Jon Del Arroz told Facebook readers today that Twitter has permanently suspended him for violating the platform’s rules.
JDA published a screencap of Twitter’s suspension notice which indicates the ban is permanent unless he successfully appeals it.
[Thanks to James Davis Nicoll for the story.]
Following the settlement between San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions, Inc. (Worldcon 76) and Jon Del Arroz of his lawsuit against the 2018 Worldcon, Del Arroz’ attorney, Peter Sean Bradley, has announced that he provided his services pro bono.
He filled in more details in this statement to File 770:
I did not charge Mr. Del Arroz anything for my services. There was a contingency fee retainer agreement but I took the case with no expectation of being paid on this case since it was not likely that the defendant had any assets (other than its trademark.) When we ascertained that defendant had not acquired insurance with the usual coverage for defamation, those expectations were confirmed.
Bradley further explained:
The out-of-pocket costs – what are called “costs” by the courts, as opposed to attorney’s fees – include things like filing fees, deposition court reporter transcript fees, in the main. I can’t think of any other costs in this case. Those costs were borne by the client. The $4,000 settlement payment covered these costs.
Bradley also mentioned another of his recent pro bono cases:
Fortunately, as a sole practitioner with approximately 40 years of experience in business litigation and plaintiff’s civil rights litigation, I have the flexibility to take cases that interest me and/or where I think I can help people.
For example, last year I represented an African-American woman who had been fired from her job with the County of Fresno before the Civil Service Commission on a pro bono basis where the case had indicia of racial discrimination. I was successful in getter her job back for her. My compensation was being able to help a very nice person while fighting racial discrimination during the George Floyd riots.
It may be surprising to some people who think of lawyers in pejorative terms, but the law is a helping profession, particularly for those of us who represent individuals rather than corporations.
And Bradley included this note about his practice in response to some belittling comments about it on this blog:
This may also come as a shock to your readership but my civil rights practice, including employment discrimination and termination, involves the representation of the disabled, women, racial/ethnic minorities, people on account of sexual orientation/identity, and people who have had their constitutional or civil rights violated. I was amused while I was reading File 770 commenters’ views about my legal ability to receive the Court of Appeal Opinion affirming a $2.6 million jury verdict on behalf of a client in a disability/defamation case. (O’Brien v. CDCR.) It seems that the Court of Appeals had a different evaluation of my legal ability than your readers, and, again, I took satisfaction in helping another very nice person while enjoying the prospects of a substantial fee.
The O’Brien Appeals court decision is online here.
(1) THE PLAY’S THE THING. “’Game of Thrones’ Broadway show to be written by George R.R. Martin” – CNBC has the story. I know there’s an obligatory comment expected here, but personally I’m glad there are things he wants to write.
The author behind the mega-hit “A Song of Ice and Fire” book series, which was the basis for HBO’s Emmy Award-winning series “Game of Thrones,” is now writing a script for a play based in the fantasy world of Westeros.
The Hollywood Reporter said Tuesday that the play will center around the Great Tourney at Harrenhal and debut in New York, London and Australia in 2023. Martin will work with playwright Duncan Macmillan (“1984”) and theater director Dominic Cooke on the project.
The Great Tourney at Harrenhal is an important historical event in the world of Westeros. Occurring 16 years before the events of HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” the contest took place over 10 days and included tournaments of jousting, archery and combat. It is also the place where Prince Rhaegar Targaryen created a nationwide scandal for dedicating his victory to Lyanna Stark instead of his wife. This decision led to Robert’s Rebellion and the Targaryens being overthrown….
(2) AUSTRALASIAN HORROR Q&A. The Redback Room is an initiative of the Australasian Horror Writers Association. Every two months, host Kyla Lee Ward will interview two horror writers from Australasia – emerging or established. In Redback Room Episode 1, Kyla talks to Australia’s most awarded horror writer, Kaaron Warren, and award-winning writer and president of the AHWA, Alan Baxter.
(3) POPULAR CREATED LANGUAGES. “League of languages” helps attract attention to what is probably a marketing site for language tutoring with its articles and statistics about fictional languages – for example, Elvish and Klingon:
For decades, fantasy and sci-fi have dominated our screens and books. To fully immerse a viewer into a fictional world, language is one of the commonly used tricks to give a sense of realness.
Typically, most films and TV shows will speak gibberish or simply create just a few words or phrases that are featured in a scene. However, some of these fictional languages have evolved into fully developed languages that can be learnt and used during coherent conversations.
We analysed the top 5 most popular fictional languages and compared speakers, learners, inspirations and word count to find out which fantasy world has the best made-up language.
So whether you’re looking for a new hobby, to feel part of a fandom or simply want to know more about linguistics from your favourite film or TV show, read our guide on the most popular fictional languages.
I wondered if this is really true, though:
Key Facts:
(4) TRADPUB HORROR. Entertainment Weekly has a conversation with “Zakiya Dalila Harris on her novel The Other Black Girl”.
Three years ago, Zakiya Dalila Harris was an assistant editor at Knopf Doubleday Publishing. Now, she’s the author of a novel that garnered a seven-figure book contract (after a 14-bidder auction) and an adaptation deal at Hulu. The Other Black Girl is best described as The Devil Wears Prada meets Get Out, with a little bit of Black Mirror thrown in. It follows Nella, a book-publishing assistant who clashes with the only other Black employee in her department. As things escalate (like anonymous threatening notes left on Nella’s desk), she begins to suspect there’s something more sinister behind their professional competition. Here, Harris, 28, offers up her process — and it’s anything but beginner’s luck.
Did you feel pressure to write a happy ending?
I definitely didn’t want a happy ending. I was really inspired by Night of the Living Dead; I love endings that are frustrating or nerve-racking. I think I subconsciously wanted to drive home the pressures that Black people are under in corporate America — I didn’t want any of the characters to be able to get out of their situations easily, because that would just reinforce the notion that it’s on Black folks to resist the system, instead of on white folks to change the system.
(5) BOXING MATCH. Io9 is shocked, I tell you, by news of “Loki Charms: Marvel’s Limited Edition Cereal Disney+ Tie-In”.
Loki has done some horrible things in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including murdering Phil Coulson and leading an alien invasion of Earth in which countless people died. But now the Norse god of mischief has gained control of Lucky Charms cereal, and this crime is beyond the pale….
(6) DON’T DO THE CRIME IF YOU CAN’T DO THE TIME. Meanwhile, let Vanity Fair tell you everything they know about the series: “’Loki’: A Complete Beginner’s Guide to Marvel’s New Show”.
Where Is Loki? This is where things get a little complicated but also pretty fun. The Loki series is set inside the world of something called the TVA, or Time Variance Authority. Don’t worry even a little bit if you feel confused here; the Loki premiere spends plenty of time explaining the rules and regulations of this place.
Here, though, are the basics: The TVA is a futuristic bureaucratic organization tasked with cleaning up messy timeline shenanigans due to the aforementioned time travel. In the MCU, when a timeline is messed with, that timeline splits off into its own reality. As you might imagine, this makes things complicated. Loki escaping from a 2012 film a full six years before his date with death in 2018? Messy. In other words, Loki enters the show, and the TVA, as a time criminal. (Fun, right?) The TVA was created in the future, but it exists outside of time. But I’m not sure you really need to worry about that yet.
(7) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
(9) COMICS SECTION.
(10) STOP THE PRESSES! Or at least slow them down a little: “’Paddington 2’ Loses Top Movie Honor Due to New Bad Review” says The Hollywood Reporter.
Not to be the bearer of bad news, but Paddington 2 has lost its recently obtained honor as the best movie of all time according to Rotten Tomatoes’ freshness ratings.
You’ll recall the headlines last month when Citizen Kane lost its decades-long 100 percent rating on the critic aggregation site due to a newly discovered negative review from 1941. The disruption caused fans to declare 2018’s much-beloved Paddington 2 as the new best film since it now had the most reviews of any title that also had a 100 percent rating.
Now, there’s been another update that changes all that.
A new review has knocked Paddington down a branch — to a 99 percent score. The review was from Film Authority and critic Eddie Harrison, who seemed to know precisely what he was doing, somewhat defensively noting, “I reviewed Paddington 2 negatively for BBC radio on release in 2017, and on multiple occasions after that, and I stand by every word of my criticism.”
(11) CATCHING HELL. Calgary author Marc Watson, who has been published on flash fiction site www.101words.org, as well as comedy site www.thecorrectness.com, begins a new fantasy series with Catching Hell Part 1: Journey.
In the distant future, two young men are thrust into unknown worlds—worlds they were raised to fear.
Aryu, the Boy with Wings, enters a realm where magic rules. Guided by the conflicted phoenix Nixon Ash, a creature sent to kill him, Aryu must confront the powerful, immortal Embracers and the balance of Everything and Nothing they inhabit. Meanwhile, Johan navigates a futuristic world, seeking a means to defeat the robotic Army of the Old destructively marching across their homeland, and reunite with his best friend.
(12) WHEN IN ROME. This vending machine will turn out a pizza in the time it takes to soft-boil an egg:
It is barely a few square meters large, just enough space for three vending machines side by side. In via Catania 2, in Rome, the first store for automatic express pizza was opened. Four flavors to select from: margherita, spicy salami, bacon and four cheeses; three minutes of waiting, which can be [whiled away] by following the different stages of preparation, and that’s it.
(13) LIQUID REFRESHMENT. What could sound more out of this world than a drink called Unicorn Tears– MAD TASTY – and for $30 for a six-pack, it’ll have to do a lot to live up to that name.
Unicorn Tears is an exotic and mysterious blend of natural fruit flavors that is delightful on the nose and refreshing for the brain. Expand your bandwidth to conquer your day with this magical elixir.
Our Hemp-Forward Formulation
At 20 MG broad-spectrum hemp extract and less than 15 calories a can, our clean, restorative, and hydrating beverage was made to fit into any wellness routine. Our Oregon-farmed hemp is sourced and extracted for all the benefits and no earthy aftertaste. There is zero sugar or sweeteners and no complicated additives needed to mask the hemp flavor.
(14) JDA STAGES TRIUMPHAL PARADE ON THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY. Jon Del Arroz threw up a couple more videos today, one of them featuring comments by his lawyer Peter Sean Bradley. He had 42 viewers at peak — that was it.
If somebody else’s blog was involved it would have been funny, So much of his screentime was meaninglessly devoted to displaying my post about the Nebula winners while he blathered in audio, then lovingly reviewed 770’s comments about his settlement. How did his lawyer get a word in edgewise?
Richard Fox also dropped in to demonstrate his solidarity with JDA’s ideas about racism:
And to horn in on JDA’s publicity by repeating his own lies about this blog (see “Perjury, Not Piracy Is The Problem”).
(15) BEZOS in SPAAAAAAAACE!The Washington Post reports “Jeff Bezos is going to space on Blue Origin’s first crewed spaceflight in July”.
A couple of weeks after Jeff Bezos officially steps down as CEO of Amazon, he’ll leap into something more mythic: riding to the edge ofspace aboard one of his own rockets, alongside his brother, in a flight that would fulfill a lifelong dream.
The plan is that Bezos, his brother, Mark, and the winner of an online auction for Blue Origin’s nonprofit foundation will be on the New Shepard on July 20 when it lifts off for a suborbital flight, the first time the spacecraft will carry passengers. The date is the anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.The flight will mark a significant milestone for Blue Origin, which lags behind Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the competition for billions of dollars in NASA and Pentagon contracts and which flies a more powerful rocket capable of taking people and supplies into orbit….
Daniel Dern comments:
One wonders whether nobody in this loop has read the last (third?) of Heinlein’s The Man Who Sold The Moon (and/or the shorter followup, Requiem), where Delos D Harriman is prohibited from flying, due to a mix of health, insurance, (avoiding bad) publicity, etc.
One wonders whether his life insurance premiums are taking a brief spike. Yeah, he can afford them.
If nothing else, I’d love to see him at the launch site buying flight insurance. (I’m sure somebody will do, or already has, a video of this.)
(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Pirates of the Caribbean On Stranger Tides Pitch Meeting” on Screen Rant, Ryan George says the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean shows that, like other fourth films in franchises, the film practices “self-plagiarism, where the film goes through moments” people liked in the first three movies. There’s also “hyper-specific magic with very vague backgrounds,” so there’s a great deal about the power of fresh mermaids’ tears (old ones won’t work) just to bring mermaids into the movie.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, Jennifer Hawthorne, Daniel Dern, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Bill.]
(1) NEBULA MUSIC. The 56th Annual Nebula Award winners post is at the link. Below, you can watch host Aydrea Walden’s fantastic song referencing all 40 finalists, then hear the great acceptance speeches:
(2) DEBARKLE. Camestros Felapton’s history of the Puppy slates and how they illuminate right wing politics has reached the announcement of the 2015 Hugo finalists, which were overwhelmingly Puppy: “Debarkle Chapter 39: April — Part 1, the Finalists”.
…In the headline Best Novel category, the combined Sad and Rabid Puppy slates had won three of the five finalist positions but would have won four out of five if Correia had not withdrawn. The Sad Puppy nominated Baen book Trial by Fire by Charles E. Gannon and the Rabid Puppy nominated Baen book The Chaplain’s War by Brad Torgersen both fell a few votes short of being a finalist. The addition of Correia’s withdrawal meant that despite everything, once again no Baen novels were Hugo finalists. In an added irony, one of the two Tor published novels in the finalists was the Sad/Rabid Puppy nominated The Dark Between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson.
In the next chapters, we will look at some of the immediate and later reactions to the Puppy sweep of the finalists. However, in this chapter, I want to concentrate on the shifting nature of the finalists.
In the days that followed many of the people co-opted by Torgersen and Day as nominees for their slates discussed their inclusion. Matthew David Surridge, a writer at The Black Gate fanzine and a nominee on both the Sad and Rabid Puppy slates for Best Fan Writer, explained that he had declined a nomination.
… Surridge had discovered accidentally that he was on the slates in February but thinking that it was unlikely that he’d be a finalist, he had ignored them. When contacted by the Hugo administrators, he declined. Surridge declining meant that Laura Mixon, author of the report on Requires Hate, became a finalist, which also meant that Best Fan Writer had one non-Puppy nominated finalist.
(3) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman gets to break a 428-day streak with Karen Osborne in Episode 146 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.
Up until my meal with writer Karen Osborne on which you’ll be eavesdropping this episode, it had been 428 days since I’d last seen an unmasked face other than my wife or son. (Except on Zoom, that is.) Due to COVID-19, I hadn’t been able to pull off that kind face-to-face chatting and chewing since Episode 117, recorded in March 2020 with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Michael Dirda. I’m more thrilled that I can possibly convey to begin the slow crawl back to a new normal.
Karen Osborne was a Nebula Award finalist last year for her short story “The Dead, In Their Uncontrollable Power.” Her fiction has appeared in Uncanny, Fireside, Escape Pod, Robot Dinosaurs, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her debut novel, Architects of Memory, the first book of The Memory War series, was published in September 2020 by Tor Books, and its sequel, Engines of Oblivion, was published this past February. She’s the emcee for the Charm City Spec reading series, has won a filmmaking award for taping a Klingon wedding, and most importantly, accompanied me on the theremin during my late-night ukulele singalong when I was Guest of Honor a few years back at the Baltimore World Fantasy Convention.
We discussed her biggest surprise after signing with an agent for her first novel, how she was able to celebrate the launch of that debut book and a Nebula nomination during the COVID-19 lockdown, what you need to keep in your head to never go wrong about a character’s motivations, how the Viable Paradise writing workshop taught her to lean in on her weird, the favorite line she’s ever written, how she wrote fanfic of her own characters to better understand them, why she doesn’t want her daughter to read her second novel until she’s 13, the way Star Trek: The Next Generation changed her life, how the Clarion workshop taught her to let go of caring what other people think of her writing, what Levar Burton means to her childhood, and much more.
(4) NOW FOR ANOTHER MUSICAL NUMBER. Nerdist says the promise is finally fulfilled: “Starlight’s Ballad from THE BOYS Season 2 Gets Full Music Video”.
Season two of The Boys put star Erin Moriarty’s musical chops on display. The first episode of the bunch set the action at the funeral of deceased Seven fixture Translucent; the emotional, and highly publicized event gave Moriarty’s character Starlight a chance to sing her heart out. However, viewers of the Amazon Prime series only got a snippet of the ballad, titled “Never Truly Vanished.” Creative forces behind the program always intended to release a longer version by way of a formal music video.
Showrunner Eric Kripke made mention of these plans to CinemaBlend back in September, just after the season had dropped online. As with so many other productions, constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic waylaid said plans. But now that things are a bit safer in the macro, the The Boys team has come together to give us the music video once promised. Take a gander below at Starlight’s rendition of “Never Truly Vanished.”
(5) SORTED. Patrick Susmilch at Hard Drive says “Progress: We Finally Have a Female Orson Scott Card” – and it’s J.K. Rowling.
Young adult fiction fans are rejoicing as the literature world finally has a female equivalent to Orson Scott Card now that J.K. Rowling’s recent series of anti-trans tweets and a 3,600 word essay have given them an opportunity to be disappointed by a female author’s hatred.
“I’m used to seeing tears on a reader’s face when I explain that the author of Ender’s Game believes that homosexuality is caused by child abuse,” said librarian Jennifer Kinsley, “but it’s a huge step forward to have to explain to young fans that their favorite female author believes that only women menstruate and that trans women are secretly trying to molest them in gender-neutral bathrooms.”…
(6) CENTER NAMES FELLOWS. Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination has announced its inaugural class of Applied Imagination Fellows, “who will work over the next year on projects to catalyze transformative change and advance visions of inclusive futures in partnership with communities around the world.”
Congratulations to Regina Kanyu Wang who is one of them:
So excited and honored to be part of the cohort! I am an imagination fellow of CSI@ASU this year!
I will create a series of video interviews with female science fiction authors, editors and fans, as well as scientists and entrepreneurs, from across China, both to foreground the creative vitality of women imagining and creating the future and to explore how these creators promote nondualistic thinking in their work, as a way to reframe conflicts and imagine a more inclusive, harmonious future. This will also be part of my PhD project at CoFUTURES, UiO.
(7) THE 50K FURSUIT. Here is an interesting confluence of fandom, tech and venture capital: “$50,000 FURSUIT: crypto-fueled bidding smashes auction record at The Dealers Den” – Dogpatch Press has the story.
The new all-time fursuit auction record is worth a nice car or some people’s yearly income. (Highest commission is a different number.) It’s been 3 years since the last record by MixedCandy: A look at furry business with a $17,017 record fursuit auction price, July 2018.
Shifting winds of tech and business helped make this possible; it has to do with porn, politics, and payment providers. We’ll get into that… but I’m sure that wasn’t on the mind of Zuri Studios and Sabi, the owner/maker based in the Czech Republic with a fluffalicious folio of “god tier fursuits“.
Sabi just found out there’s no business like sew business.
…Tripling the record since 2018 gets steaming hot takes on social media. How can any suit be worth so much?
Like any painting or original object, it’s because something’s rare and someone’s willing to pay. (Try offering less for this one!) The price isn’t just the worth of one costume; it’s for years of school and practice, growing clients and a business, and developing networks for knowledge, trade and materials. Fursuits aren’t art to hang on the wall, they’re eye candy you hug at cons. When live events thrive, it makes a market. But you don’t have to fight for this fursuit when there’s makers for many budgets, who share free DIY maker knowledge. Just remember it isn’t a get-rich business, one fursuit isn’t a goldmine, the market isn’t cornered, and it’s not a payday for a big corporation. There’s more room for makers to be pro-fans when one can get such a big reward.
But how does that kind of purchasing power come from furries?…
(8) HWA PRIDE. Horror Writers Association starts its Pride Month thematic posts with “A Point of Pride: Interview with Greg Herren”.
What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it?
Horror is one of the few forms of art—regardless of form, whether it’s the written word or a visual medium—that can evoke a visceral reaction from the audience—physical, emotional, intellectual—and I’ve always thought that was impressive.
I’ve always loved being scared (which is weird, now that I think about it). When I was a kid, my grandmother introduced me to crime and suspense movies, and she also loved what she called (and I still call them this in my head) “scary movies”—I don’t think she ever called them horror—and I also loved the haunted houses at amusement parks. I’ve always, as long as I can remember, been partial to ghost stories more than anything else….
(9) APPROVAL RATING. [Item by Rich Horton.] I stumbled into a Twitter thread about yesterday’s episode of Mythic Quest, which showed C. W. Longbottom working for “Amazing Tales” in 1972, and winning a Nebula for “Best Debut Novel” (!) in 1973 for a novel he wrote that Isaac Asimov basically rewrote … And the Nebula they used was a misprinted Nebula made in 2005 that they got from Steven Silver! Thread starts here. (Mythic Quest is an uneven show, but when it’s on, it can be wonderful!)
(10) KRAFT OBIT. David Anthony Kraft, who worked on The Defenders, Captain America and Man-Wolf early in his career, died of complications of the coronavirus on May 19. The New York Times tribute is here: “David Anthony Kraft, Comic Book Writer and Chronicler, Dies at 68”.
…Growing up as a boy in small-town North Dakota, David Anthony Kraft escaped into the world of comic books. He read issues of The Incredible Hulk hidden in his textbooks at school. He trudged through snow during brutal winters to buy the latest adventure of Thor.
When he was 12, he decided to write his own comics, so he installed a desk and a lamp in a closet at home. His stepmother soon found him scribbling away.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m writing,” he said. “This is my office.”
“What makes you think you can be a writer?”
“I will be a writer. And I’m going to work for Marvel.”
At least in his retelling, so began the real-life superhero origin story of David Anthony Kraft.
Soon enough, he sold a piece to Amazing Stories. In his teens, he wrote tales for pulpy horror comics. He developed a correspondence with Marvel’s offices in New York, and he kept asking about job openings. When he was 22, they asked him to try out for a junior staff position, and he drove to the city on his motorcycle, arriving at Marvel’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters in 1974.
Mr. Kraft became one of Marvel’s writers during the 1970s and ’80s. He was known for his work on The Defenders and on titles like Captain America and Man-Wolf. He wrote nearly the entire run of The Savage She-Hulk….
(11) MEMORY LANE.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
(13) COMICS SECTION.
(14) DROP A DIME, YOU CAN CALL ME ANYTIME. The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd weighs in on the government’s UFO report: “E.T., Phone Me!”
…Who on Earth wanted a “Friends” reunion, and why in heaven’s name doesn’t anyone from the Biden White House return my calls?
We must consider the terrestrials in our midst who seem very extraterrestrial. Mitch McConnell and Marjorie Taylor Greene are in no strict sense earthlings.
And yet not since Michael Rennie’s Klaatu and his all-powerful robot, Gort, landed their flying saucer on the Mall in the 1951 movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still” has the capital been so riveted by the possibility of aliens hovering.
Carbon-based life-forms are eagerly awaiting a report by intelligence officials about aerial phenomena lighting up the skies in recent years, mysterious objects witnessed and recorded by Navy pilots.
After reading The New York Times story on what the report will say, Luis Elizondo, who once ran the Pentagon’s secret program on U.F.O.s, tweeted, “If The New York Times reporting is accurate, the objects being witnessed by pilots around the world are far more advanced than any earthly technologies known to our intelligence services.”
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that a government that couldn’t get it together to prevent a primitive mob from attacking the seat of government on Jan. 6 can’t figure out a series of close encounters.
Could it be that we are not the center of the universe? The truth, if it’s out there, certainly isn’t in the report.
As Julian Barnes and Helene Cooper wrote in The Times, intelligence officials said they have found no evidence that the mysterious sightings are alien spacecraft. But they have also found no evidence that they’re not.
(15) THE LEADER. If your eyeballs haven’t been abused enough already, Jon Del Arroz takes his victory lap on Vox Day’s blog: “JDA defeats Worldcon” [Internet Archive link].
… I followed Vox’s lead and decided to fight it with everything I had. We filed suit for defamation and have been engaged in a long court battle for nearly 4 years. Finally, WorldCon opted to settle and wrote me a formal, public apology and gave us financial compensation…
(16) FINE BY FEYNMAN. Priyamvada Natarajan reviews three science books for The New York Review of Books in “All Things Great and Small”.
…Three new books examine our current understanding of matter’s origin and qualities, and chronicle our continuing quest to probe beyond atoms. Neutron Stars: The Quest to Understand the Zombies of the Cosmos by Katia Moskvitch, a science writer, explores recent research into the super-dense remains of stars ten times more massive than our Sun, whose precise material composition has eluded us. The astrophysicist Katie Mack’s The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) shows how the contents of our universe—matter and energy—determine its destiny and, ultimately, its demise. In Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality, the physicist Frank Wilczek, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004, addresses new discoveries that are leading to a reassessment of the atomic hypothesis. He explains how notions of matter have changed over the past decades from “all things are made of atoms” to “all things are made of elementary particles”—the expanding list of which includes quarks, gluons, muons, and the recently discovered Higgs boson….
(17) HISTORIC PLAQUE. Via Alison Scott:
(18) A WHIFF OF THINGTIME. Atlas Obscura traces “How a Giant, Stinky, Delightful Corpse Flower Got to an Abandoned Gas Station” and interviews its keeper.
…Many of us doted on houseplants, but probably not the way that Solomon Leyva did. Leyva lives in Alameda, California, an island just west of Oakland, where he raises and sells cacti, succulents, and rare plants. One of Leyva’s pandemic-era pals was a titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum), a gargantuan plant better known as the corpse flower on account of the unmistakably unsavory stench of its blooms. The plant usually shows off like this only once every several years—and when it does, its glorious fringe wilts after just a day or two. So, when Leyva’s titan arum bloomed in May, he lugged it onto a wagon and rolled it to a patch of asphalt in front of an abandoned gas station, so human neighbors could come say hello….
(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Honest Game Trailers: Omori,” which comes with a spoiler warning, Fandom Games argues that Omori’s creators succeeded in creating one of the most depressing video games ever, with “a fairly simple story that stretched out to 20 hours.”
[Thanks to JJ, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Scott Edelman, Peer, Rich Horton, Patch O’Furr, Cat Eldridge, John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Camestros Felapton.]
(1) JEMISIN ADAPTING BROKEN EARTH FOR FILM. Gizmodo collates the news about “N.K. Jemisin’s Hugo-Winning Broken Earth Trilogy Movie Deal”.
N.K. Jemisin has already made history by winning three consecutive Hugo awards for each entry in her Broken Earth trilogy: The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky. Now, the perhaps inevitable next step is here, with a just-announced big-screen deal with Sony’s TriStar Pictures that will see the author adapting her own novels.
Deadline broke the news, noting that it was a “seven figure deal,” and Jemisin herself shared the story on Twitter (further down the thread, she joyfully emphasized the part about “the author will adapt the books herself”).
…Sharp-eyed readers may recall that The Fifth Season was, at one time, being developed as a TV series for TNT—but that was back in 2017, and obviously the situation has changed.
(2) 2023 SITE SELECTION. DisCon III says the 2023 Worldcon bidders have set the voting fee.
All bidders for the 2023 Worldcon have agreed the voting fee will be $50 USD. If you are at least a Supporting Member of DisCon III, you’re eligible to vote for the 2023 Worldcon Site Selection. The voting fee is in addition to your DisCon III membership. All site selection voters will become Supporting Members of the 2023 Worldcon regardless of who wins. All money collected from the voting fee will be turned over to the winning bid. Further details regarding the voting process will be announced later this summer.
(3) CANCEL CULTURE. The Guardian’s Alison Flood talks to industry people with different perspectives in her article “‘If publishers become afraid, we’re in trouble’: publishing’s cancel culture debate boils over”.
… Sometimes the pressure works: Yiannopoulos was dropped by S&S amid outrage over his comments about consent, and Allen was dropped by Hachette after a staff walkout. Sometimes it doesn’t: staff at PRH Canada complained about Jordan Peterson’s book Beyond Order, but it went ahead anyway; PRH India chief executive Gaurav Shrinagesh brushed off Mishra’s concerns by writing about publishing a “diverse range of voices”. S&S president Jonathan Karp told staff protesting about Pence that “we come to work each day to publish, not cancel, which is the most extreme decision a publisher can make” – but reports from a recent S&S town hall show this did little to calm the workforce.
…One managing director at the Big Five, who asked to remain anonymous, said he saw “a strange contradiction” in his workplace where everyone was positive about diversity, but where some also want to “pick and choose the kind of diversity we want”.
“If we want to be a publisher and employer for everyone, our publishing has to reflect that. And it becomes a necessary inevitability that we publish books and authors of viewpoints some of our staff don’t agree with or indeed, very, very actively disagree with,” he says. “That tension is not entirely new, but for whatever reason, it seems to be sort of boiling over now. It is complicated, but also, I think, quite stimulating.”
At political publisher Biteback, editorial director Olivia Beattie finds it frustrating that the debate is “so often framed as younger editors being oversensitive, rather than acknowledging that what senior editors choose to publish has an impact on the terms of public debate.
“Any half-decent junior editor learns very quickly how to separate their personal ideological positions from the material they’re editing, because that’s a crucial part of the job,” she says. She believes the publishing industry skews more leftwing than the book-buying public, making it inevitable that staff will work on books they disagree with.
“But people aren’t having these kinds of conflicts over simple differences of political opinion, as you might assume from listening to the debate on it,” she says. “Nobody’s refusing to work on a book because it doesn’t fit with their party affiliation: what’s been at stake has virtually always been a question of whether the book or the author is responsible for inciting prejudice against already marginalised and oppressed minorities. That’s an absolutely valid area for debate. It’s also not always clear-cut – some people will be deafened by a dog-whistle that others can’t hear.”
Once junior editors are “up in arms”, Beattie believes that is proof of enough concern to warrant an internal conversation. “Ironically, the people railing against ‘cancel culture’ very often seem to be trying to shut down criticism themselves,” she says….
(4) MELLOW YELLOW. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the June 2 Financial Times, Tom Faber discusses the antitrust lawsuit Fortnite creator Epic Games filed against Apple.
Most ludicrous was the debate reported by the tech news website The Verge around Peely, a humanoid banana who is something of a mascot for Fortnite. Apple’s lawyers displayed an image of the figure in his ‘Agent Peely’ guise, saying, ‘We thought it better to go with the suit than the naked banana, since we are in federal court this morning, implying that a banana without clothes is somehow obscene. Hours later Epic’s attorney returned to this ridiculous proposition by asking Epic’s VP of marketing whether Peely without clothes would be ‘inappropriate’. Hi response was a firm ‘no.’: ‘It’s just a banana, ma’am.’
It really is a banana with sunglasses.
(5) I SEE BY YOUR OUTFIT. “Here’s the first teaser for Shazam! Fury Of The Gods, or at least Zachary Levi’s outfit in it” – Yahoo! tells what they can make of this dimly-lit pan of the new costume.
(6) AMERICA: THE MOTION PICTURE. This Netflix movie asks. “What if America’s greatest political leaders were superheroes who know four letter words and can smash things?”
(7) BOOKSELLER OBIT. [Item by Tom Whitmore.] Bob Brown (Robert L. Brown of B. Brown and Associates in Seattle) recently died of esophageal cancer.
Bob was pretty directly responsible for me becoming a bookseller: he and Clint Bigglestone and I did a rare book mailorder business in the early 1970s (50 years ago!). He continued to maintain his business, in conjunction with his other work of selling space and time (for advertising) up until right before his death. Anyone who went to big conventions and collected books probably knew him — he was a regular dealer. And he always had interesting books. His personal specialty was 19th Century SF and fantasy, but he had plenty of modern books as well; he also dealt in mysteries, like so many SF dealers. His other passions were his family and fishing. His passing leaves a major hole in the field. I’ll miss him.
PS: Please note that this is not the Bob Brown of B-Cubed Press. It’s too easy to get them confused.
(8) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
(10) COMICS SECTION.
(11) RUNS WITH SCISSORS. On the day that that Worldcon 76 settles with Jon Del Arroz – “Worldcon 76 Settles with Jon Del Arroz: Issues Apology, Will Pay Compensation” – there’s hardly anyplace he can crow because Facebook and Twitter have him suspended. He told his 3,000 YouTube subscribers yesterday in “SJWs Are Trying To Deplatform Me EVERYWHERE!” —
…and I found that I can’t post or comment for 28 days. That also includes liking apparently I tried to like a post and this came up.
And if you scroll through here there’s all of these posts dating back to June 15, 2020 uh that they say violates their community standards. Now I don’t know what these posts are. You can’t click on any of these nor tell what they are uh so it’s all guesswork but I’m gonna guess i posted some memes that somebody went through and combed through my account and then uh tried to harass me here because this is just too many instances all at once. Very very odd uh that this showed up now. I don’t say anything that salty uh usually. I do comment perhaps on some globo homo stuff with my memes especially uh you know with pride month uh you know being in our faces constantly with their little fake corporate shilling that they always do. And I also comment a lot on uh I’d say election integrity, and uh you know certain uh shots that people are getting at this point so maybe that’s what had to do with it i don’t know. But uh one sort of post going through that’s one thing but all of these it looks like somebody went back and combed through my stuff just to try to target me now. Of course within a couple hours of that I found out that the same thing had happened on Twitter.
So I’m suspended for a 30 day on Facebook uh seven day on Twitter for a recent meme I posted which was making fun of the corporate pride month. And we’ll call it corporate pride month because that’s what it is. That’s it and so they made me remove it and I’m stuck without being able to market anywhere except for here for that amount of time so they are trying to hit my social media accounts and this comes in the wake where I’ve actually got some big news in the pipeline…
(12) SPOT ON. Olivia Rutligliano reminds us why One Hundred and One Dalmatians remains one of the best Disney animated films in “Stopping for a Moment to Appreciate the Original 1961 film One Hundred and One Dalmatians” at CrimeReads.
As I type this, a new film has been released which offers a backstory into the motivations of the Disney villainess Cruella de Vil, a character who needs no introduction (or even, some might say, explanation) but has been given one anyway. I haven’t seen this new film, Cruella, which stars Emma Stone and sets itself up as a pseudo-prequel to Disney’s live-action 101 Dalmatians film from 1996, which starred Glenn Close as the diabolical, piebald, puppy-stealing termagant. I probably won’t see the new film (simply because I’m not very interested in Disney’s live-action remakes and such), but I’m not writing this to knock it. All I can say about it is that I’ve noticed that, in preparation for or perhaps inspired by its release, many have taken to watching or rewatching Disney’s original 1961 film. To which I say: good.
One Hundred and One Dalmatians (which IS a crime film) is a timeless joy, and an aesthetic marvel. If you have seen it (or even if you haven’t) you probably know the gist, but here’s a deeper dive….
(13) TRAVEL TRIVIA. “In the 1950s and 60s a UFO was described as cigar shaped. Now a UFO is described as TicTac shaped,” notes John King Tarpinian.
(14) PLANE SPEAKING. Nature covers scientific findings of “Ultrahigh-energy photons up to 1.4 petaelectronvolts from 12 ?-ray Galactic sources”.
Over 500 extremely high energy cosmic rays (PeVatrons) have been detected.
These are atomic nuclei travelling close to the speed of light. PeVatrons have energies around 100 times that of the particles generated in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. They have been detected before but their source is something of a mystery. This is because magnetic fields in space bend their trajectories. However, when they interact with the interstellar medium they generate gamma rays and these do travel in a straight line. The researchers have identified one source, the Crab Nebula. They have detected a dozen sources so doubling the known PeVatron sources. These sources seem to lie along the Galactic Plane. Sources could be other supernovae remnants, pulsar winds and related to the Galactic centre black hole: we just don’t know. However, we may learn more when the Cherenkov telescope Array in Chile and the Southern Wide-field Gamma Ray Observatory in S. America come on-line.
(15) DECISION JUICE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Queue up the obligatory “big brain/little brain” joke: “Human brain and testis found to have the highest number of common proteins” reports Phys.org.
…In this new effort, the researchers noted that evidence from other studies has found some signs of similarities between testis and the human brain. Intrigued, they initiated a study that involved analyzing the proteins produced by different parts of the body and then comparing them to see similarities. The researchers found the greatest similarities between the brain and testicles—13,442 of them. This finding suggests that the brain and the testicles share the highest number of genes of any organs in the body….
(16) LEAVING OUT THE MIDDLEMAN. This is a piece in which a woman who published a “speculative thriller” about parthenogenesis explains why she did it: “Finding Inspiration for Speculative Fiction in the History of Reproduction” at CrimeReads.
…Plutarch’s observations about mola, the supposed products of parthenogenesis, almost definitely referred to molar pregnancies, birth defects incompatible with life, or other conditions that lacked a clear medical explanation at the time. But my paranormal-obsessed brain took the idea and ran with it in entirely different directions. Plutarch couldn’t have imagined that, roughly eighteen hundred years later, a young woman would encounter his general idea and instantly feel inspired to write a thriller about virgin birth.
And yet, that’s exactly what happened. I’m a sucker for a good origin story, and this one felt big. What if Plutarch was right, and women who strayed too far from a rational male influence—women who thought for themselves—could literally imagine their own children into being? What if a woman’s unruly brain gave rise to an unruly child, conceived without the “soul” that a father would imbue?…
(17) THREE VIDEOS BY DOMINIC NOBLE. [Item by Jennifer Hawthorne.] The Deceit and Broken Promises Behind The Worst Adaptation Ever (Earthsea) is coverage of how Le Guin got incredibly badly treated by the people who produced the terrible SciFi miniseries of Earthsea.
Lost In Adaptation: Earthsea is the video about the first two books of Earthsea and the terrible miniseries itself
Lost In Adaptation: The Golden Compass is his latest video, about The Golden Compass.
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Michael Toman, Tom Whitmore, Lise Andreasen, Jennifer Hawthorne, Rob Thornton, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day bill.]
San Francisco Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon 76) has reached settlement with Jon Del Arroz in the lawsuit he filed against them for having been banned from the 2018 convention and for statements made in the public announcement of that decision.
Under today’s settlement, SFSFC will pay Del Arroz $4,000, and is publishing the following statement on its website and Facebook page:
SFSFC AND JON DEL ARROZ HAVE SETTLED THE LAWSUIT MR. DEL ARROZ FILED WHICH INVOLVED HIS BEING BANNED FROM WORLDCON 76. IN CONCLUDING THE DISPUTE, SFSFC WISHES TO ISSUE THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT:
SFSFC acknowledges the importance of reputation, especially for a relatively new author, and regrets that its public statement about barring his attendance might have led people unfamiliar with Mr. Del Arroz and his work to infer that he is or was a racist. For that, SFSFC apologizes. This attendance ban was specific to the Worldcon 76 events produced by SFSFC, and Mr. Del Arroz has the same opportunity as other members of the public to register for future SFSFC events. Worldcon 76 does not tolerate discrimination in any form — including through cosplay — based on but not limited to gender, race, ethnicity, religion, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, or physical/mental health conditions. SFSFC firmly believes that healthy political discourse requires active, mutual, good faith participation by members of the community with differing opinions.
Kevin Roche
Chair, Worldcon 76 in San Jose
President, San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions, Inc.
The agreed settlement is “a full and final settlement of all claims between the parties.”
The final settlement meets Del Arroz’ demand for an apology, but rejects two additional conditions originally included in his attorney’s proposal of May 27 (copy subsequently filed with the court), which were:
2. SFSFC will agree to make an active attempt to avoid exclusionary practices in the future to anyone in science fiction based on race, religion, creed, or political affiliation by having its board attends a diversity training course (which can be online) showing completion within one year of the date of the agreement. The settlement agreement will provide for liquidated damages of $25,000 and attorneys fees if this provision is breached.
3. Mr. Del Arroz will be added as a Diversity & Inclusivity Officer to the organization for future conventions and events to ensure discrimination based on identity does not occur again.
Also, the compensation is less than the originally proposed sum of $50,000 “for the damage done to Mr. Del Arroz’s reputation, emotional distress, and financial losses.”
SFSFC, Inc. is the parent corporation of Worldcon 76, held in San Jose. Del Arroz sued SFSFC in 2018 after the Worldcon 76 committee announced he would not be allowed to attend the convention (“Del Arroz Files Suit Against Worldcon 76”. In February 2019, the court tossed four of the five causes of action in Del Arroz’s lawsuit against Worldcon 76’s parent corporation. The case continued on the fifth complaint, defamation, and focused on SFSFC’s statement on social media banning Del Arroz from attending Worldcon 76. In May, the court rejected Worldcon 76’s Motion for Summary Judgment, and in addressing five arguments Worldcon 76’s attorney made in support of the motion Judge Manoukian said that four of the defense’s contentions were not proven, and another would need to be decided by a jury. Del Arroz’ attorney at that point waived the originally-requested jury (according to a June 2 filing). Therefore, if the case had gone to trial, it would have been solely before the judge who’d just ruled against the MSJ. These kinds of litigating hazards were likely a strong incentive to settle.
(1) CATEGORY CHALLENGED. “’Asian Fantasy’ Is A Popular Category — But Is It A Useful One?” – NPR’s Kalyani Saxena poses the question to Rebecca F. Kuang, Cindy Pon, Ken Liu, Fonda Lee, Roshani Chokshi, and Tasha Suri.
…However, not all Asian authors writing fantasy feel at home with the genre label. When I reached out to Rebecca F. Kuang, author of The Poppy War, a Hugo-nominated fantasy trilogy inspired by Chinese history, she said that she finds “Asian fantasy” to be a reductive category.
“I think that Asian doesn’t really make a lot of sense, either as a literary category or as an identity category. Obviously, there are a lot of different things that fall under the subcategory of Asian, including East Asian, including South Asians, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander, for example,” she says. “So when we call works just blanket ‘Asian,’ that belies an entire world of difference.”
So while the growing popularity of Asian fantasy marks a positive turn towards a broader and more inclusive range of experiences in fantasy, it also raises important questions: Does it actually make sense to group novels by a geographic region, especially one that encompasses billions of people? Does the label “Asian fantasy” help or hurt Asian authors? Well, the answer depends on who you’re asking….
(2) SOMTOW ON SCREEN. The Maestro – A Symphony of Terror, from Somtow Sucharitkul (in the title role) and filmmaker Paul Spurrier, opens July 14 in Bangkok at Central World SF Cinema (one of the major movie chains in Thailand). From there it will do the festival circuit, maybe book a few weird international gigs, and onto some kind of streaming platform, Somtow predicts.
The Maestro tells the story of a misunderstood genius with profound psychological problems. Rejected by the European musical establishment, he returns to his native Thailand and gets a job teaching music in a youth program. Stalked by an obsessed opera singer, ridiculed by his public, his big premiere preempted by a world-renowned conducting mediocrity, he begins a descent into madness. Accompanied by street busking violinist and a prodigy pianist from a dysfunctional family, he sets out to build a musical utopia in the wilderness to bring his transcendent vision to life … only, inevitably, it all goes horribly wrong.
(3) IF IT AIN’T BROKE, DON’T FIX IT. Hugo Book Club Blog compared the official list of 1963 Hugo Award nominees with a copy of the ballot and found something was missing. And there unquestionably was. But stay tuned for the rest of the story….
They even convinced The Hugo Awards official site to enter a correction:
Note: We previously listed Burn, Witch, Burn (1962) (alt: Night of the Eagle) ([Anglo-Amalgamated/Independent Artists] Directed by Sidney Hayers; Screenplay by Charles Beaumont & Richard Matheson and George Baxt; based on the novel Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber) as a finalist for the 1963 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation; however, a copy of the 1963 Hugo Award final ballot that we received on June 2, 2021 does not include this work as a finalist.
And yet when you look at a scanned copy of the 1963 Worldcon Program Book Burn, Witch, Burn is included. (Remember – 1962 is the eligibility year.)
In the DRAMATIC PRODUCTION category, the top four for 1962 were:
TV series: Twilight Zone
Movie: Last Year at Marienbad
Movie: The Day the Earth Caught Fire
Movie: Burn, Witch, Burn
Why is there a discrepancy between the Program Book and the official use-no-other, no-write-ins-allowed postcard ballot? Because someone made a mistake while typing the stencil for the 1963 ballot. Chair George Scithers blushingly told what happened in the Worldcon runner’s manual he wrote after the con — DisCon 1 Guide: Introduction:
…To encourage voting, we used printed, return addressed, postage prepaid postcards with the names of the nominees thereon. This of course was expensive; about $16, plus printing. On the other hand, it did improve the number of votes (about 226 people voted in the final poll, not counting late votes) and it did insure against anyone not a member sending in a forged card. For future cons, I’d suggest prepaid postcards for both nominations and final votes. Be careful and proofread these final ballots; we left “Burn, Witch, Burn” off our postcard list (4) [If George wasn’t accepting the principle of Collective Responsibility, this would read properly: “Dick Eney left ‘Burn, Witch, Burn’ off …”], an omission which was very embarrassing indeed.
(4) GOT TO HAVE IT. Julie Nováková inventories “What Technology Can’t SF Writers Live Without?” at the SFWA Blog.
When I started editing an anthology of SF stories centered around alien life, each accompanied by a short essay on the science of the story, naturally I was curious about what sciences or technologies inspire the contributing authors, how their process works and how they rely on technology. Conducting a mini-interview with each author, I asked, among other things, whether there’s any technology they can’t imagine to live without. Think for a moment what it would be for you. Some piece of 21st century technology, or something vital developed thousands of years ago? Something to guide your writing process, or indispensable in your life regardless of the craft?
Many writers (including myself, after all) can’t imagine working without computers. Rich Larson says: “Over half my day is spent on my netbook.” He uses it for around ten hours of writing and other work, and then for recreation and socialization. At night, its USB port powers the small fan that lets him sleep. “It’s basically a vital organ!”
“My Bose QC 35 wireless headphones,” says Tobias S. Buckell. They help him create a focusing space around himself. “The ritual of turning on noise canceling and hearing the world around me drop into background; it’s this trigger for focus that really helps me,” he adds….
(5) PURPLE EATER PEOPLE. Inspired by the park’s chicken dinners and boysenberry pie – and a few less legal substances — Rolly Crump’s “Legendary theme park ride resurfaces at Knott’s Berry Farm” reports the Los Angeles Times. “Knott’s Bear-y Tales: Return to the Fair” has been recreated after being out of service for a generation. Crump, the 91-year-old designer, also helped shape It’s a Small World, the Enchanted Tiki Room and the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland,
… “Everyone comes together at the fair at the end,” Merritt says. “All the characters you saw in the previous scene make a new appearance, doing something different and fun. It’s a big room. It takes up almost half of the show building.”
Crump’s theme park designs were known for near constant movement. The figures may not have been as advanced as those at Disneyland, but every mechanical creature was moving. Today’s theme park fans may want to picture the grand musical and animal finale of Disneyland’s soon-to-be rethemed Splash Mountain when trying to picture the closing seconds of Bear-y Tales.
Describes Merritt, “In the middle of the room, there’s a big balloon coming from the ceiling where the Bear-y Family are going up and down, and there’s music, there’s Dr. Fox selling his Weird Juice, there’s puppets and there’s a frog jumping contest. There’s musicians, there’s a rabbit who’s walking on wire, there’s jugglers. It’s too much. It’s sensory overload.”
…The more one digs into the scenes of the Bear-y Tales ride, the more detail and uniqueness one uncovers.
One of Crump’s first jobs at Disney was to partner with illusionist Yale Gracey on potential effects for the Haunted Mansion, so it’s perhaps no surprise that Crump wanted a sense of magic throughout Bear-y Tales. The ride was liberal in its use of projections and Pepper’s ghost-like effects. There were floating instruments, hovering candle tips and one neat trick that Merritt recalls involving an adorable mouse suddenly appearing out of a candle holder in midair.
But perhaps the real reason Bear-y Tales had such a grip on those who rode it is because in some ways it represents the kind of ride that doesn’t really exist anymore. Crump’s original had pies — and pie scents — but was little more than a story about a bunch of nomadic, bohemian animals.
“It’s super unique. It was such a snapshot in time,” says Nix. “When you look at the pictures, it wasn’t terribly advanced. The animatronics were simple, but there were a lot of them. You just felt like you were in these scenes and places.”…
(6) VIRTUAL 4TH STREET. Elizabeth Bear has made public an edition of her Throwanotherbearinthecanoe newsletter: “What we’ve been doing around here…” After fulminating against the latest “improvement” of Instagram, she alerts readers to her coming appearance at a virtual con:
….Anyway, speaking of things to do on the internet that are actually fun, there will be a Virtual 4th Street Fantasy convention this year. I’ve recorded a panel for it (“Personalizing the Apocalypse”) with a remarkable cast of brilliant people, and we will be doing a live Q&A for attendees on the weekend of June 18th.
If you would like to “attend,” you can register here! Moneys collected go toward paying off hotel expenses, and if you would like to make a donation, the convention is a 401(c) nonprofit organization, which means donations are tax-deductible.
(7) ATWOOD ACQUISITION. “Doubleday to Publish Margaret Atwood Essay Collection” – Publishers Weekly has the story.
Doubleday will publish a new collection of Margaret Atwood’s essays, Burning Questions: Essays 2004-2021, on March 1, 2022. U.S. rights were acquired from Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown.
…The selection of more than 50 essays, the publisher said, “seeks answers to burning questions such as: Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories? How much of yourself can you give away without evaporating? How can we live on our planet? Is it true? And is it fair? What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism?”…
(8) TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW. John Hertz celebrates Bob Madle’s 101st birthday with this poem:
All our yesterdays
Live on, or some of them do,
In the fannish mind,
Vitally moving new deeds
Even as we joke of them.
(9) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
June 2, 1950 – On this day in 1950, Rocketship X-M premiered. The film was produced and directed by Kurt Neumann. The screenplay was by Orville H. Hampton, Kurt Neumann and Dalton Trumbo (of Johnny Got His Gun fame). It starred Lloyd Bridges, Osa Massen, John Emery, Noah Beery, Jr., Hugh O’Brian, and Morris Ankrum. It was shot on a budget of just ninety-four thousand dollars. It was nominated for the 1951 Retro Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation at the Millennium Philcon when Destination Moon won that Award. Fandom holds it in a higher esteem that audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes do who give it a mere fifteen percent rating! Oh, and it was the first SF film to use a theremin in the soundtrack.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
(11) ASIAN AMERICAN SUPERHERO Q&A. View “Jim Lee and Asian American Superheroes”, a video interview available at the Library of Congress.
DC Chief Creative Officer and Publisher Jim Lee discusses his work in celebration of Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month. He will appear in conversation with illustrator Bernard Chang (“Generations Forged”) and writers Sarah Kuhn (“Shadow of the Batgirl”) and Minh Lê (“Green Lantern: Legacy”). This event is moderated by former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Gene Luen Yang (“Superman Smashes the Klan”).
(12) PRODUCT PLACEMENT. This iconic watch has been on stars’ wrists from Elvis to the Men in Black: “Exploring The Hollywood History Of The Hamilton Ventura Watch” at A Blog to Watch.
…The Hamilton Ventura has always been part of the Men in Black movies. Back in 1997, when the first installment (Men in Black) hit the cinema, the choice of Agents J and K was the classic Hamilton Ventura Quartz (ref. H24411732). Five years later, in 2002’s Men in Black II, the Ventura Chrono Quartz (ref. H24412732) was chosen in the starring role instead. The next decade saw those two watches reunite on-screen for Men in Black III (2012), as well as introducing the Hamilton Ventura XXL.
Men in Black: International will build on the cult following enjoyed by the Ventura since its launch in ’57. The new film focuses on two agents attempting to protect the world from a mole within their own organization, while dressed in their classic suits and armed with their essential neuralyzer pens. Helping Agent M and Agent H on their mission are the classic Hamilton Ventura Quartz (M), and the Hamilton Ventura Automatic with a cut-out dial and brown leather strap (H), respectively….
(13) JEOPARDY! Andrew Porter watched a contestant miss this one on last night’s Jeopardy!
Final Jeopardy; category: Around the World
Answer: In the 1860s, a zoologist proposed that this island was once part of a lost continent he dubbed Lemuria.
Wrong question: What is Galapagos?
Correct question: What is Madagascar?
(14) JDA SUSPENDED FROM TWITTER AND FACEBOOK. Straight from the horse’s…mouth.
(15) A HOLE IN THE WRONG ONE. “’Scary stuff’: International Space Station robotic arm struck by space junk” reports The Guardian.
The sudden appearance of a small hole in a robotic arm aboard the international space station (ISS) has brought renewed attention to the danger posed by space junk.
Mission managers discovered the puncture during an inspection of the exterior of the spacecraft on 12 May. The Canadian space agency (CSA), which operates the arm, described it as a “lucky strike” that did not affect operations or endanger the seven astronauts in orbit aboard the station.
It is not known what kind of object struck the space station or when it happened. But analysts say the incident is a reminder of the proliferating amount of junk circling Earth and the risk that poses as launches and satellites in orbit increase.
“There’s a lot of stuff out there traveling at over 17,500mph and obviously it can do a lot of damage,” John Crassidis, SUNY distinguished professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Buffalo, told the Guardian….
(16) SABERKITTENS. These prehistoric credentials probably looked pretty cute as long as you weren’t a mammoth. “Sabercats Raised Their Kittens for Years” affirms Smithsonian Magazine.
…Two new studies published this year have underscored the fact that sabercats required some of the same family ties that today’s big cats rely upon. Some young sabercats may have stayed with their parents for two years or more as they waited for their impressive fangs to come in. Those parents likely played an essential role in teaching their saberkittens how to catch and eat food, including dragging mammoth legs home to chew on. Together, these studies help highlight how sabercat behavior evolved to cope with a world in which many carnivorous species—from dire wolves to giant bears—competed for prey.
(17) WATCH YOUR SIXTH. What’s more dangerous, a sabertooth or the Doctor? Artist JohannesVIII did this piece of Doctor Who‘s Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) as a cat!
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Ben Bird Person, John A Arkansawyer, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, and John Hertz for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
(1) OCTAVIA BUTLER BIRTHDAY MONTH. The Los Angeles Public Library and The Huntington are commemorating Octavia E. Butler’s birthday throughout June in a joint celebration of her work, her legacy, and her community.
The virtual events listed below are all free, open to the public, and family-friendly, ideally for ages 10 and up.
(2) CHAMBERS ON TOUR, AT YOUR COMPUTER. Becky Chambers is doing a virtual tour for her upcoming book A Psalm for the Wild-Built. Tor.com has information about it, including links to the independent bookstores hosting each stop on the tour. It looks like she’ll be appearing in tandem with different SFF authors on Zoom at each of the three “stops” — Martha Wells, Sarah Gailey, and T.J. Klune + Alix E. Harrow. “Join Becky Chambers on Tour for A Psalm for the Wild-Built”.
In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, it’s been centuries since the robots of Panga became self-aware and walked into the wilderness. When one walks right into the life of a tea monk named Dex, an entirely unexpected connection is formed. The robot wants to know what people need. But how can one person answer that question? As Sarah Gailey said, “This is a book that, for one night, made me stop asking ‘what am I even for?’ I’m prescribing a preorder to anyone who has ever felt lost. Stunning, kind, necessary.”
(3) POST-PANDEMIC BOX OFFICE. Variety reports “’A Quiet Place Part II’ Smashes Pandemic Era Records”:
…The movie business is breathing a little easier after Paramount’s A Quiet Place Part II roared to $57 million over the Memorial Day Weekend. It’s a sign that cinemas are back after more than a year of pandemic era closures, capacity restrictions, and skittish customers.
Deadline says, “That’s a number which isn’t too far from the $60 million which the John Krasinski-directed sequel was anticipated to do in its three-day opening pre-pandemic.”
(4) REJECTION SLIP-UP. Remember, it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you. Joe Vasicek lays out his evidence in “Short Stories, Author Blacklists, and Navigating Woke Science Fiction”.
Last year, I had a short story published in the anthology Again, Hazardous Imaginings: More Politically Incorrect Science Fiction. Not only was it one of my highest paying short story sales to date, but it also made it onto the Tangent Online 2020 Recommended Reading List with a *** rating, their highest tier. Only 13 out of 293 stories on the list received that honor—and making the list at all was an accomplishment!
But a funny thing happened after the anthology came out: for a stretch of several months, I stopped receiving personalized rejections for my short story submissions, and instead got only form rejections. Normally when I write a cover letter for a short story submission, I mention the last three markets that I was published in. For example: “My stories have recently appeared in Again, Hazardous Imaginings; Twilight Tales LTUE Benefit Anthology, and Bards and Sages Quarterly (forthcoming).” In a typical month, I’ll get maybe a dozen or so form rejections and a couple of personalized rejections, depending on how many stories I have out on submission.
Back in March, I started to notice that I wasn’t getting any personalized rejections. Suspecting that my publication credit in Again, Hazardous Imaginings wasn’t helping me, I decided to change things up and only list my publication credits for stories listed in Locus Magazine’s Year In Review issue. My thinking was that all of the Hugo and Nebula eligible markets give their yearly reports in that issue, and since all of the editors want to acquire stories that are likely to win awards, a publication credit in one of those markets is more likely to get them to pay attention.
Lo and behold, I started getting personalized rejections again….
(5) YOUNG PEOPLE. In the latest Young People Read Old SFF, James Davis Nicoll turns the panel loose on “The Longest Voyage” by one of my favorite writers, Poul Anderson.
… Anderson’s curious views of the narrative role of women at the time of writing surely do not pertain to The Longest Voyage because The Longest Voyage contains no women to speak of. As well, Anderson has chosen for the setting an Earthlike moon of a gas giant, perhaps the first plausible example of such a world I recall encountering. Perhaps this story highlights Anderson’s strengths in a way to which the Young People will respond?
(I can’t bear to look!)
(6) HIGHER-TECH CONEHEADS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Even Daleks, after a hard day of extermination, need to take an ice cream break!
(7) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
(9) COMICS SECTION.
(10) BIG BEZOS IS WATCHING. According to The Guardian, “Amazon US customers have one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing”.
Amazon customers have one week to opt out of a plan that would turn every Echo speaker and Ring security camera in the US into a shared wireless network, as part of the company’s plan to fix connection problems for its smart home devices.
The proposal, called Amazon Sidewalk, involves the company’s devices being used as a springboard to build city-wide “mesh networks” that help simplify the process of setting up new devices, keep them online even if they’re out of range of home wifi, and extend the range of tracking devices such as those made by Tile.
But Sidewalk has come under fire for the apparent lack of transparency with which Amazon has rolled out the feature, as well as the limited time available for users to complete the tricky process required to opt out. Other critics have expressed concerns that failing to turn the setting off could leave customers in breach of their internet service provider’s terms and conditions.
“Amazon Sidewalk is a shared network that helps devices work better,” the company said in a Q&A document for users. “In the future, Sidewalk will support a range of experiences from using Sidewalk-enabled devices, such as smart security and lighting and diagnostics for appliances and tools.”…
(11) CHAPTERS TAKES THE CASH AND LETS THE CREDIT GO? [Item by James Davis Nicoll.] I somehow overlooked Donna Scott’s Best British SF series, now in its fifth year. Went to Chapters Indigo to order it. Chapters credits the anthologies to various famous male authors.
(12) JDA’S SPORTS REPORT.
(13) REVENGE IS A DISH BEST SERVED OLD. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] “Ancient Athenian Curse Jar Contained Dismembered Chicken And List Of Intended Victims” at IFL Science. I particularly love the article’s turn of phrase, “perhaps you need to lift your vengeance magic game.”
Have you ever hated someone so much you sacrificed a chicken in the hope its slaughter would empower a curse, then carved the targets’ names into the pot holding the chicken and buried it for more than 2,000 years? If not, perhaps you need to lift your vengeance magic game, because someone not only did that but also found 50 people they hated enough to score a place on the pot’s exterior. We don’t know whether the curse worked, but it must be conceded all the intended victims are dead.
The pot (or “chytra”) buried between 325 and 270 BCE in a corner of a building in the Athenian Agora provides insight into the uses of magic at the time. Almost a century after Socrates and Plato, the home of ancient reason and learning still had people practicing something mystical.
Having been dug up in 2006 from a corner of the Athenian Agora’s Classical Commercial Building, the chytra has finally been described by Dr Jessica Lamont of Yale University.
Under the wonderful title “The Curious Case of the Cursed Chicken”, Lamont has described her findings in Hesperia. The pot contained the head and lower limbs of a chicken, but this was no remnant of a meal. A large iron nail has been stuck through the underside, its wide circular head sealing the entrance, and a small coin has since fused to the nail head. “This assemblage belongs to the broader realm of Athenian binding curses, which, … aimed to ‘bind’ or inhibit the physical and cognitive abilities of its human targets,” Lamont writes. These were usually written on lead tablets, but the nail and animal sacrifices were common features.
More than 30 of the names are still legible, some of them familiar while others were previously unknown from Athens. The handwriting suggests at least two people carved the names, something Lamont says is “largely unprecedented in Greek curse tablets”. Other writing could include the actual curse and up to 25 names, but only scattered letters can be read….
(14) ON TOP OF OLD SMOKEY. The Pasadena Museum of History knows where you can find the humble artifacts left behind by a historic science experiment: “Lookout Mountain and the Speed of Light”.
The first lookout tower of the Angeles Forest was erected on Lookout Mountain No. 2 in 1913 and was active until 1927 when it was moved to Sunset Peak. Today, one will find on Lookout Mountain, in addition to a sign and a register, three in-line concrete blocks. The tallest of these, forty-two inches high, has a metal tablet marked “ANOTONIO 1922” and one of the smaller blocks, twenty-six inches high, has an unmarked survey point. If a sight is taken in a westernly direction over these two points, it will align to a spot on Mt. Wilson, marked on topo maps as “Michelson.” These blocks supported a mirror system for an exacting experiment by America’s first Nobel Prize winner, A.A. Michelson, in the years 1922 to 1926 to determine the speed of light.
The speed of light had been measured before, but never on such a spectacular scale or with as much accuracy. At station “MICHELSON” on Mt. Wilson; an octagonal mirror was mounted on a rotor that reflected a light beam to the station “ANTONIO” on Lookout Mountain, nearly twenty-two miles distant; then reflected back to another facet of the octagonal mirror, where it was reflected in the observer’s eye….
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Honest Trailers: Army of the Dead” on YouTube, the Screen Junkies say this new Zack Snyder film has robot zombies, brain zombies, and “the awesome zombie-killing saw,” and a team of mercenaries that has six “damaged bad-asses,” “two fun-loving bad-asses” and “the world’s most obvious traitor. But Snyder, free of studio control, still can’t figure out how to focus his film!”
[Thanks to John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, Nina Shepardson, James Davis Nicoll, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Peer.]
A court-mandated settlement conference for the parties in Jon Del Arroz’ lawsuit against San Francisco Science Fiction Convention Inc. is set for June 9. If the case is not settled, a jury trial will begin June 14. Del Arroz today publicly shared his settlement demands while talking with Vox Day during The Dankstream #47 “The Dark Lord Strikes Back (with special guest Vox Day!)” on YouTube.
SFSFC, Inc. is the parent corporation of Worldcon 76, held in San Jose. Del Arroz sued SFSFC in 2018 after the Worldcon 76 committee announced he would not be allowed to attend the convention (“Del Arroz Files Suit Against Worldcon 76”. In February 2019, the court tossed four of the five causes of action in Del Arroz’s lawsuit against Worldcon 76’s parent corporation. The case continues on the fifth complaint, defamation. Earlier this month the court rejected Worldcon 76’s motion for summary judgment asking the court to render judgment on the record already submitted, an unsuccessful effort to get the case dismissed without trial.
At the 01:37 mark in the video Del Arroz described his settlement demands:
JDA: …I could care less about trouble with this juncture. So yeah, but I just put in my um… We have to attempt to reconcile and do a settlement with the beautiful Worldcon before we get to trial here. So I just put in my demands this morning and that’s pretty fun. I would definitely accept it if they do this. I have, of course, a monetary reward which I won’t talk more about since they did defame me and cause trouble for me. But the other thing I thought is I would like to be on the board of Worldcon as a diversity and inclusivity officer to make sure this doesn’t happen to other people.
Vox Day: Well, I think that makes sense, you know, I mean they don’t have a Hispanic one, and right, yeah, they probably don’t have an indigenous people’s one, so you know you can let them know that if you’re too much for them that you know you’d be willing to accept me in that role in your style. Extremely generous of you, yeah, you know, so yeah, very nice [Laughter]
JDA: Cool, but that’s ongoing…
The suggestion about “an indigenous people’s one” is presumably in reference to Vox Day’s stated “English, Irish, Mexican, and Native American” ancestry.
[Update 06/01/2021: Corrected to show where Vox Day was speaking.]
Judge Socrates P. Manoukian has denied San Francisco Science Fiction Convention Inc.‘s motion for summary judgment in the defamation lawsuit brought against them by Jon Del Arroz. SFSFC (Worldcon 76) had asked the court to render summary judgment on the record already submitted in hope of getting the case dismissed without trial.
The court’s tentative ruling was posted online this afternoon in advance of the hearing set for May 11. The case will proceed to a jury trial scheduled to start on June 14 unless it is settled beforehand.
SFSFC, Inc. is the parent corporation of Worldcon 76, held in San Jose. Del Arroz sued SFSFC in 2018 after the Worldcon 76 committee announced he would not be allowed to attend the convention (“Del Arroz Files Suit Against Worldcon 76”. In February 2019, the court tossed four of the five causes of action in Del Arroz’s lawsuit against Worldcon 76’s parent corporation. The case continues on the fifth complaint, defamation, which focuses on SFSFC’s statement on social media banning Del Arroz from attending Worldcon 76:
…Thereafter, defendant SFSFC’s official and authorized social media posted on Facebook the following statement about the alleged reason that Plaintiff had been barred from WorldCon76: “Worldcon76 has chosen to reduce [Plaintiff’s] membership from attending to supporting. He will not be allowed to attend the convention in person. [Plaintiff’s] supporting membership preserves his rights to participate in the Hugo Awards nomination and voting process. He was informed of our decision-via email. We have taken this step because he has made it clear that he fully intends to break our code of conduct. We take that seriously. Worldcon76 strives to be an inclusive place in fandom, as difficult as that can be, and racist and bullying behavior is not acceptable at our WorldCon. This expulsion is one step toward eliminating such behavior and was not taken lightly. The senior staff and board are in agreement about the decision and it is final.”
Today’s court ruling addresses five arguments Worldcon 76’s attorney made in moving for summary judgment. Judge Manoukian said that four of the defense’s contentions were not proven, and another would need to be decided by a jury.
Here are excerpts from the court’s comments on those five points.
…In looking at the statement by defendant SFSFC at issue, it does not engage in baseless name-calling nor does it simply charge Plaintiff with being racist in some abstract sense. Instead, the average reader would understand Plaintiff has been banned from attendance at WorldCon76 “because [Plaintiff] has made it clear that he fully intends to break our code of conduct” by engaging in “racist and bullying behavior.”
Like in Overhill, defendant SFSFC’s statement accuses Plaintiff of engaging in some actual, concrete, wrongful conduct which led defendant SFSFC to believe Plaintiff would further engage in “racist and bullying behavior.” Whether Plaintiff had done so in the past or was likely to do so in the future must be based on some factual underpinning. As explained in Overhill, “if those [underlying] facts are either incorrect or incomplete, or if [defendant’s] assessment of them is erroneous, the statement may still imply a false assertion of fact.” At the very least, this court is of the opinion that a reasonable fact finder could conclude defendant SFSFC’s statement declares or implies a provably false assertion of fact.
As an alternative basis for summary judgment, defendant SFSFC contends its statement was privileged. “If the privilege arises, it is a complete defense.”
… Defendant SFSFC contends its statement was privileged because it was between “interested” parties with a mutual interest in the subject of WorldCon and for the safety of members/ attendees, in particular. Of relevance, defendant SFSFC proffers evidence that it received complaints from people in the science fiction community, including members who planned to attend WorldCon76, who had observed Plaintiff’s behavior and were afraid of confronting such harassing and disruptive conduct at the convention. Due to the ongoing controversy surrounding harassment in the science fiction community and the significant concerns raised by Plaintiff’s activities, the Committee deemed it necessary to make a statement regarding its decision.
In opposition, Plaintiff proffers evidence which raises a triable issue of material fact with regard to whether the privileged publication was made “to a person interested therein” and/or whether defendant SFSFC lost the privilege by abusing it in sending it to a much wider audience than “interested persons.” Specifically, Plaintiff proffers evidence that WorldCon76’s social media included a website and Facebook page. The readers of WorldCon76’s social media page included people [who] had never heard of [Plaintiff] or who had no concerns about [Plaintiff].
The court concluded this portion with a quote from a precedent case that indicates the issue of privilege is ambiguous enough that it needs to be determined by a jury.
Defendant SFSFC continues with its motion for summary judgment by arguing that Plaintiff is a public figure or limited purpose public figure and, consequently, must establish actual malice in order to prevail on a claim for defamation.
The court said that it did not find that Del Arroz is an “all purpose public figure” on the evidence presented.
The court also did not find that Del Arroz is a “limited purpose public figure.”
The court is not persuaded that Plaintiff, by thrusting himself into the public eye with regard to a particular controversy (political boycott/ exclusion/ cancel culture), Plaintiff has become a limited purpose public figure with regard to the defamation at issue in this case. Defendant SFSFC apparently suggests that because Plaintiff is, in defendant SFSFC’s assessment, a bad actor or behaves bad with regard to the topic of political boycott/ exclusion/ cancel culture and every topic he discusses, then his private words and acts are fair game in this case because the defamation relates to his bad acting/ bad behavior. If this were to be the case, then Plaintiff would essentially be an all purpose public figure and there would be no meaning to the term “limited purpose” and no need for there to be a nexus to a discrete matter of public controversy.
As a separate basis for summary judgment, defendant SFSFC contends its statement about Plaintiff is true. As noted above, the gist of defendant SFSFC’s statement is that Plaintiff has been banned from attendance at WorldCon76 “because [Plaintiff] has made it clear that he fully intends to break our code of conduct” by engaging in “racist and bullying behavior.” Defendant SFSFC proffers evidence that its code of conduct prohibited harassing behavior and proffers evidence that Plaintiff had previously engaged in harassing behavior online and Plaintiff threatened to wear a body camera into a convention space to film anticipated “hijinx.”
While defendant SFSFC’s argument and evidence addresses the charge that Plaintiff intended to engage in bullying behavior, defendant SFSFC does not address what the court considers to be the primary “sting” of the statement, i.e., that Plaintiff intended to engage in racist behavior. The court does not consider this to be a slight or minor inaccuracy which can be left unjustified.
Consequently, the court is of the opinion that defendant SFSFC has not met its burden of proving the truth, or substantial truth, of the alleged defamatory statement.
As a final basis for summary judgment, defendant SFSFC contends the purportedly defamatory statement is libel per quod and, therefore, Plaintiff must prove that he has suffered special damages which he cannot do. Defendant SFSFC cites two examples of libel per se (accusation of crime or being unfit to practice trade, business, or profession) and argues that since neither of those situations exist here, then the alleged defamatory statement must necessarily be libel per quod. The court does not agree with defendant SFSFC’s logic. No extrinsic aid is necessary to perceive an accusation of being racist as tending to injure the subject’s reputation. Consequently, the court need not address whether Plaintiff can or cannot establish that he has suffered special damages…
A copy of the ruling can be downloaded below; the part related to the Del Arroz suit begins on page 21.
