(1) YOUR ONE-MAN WIKI. Remember, Camestros Felapton is reading Infogalactic so you don’t have to – “Say, Camestros what’s your new fave Voxopedia page? [Update]”.
Why, I’m glad you asked that question, disembodied voice that writes the blogpost titles. My new favourite Voxopediapage is:
LIST OF ASIAN MEN’S INVENTIONS: …
And that’s not all – Elsewhere on Voxopedia more women have gone missing:
Kitty Joyner is the lead picture for ‘engineer’ on the Wikipedia page
Look, she has a slide rule and everything! Sadly her presence was just too confusing for the poor folks at Voxopedia. Maybe that big circular gizmo in the background didn’t look pi=4 enough. So, to prevent fainting and to protect sensitive dispositions, Joyner has been replaced by Oliver Heaviside.
Phew!
(2) BIG BRAIN THEOREM. TV Guide’s Liam Matthews ranks “The 11 Smartest People Who Have Appeared on The Big Bang Theory“.
The Big Bang Theory is a show about scientists, and it bolsters its academic credibility by bringing in guest stars from the world (galaxy?) of science to play themselves, as well as casting actors with graduate degrees to play characters on the show.
I’m not qualified to rank these guest stars on smarts, because I failed physics in high school. But as a professional clickbaiter, I am qualified to rank them based on how annoying I find their public persona. So without further ado, here are the 11 smartest people who have appeared on The Big Bang Theory, ranked from most to least annoying.
(3) KELLY FREAS. The Space:1970 blog posted “Kelly Freas STAR TREK Portfolio (1976)”.
In 1976, legendary science fiction illustrator, Frank Kelly Freas, published the Star Trek Portfolio, featuring gorgeous charcoal portraits of the officers of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Needless to say, it’s a highly-desired collectible these days.
JJ says, “I think that Spock bears a strong resemblance to Tommy Lee Jones! Of course, in 1976, Tommy Lee Jones looked like this…”
(4) VERBAL ENGINEER. Popular Science interviews Ken Liu:
In your Dandelion Dynasty series, you reimagine transportation, military hardware and the rest of the technological landscape in a style you’ve come to call “silkpunk.” How did you come up with that approach?
In creating the silkpunk aesthetic, I was influenced by the ideas of W. Brian Arthur, who articulates a vision of technology as a language. The task of the engineer is much like that of a poet in that the engineer must creatively combine existing elements of technology to solve novel problems, thereby devising artifacts that are new expressions in the technical language.
In the silkpunk world of my novels, this view of technology dominates. The vocabulary of the technology language relies on materials of historical importance to the people of East Asia and the Pacific islands: bamboo, shells, coral, paper, silk, feathers, sinew, etc. And the grammar of the language puts more emphasis on biomimetics?—?the airships regulate their lift by analogy with the swim bladders of fish, and the submarines move like whales through the water.
(5) FABULOUS OLD STUFF. Marcin Wichary recommends the Museu de la Tècnica de l’Empordà in Figueres, Spain.
AND THEN I SEE THIS. I don’t actually have a good photo, but the third floor is five rooms filled with HUNDREDS of typewriters. pic.twitter.com/X4SdYvMUq1
— Marcin Wichary (@mwichary) October 27, 2016
(6) WHERE’S THE BEEF? Episode 21 of Scott Edelman’s podcast Eating the Fantastic features Alyssa Wong and one of Kansas City’s famous barbecue joints.
Alyssa Wong
Listen in as we chow down on BBQ and talk about what franchise inspired her to write fanfic, the exciting moment when she first encountered a character who looked like her, where she hopes to be 10 years down the road, how she encountered Faceless Ghost Grandma, why she said, “I hate being bored and I don’t like rules,” and more.
(7) EUROCON LIVESTREAM. The 2016 Eurocon in Barcelona, Spain will be livestreamed on November 4, 5 and 6 — http://kosmopolis.cccb.org/bcneurocon/.
Their trilingual dictionary may come in handy —
(8) NAME THE YA AWARD. Lew Wolkoff of the Young Adult SF/F Award Committee asks fans to participate in their survey.
As you know, the World Science Fiction Society is in the process of creating a Campbell-like award for Best Young Adult Science Fiction or Fantasy Award. The motion passed at Kansas City and was passed on to Helsinki for, hopefully, final approval.
One of the matters that has yet to be settled is the name of the award. The Young Adult SF/F Award Committee is currently doing an online survey to get suggestions on what that name will be. This survey ends on November 15. The results will be tabulated, and a second survey of members of the World Science Fiction Society will be taken to get a recommended name (or names) for the 2017 Business Meeting.
Each year the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) gives out the Hugo and Campbell awards at its annual convention, Worldcon. The awards highlight the best science fiction and fantasy works of the previous year, and they are presented for best novel, short story, graphic story, editor, artist, and a number of other categories. Thus far there has been no award to recognize young adult (YA) books.
In response to this, the Young Adult Award Committee was created to study the viability of an award recognizing excellence in YA science fiction and fantasy at Worldcon. WSFS has since supported the creation of an award for YA fiction, and the committee’s task now turns to naming it.
We are looking for an award name that is especially evocative. We hope to capture the transformative, transportational, and captivating power of books for young adults.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY GIRLS
- Born October 28, 1902 – Elsa Lanchester, Frankie’s bride.
- Born October 28, 1952 — Annie Potts. When you decide who ya gonna call, she answers the phone.
(10) KEEPING YOUR UNIQUE VOICE. Credit where it is due – Dave Pascoe had a good column of writing advice today at Mad Genius Club.
One significant trick I learned from Dean Wesley Smith is focusing on a specific writing technique for a story. Make sure you get the sensory information into every page. Whether it’s a mention of the odors you characters smell, or the vivid colors around them (or drab, if that’s the way you roll, you dystopianist, you), or the moan of the chill wind between the weathered slats of the abandoned homestead in which your people are sheltering for the night, give the reader anchors for their imagination. And then, let the reader know the character’s reactions. That low moan, that sends a prickle up the spine of your hero, that recalls the hunting cat that terrified him as a child.
(11) TEXT TO SCREEN. Those who have been participating in the adaptation discussion here will want to eyeball Violette Malan’s “My Top Ten Novel-to-Movie Adaptations” at Black Gate.
I want to begin by saying that I’m making no judgments (well, hardly any) on which is the better version, the book or the movie. I’m only saying I thought the adaptations were good. Anyway, in no particular order, here are my top ten film adaptations (at least for this week) with the screenwriter, the source material, and the director identified.
The Princess Bride William Goldman from his own novel, directed by Rob Reiner I can’t think of anything new to say, at least not today, about what is probably my favourite movie of all time.
The Shawshank Redemption Frank Darabont adapted and directed from the Stephen King novella (Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption)
The single greatest change from novella to movie was casting the Red character as a black man. Whether that was done because they wanted Morgan Freeman, or whether it was done beforehand, I don’t think matters. A couple of other things were changed (the kid whose testimony could have freed Andy Duschesne wasn’t murdered in the original) but in each case it was done to underline some aspect of character or plot that the conciseness of screenwriting (see above) necessitated.
(12) A VIKING FUNERAL. Anne C. Perry witnesses “The Extinction Event: The Beginning of the End” at Pornokitsch.
Five years later, Jurassic has published almost fifty books. That’s thousands upon thousands of pages of stories by over a hundred authors, with art by a dozen artists, which have (so far) raised more than £8,000 for charity along the way, which is a hell of a history. Especially given that Jurassic London lost fully half of its staff after the first year, when one of the two of us (me!) leveraged her experience founding a small press to get a job in traditional publishing.
If, five years ago, we could have chosen how we’d end Jurassic, The Extinction Event is exactly what we would have wanted: it’s big, bold, brilliant and beautiful. It contains 33 stories, some from previous publications and some which are entirely original, and features new art from nine artists. In Extinction you’ll find apocalypse, bombast, lightning and lava. You’ll also fine joy and sorrow and laughter and misery, cowboys and werewolves and mummies and spaceships… and, for some reason, rather a lot of spiders.
(13) TUCKERIZING RAISES BONANZA. Monster Hunter Nation came through in a big way to help pay someone’s medical bills. Larry Correia reports:
Earlier this week I posted about taking donations to help out my buddy Mitch with his medical bills, and that we’d be taking donations in exchange for me using your name in a book.
So many of you jumped in that we had to close it the next day. We raised over $20,000 in a day and a half….
Logistically speaking, that many names is going to take me a long time and several books to work through. There are a few spots in Monster Hunter Siege I will be able to use for charity red shirts, but this is going to take years.
I tell you, once I run through these names, and I’m doing this again for some other cause several years down the road, I’m totally going to jack up the price on you guys. 🙂
The important thing is that you are awesome, and you did something amazing for a good man. Mitch is already using this money to pay bills. Once again the Monster Hunter Nation has come through. I love you guys.
(14) SCHADENFREUDE. If you like seeing someone dish it out, Michaele Jordan’s “MidAmeriCon II: Con Report” at Amazing Stories is for you. She flays the programming division, MidAmeriCon’s version of LonCon’s Fan Village, Dave Truesdale, and Charlie Lippincott.
This programming bias came back to bite them in the butt. When [Charles] Lippincott saw that MidAmericon II was planning a Star Wars day, he decided this was his chance to cash in. He prepared his own ‘MidAmericon II’ program. (We know he prepared it in advance because 4-page, 10 x 14, glossy fliers with full color illustrations do NOT happen overnight.) It was to be an all-day media event, hawking autographs ($50.00 apiece) and featuring talks, slideshows and Q&A (conflicting with numerous other con functions, including the masquerade, and again not free). He did NOT consult with the con about this program.
Having laid his plans, he proceeded to escalate his demands to MidAmericon II, demanding more money, more publicity, more perks, etc. (As I was working the press room, I saw some of his emails myself, and can personally verify that he took a high-handed ‘gimme-gimme’ approach to what we will laughingly call negotiations.) When the con failed to meet some of his new demands, he canceled on the day before the con.
He then proceeded to hold his own stream of events anyway, just across the street — without removing MidAmericon II’s name from his glossy flyer — while bad-mouthing the con at every opportunity. He stood by his plan to charge high prices for attendance at his events. I mean, really. Would YOU pay $50.00 for Charles Lippincott’s autograph? Or another $50.00 to see a slide show of scenes from movies you already know well?
Well, turnabout is fair play. The Lippincott counter-con was a disaster.
(15) THE BIRD. Why, no, Stubby, I didn’t know these authors were acquainted! “When Charles Dickens & Edgar Allan Poe Met, and Dickens’ Pet Raven Inspired Poe’s Poem ‘The Raven’”.
“There comes Poe with his raven,” wrote the poet James Russell Lowell in 1848, “like Barnaby Rudge, / Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.” Barnaby Rudge, as you may know, is a novel by Charles Dickens, published serially in 1841. Set during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, the book stands as Dickens’ first historical novel and a prelude of sorts to A Tale of Two Cities. But what, you may wonder, does it have to do with Poe and “his raven”?
… It chanced the following year the two literary greats would meet, when Poe learned of Dickens’ trip to the U.S.; he wrote to the novelist, and the two briefly exchanged letters (which you can read here). Along with Dickens on his six-month journey were his wife Catherine, his children, and Grip, his pet raven. When the two writers met in person, writes Lucinda Hawksley at the BBC, Poe “was enchanted to discover [Grip, the character] was based on Dickens’s own bird.”
(16) SANDERSON HITS JACKPOT. “DMG Nabs Rights to Brandon Sanderson’s ‘Cosmere’ Book Universe in Massive Deal” reports Variety.
DMG Entertainment has nabbed film and licensing rights to “Cosmere,” Brandon Sanderson’s acclaimed series of interconnected fantasy novels. The entertainment and media company has committed to spending $270 million, which will cover half of the money needed to back the first three movies made from Sanderson’s canon. That makes it one of the largest literary deals of the year. DMG beat out several interested parties for rights to the series. As part of the pact, insiders say Sanderson will receive a minimum guarantee on each film that is produced, as well as a rich backend, allowing the author to make millions.
[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Hampus Eckerman, and Scott Edelman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Wright.]
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The sky above the hive was the color of a file, tuned to an unscrolled pixel.
[3] Man, I miss Kelly. He was HaRoSFA’s local Filthy Pro, and they did his yardwork and stuff from time to time. I mostly saw him at cons and when we were helping him box everything up to move to CA. Just a wonderful guy.
[5] Man, I miss Ned Brooks. His house had a mind-boggling array of typewriters, all of which he had put into A-1 condition.
[11] I’ll nominate WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? for that, without reading the article (too damn busy). They turned a bunch of creaky, tedious conceits (explained at Harry Potter length) into an amazing valentine to the animation industry.
Actually incorrect credit 🙂 – that was kilteDave http://www.depascoe.com/?page_id=6
(1) YOUR ONE-MAN WIKI.
Make sure to click through and read the comments for bonus laffs 😉
(1) This Infogalactic Game can be entertaining. After browsing through the most recent changes, it became evident that VoxWorld has a specific entry for Walter Breen’s book Greek Love (while Wikipedia does not). I guess Mr. Beale has great faith in his Nefarious Agenda.
[stroon-stalk]
Yes, credit due to Mark Kitteh in particular who managed to track the many unusual redirects.
Also: these events suggest a story idea – a rewrite of Foundation but with VD as the Hari Seldon character.
(5) FABULOUS OLD STUFF.
I was curious about the purpose of the dual Imperial Typewriter, so I did some Googling, and this is what I found:
On This Day in Typewriter History: The Imperial Doppelgänger – When One Typewriter is Never Enough
citation correction: He’s actually recommending the Museu de la Tècnica de l’Empordà. He never made it to the Teatre-Museu Dalí.
1. Ken Liu Silkpunk is Epic!!! I am a fan
2. Ms. Wong is a excellent writer, but that BBQ is Epic looking tasty bbq sauce. HUBBA, HUBBA.
3. Poe & Dickens meet up?
VD should focus on this wiki thing. I honestly believe he could possibly make just as much an impression with it as he made in gaming.
1. Hee
7. That is perhaps the most useful and relevant translation guide I’ve seen in a looking time.
Camestros Felapton: Once again I have learned — never blog on credit.
Thanks for telling me who’s in the kilt.
(1) Mark-kitteh’s also been doing good work there. There are some commenters there who I don’t think post here (at least not under the same name) and I wish they would, because they’re funny. Be sure to click on previous posts — one before this has the first mention of “pi=4 guy”, who is… something.
(3) I pick up old used books regardless of contents if they have a Freas cover. ObBrushWithGreatness: I once sold Kelly some Bettie Page photos at a con, while manning someone else’s table.
(11) This is a pretty good list. I’d add “Jaws” and “The Godfather”, both of which are much better movies than books.
Liam Matthews left out Danica McKellar’s Erd?s number of 4, but that may be because then he’d have to explain Paul Erd?s.
Hmm, I cut and pasted Erdös from someone’s web page, since it’s usually easier than typing an o-umlaut when one doesn’t have a compose key set up in advance. I should have known, it looked funny when I pasted it.
this now makes me an official part of Mad Genius Club fandom
One of my regrets for not going to Worldcon this year is, perforce, the ‘Que
ticky
Clicky
Oh, also – Happy Deepavali /Diwali!
13. Good for Larry and the donors. A medical system that didn’t force people into poverty would be even better, though.
(13) TUCKERIZING RAISES BONANZA.
Well done, Larry!!
#8 YA AWARD
Hey, nothing in Young Adult SFF says “transformational, transportational” quite like “The Optimus Prime Award.”
(preens quietly to himself.)
11) My favourite example of a good book-to-screen transition is Lifeforce, adapted from Colin Wilson’s The Space Vampires.
Now, Lifeforce is not regarded as a classic of the genre, though it seems to have risen slightly in people’s estimation since it first bombed at the box office. (67% on Rotten Tomatoes sounds about right to me.) But, oh my sainted aunt, how much better it is than the book! Who would have thought that someone could make a novel about psychic vampires from outer space so ineffably boring?
Anyone know how old the copy of Wikipedia that Teddy’s mutilating is?
Most of it dates back to January this year. They do occasionally update to more recent versions – the errors Phil Sandifer pointed out recently (Prince and Gene Wilder still alive, David Cameron still British PM) were recently rectified by Camestros’s friend Idris (who was also responsible for the fun & games with the ‘Asian men’s inventions’ page’).
That voxopedia thing is so Cold War Soviet Union; maybe they should rename it Chekhovpedia or Pavelpedia.
(I am, however, awaiting the first report of its use as a resource in our public school system.)
I’ve heard the expression “Never eat anything bigger than your head,” but I think this is the first time I’ve seen someone with a meal that actually does look bigger than their head. Ask for a doggy bag, Ms. Wong! Maybe a doggy footlocker.
Was Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your head original to B. Kliban? That was the title of his second book of cartoons after his famous Cat book which became its own cottage industry.
It was interesting to learn that Truesdale was expelled from MidAmeriCon II for publishing the text of his speech, not for anything related to the Code of Conduct.
That makes much more sense to me, and I was glad to learn it.
@6 – That meal is from Gates BBQ. A huge chain in the Kansas City area. Their BBQ is amazing.
@13 – It is amazing that people will pay so much to be killed off in a novel. David Weber kills people off when they trump him on the first or second play in the LibertyCon Spades Tournament.
@14 – Truesdale was banned for publishing his speech. That is 180 degrees away from what people here and elsewhere claim he was banned for.
Does Truesdale being expelled for publishing his speech fit with the timeline? His Tangent article is dated “Monday, 22 August 2016 08:56” but his expulsion was public two days earlier.
Did he publish elsewhere before that?
@Mark – I was wondering that myself. This is also the first time I heard anything about publication rights of the printed speech, contrasting with the many corroborating reports of abuse of his position as moderator and decision to go ahead and post the video without the consent of the video-ees.
@14: on what grounds did MAC2 claim first publication rights? Did people sign away something when they sent in the program-participant form, or on some later form? Or did the blogger mis-report? I’ve never been seriously involved with the mechanics of program, but I’d have expected such a seizure to have been decided at a higher level, and to have heard some squawking about it in advance. (Among the hundreds of participants there had to be \somebody/ who’d read the fine print.)
@Mark
Here’s a Jim C. Hines post dated the 20th saying he’d listened to Truesdale’s recording, so it must have been published by then.
@Chip Hitchcock
It was a restriction only until the end of the convention, so it’s a pretty mild limitation. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems a reasonable thing for someone to agree to in exchange for getting to sit on a panel.
@Greg
I’m 99% sure that that is an update to Hine’s post. If you read a bit further down he lists Truesdale saying he is going to release the audio but has not yet done so, as an update. The top section about listening to the audio is a further update to that.
@Mark
You’re probably right. I see lots of posts on the 20th and 21st from people urging Dave to post the recording.
In that case, it looks as though Michaele Jordan isn’t a reliable source. Unless there’s more info somewhere.
Greg Hullender: It was interesting to learn that Truesdale was expelled from MidAmeriCon II for publishing the text of his speech, not for anything related to the Code of Conduct. That makes much more sense to me, and I was glad to learn it.
I’m taking that account of what happened with a big grain of salt. She claims that no one could hear what Truesdale was saying except maybe the people up at the panelists’ table — but clearly other people in the audience could — and did — hear and understand what he was saying. So I would guess that her inability to understand him was due to where she was sitting, or perhaps to an unrecognized hearing issue.
Her account of the panel is hers, and I’m not denying the validity of her perception of it. But it’s so at odds with numerous other peoples’ accounts that I am inclined to give it less weight in terms of my understanding of what went on.
Bruce Arthurs on October 29, 2016 at 7:58 am said:
That’s why you, e.g., cut a gigantic sandwich in half. As Ms. Wong did here. Thereby allowing the space-time continuum to exist for at least one more day.
Of course, it’s a bit of a missed opportunity for her. Getting an up-close-and-personal look at the start of the destruction of the universe could have been fodder for all sorts of new stories. Still, it might have spoiled the meal… 🙂
At MRK’s blog, artist Ariela Housman talks about the gorgeous calligraphy print she’s got for sale which reminds authors and artists to value their work and to not let themselves be undervalued by customers (NSFW language).
@Greg: it seems a reasonable thing for someone to agree to in exchange for getting to sit on a panel. IMO, people should not “get to” sit on a panel; they should be put on a panel because they have something to contribute to a discussion that an audience would like to hear. I know there are people (e.g., borderline authors of several species) who desperately want the apparent publicity of being on a panel — but if the convention isn’t getting value (for its members) out of this person’s appearance, it shouldn’t be putting this person on the panel, and if they are I don’t see that they have a right to additional value. I’m not even sure they’re entitled to additional value; it’s been well established that cons can’t tape panel without separate permission, so I don’t see that MAC2 had any right to any distribution at all of these authors’ words, let alone an exclusive, without a signed clause that \somebody/ should have been screaming about (even if that someone weren’t likely to produce words the con would want to reproduce). It’s one thing to post a code of conduct that can be pointed to (i.e., “you should have read this”) when expelling someone (although I note that Arisia this year made people sign the code before getting their badges); \taking/ someone’s words seems to me to require explicit permission.
Were any Filers on program, and if so do they remember what they signed?
(14) I’m with y’all here — her report is so completely at odds with everyone else’s who was there (and wrote at the time, not months later) that I’m very skeptical. And would also recommend hearing tests — he was mumbling, but understandable. If nobody heard him, there’d be no kerfuffle. About the only thing she agrees with is him reading the speech and throwing pearls. He didn’t release the audio till after he was banned, right? Even though he didn’t know it since he was hiding in Puppy Safe Space. MACII said it was for CoC violations; I believe them over her.
However, her dissing of the pathetic corporate food is right on; I’ve eaten that stuff and it’s not a party. So, so glad that 2018/76/San Jose is going to have a proper con suite and room parties.
@Chris S: That’d be socialism, and you know rugged individualist ammosexual Larry doesn’t stand for that. He also wouldn’t get to brag about his great deeds in public if his pal could have had medical treatment at a reasonable cost.
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Truesdale posted the audio on 22 Aug.
3) I think I have a set of those! (I’ve got a ton of art that I’ve never had the money to frame or enough room to display, and I know there’s at least one Kelly portfolio in the mix, and I think it’s that one.) I also have an autographed copy of the poster he did for Wizard of Speed and Time.
11) I’ll nominate the animated The Last Unicorn — which actually does manage to stay remarkably true to the source material, although one subplot was cut presumably for length reasons. A lot of the dialogue is directly from the book.
14) This was interesting:
It was this posting of his speech that got him ousted. (You heard about that, right? I gather there’s been quite a furor about it.) Vague on-line references about the Code of Conduct aside, Mr. Truesdale and all other program participants were explicitly told to give MidAmericon II first publication rights, and forbidden to publicize their remarks until after the con was over.
Was that really the case? Because this is the first mention I’ve heard of it. (And I see I’m not the only one feeling dubious about that claim.)
@ Chris S.: Seconded — that was exactly what I was thinking.
The original PBS Lathe of Heaven was a great movie-to-book translation. (Of course, PBS lost the rights to have the Beatles songs in rebroadcasts, lost the original videotape and eventually rebroadcast one with Joe Cocker-like vocals instead and missing important bits like the moment when the old lady says querelously, “Nothing seems to go quite right today,” as the volcano is erupting under Portland. Typical PBS.)
The Grifters was one of the few movies I’ve seen which actually was better than the book.
At MRK’s blog, artist Ariela Housman talks about the gorgeous calligraphy print she’s got for sale which reminds authors and artists to value their work and to not let themselves be undervalued by customers (NSFW language).
Anyone who monetizes “FYPM” should at least acknowledge Mike Monteiro. And maybe Martin Scorsese.
I vaguely recall reading Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp because it was the basis for Die Hard. I thought the movie was much better than the book, but in all honesty I often feel that way when I see the movie adaptation first. (American Psycho and Fight Club, I’m looking at you.)
Because nobody else has ever independently figured out or stated that particular four word combination?
Scroll You, Pixel Me a.k.a. Godstalk!
Scroll You, Scroll Me, Scroll it for always, that’s the way it should be.