(1) Richard Powers has been inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame reports Irene Gallo on Tor.com.
Science fiction artist Richard Powers is among the Society of Illustrators’ newest Hall of Fame inductees, along with Beatrix Potter, Peter de Seve, Marshall Arisman, Guy Billout, Rolf Armstrong, and William Glackens. Since 1958, the Society of Illustrators has elected to its Hall of Fame artists recognized for their “distinguished achievement in the art of illustration.”
Richard Powers was a hugely influential science fiction illustrator throughout the 1950s and ’60s…
Powers was dedicated to a fine art career alongside of his commercial work—the influences of modern art were clear throughout his illustration. While trends switched towards more literal and rendered illustration in the ’80s to ’90s, Powers is still beloved today. This year’s World Fantasy Convention mounted a special exhibit of nearly 90 Powers paintings and collages.
Paperback covers by Richard Powers.
(2) There are many shots of the Richard Powers exhibit in John Davis’ photos from the 2015 World Fantasy Convention.
Andrew Porter, who sent the link, hopes you will also appreciate the five paintings and the other Powers material he contributed to the show.
(3) Gallo’s post “Twelve Tor.com Story Illustrations Make it Into Society of Illustrators Awards” features all 12 images.
We talk a lot of about writers and stories on Tor.com but we always strive to give equal attention to our visual presentation. We are indebted to the artists who work tirelessly to make us, and our stories, look good and connect to readers. With that in mind, I’m sure you can appreciate how delighted and honored I am that 12 illustrations for Tor.com Publishing have been selected for this year’s Society of Illustrators annual exhibition.
(4) Simon Spanton, associate publisher at Gollancz, left Orion on November 20. Orion said Spanton was leaving the publisher after 19 years “by mutual agreement.”
Spanton joined Orion in 1996, having started out as a bookseller in 1986 and after a spell at Macmillan UK.
He first worked on Orion’s Millennium imprint in a wide role encompassing fiction, sports books, military history and children’s fiction before it was bought by Cassell in 1999, after which he became co-editorial director for Gollancz with Jo Fletcher. Spanton was promoted to the position of associate publisher at the sci-fi and fantasy imprint in May 2013, tasked with responsibility for “innovative acquisitions and Gollancz’s social media and community engagement, as well as continuing to publish his award-winning list to its full potential”.
(5) N. K. Jemisin’s newest fan is a reader who had given up on fantasy – but is back now.
There does seem to be a theme running through a lot of the fanmail I get, along these lines: people who’d stopped reading fantasy for whatever reason have been reading my work and then feeling pulled back into the genre. And that’s awesome. I love that my audience contains so many “non-traditional” fantasy fans. But this is the kind of thing that shouldn’t be happening just because of my fiction. There’s plenty of fantasy out there with “no wizards or orcs or rangers or elves”… and while I think there isn’t nearly enough fantasy out there starring middle-aged mothers of color (or biracial polyamorous proto-goddesses, or blind black women, or Asian male ex-gods with daddy issues, or gay black male assassins, or shy black female healers, or…), there’s some other stories like that out there, too. So what’s happening here, that so many ex-fantasy readers — readers who really just need one non-formulaic book to bring them back into the fold — aren’t aware that there’s stuff here they might enjoy?
(6) Pam Uphoff rides to the rescue of NaNoWriMo participants who are out of gas, in her post at Mad Genius Club.
Welcome to the last third of NaNoWriMo, where we all despair! Let me throw out some ideas that might help you get going again.
Finished? Ha! Go back a make a searchable mark (I use ///) everyplace where you told us about something instead of showing us, instead of pulling us into the situation.
Then go back to the start and search those out. Rewrite them. Use lots of dialog. Don’t be stiff and terse. Have some fun. Have your hero call something pink. Have your heroine disagree. “Don’t be silly! It’s obviously a soft dusty salmon.” “It’s a fish?” Or flip the genders on it. He’s an artist, he sees these colors. Make the reader laugh. Or cry. Or get mad.
Then go to the next mark and rewrite that bit. Do them all.
(7) A local Spokane man was in court November 16, charged with attacking his neighbor with a Klingon bat’leth, a bladed weapon, reports TV station KREM.
Carlo Morris Cerutti was in court Monday, accused of attacking his neighbor for putting trash in his trash can on Saturday. Court documents Cerutti, 50, is charged with Assault after swinging a Klingon sword at his neighbor.
Documents said Cerutti’s wife, Joyce, had accused their neighbor of putting trash in their trash can. The neighbor told police he had gotten into argument with the wife about the trash.
“Our next door neighbor was evicted and he was throwing his stuff in our garbage can so I took it put it in a bag, took it to him and said Jr. will you please not put your stuff in our garbage can,” said Joyce.
Joyce said the incident only escalated from there.
“I turned around and he chucked the bag at me and hit me in the back and then he started throwing garbage all over my yard,” said Joyce.
The neighbor said after the argument, Cerutti came rushing out of his house with a weapon that had multiple blades and started swinging. Court documents said the neighbor put his hands up and blocked the blade from striking him. The neighbor said he was able to pull the weapon away from Cerrutti and in the process, he fell backwards off the porch. The neighbor then called 911. Documents said when police arrived on scene Cerrutti was taken into custody for Assault and was later booked into the Spokane County Jail.
Joyce said that her husband never attacked the neighbor with a sword. She said her husband did grab the Klingon sword off the wall and said he did swing it at the neighbor. She said he only did this after he barged into their home.
(8) Neal Stephenson will be at George R. R. Martin’s Jean Cocteau Theatre in Santa Fe to discuss Seveneves next Friday at 3:30 p.m.
Neal Stephenson
(9) While I don’t think Brian Clegg’s “A Strange Relationship” for the SFWA Blog is heretical, surely somebody will.
Although definitions of science fiction are tricky, it surely specializes in “What if?” – placing humans (or aliens) in an imagined scenario that has an element of science or technology in its set-up and seeing how they react. This is why Jules Verne got it so wrong about H. G. Wells when comparing their fictional voyages to the Moon. Verne remarked “It occurs to me that his stories do not repose on a very scientific basis… I make use of physics.” Yet in reality, Wells did the better job. He took an admittedly fictional means of travel, but then followed it through logically in its impact on humans. Verne took an existing technology – the cannon – and used it in a totally illogical fashion, firing his astronauts into space with a g force that would have left them as soup.
It is far more important in science fiction for the follow-through of the “what if” to be realistic and logical than it is for the setup to make a clear prediction of scientific possibility.
(10) Cheezburger is letting people vote on whether “H.P. Lovecraft Looks Totally Like Woodrow Wilson”.
And you wonder why I don’t link more often to Cheezburger…
(11) Michael G. Gross, who designed the Ghostbusters logo and a famous/infamous magazine cover died November 16 at the age of 70.
Gross is perhaps best remembered at National Lampoon for the 1973 “Death” issue, whose cover featured the words “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog” emblazoned over an image of a dog with a gun to its head. “This very talented comedian named Ed Bluestone came to the office in 1972 with the line,” Beard told Splitsider in 2012. “The next day Michael found a dog who would turn its eyes away from a pistol with a little prodding. I saw this picture and simply couldn’t believe it. And it was like with a wave of his left hand. Magic.”
(12) Mike Hale finds many good things to say about Netflix’ new Jessica Jones in his review at the New York Times.
“Jessica Jones,” the second of Netflix’s original series based on Marvel comic books (after “Daredevil”), is reluctantly superheroic. Created by Melissa Rosenberg, the screenwriter of five “Twilight” movies as well as a writer on TV shows including “Dexter,” and starring the acerbic Krysten Ritter of “Don’t Trust the B____ in Apartment 23,” it’s a clever 21st-century take on film noir, featuring a heroine who hides her superstrength because it’s at the root of her extreme emotional vulnerability and fear. There’s a tricky balancing act going on — crossing a moody detective show with both a comic action thriller and a woman-in-peril psychological drama — but Ms. Rosenberg proves to be mostly up to the task.
(13) M.I.T. researchers’ haste to open a time capsule addressed to the year 2957, found during construction, led the media to kid them about their deficient counting skills.
(14) Hunger Games‘ heroine Katniss Everdeen (played by comedian Whitney Avalon) and Harry Potter‘s Hermione Granger (played by actress Molly C. Quinn) are facing off in an epic edition of Princess Rap Battles.
[Thanks to Brian Z., John King Tarpinian, Steven H Silver, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day JJ .]
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Re #6: The advice may be broadly useful, but when she talks about flipping the genders, she may be playing to a bit of a misguided stereotype. At least one survey (by Randall Munroe of xkcd fame) strongly suggests that the myth about women having more names for colors than men is entirely false (although it also suggests some other sex-linked differences in color naming that are not particularly flattering towards men). Munroe’s report of his survey’s results is very amusing and well worth browsing. I really like the miscellaneous section at the end.
http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
Don’t forget to vote in the Fourth Round of the Fantasy Movie Bracket! I don’t know about anyone else but The Princess Bride’s match-ups upset me every time. Sometimes the things you love never really get challenged, and other times the things you love are up against other things you love every single time and it is not okay.
In other words: Dice suck. I might ragequit next time I’m in a gaming store.
Hey all, bit of a obscure request because I’m sure I’m going too far back, but remember pre-Hugos you were going through a mass recommendation phase of novels, short stories, fanzines etc and some specific regions like Irish books/authors and Aussie books/authors?
Was any lists compiled during that time of all the recommendations suggested? I’d be particularly interested in books of the last two, and any other country specific lists.
Thanks.
@The Young Pretender: What is “Dagger and the Crown”?
Maybe so, but interestingly, some percentage of women see more colors than men.
Of course, those women don’t hold a candle to the mantis shrimp.
Red Wombat: I see from your twitter feed that NewHound has passed her probationary internship and is now a full-fledged member of Chez Wombat, with all rights and privileges appertaining thereto. Congratulations to you and to her!
Damn, does that thing sound dangerous!
I hope it doesn’t blow a tiny hole in my shoe before I finish stepping on it.
The women are eating all the shrimp?! That’s misandry!
@Vasha
It is bad autocorrect when I was trying to type “Dagger and the Coin,” Daniel Abraham’s series that is the love child of Game of Thrones and Wolf Hall.
One of the better discussions I’ve read–years back, and I can’t remember the specifics, unfortunately–about color perception differences across genders pointed out that women have traditionally tended to be more involved in the fabric arts. Matching colors for embroidery threads, or dying cloth, or yarn, tends to encourage a certain sensitivity to color distinctions–hence the fact that women tend to differentiate between subtle shades of colors where men don’t has as much to do with culture and gender roles as with anything innate. (So, as the excerpt at #6 would imply, an artist, male or female, would likely have more precise color differentiation than a non-artist.)
I’ve no idea if there has been any real research done on the way gender stereotypes encourage color distinctions or not; as I said, I don’t remember the details of the conversation or source. I do remember that it was a discussion of the “strong” Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which most linguists qualify very carefully these days . . .
@Mary Frances
It’s actually hard to find a modern linguist who takes it seriously at all. (The idea that if your language lacks a word for a concept, you will be unable to grasp that concept.) If anything, S&W appear to have gotten the problem exactly backwards. What’s interesting isn’t the terms your language leaves out (e.g. singular/plural in Japanese) but rather the ones the language forces you to put in (e.g. masculine/feminine in English singluar pronouns).
Contrary to Sapir-Whorf, even when a language lacks a concept, it’s always possible to explain it to people–you just need more words to do it. As one of my professors was fond of saying “nothing is ineffable.” BUT, if there’s a concept that your language forces you to provide, then you really struggle with the idea that in some other language it just may not be specified. So Americans speaking Japanese tend to think “hon” means “a book,” even though it also means “books.”
I still can’t forgive Whorf for giving people the crazy idea that Inuktitut has 100 words for snow. (It has 4.) He just didn’t understand polysynthetic languages.
@Stuart T
Not for most of them (Retro Hugo is an exception), but collating is in progress. Stay tuned. 🙂
“Schadenfreude”, for instance. It’s a term that doesn’t exist in English. But the concept can certainly be explained and understood, it just takes more words. And if a word is useful enough, it will be borrowed into the language. “Computer” pops up in any number of non-Indo-European languages nowadays. And anyone who wrote “I felt a lot of schadenfreude during the Hugos” is perfectly understood. Heck, that word’s so useful it’s in my spell-check.
From Lurkertype re: schadenfreude:
And it gets its own song in Avenue Q.
That’s schadenfreude…
People taking pleasure in your pain…
Cally on November 21, 2015 at 11:51 am said:
Red Wombat: I see from your twitter feed that NewHound has passed her probationary internship and is now a full-fledged member of Chez Wombat, with all rights and privileges appertaining thereto. Congratulations to you and to her!
Hound and thrush!
Which sounds like she ought to be running a pub, or possibly a B&B.
Aaron: I wonder if we can find someone who is “this tall” to criticize Lovecraft. Of course, Joshi probably doesn’t think anyone’s tall enough. Has Stephen King ever opined on the matter? The ghosts of Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov could probably appear and go “yeah, little bit racist” and Joshi would complain.
Thanks for the link. I miss Ebert. You always knew where you stood with him, and he liked that sci-fi stuff. Oh, for the olden days when Siskel and Ebert would try to outdo each other in how much they hated a bad movie. Good times.
My wife and I see the same color gamut, but she has much better taste. (Not that I’m tasteless, as my collection of shirts in pink, salmon, raspberry, watermelon, and dusty rose demonstrates. To say nothing of those in lilac, lavender, violet, fuschia, and related flower shades.)
@lurkertype
That’s a great example! (I usually use “selfie,” but that one’s better.)
Interestingly, this appears to be an ability that all other animals lack. If you look at papers on animal communication, this ability to associate a symbol with a new concept is something that everyone is trying to demonstrate in animals. There have been a number of false alarms, but so far it hasn’t happened.
Gorilla sign-language was probably the most exciting and, ultimately, the most disappointing. Essentially, the gorillas could learn hundreds of signs, but they would only use them to get treats. They never used them to communicate with each other, nor did they use them to ask questions of the humans.
Slate wrote a lengthy article on the sad truth about ape language research in general.
The English word for “schadenfreude” is “schadenfreude.” Most English speakers who use it today neither capitalize it nor italicize it, which (along with its inclusion in various dictionaries of English) suggests that it has been fully accepted as a loan. However, as one of those “fancy” words, it may not appear in the lexicons of many native speakers of English.
In general, language acquisition theory suggests that the hardest parts of a second+ language to acquire are not the “we-don’t-have-a-word-for-it-so-we-can’t-see-it” ones (they’re second on the list) but rather the cases where the target language draws different boundaries or has different refinements (sub-categories of snow that aren’t the same as the sub-categories of your L1–but you can learn them if you really want/need to). Thus, if we just lack a word, we can have it explained to us, as with “schadenfreude,” and have a reasonable chance of learning the new word. The strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis simply isn’t consistent with any variation of the hypothesis-testing model of language acquisition, since the whole point is that speakers are constantly creating language.
On the other hand, if you are trying to explain non-concrete concepts that do not exist in the culture of the language learner, those are learnable but MUCH harder. I’ve lived in cultures that themselves do not have “property” or a concept of “fiction” but interact with cultures that do and can confirm that Le Guin’s take on this in The Dispossessed isn’t naïve Sapir-Whorfism. We genuinely DO let our perceptual barriers affect what we see, but this too can be overcome.
However, the most difficult are the cases where we THINK we understand but actually are simply making an incorrect overlay from our L1 onto our L2. Anyone doing writing assessment knows that problems with prepositions are endemic to English Language Learners’ writing because English prepositions do not match up neatly with those of other languages but can appear to from the POV of an ELL (trying mapping the Hochdeutsche an with English prepositions, for example).
I just read another interesting story: “Limestone, Lye, and the Buzzing of Flies” by Kate Heartfield. It’s in a rather similar vein to Angela Slatter’s Of Sorrow and Such, but grimmer, without a community of friends and without even obvious moral superiority of the main character. (Yeah, this has been the week of the dark in my reading.) Slatter depicts a world of conflict between men and women, with women (users of witchcraft) forced to live marginally under threat of violence; she fills a novella with the various ways these women live with danger and interact with each other. Heartfield’s short story strips conflict down to its essence, a mythic eternal repetition of the story of “the smith” and “the smith’s wife” (in the setting of one of those historical village reenactments!) Slatter had primed me to think of it as, again, between men and women; but maybe it is not, maybe just a contrast between ways of thinking even if most men would be on one side, most women in another. Of course, it is a common
I just read another interesting story: “Limestone, Lye, and the Buzzing of Flies” by Kate Heartfield. It’s in a rather similar vein to Angela Slatter’s Of Sorrow and Such, but grimmer, without a community of friends and without even obvious moral superiority of the main character. (Yeah, this has been the week of the dark in my reading.) Slatter depicts a world of conflict between men and women, with women (users of witchcraft) forced to live marginally under threat of violence; she fills a novella with the various ways these women live with danger and interact with each other. Heartfield’s short story strips conflict down to its essence, a mythic eternal repetition of the story of “the smith” and “the smith’s wife” (in the setting of one of those historical village reenactments!) Slatter had primed me to think of it as, again, between men and women; but maybe it is not, maybe just a contrast between ways of thinking even if most men would be on one side, most women in another. Of course, it is a common human thought mode to gender such contrasts. In any case, I think people who liked Of Sorrow and Such might be interested to read “Limestone, Lye, and the Buzzing of Flies”.
human thought mode to gender such contrasts. In any case, I think people who liked Of Sorrow and Such might be interested to read “Limestone, Lye, and the Buzzing of Flies”.
Just read Flora Segunda by Ysabeau Wilce. Lovely book. Great characters, great style choices. And so nice to see a daring plan concocted by teenagers fail utterly. I’ll be getting the sequels.
@Kyra YA is generally not my thing, but I loved Flora Segunda for precisely the reasons you named. The characters, the style, and the fact that plans made by teenagers tend to come out like plans made by teenagers often do. 🙂
Flora Segunda is delightful. Wonderful world-building, and teens who act like teens.
Hmmm. After trying to explain to my husband the differences between sage, celery, and celadon green, we have settled for saying he grew up with only eight crayons in his box, so he can’t be blamed for his lack of color discrimination..
At Long Last, Sci-Fi and Fantasy Have Infiltrated the Literary Mainstream – WIRED
@Mike maybe for next roundup –
http://www.wired.com/2015/11/geeks-guide-sci-fi-fantasy-mainstream/
The podcast is talking about the new anthology of best American science fiction and fantasy with commentary by Joe Hill and John Joseph Adams. Also brief comments by Jess Row, Seanan McGuire, and Carmen Maria Machado.
Vasha’s link is broken. The story’s here: Limestone, Lye, and the Buzzing of Flies. I’m digging that title.
BethZ (at 3:18):
see also
Mrs. Blandings Chooses Paint Colors for Dream House
Has anyone else noticed that the actor playing Dumbledore in the entertaining rap video eerily resembles renowned smog Michael J. Walsh?
Greg Hullender: It’s actually hard to find a modern linguist who takes it [“strong” Sapir-Whorf] seriously at all.
I’m aware. But I’m an historical linguist, not a theoretical one, so I didn’t want to get into the theory for fear of finding myself immediately out of my depth. Which is also probably why I remember the “color distinctions and gender” part of the discussion, not the rest of it so much . . .
You took the words out of my mouth. I didn’t even make it to my beloved Vincent D’Onofrio, because good guys no matter how shady using torture to get true information and angsting about it for all of three seconds NOT ENOUGH NOPE IN THE WORLD.
Jim’s (and then others’) comments on Jessica Jones remind me that there’s a service I wish someone would provide on a regular basis: a place to go before viewing or reading the new hotness, with an emphasis on work that is overall really darned good or outright excellent, that would provide some clear commentary on trigger issues. I’ve been feeling this more and more the last couple of years, but it’s a long-standing thing – there’s stuff that may be fine for a lot of folks that simply isn’t safe for me given my trauma history, and I hate to miss out on things friends are enjoying and talking about, but I also hate to dive in and then lose an evening or a day or a series of nights or whatever to trauma crap.
I’m not looking for commentary about whether it’s suitable for kids (am not one, can’t be a parent), or how it conforms to a particular stance within evangelical Protestantism, or anything like that. I approach things as an adult, appreciative of many kinds of art and craft, impaired in my ability to partake by things as outside conscious control as a broken leg. Bringing this up usually gets me accused of being a censor anyway, but the File 770 commentariat as a whole seems sharper then that. Does anyone do this kind of thing on a regular basis? If not, doing my little part to help demonstrate demand.
I looked at Munroe’s write-up of his color survey, and was amused by the number-one conclusion, which is “nobody can spell fuchsia, including [him].” To be fair, that mapping of spelling-to-pronunciation (or vice versa, but I think it’s one of those named-for-a-botanist flowers where the spelling came first) is completely nonintuitive, at least in English.
Based on this one, “ghoti” could also be spelled “ghochs” or “ghochsi.”
Bruce Baugh: Bringing this up usually gets me accused of being a censor anyway,
Even without a traumatic history, I too would appreciate a resource that offered clear and non-judgemental guidance on trigger issues. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any, so please consider this my contribution to the demand for such. In addition, I’d like to say that anyone who ever accused you of attempting censorship for wanting any kind of personally relevant information about content deserves to be smacked with a Webster’s Second Edition Unabridged Dictionary (that’s the Really Big one). In my humble opinion, at least.
Thanks for the link. I read the article.
That is truly sad, and deeply unsettling. The primate communication centers sound like they are being run by pseudoscientists and cranks. I am shocked that the mass resignations in 2012 were so little reported.
Saddest of all is the story of Koko the gorilla, who sounds like an overweight former starlet fussed over and petted and indulged by her caretakers, leading an empty life of TV and inactivity and bullying and impossibly rich and overindulgent food, while the poor schmo who was supposed to be her mate lies neglected and crying, locked away and ignored.
From the article:
Actually, “Schadenfreude” has a perfectly good English equivalent, namely “gloat”, though it’s a verb rather than a noun. And Germans usually translate “Schadenfreude” as “gloating” (native German speaker and translator here, so I know what I’m talking about). We wouldn’t use “Schadenfreude” in an English language context, since that just looks weird.
There actually are German words which have no adequate English translation, e.g. “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (coming to terms with the negative aspects of the past), “Spießer” (boring conservative person you despise) and its adjective form “spießig”, “Heimat” (usually translated as “home” or “homeland”, but that doesn’t hit the full meaning) and its compounds like “Heimatfilm” or “Heimatroman” (a film respectively literary genre you don’t have) or “Trauerarbeit” (literally working through your grief). And German has approx. eight different names for different types of cabbage (plus regional variations), all of which translate as “cabbage” or “kale” in English, which can be very frustrating when talking about cooking.
In fact, I’m not sure why English speakers are so fascinated by the word “Schadenfreude” anyway. If you want to adopt a German word into English, please take “Spießer”, since that’s the German word I miss most.
@Cora
We like Schadenfreude because it gives our English a certain je ne sais quoi.
Now try translating “puppy” into German. 🙂
I also hate the way that torture has been normalised even for good guys. And the torture scene in Daredevil was not even glossed over like a similar scene in Arrow (which I also hated), it happened in full view, while Night Nurse was looking on.
The torture scenes pretty much killed the series for me together with the confession scenes, because those scenes of Matt asking for forgiveness for the bad things he is about to do play into a really nasty anti-Catholic stereotype (probably dating back to the Reformation) that still lingers in Protestant parts of Germany, namely that Catholics are hypocrites, because they can do whatever bad things they want and just have to go to confession and everything is forgiven. Now I understand that this particular negative sterotype about Catholics does not exist in the US, but that doesn’t make it any less offensive.
It’s a pity, because there was a lot to like about Daredevil such as one of the better representations of blindness I’ve ever seen in the popular media.
Literally translating “sad puppy” or “rabid puppy” is actually easy, though it still leads to confused looks among Germans. I usually explained the puppies to Germans as “They’re like PEGIDA or the AfD, only for science fiction”.
I’ve frankly become wary of pronouncements from both sides of the animal cognition debate. There’s been a long history of people making assumptions based on the conclusions they want to come to, whether it be that animals experience certain forms of cognition or that they don’t.
Issues of care and diet are, of course, a separate thing that always need outside checks.
Bruce
I am fortunate in that the triggers for my own PTSD are easily understood; very few people are going to assert that getting blown up and set on fire by an exploding oxygen regulator when you are 36 weeks pregnant is not going to have profound psychological consequences. Thus, when I point out that I can no more control those consequences than I can decide that my lungs should stop bleeding, even fewer people are going to assert that obviously I’m not trying hard enough because if I really put some effort into it my lungs would cease to bleed.
Not everybody has such easily understood causes for their response to trauma; we all differ. We tend, however, to have fairly similar results, and those results are really not fun, just as bleeding lungs are really not fun, which is why I assert that this is a question of fact, that this is real, and that people wittering on as if we have chosen to be upset about things are blithering idiots.
File770 is, happily, not well supplied with stocks of blithering idiots; the idea that trying to refrain from distressing others represents Censorship seems to be a complete misunderstanding of what censorship is.
It’s fairly late on this side of the pond, so I had better get some sleep; I simply wanted to say that I understand your concerns, and I’m pretty sure that Mike and our fellow posters do so as well…
@Kyra
Whenever science comes up with a really unpopular result, there are always people who strongly resist believing it. Climate change and evolution are two really good examples. Animal cognition is another. Nearly all the real scientists who study these topics are lined up on the same side of the core issues. It’s only among non-experts that there’s debate over the basics.
An excellent book I highly recommend is Are Dolphins Really Smart?: The mammal behind the myth. Although its focus is dolphins, it discusses the broader problem of animal cognition from a scientific perspective, and it’s very approachable.
It isn’t all bad news; dolphins are amazing creatures in a lot of ways. We should not insist that they be “people with fins” to appreciate and protect them.
OK, re trigger warnings, I should say that of the stories I recommended today, “Limestone…” contains a description of burning at the stake, as does Of Sorrow and Such; “Descent” talks about a school shooting. The others have some violence too, but not described as much.
Mary Frances
I cross posted with you in response to Bruce; I just wanted to say that I agree with you in principle, though I was thinking more along the lines of the complete Oxford English Dictionary. It would need to be a team effort, though, because they’re big, they’re heavy, and there’s an awful lot of them. Volunteers could be called for…
Yes, mantis shrimps (which are neither mantises nor shrimps) are definitely awesome. One of the co-authors of The Science of Discworld used to have one as a pet, and reports that they’re surprisingly intelligent. He tried giving it puzzles to solve to get its food, and after doing this for a little while, the critter seemed to get addicted, and would scorn food that didn’t require any puzzles!
That Oatmeal cartoon is great—I’ve seen it before, and recommend it to anyone who’s curious about these odd and entertaining little beasts. But my favorite is this humorous video from ZeFrank, who does extremely good parodies of the standard nature video style. His voice is pitch perfect, and his scripts are excellent. “True Facts about the Mantis Shrimp” is well worth four minutes of your time. “Imagine a color you can’t even imagine. Now do that nine more times.” 🙂
those scenes of Matt asking for forgiveness for the bad things he is about to do
That hits a slightly different stereotype in the U.S., involving fundamentalist Protestants rather than Catholics.
Cora on November 21, 2015 at 5:06 pm said:
… Actually, “Schadenfreude” has a perfectly good English equivalent, namely “gloat”, though it’s a verb rather than a noun. And Germans usually translate “Schadenfreude” as “gloating” (native German speaker and translator here, so I know what I’m talking about). We wouldn’t use “Schadenfreude” in an English language context, since that just looks weird.
Actually, it is not that tidy a fit between the two words.
While one can simply gloat over someone else’s failure, as with schadenfreude, to gloat has a broader reach.
I think more usually one gloats about one’s own victories, without much focus on any specific other person’s loss.
Poor winners gloat and brag: it’s all about them.
Whereas schadenfreude focuses on enjoying the spectacle of the ill fortune of another, without any notion of being oneself a winner.
It’s a more precise description.
The reason English speakers picked up on schadenfreude is that its meaning differs in a useful way from what was available from gloat.
What we need are more versions of doesthedogdie.com. One of my triggers is animal abuse, so if there’s any kind of pet in the preview, I check the site before buying a ticket. One reason I love science fiction is the relative lack of endangered animals.
Sadly, my first thought was “That’s not how the song goes!”
Jessica Jones blew me away with how far they took the story. Unlike Daredevil, whose questionable plot choices had me skimming for good cinematography until about episode 6, JJ gripped me from the first scene. What can I say, I’m a sucker for the Noir tint of grimdark.
Leave the scroll, take the pixel.