 in 2016.1 Every one of those searches was a potential privacy violation. Our lives are minutely documented on the phones and laptops we carry, and in the cloud. Our devices carry records of private conversations, family photos, medical documents, banking information, information about what websites we visit, and much more. Moreover, people in many professions, such as lawyers and journalists, have a heightened need to keep their electronic information confidential. How can travelers keep their digital data safe?

(7) WHERE ISN’T HE? Over the weekend a “’Where’s Waldo?’ fun run” brought in money for a good cause.

Thousands of runners donned iconic red and white-striped costumes in London for a “Where’s Waldo?” themed fun run.

The event Sunday in south London saw thousands of men, women, and children dress as the titular character from the children’s book series for a fun run that raised money for the National Literacy Trust.

(8) SQUARE PEG TIME. Declan Finn got a nip on the nose for trying to start Sad Puppies 5 himself but another website welcomed his “Superversive Dragon Award Suggestions” with open paws. Despite the welcome, he found it wasn’t easy to find the right category for all his friends’ books.

Obviously, certain of the books from the list fit no genre category. One of my novels from the list, Set to Kill, is a murder mystery that takes place in Atlanta, at a place called WyvernCon, in the middle of a political war about Tearful or Hydrophobic Puppies versus Puppy Punters from traditional Big Publishing. Obviously, this book has no similarities to real events. Heh.

However, while it is on the 2016 list, there is no murder mystery genre for the Dragons. Nor are there Westerns, so Brings the Lightning is out.  And while Chasing Freedom and The Big Sheep are both fun books with dystopic elements, they both came out too early last year in order to be eligible — and Chasing Freedom was already nominated for last year’s Dragons.  It’s the same for site favorite Ben Zyycky’s novel Beyond the Mist , which came out in January 2016.

(9) PLAGIARISM SUIT. Variety reports “Disney Accused of Stealing ‘Zootopia’ from ‘Total Recall’ Screenwriter”.

A veteran screenwriter filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday accusing Disney of stealing his idea for the hit animated film “Zootopia.”

Gary Goldman alleges that Disney took character designs, themes, lines of dialogue, and even the name “Zootopia” from a project that he first developed in 2000. He alleges that he twice pitched the project to Disney executives, in 2000 and 2009, and was rejected. The lawsuit accuses Disney of a long history of stealing ideas from others, and contends that “Zootopia” is only the most recent example of an embedded corporate practice.

“Although The Walt Disney Company rigorously enforces its copyrights, it has developed a culture that not only accepts the unauthorized copying of others’ original material, but encourages it,” Goldman alleges. “Instead of lawfully acquiring Goldman’s work, Defendants said they were not interested in producing it and sent him on his way. Thereafter, consistent with their culture of unauthorized copying, Defendants copied Goldman’s work.”

(10) COLLAPSING DAY. At long last it’s the release day for John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire. He noted on Twitter that the trolls had promptly gone to work adding negative reviews to the book’s Amazon page.

Already on thin ice with Amazon, Vox Day interrupted his unwelcoming comments about the book in general to emphasize his policy about fake reviews.

UPDATE: My position on fake reviews is what it has always been: never write fake reviews, for good or for ill. If you have not read a book or played a game, then you should not even consider reviewing it. As a former nationally syndicated professional game reviewer, I do not approve of fake reviews no matter who the author or developer is. Unlike most published authors, I have always abided by Amazon guidelines and never review books or games on Amazon. The only place I write reviews are a) on this blog, and b) on Recommend.

He also made a point in a comment:

How do you explain downvotes on that review if that is not what you wanted when you linked it?

They have nothing to do with me or what I want. If I wanted downvotes, there would be at least 535 downvotes there within an hour. Since there are not, it should be clear that I have not issued any such order or expressed any such desire.

Amazon has been removing the fake one-star reviews throughout the day as they pop up (and people complain). Although it’s gone now, too, an even rarer snarky five-star review stuck around for several hours.

(11) THE OTHER SIDE OF THE AISLE. Not all the grumpy people are on the right. On Whatever in Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire Is Here” post, he mentioned that Wil Wheaton voiced the audiobook and got back in comments —

“So you had your book narrated by a white man… Of course!”

(12) SUPERPREDICTABLE. Brian Niemeier marked the day by teeing off against Scalzi’s publisher, in “Tor Gets Desperate”, for having the Castalia House goon book The Corroding Empire taken down yesterday,.

This is what used to be called “parody” before the Left turned into control freaks with zero sense of humor. The only way you’d mistake one of those books for the other is if you couldn’t read. In which case, you’re probably not buying books in the first place.

(13) COVER CHARGE. Camestos Felapton worked over a different part of Niemeier’s post:

However, Brian is deeply impressed by Castalia House re-releasing their book with a new cover:

“While I was writing this post, Vox Day unveiled the new cover for CH’s censored book.

Let that sink in: they got a new cover done in less than a day.

The updated book should be back in the Kindle store tonight. This is why the small, fast mammals are taking down the dinosaurs.”

A generic spaceship against a background cover in LESS THAN A DAY! Gadzooks! Hmmm. I think I can do that in under an hour to Castalia House standards…

(14) MAGI STANDARD TIME. Hodinkee observes, “Balthazar, MB&F’s Latest Robot-Themed Clock, Has a Split Personality”.

Meet Balthazar. He’s a slightly terrifying robot-shaped clock that has a smiling face on one side and a grimacing skull on the other….

MB&F is calling Balthazar the big brother to Melchior, the robot clock it first launched at Baselworld 2015. The clocks have the same basic structure, each with discs for the time and the escapement in the dome on the robot’s head (unlike the smaller cousin clock, Sherman, which uses a more traditional display). If you know your New Testament, you’ll know that Melchior and Balthazar were two of the three magi to visit Jesus in the manger on the night of his birth – will we be seeing a Caspar clock sometime soon too? Personally, I’m hoping yes….

Balthazar is available with four different colors of armor – black, silver, blue, and green – each limited to 50 pieces. All colors will retail for 52,000 CHF (approximately $52,875 at time of publishing). For more, visit MB&F online.

 

(15) ASS-GRINDING HALT. Scarepop.com says “Stop the presses! Rob Lowe and his sons are making a paranormal series”.

Prolific actor, eighties teen heartthrob, Emmy-award winner and general national treasure Rob Lowe will star with his two sons, Matthew and John Owen, in an upcoming supernatural-themed A&E docuseries entitled The Lowe Files, in which the trio will travel around the country investigating unsolved legends and “eerie, age-old stories.”

As Rob Lowe himself (star of The Outsiders, St. Elmo’s Fire, and NBC’s The West Wing) tells us (via an A&E press release):

Since I was a kid I’ve loved unexplained legends, strange phenomena and the scary, supernatural stories told around campfires.

Okay. You can restart the presses now.

(16) COMIC R.I.P.S The Washington Post’s Michael Cavna has an appreciation of Bernie Wrightson as one of the greatest comic book artists to come from Baltimore…

Bernie Wrightson, who co-created the Swamp Thing, was one of his generation’s greatest masters of horror illustration and comics.

(17) QUITE A CATCH. It’s clickbait, but “Bookstore Earns Instagram Fame With Clever Snaps” only runs three pages and it’s amusing.

A bookstore in France is becoming a popular member of the Instagram community for all the right reasons. Not only does its account showcase products and events the store is offering, but also the creativity of its employees.

Librairie Mollat was the first independent bookstore to open in France in 1896. It is home to over 300,000 titles and has an inventory that spans every genre you can imagine. And while being one of the oldest bookstores in the country is a remarkable feat (especially when you consider the primarily digital world we now live in), it’s the clever Instagram posts that are getting this business noticed.

 

[Thanks to Camestros Felapton, JJ, rcade, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, Scott Edelman, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Matt Y.]

94 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 3/21/17 Pixels Are Not Looking Good For Mr. Scroll

  1. @Mike Glyer

    If there was ever a person I’d expect to claim he had a Congressman in his corner, it would be Teddy.

  2. From experience, the going rate to get a Congresscritter in your corner is $2,500. Though they aren’t particularly faithful and will just support whoever last paid them.

    The thing that amazes me is not that they can be bought, but that they are such a cheap date.

    Sorry, sorry, of course campaign contributions don’t influence our wonderful democratically-elected representatives.

  3. Aside from his feud with Scalzi, Day likely has a strategy to piggy back off the Tor release. If he can get his parody up, he’ll get good sales. As a marketing plan, is may have some issues, but it’s good business. I think he could have a case for legal action if it’s blocked.

  4. @ Techgrrl1972: If you claim that you can’t read it, you’re obviously just a Special Snowflake demanding that your whims be catered to. Because everybody can read our website! We’re the most accessible website ever!

    (CTRL-plus will embiggen text on a website page, if you’re masochistic enough to want to poke around.)

    Interesting. This didn’t show up when I tried to post it. Sorry if it shows up twice after my second attempt.

  5. “OGH and others of our vintage remember a bid to hold the 1988 Worldcon on a Norwegian Cruise Lines ship, which got a lot of attention but would probably have cratered spectacularly if it had won due to a shortage of fans with enough money to drop on such an expense.”

    Interesting idea! The ferries between Finland and Sweden are much cheaper and it is not unknown to have conferences on them. There are lot of speciality cruises, like for heavy metal and other stuff. But I’m not sure people would be happy to be stuck on one boat going back and forth for five days. Regardless of taxfree alcohol.

  6. @Lela: the problem is that it’s not a parody and Ted has admitted as much through his words and actions prior to and during this whole kerfuffle.

  7. Im pretty sure Niemeyer simply doesnt know that the story itself is not a parody. The thing with the premade cover shows that he hasnt really read VDs posts on this and only has a minor grasp on this issue. Never stopped anyone from commenting though.

  8. @Chip Hitchcock: Edmund Cooper wrote The Cloud Walker, not Edmund Crispin. Though I think he’d be flattered by the confusion. (I can see my ancient Coronet paperback copy from here – with its wonderful Foss cover, which – in the grand tradition of Foss’s relevance to the interior matter – features an electric dirigible apparently melting a submarine.)

  9. The idea of the geek cruise has really taken off in the last decade or so. The first of the JoCo cruises was in 2009 and according to the JoCo wiki, there were 334 passengers and 41 performers and staff.

    Maybe it’s another example of people from the tech sector with well-paying jobs taking control of their enjoyment rather than trying to fit into more mainstream activities.

    Re: intentionally bad literature. Does anyone have a copy of Naked Came the Stranger? I remember the cover made quite an impression on my young imagination. Only years later did I learn it was a tremendous hoax.

  10. Re: intentionally bad literature. Does anyone have a copy of Naked Came the Stranger? I remember the cover made quite an impression on my young imagination. Only years later did I learn it was a tremendous hoax.

    I remember reading part of it not long after it came out, but didn’t bother to finish–it was really bad. (I see our local library has a copy sitting a shelf somewhere in their system.)

    The “hoax” didn’t last long–the fact that it was written by committee was released just a few months after it came out.

  11. This morning I decided I needed a palate cleanser from The Stars are Legion, and a novella would do that nicely, so I started Chalk by Paul Cornell.

    Oh.
    Hell.
    No.

    That story is dark, and grim, with a handy sprinkling of grimdark on top. Now I need a palate cleanser for my palate cleanser!

  12. This is interesting. The 1 starvreviews of scalzis book no longer exiat, but i still them listed in the chart for the overall average. I clicked on ine star reviews and none showed up

  13. I’m trying to think of appropriate games to play on a BoardGameGeek cruise. The Bermuda Triangle came to mind first. The usual sort of Sink the Bismarck and Battleship like games. There was a Love Boat World Cruise board game that might be hard to find.

    Just so long as it doesn’t turn into Pandemic.

  14. I would have gone on the BoardGame Geek cruise if I had known about it. But it will be 6 years until I retire and can go when I want.

  15. (3) Fellowship
    Celebrity Cameo episodes can be hit and miss, but in general I have a lot of time for LoT. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and the costumes&set people do a very nice job.

    (17) Quite A Catch
    Oh, clever!

    @Camestros

    I would honestly watch a film of the Rogue One crew working at Amazon. Or anywhere, really.

    @Mark

    Oh dear. 🙂

  16. Lee on March 22, 2017 at 10:58 am said:
    @ Techgrrl1972: If you claim that you can’t read it, you’re obviously just a Special Snowflake demanding that your whims be catered to. Because everybody can read our website! We’re the most accessible website ever!

    (CTRL-plus will embiggen text on a website page, if you’re masochistic enough to want to poke around.)

    Interesting. This didn’t show up when I tried to post it. Sorry if it shows up twice after my second attempt.

    I’m quite familiar with CTRL-+ as my eyes got older and I use it a lot.
    Doesn’t help with gray text on black background.

    The offer of style sheets is appreciated, but I don’t muck about with complexity — if I have to work at it to read a web site, I won’t bother. Life’s too short.

  17. This is interesting. The 1 starvreviews of scalzis book no longer exiat, but i still them listed in the chart for the overall average. I clicked on ine star reviews and none showed up

    They’re there, you just have to look for them.
    It seems that just clicking on the 1 Star link shows up only those from Verified Purchasers Only. And would you believe it? Not one of the people who’ve given the book one star have definitely bought it? Isn’t that something?
    Perhaps they all rushed out and got library copies as soon as they arrived?
    Nah, most of them brag about not having read it.

  18. @Jack Lint

    That reminds me of running across Naked Came the Sasquatch in a used bookstore years ago. Published by TSR of all places. I liked it a lot better then Stranger.

  19. Mark: This morning I decided I needed a palate cleanser from The Stars are Legion, and a novella would do that nicely, so I started Chalk by Paul Cornell.
    Oh. Hell. No.
    That story is dark, and grim, with a handy sprinkling of grimdark on top. Now I need a palate cleanser for my palate cleanser!

    Given how dark The Lost Child of Lychford is, I’m not surprised.

    I am excited: Six Wakes has just shown up and is waiting for me at my library.

  20. @Chip: I am of a vintage to remember the Bermuda Triangle bid! The price was why it failed, since you can’t jam extra fen into a room on a boat without the boat knowing and charging. As 6 people in one room was the norm for our gang then (dear lord, we did 9 in a room with one queen bed one con), it was too much. Hell, we STILL do 4 but at least we all pay now.

    @Dex: If Teddy had a Congresscritter in his corner, he wouldn’t be living in Horrible Socialist Europe and his daddy wouldn’t have gone to the pokey for fraud.

    @Aaron: In a previous life (90’s, before the web and broadband), I DID get more than 535 people worldwide to do something online. Just from a thing I did as a hobby, not a cause I’d given my life to.

    @Jack Lint: I think I have an ebook of “Naked Came the Stranger” somewhere. I know I have one of “I, Libertine” (ghosted by Sturgeon as a laugh/moneymaker). And don’t forget “Atlanta Nights”, wherein SFWA and pals took down a vanity publisher.

    @Mark-kitteh: Nooooo! I needed a palate cleanser and read a volume of “Lumberjanes”. I may never get around to “Chalk”. Other than Obelisk Gate, I don’t think I’ve read anything grimdark the past year.

    Also if anyone hasn’t clicked on (1) do it now.

  21. @ lurkertype: I remember that bid too. My objection to it was that I wasn’t happy about the concom spending money on a cruise ship that could have been put toward guests and programming. (Yes, I know they have to pay for hotel facilities too, but a cruise ship has a lot of extra overhead per square foot compared to a hotel.)

  22. @Lee: Plus a lot of people were just not wanting to be on a ship. And nobody would have been able to just pop in for one or two days. I’ve been lucky enough to have a few Worldcons where I could drive home at night and bring my own food, saving all kinds of money. Nobody could have done that.

  23. @lurkertype et al: the fancyclopedia web page I pointed to also claims that the Boat was a hoax from the beginning and that the chair was desperately running around the voting site begging people not to vote for it. OTOH, given how many of the entries I’ve read appear to have been written by a certain agenda-ridden person, I’m not sure how true this is. (OTOOH, the fact that Neil didn’t speak to me despite (IIRC) knowing me back then means nothing; I was variously preoccupied in Atlanta.

  24. Just so long as it doesn’t turn into Pandemic.

    As long as the cruise isn’t headed to Madagascar, I don’t see the problem.

  25. @Shem: Thanks! I watched it on CW. Wow, I’m lost (haven’t seen the show in quite a while). 😉 Great cliffhanger, though.

    @JJ: “I am excited: Six Wakes has just shown up and is waiting for me at my library.”

    Enjoy (I hope)! 😀

  26. I think the Boat was the first bid that I pre-supported, despite the (at that time) horrendous $20 fee.

    A few years later, when the SF (later San Jose) in 2002 bid launched with a (still twice the going rate) $20 pre-support, it wasn’t quite as eye-watering, but still got us pushback, given that the “going rate” in the mid-to-late 1990s was around $10. OTOH, another highly respected fan (I’m afraid I shouldn’t name names because the person is not alive anymore and I may be mis-remembering) told us they were glad to see a real bid starting to charge a more reasonable amount for bidding.

    The 1988 Worldcon (Boat finished second to New Orleans) was the last Worldcon I did not attend. By some accounts, I didn’t miss much other than a chance to enjoy New Orleans. OGH was part of the team parachuted in to try and salvage 1988’s Programming, as I recall from the reports at the time. I heard there were buttons that said, “Don’t blame me; I voted for The Boat.”

    (I’ll be on a boat on part of the trip to this year’s Worldcon: a 30-hour voyage from Lubeck to Helsinki. It will be the longest trip I’ve ever made over water, eclipsing a ferry across the English Channel in 1995.)

  27. @Kevin: Everyone I know who went to NO that year ended up spending much more time enjoying the area than being at the con. I got a lovely letter (we did that back then!) from a friend detailing her visit to the usual tourist spots, and how she’d spent a day outside the city (and con) going to an old plantation, only returning for the Masquerade or Hugos or whatnot. She had a “Voted for the Boat” button. Apparently the con was right up there with “Con Digeo” for badness.

    I think The Boat started as a serious bid and then became a hoax, because I remember some parties a few years before where they assured me they were absolutely serious and put on the hard sell with cabin prices and everything. I’m thinking at Atlanta ’84 they were still serious; definitely in Baltimore ’83 (the vote was in 1985 as we had a 3 year lead time then instead of 2). I wasn’t at ’85 for the voting, so they may have converted to hoax by then.

  28. I usually rely on iOS Safari’s reader mode (accessed by a small button, consisting of horizontal lines, on the left-hand corner of the URL bar) to deal with bad formatting, but I have no idea whether that’s universal to all browsers. I mainly use Safari on the iPad because of sheer laziness.

  29. @Meredith

    Reader mode is useful, I use it on the ipad mini a lot. Android’s Chrome browser has had it as an experimental feature for a while but you used to have to enter chrome://flags into the address bar and find it in amongst all the other hidden options. Looks like it is now enabled by default on later versions though, on my phone a pop up at the bottom of the screen says “Make the page mobile friendly”

    Latest desktop versions of Firefox (52.0 in my case) also have a reader mode. An additional icon similar to the iOS one appears in the address bar if the page supports reader. I’m guessing much like tabbed browsing most have implemented it by now.

  30. @Kevin Standalee

    (I’ll be on a boat on part of the trip to this year’s Worldcon: a 30-hour voyage from Lubeck to Helsinki. It will be the longest trip I’ve ever made over water, eclipsing a ferry across the English Channel in 1995.)

    Well, the Baltic Sea is a lot bigger than the English Channel. And a trip on a Baltic Sea ferries is basically a mini-cruise, especially since many of the ferries are swimming entertainment centres. The Finnlines ferries who run the Lübeck-Travemünde – Helsinki route are all fairly new, too – the oldest is eleven years old.

    Lübeck has a lovely medieval town centre and is a Unesco world heritage site, so make sure you have time to enjoy it. The Holstentor (former city gate) is a must.visit.

    The ferries depart in Travemünde BTW, which is a suburb and seaside resort and quite pretty in its own right. Travemünde also has a four-mast bark, which is one of the three surviving Flying-P liners, as a museum ship, which is also well worth visiting.

  31. Of literary interest, Thomas Mann, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (one of two Nobel Prize winners born in Lübeck – the other was Willy Brandt of all people), and his somewhat lesser known brother Heinrich were both born in Lübeck. The former home of the Mann family is now a museum.

    Also, if you’re in Lübeck and not allergic, do try the marzipan the city is famous for. There is a marzipan museum as well as the original Café Niederegger, the most famous Lübeck marzipan brand.

  32. Thanks for the hints on Lübeck. Alas, our time is quite limited. We fly to Hamburg, spend one night there, then have that day to look at Hamburg, reclaim our luggage from our hotel, take the train to Lübeck, then the local bus to Travemünde. (Yes, we’ve been warned that the train station for Travemünde Skandinavienkai isn’t the same as the ferry terminal (Skandinavienkai Terminal) and that there is no foot access between the train station and ferry terminal; you have to take the bus.)

    We’d love to have more time to explore, but we’ve been forced into taking an extra week (and spending more time in Finland than originally planned) on account of my waiting too long to use my frequent-travel points. I couldn’t use them on the dates I wanted, probably because too many other people are flying in and out of Helsinki at the same time I am for some convention happening there. So I have to arrive earlier and stay later. For similar reasons, we’ll be in Iceland four nights instead of three. Total travel time will be 23 days including the drives from/to home to/from SFO with overnight hotel stays nearby.

    (Taking full advantage of a certain hotel’s park-stay-fly offer amounts to paying $20/day to park my vehicle with a hotel room thrown in at the beginning and end of the trip.)

  33. @lurkertype: the Boat vote was in 1986, not 1985; the three-year rotation became active in 1986, so both New Orleans and Boston were awarded Worldcons in Atlanta. (There were trouble signs even then; a fellow Boston committee member told me he was already regretting his vote for NO after the trouble they caused during the vote counting.) I remember the crowd scenes all too well; the voting/signup area for 1989 was jammed, possibly because the Atlanta committee figured an uncontested further-out bid wouldn’t draw many people and so wouldn’t need much space.

  34. Every new comment, I see the thread title and my brain mangles it into something ending in ” . . . Looking for Mr. GoodScroll”.

  35. @Kevin Standalee
    Hamburg has a lot to offer as well. There is the historic warehouse district Speicherstadt, the Miniature Wonderland (GRRM was allegedly quite impressed), the newly opened Elbphilharmonie building and much more. I don’t think Reeperbahn is really worth it these days, but then it’s never been like the movies in my conscious lifetime. But Reeperbahn has the advantage that you can go there at night.

    One really great and free sight to visit is the old Elbtunnel, which opened in 1911 and is full of Art Noveau terracotta reliefs and steampunky machinery. Pedestrians can take the elevator down (you can also take the stairs, of course) and walk to the far side of the river to emerge on the premises of the Blohm + Voss shipyard (I did it a few times as a teen, because my Dad worked at Blohm + Voss). Or just take the elevator back up again. The St. Pauli terminal building of the old Elbtunnel is right next to the St. Pauli Piers BTW, a lovely Art Noveau building and personal favourite, that has sadly been marred a little by WWII bomb damage and bad 1970s rebuilding.

  36. @Cora:

    Thank you. The Miniature Wonderland and the Maritime Museum are currently on our short list of things to see during the short time we have there.

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