Pixel Scroll 8/18/17 And Though She Thought Mike Knew The Answer, Well He Knew But He Would Not Say

(1) THIS JOB IS NOT THAT EASY! Nicholas Whyte is back with “The Adminstrator’s Worldcon – part 2 of my 2017 Hugo memories”.

I almost didn’t make it to Worldcon 75. My taxi was 15 minutes late picking me up from home, and then encountered serious traffic en route to Zaventem airport. I was far too late to check my bag and brought it through security, where I almost came unstuck because of the Official Hugo Glue, which Dave McCarty had given me at Smofcon in December and I now needed to give back to him. (In fact we did not need it, as the artist who created the bases had engraved the winners’ plaques and attached them to the bases herself.) Five different security officials inspected the Official Hugo Glue Gun (which fortunately in Dutch is not a gun but a “lijmapparaat”, glue machine) before I was allowed to go on my way. The captain of my plane then scolded me, entirely fairly, for bringing “hand luggage” which was, in his words, “way too big”. But he did not throw me off, and I arrived in Helsinki.

Whyte includes a clear photo of the Hugo base by itself:

(2) ALL’S WELL. Yesterday’s Scroll quoted Renay’s tweets about the dismaying condition of Lady Business’ Hugo when it arrived. She told File 770 the problems were quickly resolved:

It turns out it was melted glue from where the felt was attached to the base (it’s hot here in Arkansas!). It’s been cleaned off with no problems and we’re looking into the proper type of glue to reattach the felt so disaster averted!! The bolt and washer were missing, too, but we’re going to pick a replacement up tomorrow. Nicholas Whyte from the Hugo team was super responsive. I’m also impressed everything arrived so fast. Those Worldcon 75 volunteers are ON IT.

(3) HUGO WINNER. The speech Ada Palmer was too overwhelmed to read at the Hugos is posted at her blog: “Campbell Award & Invisible Disability”.

Thank you very much. I have a speech here but I actually can’t see it. I can think of no higher honor than having a welcome like this to this community. This… we all work so hard on other worlds, on creating them, on reading them, and discussing them, and while we do so we’re also working equally hard on this world and making it the best world we possibly can. I have a list with me of people to thank, but I can’t read it. These tears are three quarters joy, but one quarter pain. This speech wasn’t supposed to be about invisible disability, but I’m afraid it really has to be now. I have been living with invisible disability for many years and… and there are very cruel people in the world for which reason I have been for more than ten years not public about this, and I’m terrified to be at this point, but at this point I have to. I also know that there are many many more kind and warm and wonderful people in this world who are part of the team and being excellent people, so, if anyone out there is living with disability or loves someone who has, please never let that make you give up doing what you want or working towards making life more good or making the world a more fabulous place.

(4) CONREPORT. Cora Buhlert shares her Worldcon experience in a short video, Cora’s Adventures at WorldCon 75 in Helsinki. Includes a shot of one of the File 770 meetups.

(5) CURBED ENTHUSIASM. Mark Ciocco weighs in on “Hugo Awards 2017: The Results”.

The 2017 Hugo Awards were announced on Friday, so it’s time for the requisite whining/celebration that peppers the steak of our blogging diet (that’s how food works, right?) Um, anyway, despite my formal participation in the awards process roughly coinciding with the Sad/Rabid Puppy era/debacle, this marks the fourth year wherein I’ve contributed to the results. This year’s awards were less directly impacted by those meddlesome puppies, but I feel like we’re still suffering through an indirect backlash and overcorrection. This isn’t exactly new, so let’s just get on with it. (For those who really want to geek out and see how instant-runoff voting works, the detailed final and nominating ballots are available.)

The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin takes the rocket for Best Novel, making Jemisin just the third author to have back-to-back wins in this category (joining the ranks of Orson Scott Card and Lois McMaster Bujold). She’s a good author, but damn, these books are not for me. Both were at the bottom of my ballot and while I can see why her novel won last year, this one is a little more baffling. It appears to have been a close race though, with All the Birds in the Sky only narrowly missing the win. I regret not putting it higher on my ballot, as it’s the only non-series finalist, and that’s something that’s becoming more and more of an issue… My preferred Ninefox Gambit came in third in the voting, which wound up being a theme for my first ranked works this year….

(6) PHOTO FINISH. Amal El-Mohtar coincidentally provides another clear photo of the Hugo base.

(7) WHAT THEATRICAL GENIUSES ARE READING. Broadway World delivers “Your 2017 Summer Reading List Courtesy of Lin-Manuel Miranda”, which includes a few genre works:

(8) WHAT YOUNG PEOPLE ARE READING. At Young People Read Old SFF, James Davis Nicoll has sicced the panel on “By the Waters of Babylon”. (Wow – I first read that in a junior high school textbook, when I was a Young People myself!)

The second story in Phase II of Young People Read Old SFF is Stephen Vincent Benét’s 1937’s“By The Waters of Babylon”. He’s more obscure than he once was now—dying at age 44 didn’t help him stay in the spotlight—but you may have encountered his The Devil and Daniel Webster or Benét’s upbeat toe-tapper, Nightmare, with Angels, quoted in part in John Brunner’s disco-era The Jagged Orbit…

(9) ROWELL REUNITES RUNAWAYS. Marvel is bringing back Nico, Karolina, Molly, Chase, Old Lace and even Gert.

This fall, best-selling YA writer Rainbow Rowell (Carry On, Eleanor and Park), superstar artist Kris Anka (All-New X-Men, Star-Lord) and Eisner-winning colorist Matt Wilson (The Mighty Thor, Black Widow)  team up to bring the universe’s pluckiest team of super heroes back to where they belong: in the pages of a Marvel comic book.

“As a Runaways fan, it’s been such a thrill for me to see these characters together again,” said writer Rainbow Rowell. “I can’t wait to let everyone else into the party.”

“For years I batted other editors and creators back from the Runaways,” said Executive Editor Nick Lowe. “I was the last Editor to edit them and they are precious to me, so I didn’t want just ANYBODY to bring them back. So when my new favorite writer (Rainbow’s Eleanor & Park slayed me in the best way) said they were her favorites, I knew I had half of the lightning I needed. Kris [Anka] was the other missing link for the PERFECT RUNAWAYS creative team and I’m so excited to share them with the world!”

(10) NO CAPTAIN SULU. Mr. Sci-Fi, Marc Scott Zicree, talks about an unproduced Trek series:

Star Trek and Deep Space Nine writer Marc Scott Zicree shares the entire Captain Sulu Star Trek pilot he and Emmy winner Michael Reaves wrote, and shares the untold story of why you never got to see that series — despite its Hugo and Nebula Award nominations!

 

(11) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • August 18, 1947 – Hewlett-Packard Co. is incorporated, nine years after William Hewlett and David Packard sold their first oscillators from a garage in Palo Alto, where they had set up shop with $538 in capital. Moving from oscillators, the first of which they sold to Disney for the movie Fantasia, the Stanford graduates built one of the world’s largest electronics companies
  • August 18, 2001Stacy: Attack of the Schoolgirl Zombies premieres in Japan.

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

  • Born August 18, 1925 – Brian Aldiss

COMICS SECTION. John King Tarpinian approves of the monkey business on Brevity.

(13) INFRINGEMENT SUIT. In January the Arthur C. Clarke estate, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster joined with the estates of Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac to sue Frederik Colting, Melissa Medina, and their publishing firm, Moppet Books, charging copyright infringement. They charged that KinderGuides seek “to capitalize on the [classic] Novels’ enduring fame and popularity,” describing the titles as “a transparent attempt to recast their unauthorized derivatives as ‘study guides’ intended for the elementary school set.”

Publishers Weekly has a progress report on the litigation in “Still No Opinion, but Judge’s Order Bans Distribution of ‘Infringing’ KinderGuides”.

Following a summary judgment ruling last month, a federal judge this week signed off on a permanent injunction immediately barring Moppet Books from distributing in the U.S. any versions of its KinderGuides series held to be infringing, until the works on which they are based enter the public domain. In addition, Moppet Books also agreed to destroy all current copies of the infringing works “in its possession or under its control” within 10 days.

Don’t expect the shredders to fire up quite yet, however. While the ban on distribution is effective immediately, the injunction includes an automatic stay on the destruction of existing stock, pending the “final outcome” of the appeal process.

…On July 28, Judge Jed Rakoff issued a summary judgment for the plaintiffs, rejecting Moppet Books’ claims that the works, created by founders Frederik Colting and Melissa Medina for the company’s KinderGuides series, were protected by fair use. The ruling came just days after oral arguments were presented in the case, and without an accompanying memorandum by Rakoff explaining his decision, which the judge said would come “in due course.”

…Meanwhile, despite the ongoing legal battle, Moppet Books is moving ahead with plans to launch a new line of books in October, including a collection of KinderGuides based on public domain works, and two original nonfiction works.

(14) WHAT’S THAT, ROCKY? The New York Times, in “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth”, reports that new fossil discoveries show prehistoric “squirrels” glided through forests at least 160 million years ago.

In a study published on Wednesday, a team of paleontologists added some particularly fascinating new creatures to the Mesozoic Menagerie. These mammals did not lurk in the shadows of dinosaurs.

Instead, they glided far overhead, avoiding predatory dinosaurs on the ground — essentially flying squirrels of the Jurassic Period, from an extinct branch of mammals that probably still laid eggs.

(15) BRADBURY DRAMATIZED. Broadway World says a one-man Bradbury play will be part of a stage festival in New York next month.

Bill Oberst Jr. brings his award-winning solo performance, “Ray Bradbury‘s Pillar Of Fire,” one of Bradbury’s darkest tales, to Theatre Row on Sunday, Sept. 17 at 6:00pm. The NYC debut is part of the United Solo Theatre Festival.

Ray Bradbury has something to say to us at this exact moment in time;” said Oberst, “that we are citizens of the cosmos first, that the way we imagine our future determines our future, and that the most dangerous minds are those which cannot imagine themselves to be wrong.”

Oberst’s one-act adaptation uses Ray Bradbury‘s poetic prose to tell the story of William Lantry, a 400-year-old corpse who rises from the grave in the year 2349 to find himself the last dead man on Earth. Filled with hatred for a future world where superstition, gothic literature and human burials are all banned, Lantry decides to create an army of the dead. Bradbury later called the novella “a rehearsal for Fahrenheit 451.” He also famously said, “I don’t predict the future, I try to prevent it.”

(16) OLD HOME WEEK. Andrew Porter used to live in part of the historic Henry Siegel mansion, whose story was chronicled in the Daytonian in Manhattan blog yesterday.

…This is where I first published ALGOL, DEGLER! and then S.F. WEEKLY. It’s where I lived while I worked on the 1967 Worldcon, NYCon 3. I had numerous fan gatherings there, and have photos of Ted White and Arnie Katz in my room. This block of East 82nd Street is also the direct approach to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose fabled entrance stairs are visible directly down at the end of the block.

He wrote a long, fascinating comment there, including this genre tidbit –

In later years, part of the basement housed a toy store accessed by a stairway from the bookstore above. The proprietor told me that some of the toy soldiers he sold came from the collection of Donald A. Wollheim, a well-known collector and once publisher of DAW Books. And one of the buyers was George R.R. Martin, whose “Game of Thrones” (HBO) is so popular.

…For many years there was also a bookstore. In early 2017, Crawford Doyle Booksellers, which claimed to be there for 21 years, closed. However, there’d been a bookstore there since at least the late 1950s. I know, because as a teenager, I had a job delivering Womrath Library rental books to posh apartments around the area.

(17) IN THE FLOW. The Hugo Award Book Club discusses John Scalzi’s latest novel in “Review: The Collapsing Empire”.

Given John Scalzi’s track record, high profile, and vocal fan base, it seems likely that The Collapsing Empire will be given a fair amount of consideration on many 2018 Hugo nominators’ lists.

Based on how fun this book is at times, that consideration is probably warranted. The novel is set in an interstellar empire tied together by limited faster-than-light traderoutes known as ‘the Flow.’ This empire — The Interdependency — has lasted for millennia because of the economic dependence of its member worlds to each other. The key protagonists are the new Empress of the Interdependency, and the son of a scientist on a distant world whose father has spent decades discovering that the flow is going to collapse. The overaching plot — which has some parallels to Asimov’s Foundation— is expertly constructed and well-paced. Although the characters all seemed to speak with a similar voice, their motivations were clear, and the conflicts felt natural.

(18) THROWING SHADE. Solar-powered California prepares for the eclipse:

“We’re doing a lot of coordination, a lot of preparation,” says Deane Lyon, a manager at the California Independent System Operator (ISO), which manages about 80 percent of the state’s electric grid. “It’s probably the most work this company has done to prepare for a three-hour event in our history.”

Solar power already comes with up and downs, in the form of clouds.

“So this was a particularly cloudy day,” says Jan Klube of Enphase, pulling up a graph showing the solar output from one California home. The Petaluma-based company monitors rooftop solar systems around the country day in and day out.

To show how a single cloud can make a difference, he points to the afternoon hours, when the output dips by about a third. “You see the big drop, so there’s a cloud coming and going,” he explains. “That’s why you see the zigzag.”

If your solar panels are in the path of totality during the eclipse, “it will go all the way to zero,” he says.

California isn’t squarely in the path, but the moon’s partial shadow will obscure 90 percent of the sun in the north, down to nearly 60 percent in the south. That’s more than enough to cause some anxiety for the people who have to keep California’s lights on.

(19) THE DARK SIDE. Scientists to study whether nature really goes crazy during an eclipse: “Will The Eclipse Make Crops And Animals Flip Out? Scientists Ask (Really)”.

With the help of elementary school students, University of Missouri biology professor Candi Galen is putting out microphones near beehives, in gardens and in a pumpkin patch to record buzzing activity.

“I don’t think it is really known the cues that bees use or don’t use when they are foraging that tell them to jump ship and go back their hives or stay put,” Galen says. “Bees depend upon the environment to regulate their temperature, and that may suggest that if indeed it does cool off a few degrees as the eclipse progresses, then they would get less active because they would be at a lower temperature physiologically.”

Researchers are also working with nearby cattle ranchers and even fishermen to monitor fish activity, Reinbott says.

(20) DNA EDITING. An NPR report is allowed to go “Inside The Lab Where Scientists Are Editing DNA In Human Embryos”.

Critics, however, pounced on the news. They fear editing DNA in human embryos is unsafe, unnecessary and could open the door to “designer babies” and possibly someday to genetically enhanced people who are considered superior by society.

As the debate raged last week, I asked Mitalipov if I could visit his lab to see the next round of his experiments. He wants to confirm his initial results and determine whether the method can be used to repair other mutations.

He agreed to a visit, and on Monday, I became the first journalist to see these scientists cross a line that, until recently, had been taboo.

Chip Hitchcock adds a historical note: “Readers of antique SF may remember Heinlein’s elaborate description of deductive sorting of ova in Beyond This Horizon; another infodump bites the dust.”

(21) PUNISHER. The Verge invites everyone to watch The Punisher teaser trailer:

The Defenders hits Netflix today, and with it comes a look at Marvel’s upcoming show The Punisher. Frank Castle was introduced in season 2 of Daredevil. He’s played by Jon Bernthal, who will reprise his role as the gun-toting Army vet out for revenge.

Various rips of the trailer are popping up all over YouTube…

 

(22) SAY HELLO. Amazon Prime video will stream The Tick on August 25.

From creator Ben Edlund comes the hero you’ve been waiting for. In a world where heroes and villains have existed for decades, a mild-mannered accountant named Arthur has his life turned upside down when he runs into a mysterious blue superhero, The Tick, who insists that Arthur become the brains to his brawn in a crime-fighting duo. Will Arthur resist the call of Destiny or join the fight?

 

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Hampus Eckerman, JJ, James Davis Nicoll, Karl-Johan Norén, Carl Slaughter, Chip Hitchcock, Andrew Porter, and Michael J. Walsh for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]

31 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/18/17 And Though She Thought Mike Knew The Answer, Well He Knew But He Would Not Say

  1. 3) She was so touched and so happy and overwhelmed at the ceremony, it was moving and touching to watch.

  2. (8)

    (Wow – I first read that in a junior high school textbook, when I was a Young People myself!)

    Me, too!

  3. 8
    I remember reading it in school, but it was in 9th or 10th grade. It does stick with you.

  4. 17) After reading Collapsed Empire, I felt that it is cursed with adequacy. Plot is good, characters are fine, ideas are moderately interesting and so on. But the novel never gets beyond decent. Scalzi’s work often feels like this to me.

  5. @1: I hope to see the base in person some day, but from the photos it looks really good; IMO, too many bases try to outshine rather than complement the rocket.

    @8: we may have had the same textbook. Do you remember an untitled Jack Finney story, the Bishop scene from Les Miserables, and a Poirot?

    I am somewhere between amused and baffled by some of the reactions, especially not recognizing the source of the title. Oh well — it would be a boring world if everyone shared my tastes.

    @Rob Thornton: that was also my reaction — he’s done a lot of facile work and one (Lock In) that maybe will be remembered. (Repeat previous comment….)

    (edit): 2nd 5th!

  6. (3) Good for her. Although she makes me feel like a loser, getting all that stuff done with those conditions.

    (5) “Backlash and overcorrection” sounds a little… “bad behavior on both sides” to me right now. I’m cranky this week. And anyone whining there isn’t enough sensawunda in this year’s ballot… bwuh? Oor Wombat’s story alone had it all! Plus, he’s fallen for the Puppy origin story which we here know is a complete lie.

    (10) I didn’t see it even when it got a Hugo nomination, which implies that a number of people did, somehow. At cons? On bootleg VHS?

    (12.5) Roll out the barrel.

    (13) Because kids 6-12 just love Kerouac, Hemingway, and Capote. They’re out there on the playground being Dharma Bums.

    (14) Take that, Boris and Natasha.

    (18) Wow, planning ahead for something? I thought that was a lost art nowadays. Oh wait, it’s California, who survived even Enron deliberately sabotaging the power, and learned from that.

    (19) That’s pretty neat!

    (22) Still not sure about this version.

    ———————————–

    In book news, I’ve read Natasha Pulley’s new novel “The Bedlam Stacks”. Stayed up late, woke up early. I think it’s objectively better-written, as in plotting, dialogue, and descriptions than “Watchmaker of Filigree Street”, but I didn’t lurve it as much. Possibly because no 🐙? Because I like London and Tokyo more than Darkest Peru? Still, well worth your time.

    It’s set in the same universe, takes place about 20-25 years earlier.

  7. (20) One potentially concerning aspect of DNA editing is that some things that are clear defects no one would want to inflict on their child (sickle cell anemia is the most obvious example) are a result of getting two copies of the gene that protects against malaria, one from each parent. We might eliminate malaria someday, but we don’t know what else either malaria or the sickle cell gene might be useful for in the future.

    Maybe this is too arcane and remote a worry, though, brought on by the fact that I’m currently hiding out in the White Mountains with my dogs.

    (20) But in any case, Beyond This Horizon is a romance novel, so breaking the sf premise is not really fatal.

  8. Heh. I didn’t even try taking mine apart, I just put it in bubble wrap provided by the con, wrapped a hoodie around it, and shoved it in my backpack. I took it out for the TSA, put it in a separate bin, and said “IT’S A TROPHY!” when they gave me the side-eye.

    Boston was the only US flight to contend with, and the supervisor there said “Aw, that’s neat. Congratulations,” in a thick Bostonian accent, and I went on my way.

    I tell you, one may never really feel they earn the award, but schlepping that thing on my back through four airports, I’m pretty sure I earned SOMETHING. Possibly a trip to the chiropractor.

  9. RedWombat: I tell you, one may never really feel they earn the award, but schlepping that thing on my back through four airports, I’m pretty sure I earned SOMETHING. Possibly a trip to the chiropractor.

    Even going through Melbourne airport security back in 1985 I thought I would need an explanation for the Hugo stuffed in my carry-on. The person running the scanner just said, “Oh, you have one of those, too,” which was rather deflating — like every tourist was going home with one. Two of that year’s winners — Fred Pohl and Charlie Brown — had preceded me through security for the same flight.

  10. The moral of the story is: get to security before any other winner gets there. Particularly from an airport with a limited number of outgoing flights across half the planet to the country other winners are from.

    @Red Wombat: As long as you kept from getting puncture wounds (or puncture dents), it’s all good. I have seen people poked by everything from the local college plastic pointy thing* to Hugos and Emmys. Oscars are heavy but at least they’re not pointy.

    And at least none of them broke like that one year when they all had bits fall off during and right after the ceremony.

    *That would be me. I keep it on a high shelf now. They gave out medals the next year and I managed not to strangle myself. I would probably need some sort of affixed soft cap to carry a Hugo home safely; luckily this won’t ever be a problem.

  11. 1) This is a wonderful description. It is fascinating to read about all the details involved. And it felt fantastic to bring my father to the Hugos.

  12. 8) I say again, it’s time for a Benét revival.

    7) Career of Evil? I didn’t realize she was a Blue Öyster Cult fan! Which is as good an excuse as I’ll ever have for a song about the first SJW credential in outer space:

  13. @RedWombat
    Congrats on a well deserved Hugo!

    @lurkertype
    The only major award I ever got the chance to hold was the Bambi Award, a German media award. It’s heavy and has pointy bits, but at least it won’t get mistaken for weapon, since it looks exactly like what the name implies.

  14. 18) We have solar panels and a battery system. A single cloud normally doesn’t make too much of a difference, though the difference between a cloudy and sunny day at the same time of the year is notable. A rainy day is even worse than a merely cloudy one and snow stops solar power generation altogether (but in winter, most of the power we consume comes from a co-generation unit anyway). No idea what the effect of a solar eclipse would be, since the last total one in my part of the world was in 1999, when the solar panels weren’t installed yet.

  15. Getting Hugos through security:

    I think WSFS should issue a special beanie hat to every winner, one with a chin strap and a series of devices capable of affixing the award base to the top of the beanie (where the propeller would normally be).

    Instead of packing the award, having to drag it out at the check point and fumblingly trying to explain that while it is a rocket, its not really a rocket, you just stroll along with your designer hat (Gucci, you know), or sacrosanct religious headgear (you’ve heard of the Moonies, right…?) …”…take the hat off with my shoes? sure thing…” and home you go.

    Note: depending upon the height of the base, you may not be able to wear your Hugo (Boss) Hat while sitting on the plane.

  16. Back in 2014, I put my Hugo in my checked luggage, but I made sure to sharpie “THIS IS AN AWARD TROPHY” all over the boxes (one for the rocket and one for the glass base). I didn’t end up with a “The TSA searched your luggage” notice on that trip, so. I’d have tried to take it carryon, but the base that year was pretty fragile, and I figured the chances were better if it was securely bundled up with the provided packing plus all my clothes.

    I was warned not to put my Nebula in checked luggage, so I carried it in my shoulder bag. (A Think Geek Bag of Holding. That is some serious shoulder bag capacity.) Wow. Yeah. That sucker is heavy. Going through security, I took it out and put it in its own bin, because I’d also been warned that it showed up suspicious on the machines, so I figured it would help if they could look at it and just see what it was up front. No questions, no comments, no delays.

    Dang though that was a heavy award. My shoulder is aching just thinking about that trip.

    I’m glad people’s rockets are arriving so promptly! I recall it took a while in 2014, for the folks who elected to have them shipped instead of trying to carry them home themselves.

  17. Taking Hugos through airport security…
    Frisbie has a story about taking the entire box of rocket statuettes through airport security in 1972, when security was much simpler. He said he got to the desk, opened the box, and the security guy took out and unwrapped one rocket; he could see people kind of sliding behind pillars. The security guy asked if all of them were like the one, which of course they are. And the rocket got wrapped and put back in the box and carried onto the plane.

    I’ll admit to being worried in 1984, when they had to come in from the UK, what with the Olympics being in L.A. Fortunately they arrived well before the Olympic stuff got going.

  18. @lurkertype [moves Watchmaker… up Mt. Tsundoku]. But what is that blue ?emoji? — is it intended as a Cthulhu? (If so, I think we’ve reached the

    @Lis: Anything is possible; biology in more-complex animals seems to rarely have operants with just one purpose. (You may have been following a local example of the entangling of hearing and balance.) But ISTM that the proper place for the sickle-cell allele and the malaria parasite is in the ultra-deep freeze next to the smallpox virus. (Yes, I know that the parasite is sufficiently complex that it may not survive freezing. Work with me?)

    @lurkertype:And at least none of them broke like that one year when they all had bits fall off during and right after the ceremony. Which year were you thinking of? I was on the 1989 committee (overall, not Hugo design), but I think that wasn’t the only case.

    @OGH: Sounds like you got the BNF(light); I don’t remember any notables on my 1985 return flight (Qantas via Fiji and Hawaii). OTOH, the extra stop meant the plane cleared out and the 20+ fans on board could sleep lying down. OTOOH, Amy Thomson had a luggage failure on arrival due to having picked up every Aussie fanzine she could lay hands on.
    Even in 2010, Australian security was calmer than in the U.S.

  19. […we’ve reached the] limit of what can be done in that number of pixels.
    (trying to juggle too many things here, and the promised gray day has turned hot — I am so glad I’m not going anywhere near the “Free Speech” rally and countermarches — somebody is going to snap.)

  20. I must confess that Obelisk Gate wasn’t my top pick either–but I had it as #2 behind All the Birds…, so I can’t complain too much, especially since my #1 pick did get the Nebula. 🙂

    I like to see a bit of humor mixed in with my drama, and Charlie Jane both made me laugh out loud, and had me near tears. I realize that some people think that any hint of humor ruins a book, but I consider those people to be an alien species–I will never understand them.

    I must also confess to mixed feelings about the idea of Punisher show. Given the state of things right now, is this really the best time for a show about a character who thinks violence is always the right answer? Still, as long as they stick fairly close to the version that appeared in Netflix’s Daredevil, and don’t go all Frank Miller on us, I suppose it might be ok…

    To be stuck inside Berserkeley with the Galactic Blues again…

  21. I guess no one else is going to mention that this post is from the future? “Pixel Scroll 8/18/18“?

  22. I guess no one else is going to mention that this post is from the future? “Pixel Scroll 8/18/18“?

    It’s the shoggoth.

  23. Given all the time travelers here, it’s not like most of us would notice a mere year off on the post date.

  24. Pingback: AMAZING NEWS FROM FANDOM: 8/20/2017 - Amazing Stories

  25. Belatedly…

    @Chip Hitchcock

    I believe that emoji represents Katsu the clockwork octopus. 🙂 A character that got rave reviews from many a Filer after reading Watchmaker.

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