(1) TOWARD A MORE GRAMMATICAL HELL. McSweeney’s John Rauschenberg explains it all to you in “Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell, Reimagined for Linguistic Transgressions”.
First Circle (Limbo):
AutocorrectHere wander the otherwise virtuous souls who were forced into grievous errors by autocorrect programs. They sit in silent masturbation, only rising once every hour to chant eerie koans such as “ducking auto cat rectal.”
Second Circle:
The Serial CommaOne half of this circle is populated by souls who are cursed to make arguments that nobody cares about except their own mothers, howling gorgons and the infernal mistresses of hell. The other half are cursed to make arguments that nobody cares about except their own mothers, howling gorgons, and the infernal mistresses of hell. The difference between these two situations seems to matter a lot to both halves. Neither side will listen to you when you suggest that they could avoid this level entirely.
And so on.
(2) EVEN PIXAR. The Hollywood Reporter’s Kim Masters, in “John Lasseter’s Pattern of Alleged Misconduct Detailed by Disney/Pixar Insiders”, says that longtime Pixar CEO John Lasseter has been suspended following sexual harassment allegations.
Rashida Jones is still credited as a writer on Toy Story 4, the next installment in the beloved franchise. But, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter, the actress and her writing partner at the time, Will McCormack, left the project early on after John Lasseter, the acclaimed head of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation, made an unwanted advance.
Jones and McCormack did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Disney declined to comment on the alleged incident though a studio source said the departure was over “creative differences.” Multiple sources spoke with THR but asked not to be named out of fear that their careers in the tight-knit animation community would be damaged.
Based on the accounts of former Pixar insiders as well as sources in the animation community, the alleged incident was not an isolated occurrence. One longtime Pixar employee says Lasseter, who is well-known for hugging employees and others in the entertainment community, was also known by insiders for “grabbing, kissing, making comments about physical attributes.” Multiple sources say Lasseter is known to drink heavily at company social events such as premiere parties, but this source says the behavior was not always confined to such settings.
(3) MELTDOWN AT LITTLE ROCK’S COSPLAY CON. PopCultHQ extensively covers last weekend’s most disappointing event — “Chaos at Cosplay Con & Anime Experience #CCAE2017”.
November 17 & 18th was the weekend for the Cosplay Con and Anime Experience in North Little Rock, AR. This convention didn’t have a stellar list of top-name celebrities, but it had a good line-up. Their headliner was Ciara Renee from DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. Other guests included Cig and George from SYFY’s Faceoff, Joshua Monroe from Cosplay Melee, and actor/voice actor Robert Axelrod.
Ticket prices weren’t bad for a new convention. The day of the con weekend passes were only $30, Friday passes were $15, and Saturday were $25.
This cosplay con and anime experience promised to be, “The ultimate community focused convention” and was marketed as “…a celebration of comic books and pop culture that showcases the exceptional works of talented Cosplayers, writers, artists, illustrators and creators of all types.”
Instead, this turned into a complete disaster that caused so much stress and anxiety for some that at least one person ended up in the hospital. There are so many things with this con, that I’m just going to give you a list of what I have heard so far and then I will expound on a few of them;
- Bad communication all around
- Guests weren’t paid
- Caterer wasn’t paid
- No break relief for vendors
- Vendors were not allowed food or drink at their booths
- Vendors were forced to accept ‘vendor bucks’ without compensation
- No Load-in information or map provided for Vendors
- Guests were kicked out of the hotel when the convention credit card was rejected
- Not all of the Costume contests occurred
- Owner avoided guests and wasn’t even seen in the vicinity of the convention for a large portion of the show
- Owner suspected to be operating with a false identity
- Continual schedule changes during the event
- Staff wasn’t paid
- Volunteers didn’t get fed
- VIP packages weren’t entirely as promised
The article delivers a paragraph or more about each bulleted complaint and accusation, largely gathered from the victims’ Facebook comments.
(4) FOR CERTAIN VALUES. Camestros Felapton dissects the moral values of the new Netflix series in “The Punisher – An Artfully Crafted Moral Vacuum”.
But this is not a general review. What I wanted to discuss was the wisdom of making the show in the first place. I certainly had my doubts when it was announced and it was also clear that Marvel were nervous about making a show centered on a character defined by his gun-fueled killing sprees. While any of the TV/Movie versions of Marvel characters have some scope for re-invention, The Punisher has to act as a one man extra-judicial death squad. A plot line can expand his motivation or show other aspects of his character and he doesn’t even need his distinctive skull logo but sooner or later if he doesn’t kill lots of bad guys then he simply isn’t The Punisher.
…But this fourth space for superheroes to occupy for non-otherworldly threats poses problems for Marvel (and for DC). This vacuum was eluded too but not examined in Captain America: Civil War. Captain America’s stance not to sign the Sokovia Accords was not well examined or explained. Instead, the rightness of his stance is largely just assumed as an extension of Steve Rogers own integrity. That manages to just about work in that film so long as you don’t pay too much attention to it but on closer examination Rogers really has to choose to be either an agent of the state or a vigilante. If you call yourself ‘Captain America’ then you can either be a soldier employed and held accountable by the state or your indistinguishable from a nutty ‘militia’ hiding in a compound and plotting against the BATF.
The Punisher series gets this. It really is genuinely aware of these issues – mainly because they become unavoidable when your central character uses military equipment to murder criminals without trial.
(5) TRANSHUMAN. C.P. Dunphey’s The Year’s Best Transhuman SF 2017 Anthology is out from Gehenna & Hinnom.
As technology progresses, so does its connection with mankind. Augmentations, cybernetics, artificial intelligence filling the void that the absence of flesh will leave behind. In Transhumanism, we fine our imminent future. Whether this future is to be feared or rejoiced, depends on the individual.
Will technology replace mankind? If AI becomes self-aware, is a war imminent?
C.P. Dunphey, critically acclaimed author of Plane Walker and editor of the bestselling Year’s Best Body Horror 2017 Anthology and Hinnom Magazine¸ has collected 25+ stories from the best up-and-coming authors in science fiction for Gehenna & Hinnom’s sophomore collection, The Year’s Best Transhuman SF 2017 Anthology. From veteran award-winning authors like Julie Novakova, to popular horror authors like Chad Lutzke, the anthology presents no shortage of entertaining, mind-bending science fiction.
(6) THE REST OF THE FOOTAGE. Ethan Alter, in the Yahoo! Entertainment story “Steven Soderbergh Reveals The BackStory on His Viral Lucasfilm Rejection Letter”, interviews Soderbergh, who says the rejection letter from Lucasfilm (reported in the Scroll awhile back) was for some short films Soderbergh sent them and he’s actually not surprised that Lucasfilm rejected the films.
The inspirational message went viral, no doubt encouraging every dreamer with Hollywood ambitions. But the question remains: just what was on the videotape that Soderbergh submitted to Lucas? A proposed sequel to Return of the Jedi? A pitch for a standalone Ewok movie? Soderbergh’s theory for how Han Solo completed the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs? Speaking with Yahoo Entertainment, Soderbergh revealed that the tape in question had nothing to do with that galaxy far, far away. “I sent them a 3/4-inch tape that had two of my short films on it,” the director says, chuckling at his youthful hubris. “I was not surprised that it got kicked back! There aren’t enough decimal points to count how many packages George Lucas was getting at that point, and probably still gets.”
Soderbergh adds that the short films in question didn’t have any science-fiction elements, although one of them told a story that might have resonated with the director of the nostalgia-drenched teen classic American Graffiti….
(7) YELLOW LIGHT. The Washington Post’s Steven Zeitchik, in “Why ‘Justice League’ failed — and where DC goes from here”, says that the low box office returns for Justice League has cast Warner’s plans for greenlighting 10 “DC Creative Universe” films, including Flashpoint, Cyborg, and Justice League 2 into question. Part of the problem is that DC has no one equivalent to Kevin Feige at Marvel implementing quality control and that th stand-alone success of Wonder Woman leads DC and Warner to support quality “stand-alone films” rather than insisting that all its superhero properties “feed into a universe.”
A little more than three years ago, Warner Bros. announced ambitious plans for its DC Comics properties.
The film studio would undertake no fewer than 10 DC movies, chief executive Kevin Tsujihara said. It would introduce various characters and build up to a pair of “Justice League” ensemble pictures, which in turn would allow it to spin off more stand-alone movies. The template? Rival Marvel, which began with “Iron Man” in 2008 and four years later evolved into a massively successful “Avengers” film, which then became the gift that kept on giving (17 movies and counting, including the current smash “Thor: Ragnarok.”)
This past weekend, all those plans blew up.
(8) MISSING KIT REED. One of the writer’s students tells about how he kept in contact with the author: “Alexander Chee on the life, work and loss of his mentor, Kit Reed” in the LA Times.
The first day of Kit Reed’s advanced fiction class, sitting in the yellow Victorian house I would come to know simply as “Lawn Avenue,” was my first time for so many things. I had never been taught by a professor in her own home, for example, and I remember I couldn’t stop looking at it all. I had never been in a home full of that much art, or with walls painted white or black, or in rooms full of chrome furniture, Lucite lamps, and mirrors— there was an offhand glamour to it all that I loved from the start. This was the kind of home you hoped professors at Wesleyan University had, or at least I did, and I sat nervously, excited, aware that I was lucky to be there as she listed off her rules for the class. We had to turn in 20 pages every other week—she ran the class like a boot camp—and she told us never to call her before noon, as she was writing and wouldn’t answer.
Another first: I’d never had a professor tell me I could call at all, and I don’t know that any of them ever did tell me, besides her. It never occurred to me to call my professors outside of class. Her willingness to accept a call was an openness to another kind of connection and conversation with us, one that, for many of us, would go on for the rest of the time we knew her.
(9) BEWES OBIT. Rodney Bewes (1937-2017): British actor and writer, died November 21, aged 79. Genre appearances included Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1972), Jonah and the Whale (1975), Jabberwocky (1977), The Spaceman and King Arthur (aka Unidentified Flying Oddball, 1979), Doctor Who (two episodes, 1984).
(10) CASSIDY OBIT. David Cassidy (1950-2017): US singer and actor, died 21 November, aged 67. Genre appearances included The Flash (one episode, 1991), Kim Possible (voiced one episode, 2004).
(11) REESE OBIT. Is playing an angel considered genre? From CNN: “Della Reese, ‘Touched by an Angel’ star and singer, dies at 86”.
For nine seasons on CBS, Reese played Tess on “Touched by an Angel,” tasked with sending angels to Earth to help people redeem themselves.
“We were privileged to have Della as part of the CBS family when she delivered encouragement and optimism to millions of viewers as Tess on “Touched by an Angel,” CBS said in a statement to CNN. “We will forever cherish her warm embraces and generosity of spirit. She will be greatly missed. Another angel has gotten her wings.”
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born November 21, 1924 – Christopher Tolkien
(13) GENRE WHIFF. Poul Anderson always advised writers to engage all five senses. But what is a signature science fictional smell? “Ellis Brooklyn’s “Sci Fi” perfume convinced me, a fragrance monogamist, to switch scents”.
I tried “Sci Fi” from Ellis Brooklyn. Everything about this perfume is intriguing. The name, the packaging, the fact that it’s vanilla but in no way smells like what I imagined a vanilla-forward scent to be. When I think of “vanilla perfumes,” I think of the Body Fantasies body spray I bathed myself in during middle school. But Sci Fi’s vanilla is something utterly different.
Sci Fi, like a Ray Bradbury novel, pulls you in and confounds you. It begins with notes of vanilla bean, swirls into a cloud of orange and freesia, and then finishes with a bright smack of green tea. One day of wearing Sci Fi and I knew this was my next scent. I was making the switch.
(14) DISHING ABOUT THE DISH. NASA Watch has the good news: “NSF Decides Not To Shut Down Arecibo”.
Statement on NSF Record of Decision on Arecibo Observatory, NSF
“On Nov. 15, 2017, the National Science Foundation (NSF) signed its Record of Decision for the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. This important step concludes the agency’s decision-making process with respect to the general path forward for facility operations in a budget-constrained environment and provides the basis for a future decision regarding a new collaborator.”
(15) COSMIC STOGIE. You’re not from around here, are you — “Bizarre shape of interstellar asteroid”.
These properties suggest that ‘Oumuamua is dense, comprised of rock and possibly metals, has no water or ice, and that its surface was reddened due to the effects of irradiation from cosmic rays over long periods of time.
Although ‘Oumuamua formed around another star, scientists think it could have been wandering through the Milky Way, unattached to any star system, for hundreds of millions of years before its chance encounter with our Solar System.
(16) MANSON, HUBBARD AND HEINLEIN. Click-seeker Jeet Heer finds them this week with “Charles Manson’s Science Fiction Roots” in New Republic.
In 1963, while a prisoner at the federal penitentiary at McNeil Island in Washington state, Charles Manson heard other prisoners enthuse about two books: Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and L. Ron Hubbard’s self-help guide Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950). Heinlein’s novel told the story of a Mars-born messiah who preaches a doctrine of free love, leading to the creation of a religion whose followers are bound together by ritualistic water-sharing and intensive empathy (called “grokking”). Hubbard’s purportedly non-fiction book described a therapeutic technique for clearing away self-destructive mental habits. It would later serve as the basis of Hubbard’s religion, Scientology.
Manson was barely literate, so he probably didn’t delve too deeply into either of these texts. But he was gifted at absorbing information in conversation, and by talking to other prisoners he gleaned enough from both books to synthesize a new theology. His encounter with the writings of Heinlein and Hubbard was a pivotal event in his life. Until then, he had been a petty criminal and drifter who spent his life in and out of jail. But when Manson was released from McNeil Island in 1967, he was a new figure: a charismatic street preacher who gathered a flock of followers among the hippies of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco.
…As vile and sociopathic as he was, Charles Manson did have a gift for absorbing the zeitgeist, which is one reason he held such a powerful sway over the cultural imagination. Manson picked up Stranger in a Strange Land in the same spirit that he learned to strum a guitar and offer exegeses on Beatles lyrics. It was a way for him to ride the wave of cultural change. Manson remained infamous all these decades not just because he inspired mass murder, but also because he did so by manipulating some of our most powerful myths.
(17) BAD LUCK. Wrong place, wrong time? A civilian’s frustration at trying to shoot the demolition of the Georgia Dome — “‘Move bus, get out the way!'” (video).
An unlucky camera operator waited 40 minutes to film a stadium demolition – but was thwarted at the last moment.
(18) VIRTUAL MOVIE MUSEUM. Yourprops.com is the “free online museum for your movie props, costumes and wardrobe.” There are myriad photos of movie props (original and replica), wardrobe (original and replica costumes), production used items (crew jackets, shirts and gifts, storyboards, artwork, etc.).
For example: “The Dark Tower, Hero light up Breaker Kid’s Devartoi Watch”.
(19) WHEN NORTH MEETS EAST. At Adweek, see “Sensei Wu Saves Santa, Who Saves Christmas, in Lego’s Fun Holiday Ad”.
Lego Australia is out with a largely winsome addition to the Christmas advertising pile—a stop-motion animation about a Lego Santa finding his way home to save Christmas, thanks to a little surprise help from a spirited stranger.
The minute-long spot from CHE Proximity opens with a Lego North Pole—or Lego Christmas Town, as the brand calls it—set on a living room floor. It’s abuzz with holiday activity, when a human-Godzilla foot comes crashing down on the blissful scene, causing a specific Lego reindeer to squirt very specific Lego poop in fear—graphic sound effects included—while general catastrophe ensues everywhere.
(20) TODAY’S VIDEO. A lure to the dark side in these snippets of The Last Jedi – “Tempt.”
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Alan Baumler, Chris Barkley, David K.M. Klaus, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Carl Slaughter, Martin Morse Wooster, Steve Green, and Andrew Porter. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anna Nimmhaus.]
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A pixel upon both your scrolls!
[1] Is the misspelling intentional? I recognize the existence of humor, even if it is sometimes operating at frequencies my receptors don’t catch.
[6] Ah! Still my favorite Lucas movie. “Hellooo, BAAAYYY-beee!”
[10] Awww, David Cassidy.
Kip W: Let the appertainment flow immediately!
Some people may be able to work humor with intentional misspellings. Not me. As a high school friend put it, “Intentional misspellings are meaningless when true errors abound.”
5
As technology progresses, so does its connection with mankind.
Also known as, I got an IV port (‘port-a-cath’) installed Wednesday before last. It beats having needles stuck in my arm for several hours every three weeks.
I wish I could appertain some time.
“Have an hour, Kip.”
“Thanks! Um, you gonna finish that fifteen minutes?”
[17] Ow. Ow, ow, ow. This is the nightmare. I say this as one who loves to watch building demolitions. It reminds me of a phenomenon I saw working clearly on a visit to a cathedral, and whenever there was an artist trying to draw a scene, someone would go stand directly in front of them, apparently totally unaware but always dead-on in their ability to interrupt the invisible beam connecting the object beheld with the eye of the artist.
Quick response on the PopCultHQ article. I have now spoken with well over a dozen vendors, volunteers, guests and attendees to confirm there is solid information there. Facebook posts are an unreliable source and only good to gather base information.
It looks like I will be doing a small update to it tomorrow
True Fifth!
(2) Rashida Jones is denying that Lasseter is the reason she left Toy Story 4.
Misspelled fifth!
https://xkcd.com/1919/
(15) COSMIC STOGIE
So what will we do if it turns out to have an alien super-virus on board?
Johan P: Don’t lesnerize!
@Lise Andreasen
Sometimes a cigar-shaped object is just a cigar-shaped object.
[stalk-stalk]
15) If two more of these follow the first, we’ll know if its the Ramans…
17) With photography as one of the things I loved, I felt for that poor, poor cameraman. Set up and ready, with watchers in the foreground as contrast for the background of the explosion…and a bus ruins it all.
/godstalk
15) We still have humpback whales, so we should be okay until its next visit.
Ninth circle of grammatical hell – reading that New Republic article. Ouch. Get thee to a copyeditor.
Oh, yeah, “abandon all pixel, ye who scroll here.”
17: The Canadian news show I saw covering this had three interesting reactions: one newscaster kept giggling, one was baffled that the camera people set up at street level and the last one warned the other two not to take too much pleasure in the mishap since none of them were immune to similar catastrophes.
There’s a video doing the rounds with someone in, uh, Scotland, I think, trying to film a block of flats(?) being demolitioned, with a similar effect.
To help people who might otherwise end up in the eighth circle, the real error isn’t prepositions at the ends of sentences–it’s inappropriate particles at the ends of constituents. That sounds complicated, but the test for validity is easy: can you remove the particle (that word that looks like a preposition but isn’t really) and still have the sentence make sense and mean the same thing? If the answer is “yes,” then it’s incorrect use of the particle. If not, then there’s nothing wrong with the sentence.
So for “Where is my car at?” You can remove the “at” and get “Where is my car?” Therefore the original sentence is a solecism. (I.e. it makes you sound like a hick.)
But for “I put my coat on” if you remove “on” you get “I put my coat” which is meaningless. Therefore, “I put my coat on” is perfectly fine.
Very little in linguistics is always true, but this rule works in every case I’ve seen.
And, yeah, I’m aware that what gets you into the eighth circle isn’t being wrong–it’s correcting other people without their invitation. 🙂
1) At the bottom of that McSweeney’s piece is this appeal:
“We’re making the move toward reader-supported internet humor publishing. Just $5 a month (17 cents a day!) helps us keep going. . . .”
So when are they going to start posting the funny stuff?
I took kind of a left turn from my usual and reviewed Henry Huggins by Beverly Cleary.
(1) I find myself deep in the second circle.
(4) Interesting review, but I’m not sure that Cap’s opposition to the Accords wasn’t well-argued; it comes on the heels of Cap’s previous solo adventure in which a massive government organization had been infiltrated and corrupted for decades and was amassing unfathomable destructive power for explicitly totalitarian ends. His argument is very simple: I can no longer trust the state to act justly, and I will not act on its behalf for unjust ends. That’s a very securely liberal stance; liberals tend to see the state as having a large set of responsibilities; it is then granted a certain degree of authority over citizens in order to discharge those responsibilities. If the state acts unjustly, especially with regard to violence, it is seen as an abdication of those responsibilities and therefore it also abdicates its authority, and it is the responsibility of citizens to resist its attempts to exercise authority, especially violence. Within that moral/political framework, Cap’s objections are both clear and reasonable, imo, as he had just gone through an intensely personal ordeal in which he watched the state abdicate its responsibilities and therefore also its right to exercise authority–as a moral man he has an obligation to resist its attempts to assert the authority to enact violence.
There are at least two conflicting conservative frameworks that might apply. The furthest right is the roughly equivalent to the furthest left, although they differ significantly in the details–that the state has absolutely no authority whatsoever and may not even need to exist at all. The second is that the state has the authority and responsibility to act with violence to protect its citizens–either in the form of police or the military–but in almost no other way, and that all other responsibilities belong to the individual. This latter version that legitimizes state violence is really what Stark is capitulating to when he signs the Accords.
(There are many other frameworks, but I don’t think they apply.)
(5) May have to look this one up.
(16) I was allowed to read any book, in any genre, that I could lay hands on when I was a kid… except Hubbard. His books were the only ones banned in my house. My mother had been sucked into Scientology when she was very young and vulnerable and it cost her a great deal to get out (and she absolutely described it as cult-like, banning her from contact with her family, demanding the bulk of her wages, making her live in approved housing with other members), so any such books to cross our threshold would have been immediately destroyed.
3) I heard about this debacle from local folks who confirm that it was, indeed, a debacle.
17) I have not been able to stop laughing at this clip. I know it’s terrible for me to find it hilarious, but I do.
@August: I was going to bring up Cap’s experiences in Civil War as informing his choices in Civil War. And of course Cap’s reactions in Civil War were partially informed by the fact tat from his perspective, only a short time previously he was fighting Nazis who were using high technology to try to dominate the world.
Tony on the other hand, a good part of his experiences were based on his creation of Ultron, and before that his misadventures in his three movies. The upshot being “I can’t be trusted to use my powers responsibly, so neither can anybody else.” The decision to use powers needed to be taken out of the hands of single flawed individuals- AKA Tony.
One of the limitations of Civil War is that it didn’t go enough into how the personal history of these two men were driving the plot, where you basically needed to see six previous movies to get the full context. If you have thse connections, the personal tragedy of the film deepens- but that’s a bit much to expect.
I look upon ye tickbox and despair.
@3: so was the operator an absolute noob, or a con artist, or some of both? And was this a new con(vention)? If so, I’m wondering why people weren’t more cautious given recent reports. I’m also croggled that vendors thought the convention should provide someone to cover their tables; I know there are a lot of differences between ~mainline SF conventions and other fan-oriented, but this seems especially odd — ISTM that $200 for a booth (per the comments) is not enough to include free labor. (Recent data from memory: Sasquan paid a decorator close to $100 per booth for setup and charged a few hundred dollars.) I’m equally croggled by the surprise at the outside-food ban; how many convention centers don’t have this?
@4 / @Camestros: s/eluded/alluded/ (in the original — not OGH’s error).
@14: to me, “The Dish” will always be in Australia; visiting it was one of the high points of my Aussiecon 4 trip.
@16: this “news” is only ~47 years old. (I remember using it as a speech topic in high school English.) Has it been waving all those years?
@Kip W (re @17): people used to tell such annoyances “You’re a better door than window” (yes, the short form isn’t grammatical); these days you could get hurt doing that.
@Chip. Sadly, I didn’t get to see that Dish on my Australia trip for DUFF, but I did see the facility near Canberra.
@7: I continued to be amazed that critics like Steven Zeitchik fail to realize that the DC films are NOT Marvel films and that on some unconscious level, fervently wanting them to be more alike would diminishes both sets of franchises.
I enjoy the DCU movies for what they are, not for what it isn’t.
I don’t want the DCU movies to be like Marvel films; I just want them to not be terrible.
Meredith Moment!
There’s a new Humble Bundle. Lots of really good stuff from Tachyon.
Kip W on November 21, 2017 at 8:37 pm said:
When I was a kid, I overheard my dad saying that he really wished there were an extra week between Christmas and New Years, so I made him a special December calendar with 38 days for his stocking. 🙂
—
Re. 1. When I was young, I was a bit of a Grammar Nazi, but I repented after realizing what a dick I was being, and now I restrict my urges in that direction to criticizing and dissecting Grammar Nazi posts for errors and false information. I guess that makes me a Grammar Nazi Nazi, or antigramfa. 🙂
Is it ok to punch a Grammar Nazi? I tend to think it’s not much worse than punching regular ones. 😉
I look upon ye tickbox and despair.
Wait. There’s a spare?
(slaps own forehead)
(7) YELLOW LIGHT
Welp, I just went to see Justice League. It wasn’t terrible, it just lacked the high polish and sense of individual flair that we can expect good superhero movies to have now.
DC don’t need to imitate Marvel in style, or structure, or tone, but they do need to see that Marvel have succeeded because they’ve let each set of movies have their own voice while carefully curating the overall effect to help them all fit together. It’s not always successful but their strike rate is so far above DC right now that it’s embarrassing.
The usual rule of thumb is that when you correct someone’s spelling and/or grammar online, you tend to make a mistake of your own. So if you correct a Nazi grammar’s correction, are you still likely to make a mistake? The interwebs would soon fill up with nothing but corrections.
Think of the appertainment possibilities!
A clown with his sales falling down
Or the talk that’s a god who is stalked
Or the post where the puppy is toast.
That’s appertainment!
(Not really, but not enough time to come up with grammatic and spelling error lyrics.)
@Paul Weimer: I also saw the one near Canberra rather than the one in the town ~featured in the movie (which was shot somewhere else because the real town had sprawled and changed) — but the ~Canberra (formerly Honeysuckle Creek) claims to be the one that actually was in use when Armstrong set foot on the moon, so IMO it counts.
Jack Lint: The usual rule of thumb is that when you correct someone’s spelling and/or grammar online, you tend to make a mistake of your own.
There’s even a name for it: Murphry’s Law.
@MrDalliard – Wow, that is the best Humble Bundle I’ve ever seen! Ugh! They say the sun never sets on the great Tsundoku Range.
@Jack Lint – I’ve been hit by that rule so many times that for a long while I would double- and triple-check my statements before correcting someone. Eventually I realized it’s better to just keep my keyboard shut. I usually manage it.
Soon Lee: Indeed, and Muphry’s Law was invented by Aussie fanzine fan John Bangsund.
Yeah, no, there’s nothing at all grammatically wrong with “Where’s my car at?” Not even if you could leave “at” out of the sentence. Seriously, there just isn’t. It’s a fake rule, just as fake as the prohibition on infinitive splitting. Its use as a class-marker doesn’t magically grant it grammatical legitimacy. So, no solecism, but plenty of classism.
@Mike,
I’m one of the Lucky 10000.
@Jack Lint:
Very nice.
“The light, Against the Fall of Night,
Or the stars, seen from the Sands of Mars,
Or the spouse from Atreides’ Great House,
That’s appertainment!”
“And all I ask is a tall Scroll and a Pixel to Godstalk her by”
@Ann Leckie
You are my grammar-hero.
Some folks might get a kick out of this. I think that Mike reported recently about Borderlands Books in San Francisco getting a new permanent home thanks in part to crowdfunding. But it turns out that’s only half the story. The other half is the old business at that location, Recycled Records, set up a three way deal where Borderlands got the location, and the Internet Archive got to pick through all of RR’s collection of vinyl for obscure historical gems to save. Story as reported in the local news here.
(1) TOWARD A MORE GRAMMATICAL HELL. Luvs it! I’m pretty sure I’ve inhabited almost all of these. ::blush::
– – – – –
Meredith Moments:
Marina J. Lostetter’s Noumenon is $2.99 from Harper Voyager (uses DRM). This SF novel follows clones on a (multi-generational, IIRC) journey to a far star finding a “big dumb object.” This sounds super duper up my alley.
Antonia Honeywell’s The Ship is $2.99 from Orbit (uses DRM). This YA (methinks) novel is about a naive young woman when civilization collapses; her father basically does a Noah’s Ark thing with 500 people, but mysteries abound about what’s going on with this floating utopia, where they’re going, etc. I’m less sure about this one, but it’s getting plenty of praise.
Kendall: Antonia Honeywell’s The Ship
That was one of the books which I classified as “Stories In Which The Journey Of The Protagonist Does Not, Unfortunately, Include Growing The Fuck Up”.
The problem with it is that the main character is an incredibly selfish and thoughtless person whose selfish and thoughtless actions are portrayed, in the end of the book, as being brave and heroic. The book’s only saving grace is that it would be — thankfully — very difficult to come up with a sequel based on the worldbuilding setup. 😐