51 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 1/18/22
21 Jaunt Street”

1. (1) Wombat Droppings! Best title ever!

   (2) Combat Wombat!

   The chat queues on the ghostwriting site are slower than my ISP’s technical support. Yikes. By the way, a similar site was claiming that their ghostwriters wrote “Robinson Crusoe” plus several books by John Dee. Nice trick.

   (5) If you’re going to read “squeecore” tweets, the curated ones are better.

   (8) Gulp! That was so long ago I watched it on a black-and-white TV. “He’s breaking up! He’s breaking up!”

2. a similar site was claiming that their ghostwriters wrote “Robinson Crusoe” plus several books by John Dee.

   Those ghosts have been dead a long time.

3. I wonder if the Heinlein juveniles are “squeecore”?

4. (8) An addendum to the primary cast of Six Million Dollar Man. Martin E. Brooks took over the role of Rudy Wells in 1975, also playing the part on The Bionic Woman. Alan Oppenheimer first played Rudy Wells in the TV series, while Martin Balsam played him in the original TV movie pilot.

   (9). Sean Connery was not in Excalibur. He did play Arthur in the horrible movie First Knight, but was not in Excalibur. That was Nigel Terry. Connery was also the Green Knight in Sword of the Valiant. I think that’s about it for him and the Arthurian Legends.

5. 9) Jane Horrocks also played Edina Monsoon’s much put upon assistant, Bubble, who seemed epically incompetent, until she wasn’t. In the episode “France” Eddy was shocked to find out that Bubble spoke fluent French.

   Zardoz, come on Sean Connery in what is essentially a leather diaper for the run of the movie, what’s not to like?

6. (14) It’s okay, he just paused to line up with the docking bay.

   (It’s at the end of a driveway.)

   (2) Legal twitter picked up on this, and word has been passed to Norah Roberts. Since they’re also claiming ghost-writership of at least on Marvel comic, that gets the Mouse involved.

7. Troyce says Sean Connery was not in Excalibur. He did play Arthur in the horrible movie First Knight, but was not in Excalibur. That was Nigel Terry. Connery was also the Green Knight in Sword of the Valiant. I think that’s about it for him and the Arthurian Legends.

   Huh? I didn’t say he was. I said Boorman was responsible for both films. I don’t even name check Connery in that Birthday.

   Ahhh I see I did it after checking my notes originally but our ever so OGH caught it. Thanks Mike!

8. Cat Eldridge: After reading Troyce’s comment I corrected the Boorman birthday. There no longer being any Connery parallel, I got rid of both mentions of his name.

9. (4) Excellent news.

   @Rob Thornton: Have Spacesuit is squeecore.

10. Mike Glyer says to me: After reading Troyce’s comment I corrected the Boorman birthday. There no longer being any Connery parallel, I got rid of both mentions of his name.

    Yeah it was an unfortunate mistake. Thanks for editing it out.

11. P J Evans said:

    (14) It’s okay, he just paused to line up with the docking bay.
    (It’s at the end of a driveway.)

    Nah, Sulu knows exactly what he’s doing. Yaw to port 90* and it’ll be perfect.

    P J also said:

    Since they’re also claiming ghost-writership of at least one Marvel comic, that gets the Mouse involved.

    On the one tentacle, I normally don’t abide siccing The Mouse on anybody but for this bunch I’m OK with it.
    On the other tentacle, given #DisneyMustPay I wonder what their pack of barely-domesticated lawyers will do.

    On the gripping hand:
    Since Clint Eastwood basically plays the same character in his SF movies, would his genre be called “DoyoufeelluckyPunk”?

12. (9) Zardoz is a masterpiece. It is legitimately a great movie, and more daring and innovative than any SF movie in the past five years.

13. (5) A well-curated set, but I confess my main takeaway is that I now want something with pancetta and Calabrian chiles.

14. (9) Milne wrote a quite excellent fantasy novel, Once on a Time, which receives far less genre attention than it merits, and a stage adaptation of a genre classic, Toad of Toad Hall.

15. Squeecore is what my cat does when petted. “Core-core-core” goes the kitten.

16. I was watching something fairly recently – pretty sure it was animated, but can’t remember what – and they used the sound effect that meant Steve’s bionics had kicked in to indicate the character was doing something especially strenuous.

17. It is a proud and lonely thing to be a Zardoz fan….

18. Wow, squeecore, huh? I would suggest, though, that the people getting annoyed might want to listen to the actual podcast episode first, instead of drawing from secondary sources. Doesn’t read to me like many do.

19. 8) Johnson also created the wonderfully terrible V.

    9) Schroedinger’s Cat has instances of some of the characters from Illuminatus!, but appears to take place in a bundle of closely related but different universes, a decade or so later.

    9bis) If Zardoz had gotten the attention it deserved, cyberpunk could have been prevented.

    (The novel is billed “John Boorman with Bill Stair”, which makes me suspect the Stair chap did the heavy lifting.)

    The Scroll is good. The Pixel is evil.

20. fdhrrpber
    [pronounced “fudrrupuber”]

21. (8) My favorite Six-Million-Dollar-man-episode was an episode of “misfits of science” that was a thinly-veiled stab in that direction.

22. My favorite Robert Anton Wilson is Masks of the Illuminati, which, despite the name, is unrelated to the Illuminatus trilogy. It is a standalone mystery starring James Joyce and Albert Einstein. It is much more of a, well, a story than most of his other works, though it still certainly has plenty of the weirdness he’s known for.

    Also, he once used a joke of mine (with permission) in one of his books, although it’s been so long that I no longer remember for sure which book or which joke.

23. It’s 9343, and the number of occasions I’ve had strangers in my apartment this past week reached the “straw that broke the camel’s back” level on Tuesday.

24. Markus: I would suggest, though, that the people getting annoyed might want to listen to the actual podcast episode first, instead of drawing from secondary sources. Doesn’t read to me like many do.

    Look, I read the Reddit commenter’s summary, which Benedict says is spot-on. That’s a primary source. But that summary doesn’t describe the vast majority of recent Hugo Finalists. So you tell me, what am I missing here?

    This made-up term is the result of podcasters throwing a bunch of random shit at the wall and hoping that some of it sticks, in order to get attention for their podcast. It doesn’t actually mean anything.

25. what he ^ said

    (as in the previous commentator)

26. 8) Talk about the passage of time invoking the suck fairy. That show has been rendered completely unbelievable given present day facts.

    6 million would get you my triple bypass surgery and a cup of coffee these days.

    If that show had wanted to be accurate, it would have taken place in Thailand, or Belize or some other medical-tourism country and the script writers could have made a big deal about the main characters failing to get visas allowing travel to the US

27. @Xtifr: I’m with you on Masks of the Illuminati. It hits the didactic points Wilson wanted without sacrificing the story–far from it.

28. (1) There had better be SLIME MOLDS.

29. @OlakRokne

    ZARDOZ is two-thirds of a great, visionary SF movie, I agree.

    It totally jumps the shark at the point when Sean Connery says, “Stay within my aura.” Sadly, Boorman didn’t have a better ending for his movie than to have Zed turn psionic superman — always a bad move, sinking almost everything from that point on to the level of Frank Herbert’s THE EYES OF HEISENBERG and uncountable similar pieces of skiffy dreck.

    However, IMO, a musical remake of ZARDOZ — with chorus lines of Zardoz-mask-wearing, orange-diapered Exterminators doing unison kicks in Rockette-style dance routines — would be a great, great thing.

30. There are some wacky ideas in Zardoz, and I think it tries to get where it’s going, but man, it really can’t quite make it, IMO. I do think that no one else, except maybe David Lynch in his prime, could have made a go of it.

31. @JJ

    I read the Reddit commenter’s summary, which Benedict says is spot-on. That’s a primary source.

    ???
    The podcast is the primary source. Another party’s description of the podcast is a secondary source. This is standard historiography.

32. @ Mark Pontin

    However, IMO, a musical remake of ZARDOZ — with chorus lines of Zardoz-mask-wearing, orange-diapered Exterminators doing unison kicks in Rockette-style dance routines — would be a great, great thing.

    Just seeing the Times Square billboards for Zardoz: The Musical would be a substantial blow for justice and against the forces of evil.

33. @JJ:
    Come, be fair. It’s not exactly random shit, so much as Insufficientideologicalpuritycore doesn’t trip off the tongue.

    Honestly, this almost feels like someone who favors the humorless message-fiction the puppies swore they were campaigning against but missed the whole SP/RP saga, or totally had the wrong takeaway.

34. (16) isn’t there a specific word for inserting a real person into a work of fiction for whatever reason? Lost a bet, raising money for charity, sheer cussedness, etc.

35. @bill:

    “amazing that some random Redditor was able to understand and summarize the squeecore episode while a decade’s worth of Hugo winners decided it was impossible to parse”

    Source: R.S. Benedict

36. @Miles Carter — “Tuckerization”, I believe.

37. bill: The podcast is the primary source.

    Yes, and Benedict is the podcaster. She’s the primary source.

38. @Mark Pontin:

39. PhilRM: That hyperbole shows that Benedict may be a source, but how reliable a source needs to be considered.

40. @JJ — Okay, so the podcast is primary, and Benedict’s comments indicate that the redditor is reliable. But the redditor is still secondary (unless he or she was part of the podcast).

41. I still don’t know how someone looks at recent Hugo winners (or the latest SF stories or whatever) and makes claims like “Whedonesque” and “pop culture references” (etc.).

    Then you have the claims that the stories have no real character growth, “huge discomfort with intense emotions,” etc. How do you even measure that? It’s easy to quantify whether or not a story has pop culture references. But the other things? Not so much. (You can claim those things, but it’s harder to get agreement because those are hard to define.)

    And now, redemption arcs mean that the author has some kind of neoliberal agenda. That they are trying to convert the enemies into allies. Has anyone forgotten the rather odd redemption arc original Fuzzy books? In the second book, Victor Grego, one of the villains from the first book, becomes the protagonist? That neoliberal H. Beam Piper! Snort… (Yet in John Scalzi’s Fuzzy Planet, there were no such redemption arcs. The bad guys remained BAD.)

    It’s normal to dislike a certain type of story. But that doesn’t mean that a story you don’t like meets certain set criteria. Or that those stories are pushing an agenda. Maybe people just want to write the type of story they want to read (a la C. S. Lewis.)

    I see a lot of people trying to push square pegs into round holes. Maybe they want to replace the board so that all the holes are square now. But that ignores all the readers who want stories for other reasons.

    Or gosh, people who want to be able to more than one type of story.

42. 1.) Yeah, haven’t made it over to Twitter yet. Keep in mind that Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb is involved in the claims. And, shortly after the Tweets started, Courtney Milan announced that she had emailed Roberts. It’s pretty well-known that you don’t mess with Nora Roberts when it comes to things like this.

    This is well worth getting the popcorn out. Roberts. Neil Gaiman is also involved and aware. Disney. Marvel. I can just see the lawyers rubbing their hands gleefully.

43. I’d wondered about the chorus at Discon Opening Ceremonies, since all I’d heard was rather vague descriptions.

    So the video was available, and I watched it.

    It was a great deal worse than I could have imagined– not mere Christian triumphalism. I was expecting O Holy Night, which is arguably over the top, but is also a fine song that I would be glad to hear.

    No, something like half of the performance was repetition of “fall on your knees before Him, something something adore Him, Emmanuel”. I’m sure no one meant any ill, but it was wildly inappropriate.

44. @OGH: Perhaps a better question is, a source of what?

45. @Joe H. Thanks dude!

46. Cath Jackel: Thanks for the link to the BBC story about pterosaurs. That was a fun science story.

47. Re Benedict’s benediction of the Reddit quote:

    amazing that some random Redditor was able to understand and summarize the squeecore episode while a decade’s worth of Hugo winners decided it was impossible to parse

    I assume in JJ’s comment above, “That’s a primary source,” “that” refers to Benedict, the podcaster, giving the primary source’s seal of approval to the reddit summary (which yes, is a secondary source).

    Although arguably the secondary sources writing in response to the podcast are primary sources showing how fandom is responding (which is what I’m interested in thinking about/analyzing). Summaries can be more or less accurate (and the fact that it’s miserably hard for me to summarize something I’ve only heard without listening to it multiple times or creating a transcript is why I’m not about to engage with the podcast), but reading a number of summaries about the same primary source and seeing what gets emphasized or not (and how similar some of the discussion is to earlier incidents in fandom about “the death/destruction of pure sf”) is something I enjoy doing.

    What really struck me in the tweet was the claim that TEN years’ worth of Hugo winners (ALL the Hugo winners for ten years? really) have been unable “to parse” it which seems an inflationary claim at best (downright dishonest at worst). I mean, unless I’ve missed a lot of posts/comments, there hasn’t been that much discussion by that many Hugo winners (as opposed to other fans). And that makes me think, as others have noted, that the original podcast was clickbait, or trolling for a response, more than engaging in good faith. Since it’s a backhanded slap at the poor “unable to parse” Hugo winners as well, it also seems more evidence of prejudice against (some) Hugo winners as motivation.

48. @ Patrick Miller —

    Many thanks! I am humbled — greater minds than mine have already made ZARDOZ; THE MUSICAL a reality. Nice breasts on the Exterminators.

49. When Camestros first blogged about that podcast, my reaction was a roll of the eyes and a muttered “RSB gonna RSB.” As the squeecore discourse progresses, I only see that impression confirmed. The Queen of Bad SFF Takes retains hold of her crown.

50. 1 & 2 – It was a very busy day here at Wombathaus.

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