48 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 10/30/17 Cast Your Scrolls upon the Pixels, And They Will Return Tenfold”

1. Today I noticed you can give Rorschach’s lines to Galadriel and vice versa and still have the result make sense.

2. No thoughts. Used them all.

3. You are a disturbing man, Mr. Nicoll, and frankly, I’m shocked…to see we only have four FB friends in common. I expect more connection with the strange and disturbed. 😀

   (I definitely giggled at the post and its examples.)

4. FYI, All Systems Red by Martha Wells has an audiobook now, FYI. The narrator is Kevin R. Free, who did a great job narrating “The Ballad of Black Tom” last year.

   I’m 4th or 5th or something. ETA: Ah, the support position – pre-5th!

5. I feel like Murderbot is this year’s Godstalk.

   ETA: Frickin’ A! Actual fifth! Along with James and Xtifr, we’re a power chord!

   Or if you go James -> (next poster after me) -> Lis -> Me you get the chord progression for The Monster Mash!

   EATA: Not including the minors here because I’m not sure how to note them.

6. “Or All the Scrolls With Pixels”

7. Has anybody read Amatka, by Karin Tidbeck?

   I’m a third of the way through, and enjoying the heck out of it.

8. kathodus: I feel like Murderbot is this year’s Godstalk.

   It seems to be the runaway Best Novella contender among Filers this year; I’ve already collected 19 raves for it in my Novellapalooza post.

   The next most popular are And Then There Were (N-One) by Sarah Pinsker and Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire, with 6 raves each.

9. Teddy is as usual comparing apples and alligators, since as far as I can tell his project isn’t on Kickstarter.

10. NickPheas: I’m not any fonder of Beale or his comics than you, but this “freestartr” site seems less popular than Kickstarter; I don’t really see how that counts against him.

11. At least one of those “expensive toys” is an urban legend.

12. @Standback: haven’t read Amatka, but did recently read Tidbeck’s short story collection Jaganath, and was impressed. (My overall impression was “deconstructed fairytales like Ursula Vernon’s, but with a strong Scandinavian influence, and with all the warm feel-good stuff drained out and replaced with delicious ice-cold hemlock.” YMMV.)

13. 12) Federico Luppi has at least one other genre credit: THE STONE RAFT (2003), based on the Jose Saramago novel wherein the Iberian peninsula breaks away from Europe and heads out to sea. It’s a “quiet” movie (I called it “a pastoral catastrophe” when I reviewed it a few years ago), with little in the way of dramatic scenery-chewing by any of the actors, but Luppi has a charisma and gravitas that dominates the screen whenever he’s on.

14. @ James Davis Nicholl

    FWIW, you’ve got another FB follower now!

    [botstalk]

15. Has anybody read Amatka, by Karin Tidbeck?

    Yes. I really, really liked it. I’d currently put it in my top ~6 SFF novels for this year (along with The Power, Miranda and Caliban, City of Miracles, The Ruin of Angels, and The Stone Sky).

    Bearing in mind, of course, that there are some promising-sounding titles I haven’t gotten to yet (e.g. Creatures of Will and Temper, Oathbringer, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, Spoonbenders, Proof of Concept, Winter Tide, Dragon’s Green, The Girl Who Drank the Moon, Borne, Journey Across the Hidden Islands, Strange the Dreamer, Martians Abroad, Tell the Wind and Fire, An Unkindness of Magicians, A Man of Shadows, Meddling Kids, The Fall of the Readers …)

16. /Rorschachstalk

17. (21) the copyeditor takes a bow.
    https://twitter.com/DeannaHoak/status/925147550260137984

18. (5) Very excited! I’m a big fan of the franchise, even when it’s awful.

    (10) I have #8, had #12 but my nieces and nephews took it and trashed it a few years back, ditto #13, #19, and #20 (still have the Jawa, but they destroyed the cape).

19. @3: Speaking of Stranger as being about love is interesting, considering that it still has reactionary attitude toward homosexuality (Mike, looking androgynous, gets offers from both sexes but senses a “basic wrongness” in the ones from males). I wonder what changed RAH’s attitude; I have trouble imagining him simply following a trend — did he change himself or was he self-censoring–to–market in earlier works?

    @17: the gendering info is interesting, but there is so much conditioning wrt gender in many cultures that it’s not surprising (although I’d love to see those results cross-analyzed by age, or how they come out a generation in the future). But the geographic-directional cultures suggest a fascinating learned ability (albeit with at least one limitation the story points out); I wonder how someone from such a culture would handle the additional ~directions and lack of geographic points if they were in the ISS?

    @26: I’ve become resigned to monstrous Xmas decorations — there was one on the way home that required serious extra power — but when did they become a Thing for Halloween?

20. Alt$Hero strikes me as an interesting but tricky gamble from Teddo. To get the campaign to a quarter of a million, he’s added an increasingly large number of volumes for the main series, plus novels, maps, the Chuck spinoff, and perhaps other stuff I haven’t bothered to check. Existing backers then pay even more to add on the new product to their package, so he can raise more money for another stretch goal which backers have to pay even more for, and so on.

    That means a lot of his backers are invested in a really long stretch of franchise development, giving an equally long window for things to go wrong – possible non-delivery is the most obvious but it’s also nigh certain that the cracks in the political agenda are going to start showing the moment this moves from “LOL here are pictures to piss off the essjaydubs” to an actual thing with content and storyline. The focus on advertising with female characters already seems to have created tension between those who love that they are getting the dubious anatomied scantily clad ladies which all other comic books apparently denied them, and dissenting voices complaining that these don’t respect “modest family values” and the “inherent capabilities of women” etc.

    With Infogalactic demonstrating how much power that crew actually have to challenge mainstream cultural institutions, this therefore seems to be a product with the usual poor prospects of moving beyond the altie/pup echo chamber and a high risk of actively angering or alienating sections of his base in the long term.

    What I’m saying here is, a fascinating new “season” of intra-group kerfuffle might be incoming for anyone who embarrassingly derives some entertainment from watching that sort of thing. I miiiiight have some popcorn stashed in the cupboard just in case…

21. Five hundred years ago today, Martin Luther nailed 95 pixels onto the church scroll.

22. @Standback: Has anybody read Amatka, by Karin Tidbeck?

    Yes, I loved it. Tidbeck pulls off the difficult balancing act of taking the novel in an increasingly surrealistic direction without ever slipping into nonsense.

23. @Steve @Kyra @Phil: Very neat 🙂

    I’m sure the best lies ahead, but the sense that the entire world is dissolving underneath Vanja’s feet, in one way or another, is really powerful, and the SF-nal conceit is just delightful.

24. Meredith Moment:

    The Starlit Woods, Parisien and Wolfe (eds), is on sale for $1.99 in the US at Amazon.

    In 3513, Hallowe’en celebrates you.

25. @Chip Hitchcock

    3) that line was from Gillian’s POV. She thought Mike sensed wrongness and overlooked that Jubal told Mike to only kiss girls. Do note that later in the nest, Ben nearly ends up in a three-way involving Mike but instead runs out the door.

26. @Chip Hitchcock

    @17: the gendering info is interesting, but there is so much conditioning wrt gender in many cultures that it’s not surprising

    The general thinking in linguistics today is that semantic content exists even when the language doesn’t express it in syntax. So in English when you say “I had lunch with the neighbor” even though “the neighbor” doesn’t have gender expressed in the syntax, the listener still gives it a gender, assigned to “I don’t know yet.”

    Languages make extensive use of “I don’t know yet” in other areas. E.g. “When she won the election, April was surprised.” We cope just fine with the idea that “she” refers to a particular person, even though that person doesn’t get mentioned until later in the sentence.

    Likewise, Japanese doesn’t have a syntactic future tense, but any expression is easily disambiguated sematically within a sentence or two. The basic dictionary form isn’t really present tense; it’s present/future, to be resolved later. More spectacularly, Japanese nouns don’t have number. The word “hon” isn’t “book”; it’s “book or books, to be determined later.”

    This is why I believe I (and others) have trouble accepting “they” as a singular pronoun for non-binary people. The usual singular use of “they” takes an “I don’t know yet” but the non-binary use takes a concrete value. E.g. “Someone was outside the house. They knocked over the trash can” (“they” could be he or she) vs. “When Alice won the election, they were surprised” (“they” means non-binary). No matter how much text I read with this “non-binary they,” it always strips my mental gears, making reading painful.

27. @Standback

    I’ve read Amatka too. Definitely one of the most atmospheric books I’ve read this year. I love how stark it is. I found over the months since that it has haunted me. Hope you enjoy to the end.

    I second the recommendation for Jagannath too.

28. The thing with Alt$Hero is he probably has no intention of producing a product and his backers probably don’t care if they receive one.

29. (21) The badass copyeditor is Deanna Hoak. I wish I’d mentioned her name in that tweet instead of in a subsequent one, because it’s gotten a bit of traction, and Deanna deserves all the notice and credit in the world. She’s awesome.

30. (21) Ha! That is some attention to detail!

    @Greg Hullender

    This is why I believe I (and others) have trouble accepting “they” as a singular pronoun for non-binary people. The usual singular use of “they” takes an “I don’t know yet” but the non-binary use takes a concrete value. E.g. “Someone was outside the house. They knocked over the trash can” (“they” could be he or she) vs. “When Alice won the election, they were surprised” (“they” means non-binary). No matter how much text I read with this “non-binary they,” it always strips my mental gears, making reading painful.

    I read the singular they by default as “I don’t know yet,” but just “I don’t know” if it seems to be used in the context of non-binary gender. I may be misunderstanding your trouble with it, but for me it’s made a person’s gender less prominent. This is also happening in real life as I meet more people who are not necessarily interested in passing as any particular gender. My brain just slots anyone whose gender isn’t apparent into a neutral “they area” until/unless I’m told otherwise. Or at least, that’s what I try to do.

31. @Standback: And to echo Steve Wright and SamJ, Tidbeck’s story collection Jagannath is also excellent.

32. Another vote for Amatka. This novel probably will make my Hugo list this year.

33. Greg Hullender on October 31, 2017 at 9:18 am said:

    This is why I believe I (and others) have trouble accepting “they” as a singular pronoun for non-binary people. The usual singular use of “they” takes an “I don’t know yet” but the non-binary use takes a concrete value. E.g. “Someone was outside the house. They knocked over the trash can” (“they” could be he or she) vs. “When Alice won the election, they were surprised” (“they” means non-binary). No matter how much text I read with this “non-binary they,” it always strips my mental gears, making reading painful.

    By “usual use” I think you mean “old-fashioned use”. The new use (and I freely admit it’s new) has managed to become widespread enough that it seems a bit of a stretch to call it “unusual” any more.

    That said, I agree that it’s something that older folks (like me) are likely to struggle with. I certainly found it disconcerting at first. And the rapidity of its spread is definitely startling.

    Now I’m a bit of a neophile, and an enthusiast about linguistics, so this opportunity to see language-change in action pleases me, and I’ve made an effort to adapt and get used to the new usage. I realize that many of my fellow old folks are more likely to be sticks-in-the-mud, but this is a change that the language has long needed. Complaints about the lack of a genderless singular pronoun in English have been common since I was a kid. So, unlike a lot of language changes, this one is filling a very real major need. Which, I think, is part of the reason it’s happening so quickly.

    In forty years (and maybe sooner), I expect that people who find the usage odd will be rarer than people who find the concept of taking pictures with a phone to be odd are today.

    I guess what I’m trying to say is: it works, it’s useful, and it’s looking pretty inevitable. It’s probably time to get over it and try to adapt. It’s really not that hard, since it’s a familiar word, and not too distant from traditional uses. If you’re not actively fighting it, I think you’ll find the transition pretty easy. I certainly have. (Even if I still occasionally have to stop and think about it.)

34. Sigh. Amatka doesn’t have a UK ebook release. Neither does Six Wakes.

    (1) THE REASON FOR THE SEASON

    I’m tempted. I really like minifigures.

    And it’s a lot cheaper than the Diptyque advent calendar I’ve been sighing over (£300, so I definitely can’t afford it). Perfume nerdery is challenging when you’re poor.

    (2) HANS DUO

    Given the murmurings about the original shoot I did wonder how much they’d be able to reuse. Not much, I guess!

    (5) BACK TO THE STARGATE

    I got around to watching the original film recently and Catherine Langford was very much my favourite character. I hope this ends up being good.

    (21) KEEPING THE WOW IN BOW WOW

    Now that’s a really thorough job. 🙂

    (26) PUMPKINS IN CHORUS

    Wow!

35. Someone who is not young on the singular use of ‘they’:

    Wired: Years ago I read your two books on writing, Steering the Craft and The Language of the Night, and one thing that really struck me from those were your comments about how wrongheaded many of our so-called “rules” of grammar are. Are there any particular grammar rules that you’d like to see go away?

    Le Guin: I was probably talking about the fact that the grammarians kept telling us that we can’t use “they” as a singular — like, “If anybody needs an abortion, he should have to tell his mother and father.” Would you only use “he,” because “he” is the generic pronoun? I mean, this is nonsense in English. And English has always used “they” — it’s in Shakespeare. You know, “Anybody needs an abortion, they should not have to tell their parents.” It’s one of these arbitrary bans that every now and then grammarians get away with, and that kind of thing — where there’s a moral influence from it — you have to talk about that. The thing with grammar is to just accept the rules and use them as you see fit. But you have to know them before you can break them. That’s the only rule I accept.

36. The use of “they” as a singular has a long history. I’ve used “they” as a singular for decades. It’s perfectly acceptable, it’s appropriate and courteous to use as a singular if an individual prefers its use over other choices and if someone says it isn’t proper to do so as a point of grammar, they are talking out of their hat.

    https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/singular-nonbinary-they

    In 7745, “they” as singular is still in use.

37. Yes, but as Greg was trying to explain, there’s a notable difference between:

    1. “A student must present their id to enter” and
    2. “Susan carried their id in their bra.”

    The first, with Greg’s unknowns, is the traditional form of singular “they”, and has been unremarkable for centuries (though a few misguided souls have peeved about it).

    The second, using singular “they” for a known person of known gender, is the new form, and it’s one many older folks find jarring–even people who think the first example is perfectly fine.

    I still find the second example a bit jarring, and I love it and embrace it. But not everyone is as sanguine about being jarred as I am. 🙂

38. I read the singular they by default as “not important”.

39. @Hampus Eckerman: “I read the singular they by default as ‘not important’.”

    I’ve used it for some time when I needed to obscure someone’s gender.

40. #11: I remember Ben Solon fondly. His fanzine Nyarlehotep was excellent. I thought I had a photo of him here but, looking through my vast “S” folder, don’t see it. He certainly deserves a better obituary.

    I really must do something more about organizing my photo files (which currently take up a large legal-size file cabinet) better. Then there’s the banker’s box of unsorted photos…not to mention all the photos Forry sent me that I still haven’t scanned in yet.

    I see you’re continuing to use all those news items I send to you. I’m astonished by the realization that I’ve been doing news stuff since 1960 or 61. Frankly, the oldest stuff is becoming shrouded in my brain pan.

41. The discussion of “they” brings up a question I had about Provenance after I’d gulped the book and had a bit of time to wonder. In the Ancillary trilogy, the focal character couldn’t identify gender and so used feminine forms for everyone (IIRC…). In the new work, ISTM that the focal character (at least) has no problem identifying males, females, and a 3rd (neuter?) gender, without asking even newly-met people what pronouns they prefer. Am I missing something (e.g., that in that world all 3 genders are always identifiable, unlike ours), or did Leckie just ignore the issue (e.g., for the sake of making the rest of the story keep moving)?

42. Chip Hitchcock on November 1, 2017 at 8:54 pm said:

    Provenance isn’t set in the Radch empire. Or at least, the people in it are mostly not Radch, and don’t use that language, so they have pronouns all over the place.

43. I suppose Leckie’s point was to emulate the way we see people and identify their presented gender without thinking about it. “I knew it was a he because of the tie and tweed trousers” would be a weird thing for any of us to think about in a non-genre novel, so it would have been out of place for Provenance’s protagonist to say, “I knew X was they because of the bell bottoms and boutonniere on the plaid frock coat” or whatever.

44. @P J Evans: I was questioning not the language itself but the fact that everybody knows how to use it correctly all the time (at least in this aspect). AFAICT, the Radch empire has gendered pronouns; it was only the one character that couldn’t identify others’ genders at all.

    @jayn: I suppose smoothing-out-the-prose is plausible — but I was less interested in how gender was identified than that nobody ever had to ask “which pronouns do you use?” even with three recognized genders (that we know of from this one story). I suppose that’s a bit much to ask of something based on a caper.

45. @Chip:

    AFAICT, the Radch empire has gendered pronouns; it was only the one character that couldn’t identify others’ genders at all.

    As I recall, the Radch language did not have gendered pronouns – it had one pronoun that translated to “she”; thus in non-Radch cultures (especially in the culture in which people were wearing heavy winter clothing) our protagonist was facing both the problem of figuring out which gender particular people were, and the challenge of remembering to go to the trouble of assigning a specific gender in sentences that in her native tongue would not have required her to do so.

46. I think there’s a passage where Breq mentions that the (non-Radch) people she is living among always know people’s genders, even though she can’t work out how they do it. I guess it’s something to do with the way people hold themselves. or the like.

47. @Andrew M:

    I think there’s a passage where Breq mentions that the (non-Radch) people she is living among always know people’s genders, even though she can’t work out how they do it. I guess it’s something to do with the way people hold themselves. or the like.

    Or perhaps with clothing, makeup or jewelry codes that Breq hasn’t learned.

48. /BreqStalk

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