Faux Scroll 8/23/18 The Fan Who Was Thursday

(1) WHAT’S UP DOC? They’re going to put heart pacemaker in me this afternoon. I’ve been able to get online for a little while before prepping. Will be back soon as I can.

Add your own items in the comments if you find something wonderful!

124 thoughts on “Faux Scroll 8/23/18 The Fan Who Was Thursday

  1. @Nancy SAuer – thanks for the recommendations! Apparently our team is having dinner together at Flagship Commons at 6, and I’ve been told that Runza is a local tradition.

    @Wombat – I think you’ve sighted one of the lesser-known symptoms of having stumbled into an alternate universe. Can airships be far behind?

  2. I scroll to this end. And I agree with what they typed. Pixelated 100 per cent.

  3. Mike, I hope everything went well and you pacemaker will keep your heart going strong and steady. Wishing you a speedy and uncomplicated recovery!

  4. links:
    Lies, damned lies and favourite stats

    To celebrate the power of numbers to shine a light on fake news and bogus claims, the Royal Statistical Society runs a competition for the best statistic of the year.
    They want people to send in the stat that captures the zeitgeist of 2018, or in some way reveals something surprising or powerful – a hitherto unseen truth.

    an example:

    Seven people per year, on average, die from attacks by British cows. In comparison, on average, six people are killed in shark attacks per year globally. Yet it is sharks, rather than cows, that are feared and often demonised in popular culture.

    A spoonful of sugar? The festivals mixing music and science

    The Innocents: How Netflix series explores teenage life by shapeshifting

  5. For anyone interested, over on Forumania we’ll be starting a discussion of Novik’s Spinning Silver; two chapters every two days so the discussion will go for most of September. THIS LINK will bring you to the Reading Group page. (You can follow the discussion without a login, but I encourage people to jump in….) We’re doing cover-and-blurb now, but will start Chapters 1-2 tomorrow (Sunday the 26th.)

    Only one rule for the Reading Group: NO SPOILERS, please!

  6. @Rick Moen: Thanks for the Guardian article link about Jemisin’s Hugo wins. One of the closing lines: “These novels are a gift to the whole of our culture.” 🙂

  7. After a long (two years plus) abstinence from fiction reading, I picked up a copy of Annihilation a couple of days ago and began it last night. Looks like I made a good choice. I stayed up way too late.

    So far, I’m really enjoying it. I wish, however, I hadn’t watched the movie first, since I feel much of what ought still to be mysterious to me I understand better than I should. And the movie has such an intense visual style that it can’t help but influence my imagining of the novel. I do admire, though, the way Natalie Portman’s narration so clearly echoes the dreamy, disjoint style of the original.

    My favourite line so far (the significance of which I’m sure would have passed me by had I not seen the movie): “when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.”

  8. @Rick Moen: great article — not just a resounding endorsement, but a vigorous description of why a lot of people read SF.

  9. Some not-quite-new links left behind in the tangle:

    When petrodollars hand you lemons: Heatwave reveals England’s lost prehistoric sites. aka “Runes are busting out all over.”

    NPR audience and judges pick 100 favorite horror stories. ~1000 of the ~7000 nominations were for King — but the rule was one work per author, so there’s a lot of spread.

    When flying to Mars is your day job. Interview with one of the women running the next Mars lander; it’s a night job as well, because the team is already on Martian time.

    Get off my lawn! The vanish{ing,ed} tech kids did and didn’t recognize. Interestingly, the sample underage population recognized some older tech — phonographs, rotary phones — better than intermediate tech like audio cassettes.

    The artist redrawing sexist comic book covers. I remember Wiscon panelists trying to assume the poses of various covers — but they, unlike this artist and her targets, were restrained by physical reality.

  10. More links:

    German TV personality and actor Dieter Thomas Heck died yesterday. He was mainly known for hosting music and game shows, but he was also an actor and had a memorable SF role as the game show host in “Das Millionenspiel”, a 1970 adaptation of a Robert Sheckley story. And since I couldn’t find an English language obituary for him anywhere, I wrote one myself.

    And while searching Deutsche Welle for an English language Heck obituary, I came across this nice profile of Tim Burton on the occasion of his 60th birthday.

  11. Just finished Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Fated Sky. I liked the first one, but I liked this one better.

  12. @Cliff – That line–on the second page of the book, if I remember right–jumped out at me on my very first reading of Annihilation several years ago. I had to stop right then and reread the sentence out loud just so my ears could appreciate it too. It was startling, beautiful and melancholy. By the time I’d finished the first book I had a deeper appreciation of the many levels on which it worked, sure, but it had a lot of power right there in the first unspoiled reading too.

    VanderMeer’s prose often has that effect on me. My husband has had to put up with me randomly interrupting him with select sentences on multiple occasions.

  13. @Nicole – I’m so glad you enjoyed the same line. You’re right, of course, it’s great in its own right, as well as its functioning as foreshadowing and harmony.

    I hope your husband appreciates the quotes :). I was raving about it so much yesterday that my daughter has asked to borrow it after I’ve finished it.

  14. @JJ oh my! If my link had been any older, it would have been nominated for a Retro Hugo.

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