Pixel Scroll 12/12/23 Dancing With Pixels In Our Scrolls

(1) PAXSON ASSAILANT BYRON DECLES ARRESTED. The Berkeley Scanner reports that Byron DeCles, wanted for his attack on Diana Paxson and her son, Ian, was caught today and charged with attempted murder: “Berkeley double stabbing suspect arrested in Oakland”.

A man who had been wanted by police since Friday in connection with a stabbing in Berkeley that sent two people to the hospital is now in custody, according to booking records.

Byron DeCles, 21, was arrested shortly before 4 a.m. Tuesday in Oakland on a warrant from the Berkeley case, jail records show.

…On Tuesday, DeCles was arrested by OPD on suspicion of attempted murder, battery with serious bodily injury, elder abuse and burglary, according to booking records….

DeCles, who is unhoused, has no prior criminal cases in Alameda County, according to court records online.

According to preliminary information, he is related to the victims and has a history of mental health issues.

DeCles is now scheduled for arraignment Thursday at Wiley Manuel Courthouse in Oakland. He is being held without bail….

The Berkeley Scanner also got an update from Diana Paxson about her injuries: “Berkeley writer Diana Paxson on the mend after stabbing”.

… Reached by phone late Tuesday afternoon, Paxson said she had spent the whole day responding to the many well wishes she’d received from supporters and friends….

“We are currently being very, very grateful to the members of our community — our local community and the larger community — who have been sending us energy for protection,” she told The Scanner. “It’s been a very difficult time and we are also incredibly relieved and grateful to the Oakland Police Department for actually being able to find him.”

… Paxson said she and her son were “recovering well” from their injuries.

“We look forward to being able to resume our usual schedule of events with our community,” she said.

She said she and Grey now need to look into several home repairs stemming from Friday’s incident. They plan to call the Family Justice Center in Oakland, which helps victims with a range of services in the aftermath of crimes.

“We’re very happy to hear that there is such a thing,” she said.

Paxson said what happened Friday had been the culmination of “a series of difficulties” with DeCles over the past year, which may have stemmed from or been exacerbated by untreated head injuries linked to multiple vehicle collisions.

“He never went to the hospital to be checked out,” she said. “We’re hoping that at least he’ll get checked out now.”

Paxson said medication can also help with these types of issues, but only if people take it.

“The light bulb has to want to be changed,” she said, adding: “Our whole mental system needs a lot more support than it’s been getting. That’s something to think about.”…

Diana Paxson also said today in a public Facebook post:

What’s on my mind is overwhelming gratitude that our attacker was arrested by the Oakland police this morning.

Many, many thanks to everyone who has been sending energy for protection and aid in hunting him down.

(2) CORRAIN APOLOGY. Cait Corrain reopened her X.com account today to publish “A sincere apology”, which attributed her surreptitious campaign of one-star reviews against other debut authors to “depression, alcoholism, and substance abuse”, and a “complete psychological breakdown” after starting a new medication. (Click for larger image.)

Many responses in social media, not excerpted here, have been skeptical, or view the statement as inadequate.

Surprisingly, an author found Corrain’s book was still on Amazon, now with a 2027 publication date. Del Rey Books cleared the air.

The Washington Post covered the story today: “Author Cait Corrain loses book deal after ‘review bombing’ debut authors’ books via Goodreads”. (Gift link.)


Nnedi Okorafor’s notes about the shortcomings of Goodreads and the prevalence of this kind of misconduct are well worth thinking about. Thread starts here.

(3) DUNE TRAILER. “Dune Part 2’s Epic New Trailer Teases a War Across Generations” at Gizmodo.

… The main thing you get from that trailer is that Part Two is just a much, much bigger movie than Part One. Part One had to move all the pieces into place. Now, Paul is becoming the leader of an entire people and will use them to win back their planet. We’re talking war on a planetary scale, which—most excitingly—includes not just one, but multiple sandworms tearing through soldiers. Can you wait to see that shot in IMAX? We can’t….

(4) JURY SIDES WITH FORTNITE. The New York Times reports that a federal district court jury sided against Google: “Google Loses Antitrust Court Battle With Makers of Fortnite Video Game”.

A jury ruled on Monday that Google had violated antitrust laws to extract fees and limit competition from Epic Games and other developers on its Play mobile app store, in a case that could rewrite the rules on how thousands of businesses make money on Google’s smartphone operating system, Android.

After deliberating for a little more than three hours, the nine-person federal jury sided with Epic Games on all 11 questions in a monthlong trial that was the latest turn in a three-year legal battle.

The jury in San Francisco found that Epic, the maker of the hit game Fortnite, proved that Google had maintained a monopoly in the smartphone app store market and engaged in anticompetitive conduct that harmed the videogame maker.

Google could be forced to alter its Play Store rules, allowing other companies to offer competing app stores and making it easier for developers to avoid the cut it collects from in-app purchases.

Judge James Donato of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California will decide the remedies needed to address Google’s conduct next year. Google said it would appeal the verdict….

(5) RECOGNITION RESTORED. [Item by Steven French.] This sounds genre to me, especially as the author Yambo Ouologuem is described as writing in the style of Vonnegut. “African writer ruined by row with Graham Greene finally gets chance to shine” in the Guardian.

In 1968 the books pages of the French newspaper Le Monde excitedly praised an uncompromising new novel, Bound to Violence, going on to salute its author as one of “the rare intellectuals of international stature presented to the world by Black Africa”.

The newspaper’s words, written in tribute to the young Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem, sound condescending today. Back then, however, the intended compliment was genuine and many European critics soon agreed: the publication of Ouologuem’s strange novel really did mark the arrival of a major new talent.

But the literary world can be brutal, and particularly so for a young African novelist living in Paris who was attempting a fresh twist on conventional storytelling.

Fellow African writers began to express shock at Ouologuem’s harsh parody of his own culture. Three years later damaging accusations of plagiarism had also emerged, including a public skirmish with Graham Greene, which ended Ouologuem’s short career. He retreated into the life of a recluse, returned to Mali and died in 2017, having never published again.

Now, 50 years after this scandal, Penguin Classics is to bring out a new English edition of Bound to Violence in a bid to rehabilitate the gifted author and introduce him to new readers.

“I was so exhilarated when I read this book,” said Penguin editor Ka Bradley. “It’s the history of an imaginary African empire called Nakem and whole centuries are dealt with in just a paragraph or two. It’s dizzying.”

(6) WRITING WITH AI IS NOT A SPORT. This player has been ejected. “Publisher Of Sports Illustrated Ousts CEO Ross Levinsohn” reports Deadline.

The CEO of the parent company of Sports Illustrated was ousted on Monday.

The firing followed a scandal over the publication’s use of AI-generated stories from fake authors, although it was not immediately clear if that was related to the shakeup.

Ross Levinsohn, CEO of The Arena Group, was terminated and Manoj Bhargava was named interim chief executive officer, the company said. No other information was provided, other than that the board met “and took actions to improve the operational efficiency and revenue of the company.”…

(7) AUTHOR’S CANDIDACY SCOTCHED. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] The Tomorrow’s MPs Twitter account reported that a potential candidate for a constituency in Scotland was forced to stand down from the party selection contest, due to the content of novels he had previously written.  The tweet links to a piece in The Courier news website, which states:

A long-serving Fife Labour councillor has stood down from an internal contest to stand as the party’s candidate in Glenrothes after concerns were raised about fantasy books he has written.

Insiders expect Altany Craik to issue a statement saying he is withdrawing from the contest for “family reasons”.

But we can reveal that Mr Craik, a supernatural horror author, was directed to stand down because of party reservations about his novels.

Mr Craik had been seeking support from members to stand as the Labour candidate for Glenrothes at the General Election expected next year….

…A source said: “It’s absolutely disgusting.”

“They’re saying he’s not a suitable candidate because his books are too sexy and satanic.”…

…His profile on Amazon includes titles such as “Innocence Lost”, with readers praising the books and it’s (sic) protagonist, Father Andrew Steel.

One reviewer wrote: “This book has graphic descriptions of gore, mutilation, rape, and foul language. But getting past that, it is a worthwhile read.”…

(8) GUESS WHO HAS A NEW NEIGHBOR? [Item by John King Tarpinian.] John Waters’ star adjoins Ray Bradbury’s on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

(9) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]

Post about the Chengdu Worldcon receives complaint from con organizers

This November 13th post (archive.org backup copy) by an account using the name 四海朝阳/Sihai Zhaoyang is mostly about the history of the Chengdu Worldcon, although there’s some relatively brief coverage of the actual con itself – mainly the online aspects – towards the end.  Some extracts via Google Translate, with manual edits:

On January 17, 2022, the official WeChat public account of the Chengdu Worldcon released volunteer recruitment information. However, according to feedback from science fiction fans who submitted their resumes, there were no updates after their submission, and there was no mention of subsidies or compensation for volunteers. In actuality, volunteers during the conference were recruited from surrounding schools.

On January 20, 2022 [this is an error/typo, it should read “2023”], some science fiction fans on Twitter discovered that the Chengdu Science Fiction Conference had officially announced that the conference would be rescheduled from August to October 2023, and the location changed from the Century City International Convention and Exhibition Center to the Chengdu Science Fiction Museum. This news was not announced to Chinese fans at that time, nor were those who voted that year notified. (i.e. the group of science fiction fans who were also members of the 81st World Science Fiction Convention).  It was not until that night that the notice of the postponement and venue change was hastily issued.

In fact, this change had been known about for a long time. In May 2022, a science fiction fan discovered the news on a government bidding website that the Chengdu Science Fiction Museum and Qingrong Lake Science Fiction Park would be built in Pidu District, Chengdu, and posted this on Weibo. After making the news public, they received a message from the organizing committee, ordering them to delete their Weibo post. However, coverage of the same topic could still be seen in local Chengdu media.  At this time, the estimated completion time was the end of June [presumably 2023], and the exhibition completion time would be the end of July….

The organizing committee of the Chengdu Worldcon also began to travel to various cities to conduct research with local science fiction fans. However, of the university science fiction clubs with the largest number of science fiction fans, very few received relevant notifications. During this process, the organizing committee members who did not understand science fiction once again made a joke. Their main person in charge had never heard of such a thing as a “light saber” and vowed to invite Shinichi Hoshi,

Kobayashi Yasumi, Douglas Adams and others mentioned by fans, despite all those people passing away long ago…

[During the preparation period in the days leading up to the con] something ridiculous happened. A staff member from Science Fiction World entered the venue with Liu Cixin’s Hugo Award trophy from 2015, to set it up as an exhibit. However, they were stopped by the security guard at the door, because the trophy was too long and was a sharp object…

Of course, we cannot ignore the “good” side of this conference, and that side has nothing to do with this organizing committee and comes purely from the lovely fans. Thanks to the efforts of some of the staff from Science Fiction World, the science fiction associations of many schools took a group photo at the Galaxy Awards Ceremony for the “Best Science Fiction Society Award”. The number of participating societies has become the highest in history. Science fiction fans communicated with each other at the conference, from badges to ribbons, embodying the ingenuity and wonderful ideas of fantasy fans.  After RiverFlow was taken to hospital, many science fiction fans and science fiction authors rushed there spontaneously and waited all night. Online and offline, most of the problems encountered by science fiction fans were solved by other enthusiastic science fiction fans. No matter how many times a question was asked, they never tired of answering it…

Has the Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention had a good or bad impact on Chinese science fiction? In the short term, the answer does not seem to be available.

A couple of days later, on November 15th, there was a follow-up post (archive.org copy), stating that a complaint about the original post had been received from the Worldcon organizers.  A screenshot of the complaint was included; a Google Translate rendition to English is below, which I haven’t edited in any way.

The following content is not officially provided by WeChat and should be filled in by the rights holder when making a complaint. Please operate with caution.

This article involves malicious attacks against individuals, institutions and governments, seriously affects the government’s credibility, denies the work results of the Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention Organizing Committee, and misguides public opinion.

As the only legal entity of the 2023 Chengdu World Science Fiction Conference, the Chengdu Science Fiction Association strictly abides by the World Science Fiction Association charter and relevant regulations from application to hosting. The theme salon, guest reception, Hugo Award selection and award, and ticket sales all comply with relevant requirements. Said untrue situation.

The original poster responds by stating that their post was based on public information, whether from the con itself, or posted online by other members of the public, and argues that ‘it is precisely the organizing committee of the Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention itself that “seriously affects the government’s credibility.”‘ (via Google Translate, again with no manual edits).

It’s not clear to me whether this complaint had any weight behind it, legal or otherwise.  As I understand it, once a post has been made public on Weixin/WeChat, only a small number of edits can be made, so presumably any response would have involved taking the post down rather than removing any offending text.  Given that the post is still up a month later, the complaint seems to have had zero effect – other than provoking further coverage in this Weibo post by SF Light Year, and in issue 16 of the Zhejiang University SF association news summary, and now here, causing a Streisand effect.

Xingyun (Nebula) event to be held at the Chengdu SF Museum in May 2024

On the weekend of May 17th-19th next year, the 2024 Xingyun (Nebula) Celebration will be held at the Chengdu SF museum.  To the best of my knowledge, this is the only confirmed event or activity to be held at the venue post-Worldcon, other than Lukyanenko’s tour on December 1st.

This event appears to comprise three elements (via Google Translate, so these may not be the official English names):

  • The 2024 Children’s Science Fiction Conference
  • The 2024 International Science Fiction Summit Forum
  • The 15th Annual Xingyun (Nebula) Awards – I think these may have been previously announced, although I don’t think it was covered here on File 770.

Note: Looking at the dates of previous SFWA Nebula conferences, it wouldn’t surprise if both events take place on the same weekend.

Video of an SF themed bus in Chengdu

This three-minute video was filmed on the final day of the con, and posted to Bilibili a couple of days later.  It shows an SF-themed bus, followed by a timelapse sequence of the route it takes.  I’m sure people who attended the Worldcon may need to correct me, but I think the red and blue banners that hang from most of the streetlights were also promoting the con?

Note that these seem to be buses running a public route, different from the red ones that I think were dedicated to transporting Worldcon attendees, and which can be seen in the first photo.

(10) BUILDING A TOWN WITHOUT CGI. Not something many movie makers would do. “’Oppenheimer’ Production Designer Ruth De Jong – Featurette” at Deadline.

When location scouting for Oppenheimer, production designer Ruth De Jong was tasked with finding a location to recreate Los Alamos. Although the actual town of Los Alamos was too modernized to use for the period piece, De Jong and her team spent some time there for research. “I began laying out the expanse of the town with our set designer Jim Hewitt,” she says. “We took these drawings, with plans and elevations, and made foam core architectural models in a quarter-inch scale.”

De Jong and her team landed on Ghost Ranch, which is along the same mountain range as the existing Los Alamos. “We had this epic town that we wanted to do,” she says, “but the U.S. government had $2 million and a few years and I had nowhere near that.” Neither De Jong nor director Christopher Nolan wanted to use CGI for extensions on the town, so De Jong opted for building exteriors and shooting the interiors at the actual Los Alamos, like Oppenheimer’s house, which has been largely untouched since he lived there.…

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 12, 1946 Josepha Sherman. (Died 2012.) Josepha Sherman was a remarkable woman. She was another individual who died far too young. Author, folklorist, and anthologist, I knew her for a number of years up to the time of her death, by email and phone, though I lost touch with her a few years before she died. 

She wrote dozens of short stories and novels, including her Compton Crook Award-winning novel The Shining Falcon. She was prolific with Child of Faerie, Child of EarthA Strange and Ancient NameWindleafGleaming BrightKing’s Son, Magic’s Son and Son of Darkness being some of her other novels. 

She also penned five novels set in the Trek verse co-authored with Susan Shwartz including Vulcan’s Forge and Vulcan’s Heart.  She wrote a lot of media tie dipping into the universes of Andromeda and BuffyBardic Choices (with Mercedes Lackey) and even Highlander as she told me she loved Adrian Paul there.

Oh, she was a superb anthologist. A Jewish woman, she put together several collections reflecting what she knew so well — A Sampler of Jewish-American Folklore and Rachel The Clever and Other Jewish Folktales. But my favorite work by her was isn’t an anthology, but a rather serious work she did with T.K.F. Weisskopf: Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts: The Subversive Folklore of Childhood. Yes, Green Man reviewed it as she sent us a copy. Actually we reviewed so long ago that it ran on our predecessor, Mostly Folk, but that is another story for another time.

So let’s finish off by telling you that she was a Winter Queen at Green Man as was Ellen Kushner and Jane Yolen. All it means is they get to write a Speech and get chocolate. Somehow that charms them, so here’s Joshepa’s meditation on Winter: “Josepha Sherman’s Winter Queen Speech”.

Josepha Sherman. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter

(12) SHINY. Peer today posted a stunning improvement to that popular tune about a reindeer hero.  

You know Pixelsdasher and Pixeldancer
And Pixelprancer and Pixelvixen,
Pixelcomet and Pixelcupid
And Pixeldonner and Pixelblitzen.
But do you recall
The most famous scroll title of all?
Godstalk the click-boxed title
Had a very shiny scroll
And if you ever saw it
You would even feed the troll
All of the other titles
Used to laugh and scroll its names
They never let poor Godstalk
Play in any wordle games

Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Mike came to say,
“Jetpacks not working,
Won’t you scroll my File tonight?”

Then all the Filers loved it
And they shouted it out with glee,
“Godstalk as a scroll title
will go down in history!”

With apologies to … everyone I guess.

(13) FANAC’S APA PANEL NOW ONLINE.

APAs Everywhere with Fred Lerner, Christina Lake, Amy Thomson and Tom Whitmore

In this wonderful FanHistory Zoom panel, our speakers, all long-time participants (in multiple different APAs), speak about their experiences with APA life. During this 2-part recording, you’ll hear their personal fannish origin stories and APA experiences, along with a wealth of fascinating commentary on the nature and purpose of APAs. From “fanac in a corner” to “intentional community”, this video provides thoughtful, insightful discussion on why APAs have been a mainstay of science fiction fandom.

Of particular interest are the discussions of “standing waves” of cultural issues that run through our APAs and the ways that science fiction fandom has dealt with cultural challenges. Fandom had notable failures (and successes) dealing with social issues long before the general culture dealt with them.

Of course, it’s not all social commentary. You’ll hear the story of APAs used in divorce proceedings, APAs which may have been created to bedevil particular individuals, and the APA which didn’t live up to its banner of “the 13 nastiest bastards in fandom”.  You’ll learn why APAs thrive, even in this era of instant  online gratification. Other topics: privacy issues, digital preservation of APAs, a soft toy APA, APAs you wouldn’t join, Langdon charts, and of course, audience Q&A.

Part 1

Part 2

(14) THEY’RE NOT PLAYING AROUND. Turn out the lights, the party’s over. “E3 has entertained its last electronic expo” says TechCrunch.

E3’s decades-long history has been peppered with ups and downs. The annual Los Angeles-based gaming expo saw a decade of steady growth after it was founded in the mid-90s. The mid-00s, on the other hand, were an altogether different story, as the event struggled, downsized and moved out of the LA Convention Center.

Opening the industry-only event to the public breathed new life into the event the following decade, however, until 2020 saw E3 — and the rest of the world — suddenly grind to a halt. Since then, the show has, understandably, struggled.

The in-person event was canceled courtesy of COVID, and a virtual version failed to materialize by that summer. Show organizer, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), did manage an online event in 2021, only to once again cancel things in full the following year. After failing to garner enough interest, there was no E3 2023, nor will the event return in 2024.

Given its recent history, there was little surprise this morning, when the ESA announced that E3 is now gone for good. Such decisions are never easy to make, and big organizations/events take a while to wind down. The group no doubt wanted to exhaust all feasible options before officially throwing in the towel for good….

(15) BEAR BEGINNINGS. The Guardian declares “Paws for applause: Paddington set to star in stage musical”.

Paddington, Michael Bond’s “very rare sort of bear”, is to star in a new stage musical. The production, announced on Tuesday, is being developed by Sonia Friedman’s company, whose hits include Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and will have music and lyrics by McFly’s Tom Fletcher. It is currently being workshopped with the title Paddington: The Musical and has a UK premiere planned for 2025.

The show is adapted from Bond’s bestselling children’s books – the first of which was published 65 years ago – and from the popular live-action film versions which feature Ben Whishaw as the voice of a CGI Paddington. How the marmalade-loving, accident-prone bear will be represented on stage has not yet been revealed….

(16) SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD. The New York Times finds some are “Using A.I. to Talk to the Dead”.

Dr. Stephenie Lucas Oney is 75, but she still turns to her father for advice. How did he deal with racism, she wonders. How did he succeed when the odds were stacked against him?

The answers are rooted in William Lucas’s experience as a Black man from Harlem who made his living as a police officer, F.B.I. agent and judge. But Dr. Oney doesn’t receive the guidance in person. Her father has been dead for more than a year.

Instead, she listens to the answers, delivered in her father’s voice, on her phone through HereAfter AI, an app powered by artificial intelligence that generates responses based on hours of interviews conducted with him before he died in May 2022.

His voice gives her comfort, but she said she created the profile more for her four children and eight grandchildren.

“I want the children to hear all of those things in his voice,” Dr. Oney, an endocrinologist, said from her home in Grosse Pointe, Mich., “and not from me trying to paraphrase, but to hear it from his point of view, his time and his perspective.”…

… HereAfter AI was introduced in 2019, two years after the debut of StoryFile, which produces interactive videos in which subjects appear to make eye contact, breathe and blink as they respond to questions. Both generate answers from responses users gave to prompts like “Tell me about your childhood” and “What’s the greatest challenge you faced?”…

… StoryFile offers a “high-fidelity” version in which someone is interviewed in a studio by a historian, but there is also a version that requires only a laptop and webcam to get started. Stephen Smith, a co-founder, had his mother, Marina Smith, a Holocaust educator, try it out. Her StoryFile avatar fielded questions at her funeral in July.

According to StoryFile, about 5,000 people have made profiles. Among them was the actor Ed Asner, who was interviewed eight weeks before his death in 2021.

The company sent Mr. Asner’s StoryFile to his son Matt Asner, who was stunned to see his father looking at him and appearing to answer questions.

“I was blown away by it,” Matt Asner said. “It was unbelievable to me about how I could have this interaction with my father that was relevant and meaningful, and it was his personality. This man that I really missed, my best friend, was there.”…

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Doctor Who releases Christmas single The Goblin Song” and it’s on the Guardian’s radar. Warning for anthropophagy. Or maybe not. It’s goblins doing it.

For the first time in its 60-year history, Doctor Who is releasing an official Christmas single.

The Goblin Song, written by the show’s composer, Murray Gold, with lyrics by Russell T Davies, is raising money for Children in Need….

…The music video features a clip from the forthcoming Doctor Who Christmas special, in which Ncuti Gatwa will make his full-length debut as the Doctor, alongside Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday, who joins as a regular Tardis companion.

During the video, the Doctor and Ruby are seen crawling through a pirate ship while goblins sing about eating a baby. Gold described the song as “fiendishly catchy”, adding: “I don’t like these goblins – and you won’t either.”

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Ersatz Culture, Rob Thornton, Rose Embolism, Anne Marble, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Hampus Eckerman.]

Pixel Scroll 8/22/23 The File Exploded With A Mighty Crash As We Fell Into The Scroll

(1) WILL KOSA LEAD TO DELETION OF ONLINE QUEER CONTENT? Charlie Jane Anders’ latest Happy Dancing newsletter warns “The Internet Is About to Get a Lot Worse”.

…For now at least, you can still talk freely about being trans or queer on the Internet, without fear of overt censorship*. You might well face online harassment and violent threats, and you might even face real-world consequences if you get on the radar of the worst people. But the Internet does not suppress the trans and queer stories that are being violently removed from schools, libraries, and other public spaces in much of the country right now.

That’s about to change — unless we all take action.

A new bill called the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, is sailing towards passage in the Senate with bipartisan support. Among other things, this bill would give the attorney general of every state, including red states, the right to sue Internet platforms if they allow any content that is deemed harmful to minors. This clause is so vaguely defined that attorneys general can absolutely claim that queer content violates it — and they don’t even need to win these lawsuits in order to prevail. They might not even need to file a lawsuit, in fact. The mere threat of an expensive, grueling legal battle will be enough to make almost every Internet platform begin to scrub anything related to queer people.

The right wing Heritage Foundation has already stated publicly that the GOP will use this provision to remove any discussions of trans or queer lives from the Internet. They’re salivating over the prospect.

And yep, I did say this bill has bipartisan support. Many Democrats have already signed on as co-sponsors. And President Joe Biden has urged lawmakers to pass this bill in the strongest possible terms….

(2) WRITER’S NATIONAL FRONT CONNECTION RECALLED. David A. Riley announced to readers of his blog on June 19 that his 11,600-word sword and sorcery novelette “Ossani the Healer and the Beautiful Homunculus” “has been accepted for publication – and by one of the most prestigious markets I have ever appeared in.” On July 5 he revealed that the story “will be published sometime later this year in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.”

Today someone who noticed the F&SF sale news connected Riley with his history of having once been part of the UK’s National Front.

https://twitter.com/ChristopherRowe/status/1693978873245860074

Christopher Rowe is referring to F&SF publisher Gordon Van Gelder and editor Sheree Renée Thomas.

David A. Riley’s history with the UK’s National Front became common knowledge in 2016 after Riley was included on HWA’s Bram Stoker Award Jury. The HWA appointment became news at a time when questions were already being asked of Riley due to his involvement in the relaunch of Weirdbook. Riley reportedly answered in a no-longer-available Facebook thread. The davidandrewrileyisafascist Tumblr hosts a screenshot of the comment, which says in part:

I think I need to put the record straight. Yes, I was in the National Front for ten year from 1973 to the middle of 1983. During that time I never regarded the party as fascist, though it did have minority elements within it that undoubtedly were. …I have never regarded myself as a fascist, and certainly not a nazi. The term ‘white supremacist’ is one I don’t recognise and certainly repudiate. If you saw me associating with my ethnically diverse neighbours in Bulgaria you would not level that at me then. I know this will not convince some people, and, quite honestly, I accept that….

The relationship between Riley’s past political views and organizing activity, and his current views, and whether he should be serving on an HWA awards jury, became subjects of intense discussion. Before long HWA President Lisa Morton said he was taken off the jury by mutual agreement.

Riley was interviewed by David Dubrow shortly after the 2016 kerfuffle (“Interview With David A Riley”.) Here is a quote:

Do you feel as though you have anything to apologize for in regard to your politics, past or present?

Who should I apologize to? To those who have been baying for my blood? Most of the people involved in this debate come from the States. Since I have never been involved in politics there I should certainly not have to apologise to them. Do I regret having spent those years that I did in the National Front? Yes. If I had my time over again I would not do it. But the early seventies were a different time….

Today s. j. bagley commented on Rowe’s report about Sheree Renée Thomas’ statement:

And Rowe expressed this concern to another author:

(3) AI TRAINING PUSHBACK. [Item by Bill.] Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance has taken down the prominent “Books3” dataset, that was used to train high-profile AI models including Meta’s. “Anti-Piracy Group Takes AI Training Dataset ‘Books3′ Offline” reports Gizmodo. Despite being removed from their original host site, the dataset is available elsewhere on the internet.

One of the most prominent pirated book repositories used for training AI, Books3, has been kicked out from the online nest it had been roosting in for nearly three years. Rights-holders have been at war with online pirates for decades, but artificial intelligence is like oil seeping into copyright law’s water. The two simply do not mix, and the fumes rising from the surface just need a spark to set the entire concept of intellectual property rights alight.

As first reported by TorrentFreak, the large pirate repository The Eye took down the Books3 dataset after the Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance sent the site a DMCA takedown. Now trying to access that dataset gives a 404 error. The Eye still hosts other training data for AI, but the portion allotted for books has vanished….

(4) PURLOINED VOLUMES. And the Guardian is quite familiar with what’s in Books3: “Zadie Smith, Stephen King and Rachel Cusk’s pirated works used to train AI”.

… More than 170,000 titles were fed into models run by companies including Meta and Bloomberg, according to an analysis of “Books3” – the dataset harnessed by the firms to build their AI tools.

Books3 was used to train Meta’s LLaMA, one of a number of large language models – the best-known of which is OpenAI’s ChatGPT – that can generate content based on patterns identified in sample texts. The dataset was also used to train Bloomberg’s BloombergGPT, EleutherAI’s GPT-J and it is “likely” it has been used in other AI models.

The titles contained in Books3 are roughly one-third fiction and two-thirds nonfiction, and the majority were published within the last two decades. Along with Smith, King, Cusk and Ferrante’s writing, copyrighted works in the dataset include 33 books by Margaret Atwood, at least nine by Haruki Murakami, nine by bell hooks, seven by Jonathan Franzen, five by Jennifer Egan and five by David Grann….

(5) WEEKEND B.O. The Hollywood Reporter checked the cash registers and found “’Blue Beetle’ Box Office Opening Beats ‘Barbie,’ ‘Strays’ Gets Lost”.

…After ruling the box office roost for four weekends, Barbie fell to second place as DC’s superhero pic Blue Beetle took the top spot. It opened to an estimated $25.4 in North America. …

(6) BRADBURY MEMORIES. On Ray Bradbury’s 103rd birthday, John King Tarpinian visited his gravesite, bringing a funny book, a cake, and a dinosaur. (John always takes the cake to the cemetery office for the staff to enjoy.)

(7) BACK IN THE DAY. In this episode of Day at Night taped on January 21, 1974, host James Day speaks with Ray Bradbury about his career, the importance of fantasizing, his aspirations as a young child, his dislike of college for a writer, his idea of thinking compared to really living, and his love of the library.

(8) REMEMBERING BUSTER CRABBE. Steve Vertlieb invites fans to read his article “Careening Spaceships And Thundering Hooves: The Magic, Majesty (And Friendship) Of Buster Crabbe … And An Era” at Better Days, Benner Nights.

When I was a little kid, prior to the Civil War, I had an imagination as fertile and as wide as my large brown eyes, dreamily filled with awe and wonder. My dad brought home our first television set in 1950.

Here is an affectionate remembrance of the Saturday Matinee and 1950’s Philadelphia television when classic cliffhanger serials thrilled and excited “children of all ages”… when careening spaceships and thundering hooves echoed through the revered imaginations and hallowed corridors of time and memory…and when Buster Crabbe lovingly brought “Flash Gordon,” “Buck Rogers,” “Red Barry,” and “Captain Gallant Of The Foreign Legion” to life in darkened movie palaces, and on television screens, all over the world.

Return with us now to “those thrilling days of yesteryear” when Zorro, Buzz Corry of the “Space Patrol,” Ming, The Merciless, Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry in “The Phantom Empire,” and Larry “Buster” Crabbe lit the early days of television, and Saturday afternoon motion picture screens, with magical imagery, and unforgettable excitement. Just click on the blue link above to escape into the past, via the world of tomorrow.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 22, 1909 Paul W. Fairman. His story “No Teeth for the Tiger” was published in the February 1950 issue of Amazing Stories. Two years later, he was the founding editor of If, but he edited only four issues. In 1955, he became the editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic which he would hold for three years. There are several films, Target Earth and Invasion of the Saucer Men, based on his stories, plus some TV episodes as well. (Died 1977.)
  • Born August 22, 1919 Douglas W F Mayer. A British fan who was editor for three issues of Amateur Science Stories published by the Science Fiction Association of Leeds, England. He was thereby the publisher of Arthur C. Clarke’s very first short story, “Travel by Wire”, which appeared in the second issue in December 1937. He would later edit the Tomorrow fanzine which would be nominated for the 1939 Best Fanzine Retro Hugo. (Died 1976.)
  • Born August 22, 1920 Ray Bradbury. Seriously where do I start? He wrote some of the most wonderful stories that I’ve ever read, genre or not, many of which got turned into quite superb video tales on the Ray Bradbury Theater. As for novels, my absolute favorite will always be Something This Way Wicked Comes. (I’m ambivalent on the film version.) And yes I know it isn’t really a novel but The Illustrated Man I treat as such and I loved the film that came out of it with Rod Steiger in that role. Let’s not forget The Martian Chronicles. (Died 2012.)
  • Born August 22, 1945 David Chase, 78. He’s here today mainly because he wrote nine episodes including the “Kolchak: Demon and the Mummy” telefilm of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. He also wrote the screenplay for The Grave of The Vampire, and one for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Enough Rope for Two”, which he also directed.
  • Born August 22, 1955 Will Shetterly, 68. Of his novels, I recommend his two Borderland novels, Elsewhere and Nevernever, which were both nominees for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature, and his sort of biographical Dogland. Married to Emma Bull whose Finder: A Novel of The Borderlands is always highly recommended, they did a trailer for her War for The Oaks novel which is worth seeing as you’ll spot Minnesota fans in it. And Emma as the Elf Queen is definitely something to behold.  Will was planning to run for Governor of Minnesota so he had collected funds for that. That instead went instead to this film
  • Born August 22, 1948 — Susan Wood. She received three Hugo Awards for Best Fan Writer in 1974, 1977, and 1981, and a Best Fanzine Hugo as coeditor of Energumen in 1973In 1976 she was instrumental in organizing the very first feminist panel at a con, at MidAmericon. The reaction to this helped lead to the founding of A Women’s APA and of WisCon. While teaching courses in SF at UBC, one of her students was William Gibson.  “Fragments of a Hologram Rose” which is his first published story was written as an assignment in her SF class. (Died 1980.)
  • Born August 22, 1963 Tori Amos, 60. One of Gaiman’s favorite musicians, so it’s appropriate that she penned two essays, the afterword to “Death” in Sandman: Book of Dreams) and the Introduction to “Death” in The High Cost of Living. Although created before they ever met, Delirium from The Sandman is based on her. Bookriot did a nice piece on their friendship.

(10) LONE STAR REVIEWS. BookRiot challenges readers: “Can You Guess the Fantasy Book Based on Its 1-Star Reviews?” I’m surprised I’m able to say I did guess one.

We’ve all been there: You go to leave a review of an amazing book, only to see that someone has left it a dreaded 1-star review. And when you read it? Oof. Did the two of you even read the same book? Well, let’s put it to the test. Can you guess these fantasy books based only on their 1-star reviews?

I did not get this one. I should have – I read it! But then, I thought it was good. Maybe that threw me off.

3. CLICK HERE TO REVEAL THE BOOK.

“What a bore! To read a rock’s thoughts and almost nothing else happens? Please!”

“Be careful when you see a Shakespeare reference while looking for a good fantasy read. I do not recommend.”

[M]oves at a pace that a snail could race past.”

(11) WARM UP YOUR CREDIT CARDS. “Disney Drops Another Great 4K Blu-Ray Surprise With Plush Releases Of Major Star Wars And Marvel Shows”Forbes has the story.

…The information released by Disney today lists four initial series set to get the 4K Blu-ray and Blu-ray treatment: Loki Season One, WandaVisionThe Mandalorian Season One, and The Mandalorian Season Two….

… What’s more, these TV series releases are going all-out to appeal to fans by sporting steelbook packaging for both their 4K and HD Blu-ray versions; gorgeous box art designs by artist Attila Szarka; as well as concept art cards and never-before-seen bonus features. And as perhaps the biggest surprise of all, Disney has confirmed that it will be pressing the 4K versions of these TV series releases on 100GB discs rather than the 66GB-capacity discs that it’s used for all of its previous 4K Blu-ray releases bar the two Avatar movies….

(12) WHERE’S MY JETPACK LYRICS? Here they are. Thank you, Peer, for these sympathetic words.

Jet pack crashes
A new Scroll cries
Its pixels falls to the floor
Mike opens his eyes
The confusion sets in
Before the filer can even click the box

Jetpack crashes
An old scroll dies
Its pixel fall to the floor
Mike closes his tabs
The items that was in theirs
Reposted now, by the baby down the hall
Oh, now feel it being discussed again
Like a rolling thunder reported on X
Blogs pulling Items from the center of the scroll again
I can tick box now

Jetpack crashes
A new scroll is born.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon comes to Netflix starting December 22. The way Variety sees it, “…The trailer has just about every piece of sci-fi and fantasy imagery you can imagine: a princess prophesied to end a war, spaceships raining lasers down on a hapless village, talking robots, a spider creature, a badass wielding glowing red laser swords, a flying pegasus-like animal and lots of slow-mo….”

The YouTube blurb says:

From Zack Snyder, the filmmaker behind 300, Man of Steel, and Army of the Dead, comes REBEL MOON, an epic science-fantasy event decades in the making. When a peaceful colony on the edge of a galaxy finds itself threatened by the armies of a tyrannical ruling force, Kora (Sofia Boutella), a mysterious stranger living among the villagers, becomes their best hope for survival. Tasked with finding trained fighters who will unite with her in making an impossible stand against the Mother World, Kora assembles a small band of warriors — outsiders, insurgents, peasants and orphans of war from different worlds who share a common need for redemption and revenge. As the shadow of an entire Realm bears down on the unlikeliest of moons, a battle over the fate of a galaxy is waged, and in the process, a new army of heroes is formed.

[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Daniel Dern, Bill, Steven French, Dan Bloch, Steve Vertlieb, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

A Bradbury Centennial-and-a-Half

A roundup of Ray Bradbury links.

(1) PUBLIC RADIO. Morning Edition has clips from last month’s Read-A-Thon in “Marking The Centennial Of Author Ray Bradbury’s Birth”.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of science fiction writer Ray Bradbury. Oh, I remember reading “The Illustrated Man” when I was a kid in school. NPR’s Petra Mayer reports on his legacy.

PETRA MAYER, BYLINE: Ray Bradbury is sometimes called the poet of science fiction. His words demand to be read aloud.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MARJORIE LIU: (Reading) He opened the bedroom door. It was like coming into the cold marble room of the mausoleum after the moon has set.

MAYER: That’s author and comics creator Marjorie Liu taking part in a massive online read-a-thon of Bradbury’s classic “Fahrenheit 451,” held to mark his hundredth birthday. This is the moment where Montag, the hero, finds his wife overdosed on sleeping pills.

(2) A HALF-CENTENNIAL. At the Soho Photo Gallery — “Elizabeth Nahum-Albright – I Saw it at Ray’s House”.  

I Saw it at Ray’s House is a photographic journey through more than 70 images that captures moments of magic and gentle decline in the house of Science Fiction giant, Ray Bradbury (1920-2012). Many of the photos were taken the year after he passed away, as books and objects that defined his seventy-year career were staged and packed for preservation. Some were taken while he still lived and wrote in the house; I had a unique and deeply personal connection to the author, allowing me unique access to the space where he lived for more than half a century. These photographs have become a study of a person who was deeply engaged in many aspects of American culture. They are the last photos of the house as it was when Bradbury occupied it, and together they offer points for reflection on the themes of collection, as well as what a person’s possessions say about who they were and what they valued. The project is a study in how we touch everyone we’re close to–– when we pass on we leave something behind, whether it be physical objects or memories that continue to live with those we cared about. 

(3) FEARSOME COMICS. “Seasons Of Terror Brings Stephen King and Ray Bradbury Comics”Bleeding Cool has the lowdown.

Seasons of Terror is a graphic anthology that features four stories adapted to comic books by Richard Chizmar. The stories are by Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and Robert McCammon. Each story is illustrated by a different artist, Dennis Calero, Ray Fawkes, Francois Vaillancourt and Steve Wands.

(4) DON’T EXPECT TO READ IT. The new issue of The American Scholar has an unpublished Ray Bradbury story, “The Joke” – which you have to be a subscriber to read (so why am I linking to it?)

Although best known for his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury was also a prolific writer of short stories, having published his first while still a teenager. This previously unpublished story likely dates to 1950, the year The Martian Chronicles appeared. Bradbury brought a fertile imagination to bear on his works of fantasy, horror, and science fiction—some of the most popular of the last century. As his close friend and bibliographer Donn Albright remembers, that imagination kept firing even while the writer was asleep. “Ray woke in middle of the night,” Albright recalls, “and would write dreams down, then later go back and ‘finish’ them. It’s the case here and in many of his stories.” Bradbury, however, never quite finished “The Joke.” According to the scholar Jonathan Eller, the writer meant to compose one additional scene, in which the protagonist, a young writer named Charlie, meets his friend Hank at a bar, on the night of his 30th birthday. Bradbury sketched the scene out in three sentences, which we include here in italics. —Ed.

(5) DOGGING IT. Episode 6 of Jeffrey Kahan’s Mentors and Role Models Podcast has a Bradbury angle: “Phil Nichols and I talk Bradbury, Bloch, and Pink’s Hotdogs!”

Along the way they reference this video of Harlan Ellison reading.

(6) BRADBURY IN THE PULPS. The latest issue of The Pulpster features coverage of the Ray Bradbury centennial.

…It won’t be a regular edition. Think of it as THE PULPSTER ANNUAL. While not Sears Roebuck catalog thick like an AMAZING STORIES ANNUAL, number 29 of THE PULPSTER will be almost twice as large as last year’s edition, coming in at 84 pages plus covers.

And a lot of great content will be filling those pages!

THE PULPSTER has two major themes this year: the 100th anniversary of the birth of author Ray Bradbury, and the 100th anniversary of the debut of BLACK MASK.

(7) TRILOGY COMPLETED. Steven Paul Leiva reviews the third and final book in Jonathan R. Eller’s Bradbury biography: “With Bradbury Beyond Apollo A Clear-Eyed And Penetrating Bio Is Concluded”.

With the publication of Bradbury Beyond Apollo (University of Illinois Press), Jonathan R. Eller has completed his three-volume self-designated “biography of a mind” of the author of Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Dandelion Wine, and hundreds of published short stories. Eller began with Becoming Ray Bradbury in 2011, followed that up with Ray Bradbury Unbound in 2014, and it has been six long years for this conclusion to reach us. Although the book’s publication date of August 22, 2020, the centenary of Bradbury’s birth, is so appropriate, it is easy to forgive Eller. 

The obvious question then is, was it worth the wait? I suppose each reader must answer that for themselves, but it was for me.

… I have a particular affection for this third volume, as it includes the years I knew Bradbury as a colleague and friend from 1977 to the end of his life. Indeed, I come in as a minor character in Bradbury’s story when Eller writes about our work together on a film project (unfulfilled and unsatisfactory for us both) in 1982-83. And my organizing of a series of city-wide events celebrating Bradbury’s 90th birthday in 2010, Ray Bradbury Week in Los Angeles. But affection is not assessment, and in assessing this volume, I was struck not only by Eller’s compassionate if still objective eye on Bradbury but by just how fine a writer Eller is himself.

(8) LYRICAL BRADBURY TRIBUTE. Today’s roundup concludes with a Filer’s verse left as a comment in 2018.


By Peer

Now I feelpressure inside the mountain
I feel pressure, burning the peers
And I feel pressure, hollowing souls
And I feel pressure, filing the peer
And I hope you remember thee

Oh, should my pixels scroll
Then surely I’ll do the same
Confined in ticked boxes
We got too close to the Baen
Calling out Ray hold fast and we will
Watch the books burn on and on the martian side
Dandelion comes upon the wine

(With pressure from Ed Sheeran)


[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Dennis Howard, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories.]

A Sesame Street-style SFF Alphabet Song

[[Editor’s Note: I wanted more people to see Peer’s song, left in comments, and got his permission to run it as a front-page post.]]

Peer: If there is Sesame Street, there should be an alphabet song:

A is for Atreides, the house that rules in Dune
B is for books, because, well, obviously
C is for The City and also for the City
D is for Death Star, a well named piece of prop
E is for Endor, a planet known for pelts
F is for Frodo, the one who drops the ring
G is for GlaDos, a computer that went mad
H is for Hal, which is another one
I is for If you were a dinosaur my love, just to annoy the Pups
J is for Jemisin who scored the biggest hattrick
K is for Klaatu, who’s not a pokemon
L is for Lensmen, although maybe not
M is for Montag, a fireman burns books
N is for Neuromancer, where the internet has no trolls
O is for Oceania, who was always at war with Eastasia
P is for Pern, because Dragons can be SF too
Q is for Q, because why the hell not?
R is for Riverworld an underused concept
S is for Slartibartfast, the inventor of fjords
T is for Thursday, the women who died a lot
U is fot Uthacalthing, the TImbrimi ambassador
V is for Vimes, who cherishes his boots
W is for the Warden, because the moon IS a harsh mistress
X is for the variable you try to add to Venus
Y is for Yulsman, just so I can mention Elander Morning
Z is for Zanzibar, where you would try to stand on

Filers Destroy Even More Lyrics

Almost anything will make a Filer burst into verse. I’ve been clipping the highlights from our own version of La La Land reality for over a year, and today I’m ready to play them for you.

Matthew Johnson https://file770.com/?p=33927&cpage=3#comment-579600 – (“Be Our Guest”)

 (And the juxtaposition of Lovecraft and Beauty and the beast makes me wish there was a mash-up of the two. With a few tweaks, it could be a truly horrifying story.)

Lose your mind, lose your mind
Your skull will be a melon rind
Open up the evil book
And ancient secrets you will find
Hidden clues, shoggoth ooze
You’ve got the Miskatonic blues
Try the fungi, they’re a lulu
Don’t believe me? Ask Cthulu
Thought and reason, you can park ’em
After all, sir, this is Arkham
Our hotel Bible’s not from Gideon
All our curves are non-Euclidean
When you’ve gouged your eyes out you’ll be glad you’re blind
Open the Necronomicon
Read a page and then what fun,
You’ll lose your mind, lose your mind, lose your mind!

Niall McAuley https://file770.com/?p=34266&cpage=1#comment-615233 (Beowulf)

So. The Filers in days gone by
and the SMOFs who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those pixels’ heroic scrolling.

Soon Lee https://file770.com/?p=28318&cpage=3#comment-418410 (“The Gambler”)

The Writer

On a cool Autumn’s eve
At a Worldcon bound for nowhere
I met up with the writer
We were both too tired to sleep

So we took turns a-starin’
Out the window at the darkness
The boredom overtook us,
And she began to speak

She said, “Child, I’ve made a life
Out of writin’ people’s stories
Knowin’ what the plots were
By the way they held their tropes

So if you don’t mind me sayin’
I can see you’re out of ideas
For a taste of your Oolong
I’ll give you some advice”

So I handed her my China
And she drank down my last swallow
Then she bummed a cigarette
And asked me for a light

And the night got deathly quiet
And her face lost all expression
She said, “If you’re gonna play the game, child
You gotta learn to write it right

You’ve got to know when to show ’em
Know when to tell ’em
Know when to passive voice
And to gerund

You never check your wordcount
When you’re typin’ at the keyboard
There’ll be time enough for counting
When the writin’s done

Every writer knows
That the secret to good writin’
Is knowin’ what to throw away
And knowin’ what to keep

‘Cause every book’s a winner
And every book’s a loser
And the best that you can hope for is to Fail
Better next

And when she finished speakin’
She turned back toward the window
Crushed out her cigarette
And faded off to sleep

And somewhere in the darkness
The writer she dreamt stories
But in her final words
I found advice that I could keep

You’ve got to know when to show ’em
Know when to tell ’em
Know when to passive voice
And to gerund

You never check your wordcount
When you’re typin’ at the keyboard
There’ll be time enough for counting
When the writin’s done

Repeat to fade

(Starring Badass Raadchai Ann Leckie as the writer. With apologies to Kenny Rogers)

Peer Sylvester https://file770.com/?p=32890&cpage=1#comment-536816 (“When I’m washing windows” from George Formby)

Now I go ticking boxes to earn an honest bob
For a nosy filer it’s an interestin’ job
Now it’s a job that just suits me
A box ticker you would be
If you can scroll what I can see
When I’m ticking boxes

Pixels and filers too
You should see them argue ‘n coo
You’d be surprised at things they do
When I’m ticking boxes

In my mind I’ll work hard
But I’ll never stop
I’ll scroll this blinkin’ thread
Till I get right to the top

The star wars thing, it looks divine
The twitter guy, he is doin’ fine
I’d rather have Mikes job than mine
When I’m ticking boxes

The handmaids’ new series I call
It’s a wonder if it will fall
My mind’s not on my work at all
When I’m ticking boxes

I know a fella, not so swell
He is a puppy, that’s plain to tell
I’ve seen him insult Jemison as well
When I’m ticking boxes

Oh, with my mouse I’ll scroll hard
But I’ll never stop
I’ll click this blinkin’ box
Till I get it right on the nob

Oz and awards lyin’ side by side
God stalks I have spied
I’ve often seen what goes inside
When I’m ticking boxes

Camestros Felapton https://file770.com/?p=33089&cpage=1#comment-546353 (“Try a Little Tenderness”)

Oh the Gorn may be weary–
Them Gorns they do get weary
Wearing those same old metallic shorts, yeah yeah…
But when the Gorn gets weary
Try a little pixelness….

Cubist https://file770.com/?p=32862&cpage=4#comment-539962 (“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”)

picture yourself on a scroll on a pixel
with vector equations and hex-color codes
suddenly someone relocates the cursor
and turns on alternative modes

high-contrast JPEGs and aliased TIFFs
stealing your vision away
look for your rods and your retinal cones
and you’re blind

pixel in the scroll with diamonds…

Rev. Bob https://file770.com/?p=34266&cpage=1#comment-615153

The Mount Tsundoku pile is hangin’ over my head
And if it falls over I reckon it’ll render me dead
Oh! Woe is me! Typos are a misery!
But I-I-I’ve got to read
So I’m off to start ‘nother pretty thick doorstop!

Jack Lint https://file770.com/?p=32961&cpage=2#comment-540505 (Kipling’s “Gentlemen-Rankers”)

Since we’re talking of things that are Kipled:
We’re poor pixel scrolls who’ve lost our books,
Baa! Baa! Baa!
We’re little morlocks who’ve got no Nooks,
Baa–aa–aa!
Gentlefolk-filers out on the spree,
Damned from here to the Library,
God ha’ mercy on such as we,
Fifth! Godstalk!

Morlocks doesn’t really work there, but it seemed important at the time.

Peer https://file770.com/?p=33024&cpage=1#comment-543093 (People Are Strange)

People are strange
When you are a filer
Twitter seems wicked
When you’re unwanted
Places are uneven
When you are scrolled

Kip W. https://file770.com/?p=33089&cpage=1#comment-546116

Scroll on, thou doughty filer;
And, as thy pixels flow,
Scroll messages of media
To every fan below.

microtherion https://file770.com/?p=33129&cpage=2#comment-548951

Yor-El And The Gang Singing:
Oh yes, it’s Kryptonite
And the feeling’s right
Oh what a night

Luthor, he’s got the one
A rock that’s special everywhere
From Gotham to Metropolis
It’s Kryptonite, and Superman is down

[It’s Kryptonite…]

Wonder Woman, Lois Lane
You mothers both named “Martha”
Come here you hostage lady
Yeah, stay with me tonight

If you hear any gats
It’s just the Bat
It’s Kryptonite

Gonna use that Kryptonite
Use that Kryptonite
Gonna use that Kryptonite
Use that Kryptonite

[It’s Kryptonite…]

Stoic Cynic https://file770.com/?p=33129&cpage=1#comment-548627 (“Ragtime Gal”)

Hello my baby,
Hello my pixel,
Hello my scrolltime file.

Send me a tick by wire,
Baby the blog’s on fire…
*notices audience*

Ribbit!

Kip W. https://file770.com/?p=33274&cpage=2#comment-556328 (“High Hopes”)

Once there was a marten so fine,
Thought he’d take Collider off line
Everyone said, “Your mind’s flyin’…
You can’t take that off line!”

But he had
High hopes,
He had
High hopes,
He had
Sky-high don’t-care-if-I-die hopes
So whether mouse or mink,
If your Brain can think
You can scheme with Pink-
-y till nine.

Oops, there goes the Large Collider off
Oops, there goes the Large Collider off
Oops, there goes the Large Collider off line

Ka-
BOOM!

Peer Sylvester https://file770.com/?p=33328&cpage=1#comment-556877 (“The Joker” from Steve Miller Band)

Some filers scroll for the space cowboys
Some scroll for rockets and love
Some scroll for Boris (*)
Cause we scroll for the Tingle and love!

People scroll here, baby
Some clicking it wrong, clicking it wrong
Well, don’t you worry baby
Don’t worry
Cause were right here, right here, right here, right here at home

Cause we´re a Brunner
we´ re a Carter
we are a LeGuin
And were much smarter
We read SciFi in the sun!

(*) Strugatzki of course!

IanP https://file770.com/?p=33328&cpage=1#comment-556985 (Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name”)

Scrolled through the heart
And you’re to blame
Darling, you give Kzin a bad name…

A Kindle’s sale is what you tell
You promise me heaven, then put me through hell
Piles of books got a hold on me
Mount Tsundoku’s a prison, you can’t break free

Oh, oh, you’re a pixeled gun (yeah)
Oh, oh, there’s nowhere to run
No one can file me
The damage is done

Scrolled through the heart
And you’re to blame
You give Kzin a bad name (bad name)
I read my part
And you play with your game
You give Kzin a bad name (bad name)
You give Kzin a bad name
You give Kzin a bad name

Kurt Busiek https://file770.com/?p=33381&cpage=1#comment-559446

Pixel Scroll is my name
770’s my nation
Cyberspace my dwelling place
The File’s my destination

Steve Davidson https://file770.com/?p=33461&cpage=1#comment-562912

Mikey had a little file
there it is, on the screen
its just a little file
why not scroll it up
cute cute, little file
little pixels, little scrolls
now its comin at me
flowing cross the computer screen

pixel pixel, please let me scroll you
I want to write the fifth comment
Filer filer, its just a file
we want to make it the fifth comment

Camestros Felapton https://file770.com/?p=33485&cpage=1#comment-563726 (David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars”)

Pixel Scrolldust and Filers from Mars
Pixel scrolled guitar, blogging posts by Mike & Glyer
And the Filers from Mars
He scrolled it left hand
But made it too far
Became a special post by our gracious host

Peer Sylvester https://file770.com/?p=33546&cpage=1#comment-566010 (“Where is my mind” from The Pixies)

Ooh, stop
With your pixels in the air and your mouse on the ground
Try to tick and click it, yeah
Your box will collapse
But there’s nothing in it
And you’ll ask yourself
Where is my file
Where is my file
Where is my file

Peer Sylvester https://file770.com/?p=34628&cpage=2#comment-624273 (“No Milk Today” from Herman’s Hermits)

No scroll today
cause Mike has gone away
For signing of a book
“No scroll” is what it took
How could he know just what this absence means?
The end of all our scrolls, the end of all our dreams

Camestros Felapton https://file770.com/?p=33546&cpage=1#comment-566131 (“Distant Sun” by Crowded House)

When your seven worlds collide
Whenever I am by your side
And dust from a distant sun
Will shower over everyone

Charon D.  https://file770.com/?p=34101&cpage=1#comment-605760 (“Little Old Lady From Pasadena”)

Now everybody’s saying that there’s nobody shadier
Than the little old lady from Pixelgradia
She’s scrolling fast, she’s scrolling hard
She’s the terror of Pixelgradia Boulevard

Go granny go granny go granny go!

John Hertz – “Superstar”

Frankenstein,
Frankenstein,
Why are your eyes always filled with brine?

Frankenstein,
You’ve gone far;
Do you think you’re what they say you are?

Peer Sylvester https://file770.com/?p=34151&cpage=1#comment-610212 (“House of the Rising Sun“)

There is a house in New Crobuzon
They call the Rising Son
And it’s been the scroll of many a poor boy
And Godstalk, I know I’m one!

My mother was a Filer
She scrolled my new blue dreams
My father was a Slakemoth man
Down in New Crobuzon

Now the only thing a slakemoth needs
Is some dreams and a trunk
And the only time he’s satisfied
Is when he’s on a weaver

Camestros Felapton https://file770.com/?p=34186&cpage=2#comment-612125

We are the Hugo voting mere-people
We swish our flippy tails
We like to read our books a lot
And all that that entails

Once we lived on land you see
Amid the normal folk
But rabid mammal griefing
Made us all a bit more ‘woke’

“If we really must regress” we said
“and head back to the past,”
“Let’s return to the sea”
“But this time make it last”

Now we live among the dolphins
The whales and all the cephlapods
You are welcome to join us
Among the weird, the strange, the odds

Johan P https://file770.com/?p=34266&cpage=1#comment-615027 (“Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love” by Cole Porter)

Birds do it, bees do it
Even pixel scrolling files do it
Let’s do it, let’s fall in love

Steve Davidson https://file770.com/?p=34266&cpage=1#comment-614908

The pixel must scroll
down the file of Mike’s dreaming
Flow Glyer, slow let the fifths and nears
come streaming onto my screen,
onto my screen
There’s a file, over at the fannish place
there’s a file, scrolling in a pixel place
there a hive, a hive of villany in every fans life

Peer Sylvester https://file770.com/?p=34266&cpage=1#comment-614968 (These Boots Are Made For Walkin’)

Well, these files are made for scrolling, and that’s just what they’ll do

One of these days these files are gonna scroll all over you
You keep tickin ‘ when you oughta be clickin’
You keep stalking when you oughta not God
You keep fifthing ‘ when you oughta be a’seconding’
What’s right is right but you ain’t been left just yet
These files are made for scrolling, and that’s just what they’ll do

Matthew Johnson https://file770.com/?p=34357&cpage=5#comment-619490 (“The Jumblies” by Edward  Lear)

Far and few, far and few, are the lands where the Filers stroll
Their books are piled in a tsundoku
And they went to sea in a scroll.

They went to sea in a scroll, they did, in a scroll they went to sea
In spite of all that the pups would say
In a Meredith Moment on book launch day
In a scroll they went to sea

And when the scroll was nearly wrecked
And everyone said “You’re just boxes to check!”
They called aloud, “Our scroll’s done with,
But we don’t care a pixel! We don’t give a fifth!
In a scroll we’ll go to sea!”

Far and few, far and few, are the lands where the Filers stroll
Their books are piled in a tsundoku
And they went to sea in a scroll.

Camestros Felapton https://file770.com/?p=34259&cpage=2#comment-614694 (“Goldfinger”)

I spent today cleaning things and entertaining other members of the household with my Shirley Bassey impression:

Molddddd fingers,
He’s the man, the man with the mouldy touch!
It rained too much
(so now he has)
Molddddd fingers
Beckons you, with his dusty clawsssss
They’re full of spores!!!!!!

Peer Sylvester https://file770.com/?p=34266&cpage=1#comment-615126 (Let’s Do The Time Warp Again)

Let’s do the Godstalk again.

Let’s do the Godstalk again.
It’s just a click with the left.
And then a box from the right.
Scroll your hands with your hips.
You bring your comments in tight.
But it’s the puppydrek
That really drives you insane.
Let’s do the Godstalk again.
Let’s do the Godstalk again.

Magenta:
It’s so dreamy, oh fantasy free me.
So you can’t vote me, no, not at all.
In another dimension, with
scientific invention,
Well pixelated I scroll all.

RiffRaff:
With a bit of a Mars flip

Magenta:
You’re on the file drip.

RiffRaff:
And nothing can ever scroll the same.

Magenta:
You’re read like a mountain.

RiffRaff:
still more books;you cant count´em .

All:

Let’s do the Godstalk again.
Let’s do the Goldstalk again.

Charon D. https://file770.com/?p=34697&cpage=1#comment-625555 (“A Pirate’s Life For Me”)

We pillage and plunder and polish our hooks
Appertain, me hearties, yo ho!
Or we would if we weren’t sitting around reading books
Appertain, me hearties, yo ho!

Yo ho, yo ho, a pixel scroll for me!

Tom Becker https://file770.com/?p=34828&cpage=1#comment-630510 (The Road Goes On Forever by Robert Earl Keen, Jr.)

Sherry was a blogger at the local fannish site
She had a reputation as a girl could really write

Down Main Street after midnight with a brand new file of zines A fresh one before her nose and a bheer appertained
She’d ride down to the clubhouse and meet with all her friends
The scroll goes on forever and the pixels never end

Kip W. https://file770.com/?p=34828&cpage=2#comment-630692

Useta blog down south on a pixel farm
Near Corflu, Tennessee.
‘Tweren’t nobody there in that cube but air,
Seventeen billion pixels and me.
One day round three, I said “OMG,
I’ll read File Sev’n Seven-teee!
It blew my screen,
Turned my red lights green
And I scrolled my pixels freee!

And there was
Pixels on the Hugos,
Pixels on the zines,
Pixels scrolled on costuming
And television screens
Pixels writing con reports from Washington, DC,
When I scrolled my pixels freeeee!

Pixel Scroll 4/7/17 The Pixel Out of Scrolls (by M.G. Filecraft)

(1) LOOK OUT BELOW. To avoid the chance that the Cassini probe might crash into and contaminate a moon of Saturn, NASA plans to crash it into the planet.

“Cassini’s own discoveries were its demise,” said Earl Maize, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) who manages the Cassini mission.

Maize was referring to a warm, saltwater ocean that Cassini found hiding beneath the icy crust of Enceladus, a large moon of Saturn that spews water into space. NASA’s probe flew through these curtain-like jets of vapor and ice in October 2015, “tasted” the material, and indirectly discovered the subsurface ocean’s composition — and it’s one that may support alien life.

“We cannot risk an inadvertent contact with that pristine body,” Maize said. “Cassini has got to be put safely away. And since we wanted to stay at Saturn, the only choice was to destroy it in some controlled fashion.”

(2) ON THE AIR. Hear Hugo nominees Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone on Ottawa radio program All in a Day.

(3) MUSICAL HUGOS. Pitchfork makes its case for “Why clipping.’s Hugo Nomination Matters for Music in Science Fiction”.

Earlier this week, Splendor & Misery—the sophomore album by experimental L.A. rap group clipping.—was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. The Hugo is the highest prize in science fiction/fantasy, granted annually to the genres’ best literature, cinema, television, comics, and visual art. But the awards have never been particularly receptive to music. The last time a musical album was recognized by the Hugos was 1971, when Paul Kantner’s Blows Against the Empire was nominated. The Jefferson Airplane guitarist’s solo debut grandly envisioned a countercultural exodus to outer space, helping set the stage for many more sci-fi concept albums to come, starting with prog-rock’s explosion.

The storyline that winds through Splendor & Misery is just as political as Kantner’s. Set in a dystopian future, the LP revolves around a mutineer among a starship’s slave population, who falls in love with the ship’s computer. This Afrofuturist narrative, as rapped by Daveed Diggs, is matched by a dissonant yet sympathetic soundscape from producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes—one that evokes the isolation and complicated passion of the premise. Visually, this arc is represented in Hutson’s cover art: a spaceman with his pressure suit in tatters, revealing bare feet. “It’s a reference to how runaway slaves have been depicted in the U.S. in newspaper announcements and paintings like Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series,” Hutson says.

Diggs is no stranger to awards, having snagged both a Grammy and a Tony for his role in Hamilton, but clipping.’s Hugo nomination is just as profound….

(4) THE ROAD TO HELSINKI. Camestros Felapton begins his review of the nominees with “Hugo 2017: Fanwriter”.

Chunk one: established fan writers: Mike Glyer, Natalie Luhrs, Foz Meadows and Abigail Nussbaum. Chunk two: Jeffro Johnson, the Rabid nominee but one with a track record of informed fan writing on genre issues. Chunk three: the inimitable Dr Tingle. The discussion below is in no particular order.

(5) SF INFILTRATES LIT AWARD. China Miéville’s This Census-Taker is one of eight finalists for the Rathbones Folio Prize, given “to celebrate the best literature of our time, regardless of form.” All books considered for the prize are nominated by the Folio Academy, an international group of esteemed writers and critics. The three judges for the 2017 prize are Ahdaf Soueif (chair), Lucy Hughes-Hallett and Rachel Holmes. The winner will be announced on May 24 at a ceremony at the British Library.

(6) CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD. Filer and board game designer Peer Sylvester has been interviewed by Multiverse.

Q:  THE LOST EXPEDITION comes out this year. What can you tell our readers about this board game (without giving too much away?)

PS: Percy Fawcett was arguably the most famous adventurer of his time. In 1925 he set into the Brazilian rainforest with his son and a friend to find El Dorado (which he called “Z”), never to return again. Speculations of his fate were printed in newspapers for years with a movie coming out this year as well.

The players follow his footsteps into the jungle. It’s a cooperative game (you can play two-players head-to-head as well) where you have to manage all the dangers of the jungle and hopefully come back alive. It has a quite unique mechanism that prevents “quarterbacking”, i.e. players dominating everyone else. The game features beautiful art by Garen Ewing.  It will be, without doubt, my prettiest game so far. It has a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-Book vibe. But, unlike those books, different dangers come out at different times, so every decision is unique.

(7) GET YOUR KITSCH ON. Submissions for The Kitschies awards have opened and will continue until November 1. File 770 wrote a summary piece about the awards last month.

(8) CHUCK TINGLE’S NEW SITE. Time to troll the pups again!

Like last year, the DEVILS were so excited about being DEVILS that they forgot to register important website names of their scoundrel ways. This year they are playing scoundrel pranks again, but now instead of learning about common devilman topics like having a lonesome way or crying about ethics in basement dwelling, this site can be used to PROVE LOVE by helping all with identification of a REVERSE TWIN! …

THE POWER IS YOURS

Never forget, the most powerful way to stop devils and scoundrels in this timeline is to PROVE LOVE EVERY DAY. Use this as a reminder and prove love in some small way in your daily life. Pick up the phone and call your family or friends just to tell them you care about them and that they mean so much to you. Help pick up some trash around your neighborhood. Let someone go ahead of you in line. As REVERSE TWINS pour in from other timelines, we can do our part to make this timeline FULL OF LOVE FOR ALL, and the power to do that is in your hands with every choice that you make! YOU ARE SO POWERFUL AND IMPORTANT, AND YOU ARE THE BEST IN THE WHOLE WORLD AT BEING YOU! USE THIS POWER TO MAKE LOVE REAL!

(9) THIS YEAR’S PUPPY PORN NOMINEE. Meanwhile, io9 discovered Stix Hiscox is a woman: “Meet the Hugo-Nominated Author of Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By the T-Rex”.

So, who is Stix Hiscock? Is he some Chuck Tingle copycat riding on the coattails of scifi porn parody? Some right-wing heterosexual man’s answer to Tingle’s gay erotica, making science fiction great again (with boobs)? Or, better yet, is he Chuck Tingle himself? Turns out, none of the above.

(10) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • April 7, 1989:  Dystopian brawler Cyborg opens in theaters.
  • April 7, 1933: The Eighth Wonder of the World appears to audiences nationwide

(11) CELEBRITY VISITS JIMMY OLSEN. Don Rickles,who passed away yesterday, and his doppelganger once appeared in comics with Superman’s Pal.

(12) CRAM SESSION. There are always 15 things we don’t know. ScreenRant works hard to fill those gaps, as in the case of  “15 Things You Didn’t Know About Captain Picard”.

  1. Captain Picard Loved To Swear

Patrick Stewart is a great actor, but foreign accents are not his strong suit. Captain Picard hails from La Barre, France, yet Patrick Stewart chose to use an English accent for his portrayal of the character. He also used an English accent for Charles Xavier in the X-Men movies (who is American) and Seti in The Prince of Egypt (who is Egyptian). You cannot argue with results, however, and the Star Trek expanded universe has offered a few handwave solutions to why Picard speaks with an English accent. These range from everyone in France adopting the accent when English became a universal language, to him actually speaking in a French accent the whole time, but we hear it as English due to his universal translator.

There were a few instances of Picard’s Frenchness that Patrick Stewart snuck into the dialogue. Captain Picard would occasionally say “merde” when facing a nasty situation. This is the French equivalent to saying “shit” when it is being said in exasperation.

(13) ELEMENTARY. The names of four new elements have been officially approved.

The periodic table just got some new members, as the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has officially accepted new names for four elements. Element numbers 113, 115, 117 and 118 will no longer be known by their placeholder names, and instead have all-new monikers decided upon by their discoverers.

The discoveries were first recognized about a year ago, and the proposed names for them were decided upon this past June. Now, chemistry’s highest group has decided they are valid and will move forward with the all-new labels.

  • Nihonium (Nh), is element 113, and is named for the Japanese word for Japan, which is Nihon.
  • Moscovium (Mc), element 115, is named for Moscow.
  • Tennessine (Tn), element 117, is named for Tennessee.
  • Oganesson (Og), element 118, is named after Yuri Oganessian, honoring the 83-year-old physicist whose team is credited with being the top element hunters in the field.

(14) NOT TED COBBLER. Pratchett fans will remember Jason Ogg, who once shod an ant just to prove he could in fact shoe anything (for which the price was he would shoe anything, including Death’s horse). A Russian artisan actually made a life-size flea with shoes.

In a supersized world, Prague’s Museum of Miniatures thinks small. Very small. In millimetres, in fact.

A short walk from Prague Castle, this odd museum houses wonders invisible to the naked eye. After entering the room filled with microscopes, I found a desert scene of camels and palms inside the eye of a needle, an animal menagerie perched on a mosquito leg and the Lord’s Prayer written on a hair.

(15) DON’T FORGET. Contrary to widely-held theories used in various SF stories, short-term and long-term memories are formed separately.

The US and Japanese team found that the brain “doubles up” by simultaneously making two memories of events.

One is for the here-and-now and the other for a lifetime, they found.

It had been thought that all memories start as a short-term memory and are then slowly converted into a long-term one.

Experts said the findings were surprising, but also beautiful and convincing….

(16) NOTHING BUT HOT AIR. Atmosphere is confirmed on an exoplanet.

Scientists say they have detected an atmosphere around an Earth-like planet for the first time.

They have studied a world known as GJ 1132b, which is 1.4-times the size of our planet and lies 39 light years away.

Their observations suggest that the “super-Earth” is cloaked in a thick layer of gases that are either water or methane or a mixture of both.

The study is published in the Astronomical Journal.

Discovering an atmosphere, and characterising it, is an important step forward in the hunt for life beyond our Solar System.

But it is highly unlikely that this world is habitable: it has a surface temperature of 370C.

(17) QUANTUM BLEEP. If you’re going to be taking part in one of history’s iconic moments, you’d better prepare a speech.

(18) ANIME PRAISED. NPR likes Your Name — not a Studio Ghibli production, but animation direction is by a longtime Ghibli artist: “’Your Name’ Goes There”.

In the charming and soulful Japanese anime Your Name, two teenagers who have never met wake up rattled to discover that they have switched bodies in their sleep, or more precisely their dreams. And it’s not just their anatomies they’ve exchanged, or even the identities-in-progress each has managed to cobble together at such a tender age. Mitsuha, a spirited but restless small-town girl of Miyazaki-type vintage, and Taki, a Tokyo high school boy, have also swapped the country for the city, with all the psychic and cultural adjustments that will entail.

(19) CARTOON OF THE DAY. “Are You Lost in the World Like Me?” is a Max-Fleischer-style cartoon on Vimeo, with music by Moby, which explains what happens to the few people who AREN’T staring at their smartphones all day.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Carl Slaughter, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster, Stephen Burridge, Peer Sylvester, and Chip Hitchcock for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Rev. Bob.]

Pixel Scroll 12/2/16 Scrolls, Mr. Pixel, Zillions Of ’Em!

(1) I ROCK, I RAN, EUPHRASIA. Amazing Stories’ Jack Clemons answers the question “Killer Asteroids: Can We Stop Them?”

In an earlier post I talked about the ongoing risk of a sizable asteroid impacting Earth, causing atomic bomb-like destruction, and the still-nascent technologies we’ve developed so far just to track asteroids. So an obvious question is, if we did discover one headed for a bullseye with Earth, and if we had enough time to react, what could we do about it?

The answer at this point is: not much. In the words of NASA administrator Charles Bolden, “If it’s coming in three weeks, pray.” The difficulty comes from attempting to stop, slow or even deflect a massively destructive boulder, which might range in girth anywhere from the size of a tractor-trailer to a planetoid hundreds of miles in diameter, traveling at 40,000 miles per hour.

That’s not to say no one is worrying about it. In fact, several of NASA’s finest have given the problem a lot of thought and so far they’ve come up with three options they’ve labeled “Nuke”, “Kick” or “Tug”.

(2) RING OUT. Moshe Feder calls it bad news for Rob Hansen and everyone who loves bells. Whitechapel Bell Foundry, the UK’s oldest manufacturing business, founded 1570 – and reportedly where fanhistorian Rob Hansen works – is is closing down. The announcement earned the business a long profile in Spitalfields Life.

It is with deep regret that I announce the closure of Whitechapel Bell Foundry, the world’s most famous bell foundry and Britain’s oldest manufacturing company. Below you can read my interview with Alan Hughes, the last in a line of bell founders stretching back to 1420, who will retire next year at sixty-eight years old when the foundry closes in May 2017 and the building is sold – meanwhile, negotiations for the future ownership of the business are underway.

Feder says, “I hope someone buys and saves it, even if it has to move.”

(3) MURDER MOST FOUR. Dave Langford’s Ansible Editions has published an ebook edition of Yvonne Rousseau’s The Murders at Hanging Rock (first published in 1980). Mystery multiplied!

murders-at-hanging-rock

What really happened at Hanging Rock on St Valentine’s Day in 1900?

Picnic at Hanging Rock is the source for this erudite literary entertainment, which will be enjoyed and appreciated by all scholars and lovers of unsolved mysteries. In The Murders at Hanging Rock, Yvonne Rousseau offers four logical, carefully worked-out but thoroughly tongue-in-cheek explanations of the fate of the missing picnickers from Appleyard College.

Now reprinted with a foreword by John Taylor which casts yet more light on the subject, The Murders at Hanging Rock is an essential and amusing companion to Lady Lindsay’s classic story.

  • • •

In 1987, the long-suppressed Chapter 18 of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock was published as The Secret of Hanging Rock, a chapbook to which Yvonne Rousseau contributed a further ingenious commentary which has been added (with a new Preface of its own) to the Ansible Editions ebook of The Murders at Hanging Rock.

(4) RETROSPECTIVE. Randy Byers, just about the nicest person in fanzine fandom, looks back on his first year of fighting a cancer that tore his life apart and reassembled it in a new way.

A lot has happened in the last year and I’m hopeful that there’s more amazement to come, but I thought it was worth marking that a year ago I walked through a door into an examination room and exited a stranger in a strange land that had such people in it.

(5) HINES BENEFIT AUCTION #7. The seventh of Jim C. Hines’ 24 Transgender Michigan Fundraiser auctions is for an autographed novel and half a pound of specially roasted coffee beans, from Leah Cutter.

Today’s auction is for a signed copy of THE RAVEN AND THE DANCING TIGER, and half a pound of specially roasted coffee beans, both from author and coffee geek Leah Cutter.

About the Book:

Peter worries about just three things: dancing, finding a girlfriend, and hiding his raven soul.

Peter is a raven warrior, an ancient race known for their assassination and fighting skills. Through secrecy and strict teaching, they’ve learned to cope with the modern world.

When Peter meets Tamara, he knows she’s different. Special. He doesn’t learn until too late that she has secrets too. Tamara is a tiger warrior. And her kind are only interested in killing his kind.

About the Coffee:

Leah will be in touch with the winner to determine what type of roast you want. (Light? Dark? Espresso? Uncertain blend? Decaf? Etc…)

(6) HARLAN IS #1. Digital Trends reviewed all the iterations of Star Trek and picked the top episode from each: “From time travel to Tribbles: Here are the best Star Trek episodes from every series”.

Over its five decades, no science-fiction property has had more of an effect on the genre than Star Trek. Five television series, an animated cartoon, and a dozen movies have captivated Trekkies for generations. While the show has occasionally produced some kitschy dialogue and plot lines that are cringe-worthy, there are many episodes that withstand the test of time as some of the greatest sci-fi adventures ever put on a screen.

In preparation for the forthcoming new series from CBS, Star Trek: Discovery, we glossed hundreds of episodes from each live-action series and picked some of our favorites for you to enjoy, whether you’re new to the franchise or a life-long fan. We’re sure this will cause a lot of discussion, but if you really want to go where no sci-fi adventure has gone before, here are the 20 episodes you’ll want on your watch list.

Star Trek: The Original Series

Set in the 23rd century, Star Trek: TOS follows the five-year mission of the USS Enterprise, with Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner), first officer and half-Vulcan Spock, the ever cantankerous ship’s Doctor Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelly), Uhuru (Nichelle Nichols), Sulu (George Takei), and the rest of the gang, alongside a host of alien species.

The winner

Season 1, episode 28: The City on the Edge of Forever

The final episode of the original series’ first season gets our nod for its solid storyline. Some of the episodes of TOS seemed to suffer from gimmicky — if not corny — plots, but Roddenberry and his team thread the needle well in this one. In fact, it was good enough to receive the 1968 Hugo (the Emmys of sci-fi) for Best Dramatic Presentation.

In this episode, Kirk and Spock must travel back in time to go after McCoy, who, in a fit of delusion following an accidental overdose of Cordrazine, transports down to the nearest planet. This planet is home to a time portal, and McCoy enters the portal. The incident alters the time line, causing the Enterprise and the entire Federation to disappear. Kirk and Spock bargain with the “Guardian of Forever” to enter the portal, which takes them back to 1930s New York City. What unfolds is a story about timelines that might have been, a device later used by J.J. Abrams in the series’ cinematic reboot.

(7) IT’S CONTAGIOUS. Skyboat Audiobook of Harlan Ellison’s Star Trek Teleplay was named to AudioFile’s Best Audiobooks of 2016.

Today, AudioFile Magazine named THE CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER as one of the BEST AUDIOBOOKS of 2016. Took our breath away. We wanted to share this amazing news with you, because without you, there would have been no audiobook. There are thousands of books produced every year, and it is deeply moving that CITY was included on this prestigious list. And that brings us back to thanking all of you again and again for your outpouring of love and financial support. Bless you one and all during this Holiday Season.

(8) SACHS OBIT. Fawlty Towers star Andrew Sachs has died reports the BBC.

Fawlty Towers star Andrew Sachs, who played hapless Spanish waiter Manuel in the BBC sitcom, has died aged 86, his family has confirmed.

Sachs, who had been suffering from dementia for four years, died on 23 November and was buried on Thursday.

On his role of Manuel, he told the BBC in 2014: “It was just a part I was playing and people seemed to laugh.”

….Manuel was one of the most imitated comedy characters of the 1970s.

The waiter, who famously hailed from Barcelona, often said little more than the word “Que?” to generate laughs, but arguably his most famous line was “I know nothing”.

Fawlty Towers co-writer Booth, who played hotel maid Polly Sherman in the series, said Sachs “spoke to the world with his body as well as his mangled English.”

She said he was a “universally beloved figure”, saying it was “a privilege and an education to work with him”.

Writing in the Guardian, she also compared the pairing of Cleese and Sachs to that of Abbott and Costello or Laurel and Hardy.

(9) CARTOON AMERICAN. Gizmodo’s Casey Chan thinks this is true: “Why Bugs Bunny Is the Ultimate Animated American Icon”.

Mickey Mouse is obviously more well-known than Bugs Bunny. But there’s a kitschy globalization aspect to Mickey that Bugs has somehow managed to avoid ,even though they both served as mascots for their companies (Disney and Warner Bros., respectively). How did Bugs do it?

Kaptain Kristian breaks down the difference between Mickey and Bugs as such: Bugs is cool, slick, funny, defiant, and in control. Mickey is tame, inoffensive, and, well, corporate as hell. Bugs is who most Americans want to be (even if we’re meek li’l Mickeys inside), Mickey is just a safe brand that gets stamped around the world. And while Bugs is a character, Mickey is a company.

Instead of running down Mickey Mouse, Chan needs to justify picking Bugs over Homer Simpson. The aggressively credulous Homer is our neighbor, our nightmare, and – if never to be admitted – sometimes ourselves.

(10) INDIE OR NOT TO INDIE. When asked “Why even have a publisher?”, Fynbospress gave this answer in a comment at Mad Genius Club:

For us, the value of a publisher is as follows:

1.) Exploitation of rights that would otherwise lay fallow. Namely, audiobook, because I personally don’t care for the medium, and therefore am crippled when it comes to trying to put out a good quality product.

2.) additional fanbase. Publishers like Baen and Castalia have cultivated a fanbase that is willing to buy a new author based solely on the publisher – and whether you’re a newcomer to the field or trying to expand into a new market, these are additional sales and market penetration above what we can easily reach. (Note; do research on your publisher. Nobody ever says “Oh, boy, I can’t wait for the next Penguin Putnam release!” So the majors are actually less attractive this way.)

3.) additional marketing efforts. Again, due diligence is required, but if the publisher is willing to commit to pushing your book, that’s more work the author doesn’t have to do. If the press is big enough that your editor has to run this past a marketing department, then it’s critical to get this in the contract.

4.) Someone else to carry the ball. We’ve had some interesting medical adventures over the last couple years. The ability to hand a manuscript off, and not have to do anything else (even though the publisher did ask us for approval / suggestions on cover and blurb), was the difference between getting Brings the Lightning out or not. And when we’re more concerned with the surgeon saying “Unfortunately, due to shrapnel in his body, we can’t put your husband in the MRI to see if complications X or Y will ensue…” having a publisher who will get a royalty check to us is much nicer than having 70% of nothing.

Note that these reasons are very individual to us and our circumstances; they do not necessarily apply to all authors.

(11) AWARD FOR NON-ALTERNATE HISTORY. Pornokitsch tells us that once upon a time there was such a thing as “The Georgette Heyer Historical Fiction Prize”.

Something else I’ve learned this week – the existence of “The Georgette Heyer Historical Fiction Prize”. This was proudly emblazoned on the spine of Zemindar, which I promptly bought for £2. See, awards do sell books!

Sponsored by Corgi Books and The Bodley Head, the Georgette Heyer Historical Fiction Prize ran from 1978 to 1989. It was for discovering “new talent in historical fiction writing” – and not solely Heyer’s stomping ground of the Regency period, as shown by the list of winners below….

There’s a great article about the prize on Reading the Pastwhere Sarah Johnson has done a terrific job of piecing together the award’s history.

(12) RIOT BEGINS IN 3, 2, 1…. Peter Burfeind pokes all those sensitive places in an article for The Federalist, “Aliens Don’t Exist, But They Tell Us A Lot About Atheists”.

In his movie “Expelled,” Ben Stein challenged Richard Dawkins about the remarkable phenomenon of life on planet earth: how could life arise given the sheer magnitude of its improbability? Dawkins suggested aliens possibly deposited life on earth.

Dawkins, we recall, is an atheist, a scientist directed only by provable facts. Yet he’s willing to posit the source of earthly life to a concept lacking any evidence.

Of course, Dawkins is guilty of nothing more than a thought experiment, something great scientists do all the time. Accordingly, a galaxy without aliens would be like a valley producing no life decades after a massive volcano covered it with volcanic ash—eventually some seed will find its way into the hard crevices, and though difficult, life will find a way.

(13) BACK TO THE BIG BANG. Beware – CinemaBlend tells “What Christopher Lloyd Did On The Big Bang Theory”.

Warning: Spoilers ahead for tonight’s episode of The Big Bang Theory.

The Big Bang Theory has become known, in its 10 seasons on the air, for enlisting the help of several guest stars to enhance the stories the show tells of the group of funny friends we’ve all come to know and love. It was announced a few weeks ago that tonight’s episode, titled “The Property Division Collision,” would feature a guest appearance from iconic actor Christopher Lloyd, but we didn’t know who he’d be playing or how his character would feature into the main plot. Episode 10 of The Big Bang Theory saw Christopher Lloyd playing Theodore, Penny and Leonard’s new oddball roommate.

(14) FOR AN INCREASE IN CHRISTMAS CHEER.  The Tea and Jeopardy advent calendar podcasts run from thirty seconds to five minutes (so far).

Advent Calendar 2016 – Day 1

Whimsy, silliness and festive cheer! The Tea and Jeopardy advent calendar begins with a card and gift from the Harper Voyager Publishing Director Natasha Bardon!

Advent Calendar 2016 – Day 2

Day 2 of the Tea and Jeopardy advent calendar features a card and gift from Sebastien de Castell. A song is mentioned in the episode that you can listen to here.

(15) IT GETS VERSE. A magnificent effort by Peer Sylvester: https://file770.com/?p=32198&cpage=2#comment-513386

I scrolled myself today
To see if I still file
I boxticked on the pain
The only thing that’s real
The pixel tears a hole
The old familiar sting
Try to scroll it all away
But I remember everything

(Rest of the day: Try to get the song out of my head again)

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Mark-kitteh, and Chip Hitchcock for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]