(1) X-WING. Hollywood decorating the neighborhood for the premiere of Rogue One. Robert Kerr’s photo shows a prop now on display curbside near the theater.
Yahoo! Movies ran a series of photos taken while the fighter was being hauled into position.
Star Wars has definitely landed in Hollywood.
Preparations for Saturday’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story premiere have already seen some big road closures on Hollywood Blvd. — and on Tuesday, an X-Wing was spotted in the area where the stars of the film will gather in a few days.
Pictures quickly spread on social media, as apparently keeping an X-Wing secret is even trickier than keeping plans for the Death Star under wraps.
The red-carpet premiere itself also prompted major road closures in Hollywood, with the X-Wing now clogging streets up further. Road closures will last until 6 a.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 13.
(2) JAM ON MARS. Will Curiosity need Tommy John surgery? Seeker says “Curiosity’s Mars Drill Is Jammed”.
The Mars rover’s robotic arm-mounted drill appears to have malfunctioned and NASA has instructed the rover to hang tight while they find a solution.
Having your drill break down while you’re millions of miles from the nearest hardware store would be a bummer, but that is exactly what’s happened to NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity.
The rover, which is currently located at the lower slopes of the 3.4-mile-high Mount Sharp (officially known as Aeolis Mons), was supposed to carry out a drilling operation on a geologically interesting location on Dec. 1 when mission controllers got word that Curiosity was unable to complete its commands. Early indications show that the rover detected a fault with the “drill feed” mechanism that lowers the drill piece to the rocky sample and aborted the operation.
(3) AT HOME. The Chicago Reader visited a popular sf author in her new (since 2012) neighborhood — “Mary Robinette Kowal makes puppets and writes in a 1913 building in the Ukranian Village”.
A fire is roaring in the fireplace and sprays of bright red winterberry adorn a vase on the deco mantel. The scent of hot cider wafts through the air. What Victorian-era storybook scene have I stepped into on this chilly, gray day in late November? It’s the home of Hugo Award–winning author, audiobook narrator, and professional puppeteer Mary Robinette Kowal, a spacious and stately 1913 apartment in Ukrainian Village that she shares with her winemaker husband, Robert, and their two cats.
(4) RETURN OF RUTLAND WEEKEND TV. The Guardian ran this feature in August — “Ex-Python Eric Idle and Brian Cox to take on The Entire Universe for the BBC”. But now the BBC broadcast date is nearing.
Written by Idle, the one-hour show will feature the return of Rutland Weekend Television, the haphazard station depicted in Idle’s sketch show of the same name during the 1970s.
Filmed in front of a live studio audience, The Entire Universe will feature an “explosion of comedy, music and dance” and will air on BBC2.
Davis plays The Big Bang and comedian Fielding is Einstein, while Game of Thrones actor Hannah Waddingham tackles time, and Robin Ince attempts to keep order.
Idle has written songs for the Christmas special, which will be choreographed by Arlene Phillips and combine “fascinating facts about the birth of the universe with larger-than-life comedy characters”.
Cox finds himself in a major musical at Rutland Weekend Television, after thinking he is booked to give a lecture.
The program will be broadcast in Britain on BBC2 on December 26.
(5) DO JAMES DAVIS NICOLL’S HOMEWORK. He’s lining up books to review in 2017, and feels there’s one writer demographic that requires more of his attention:
Don’t often tick the Other/Genderqueer/Non-Binary box in my site’s review gender fields. Can change that. What authors should I consider?
He emailed me the link asking, “Do the F770 people have suggestions?”
(6) HINES BENEFIT AUCTION #12. The twelfth of Jim C. Hines’ 24 Transgender Michigan Fundraiser auctions is for the four-book Twixt series from Dawn Metcalf.
Today’s auction is for a signed set of all four TWIXT books. But wait – there’s more! Metcalf also has a pile of “own voices” and books she’s offered to donate to a local shelter and/or children’s hospital in your name. The higher the bidding, the more books she’ll donate!
- $25: Two books
- $35: Three books
- $45: Four books
- $60: Five books
- $75: Six books
About Book One: INDELIBLE:
Some things are permanent. Indelible. And they cannot be changed back.
Joy Malone learns this the night she sees a stranger with all-black eyes across a crowded room-right before the mystery boy tries to cut out her eye. Instead, the wound accidentally marks her as property of Indelible Ink, and this dangerous mistake thrusts Joy into an incomprehensible world-a world of monsters at the window, glowing girls on the doorstep and a life that will never be the same. Now Joy must pretend to be Ink’s chosen one-his helper, his love, his something for the foreseeable future … and failure to be convincing means a painful death for them both. Swept into a world of monsters, illusion, immortal honor and revenge, Joy discovers that sometimes, there are no mistakes.
Somewhere between reality and myth lies … THE TWIXT!
(7) TINGLE’S SATIRICAL NEWS SITE. Chuck Tingle harpoons the “alt-right” with his most feared weapon – laughter — at a new website, Buttbart. At the bottom of the home page are links for donating to the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood and the Billings Public Library Foundation
READER POLL: What is real?
We asked our readers if reality was a constantly shifting web of cosmic planes, blinking in and out of exhistence depending on our location in spacetime.
YES: %87
NO: %2
K’GULH-TUB KA: %11
(8) GLENN OBIT. Mercury astronaut and former U.S. Senator John Glenn (1921-2016) died December 8 reports SF News Site.
Glenn was the last surviving member of the Mercury 7 astronauts and the first American to orbit the Earth, flying on the third Mercury mission on February 20, 1962 aboard Friendship 7. Following his flight and status as a national hero, Glenn was grounded by President Kennedy and eventually became a Senator from Ohio and ran unsuccessfully for President. The oldest of the Mercury astronauts, he flew a second time in 1998 about the space shuttle Discovery, becoming the oldest man to fly in space.
CNN’s obituary recounted the highlights of his 1962 mission:
….Glenn recalled in a Life magazine article a strange phenomenon that occurred during the mission: “There, spread out as far as I could see were literally thousands of tiny luminous objects that glowed in the black sky like fireflies. I was riding slowly through them, and the sensation was like walking backwards through a pasture where someone had waved a wand and made all the fireflies stop right where they were and glow steadily.”
The flight also featured a glitch that contributed to Glenn’s reputation for being cool under fire.
Because of an indicator light showing that the Mercury capsule’s heat shield was partly detached, mission controllers decided to bring Glenn home early and told him not to jettison his aft retro rockets, which allowed him to maneuver the craft in space. Because the retropack was strapped to the heat shield, it was thought it would provide an extra measure of security.
It would later be learned that the heat shield wasn’t damaged, but the fiery re-entry was made more spectacular by the scorching retropack in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Glenn’s first words when he stepped aboard the deck of the USS Noa were, “Boy, that was a real fireball of a ride!”
…More than 20 years after their historic missions, the team was immortalized in the 1983 movie “The Right Stuff.” Glenn — portrayed by Ed Harris — didn’t care much for the film, saying, “I thought it was dramatic enough without Hollywood doing its number on it.”
We are saddened by the loss of Sen. John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth. A true American hero. Godspeed, John Glenn. Ad astra. pic.twitter.com/89idi9r1NB
— NASA (@NASA) December 8, 2016
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY GIRLS
- Born December 8, 1953 – Kim Basinger, Batman’s Vicki Vale.
- Born December 8, 1964 – Teri Hatcher, Lois and Clark’s Lois Lane.
(10) TA-POCKETA-POCKETA
- Born December 8, 1894 – James Thurber
(11) A GRAIL OF A TALE. A dinosaur tail was discovered trapped in amber in Myanmar.
The tail of a 99-million-year-old dinosaur has been found entombed in amber, an unprecedented discovery that has blown away scientists.
Xing Lida, a Chinese paleontologist found the specimen, the size of a dried apricot, at an amber market in northern Myanmar near the Chinese border.
The remarkable piece was destined to end up as a curiosity or piece of jewelry, with Burmese traders believing a plant fragment was trapped inside.
“I realized that the content was a vertebrate, probably theropod, rather than any plant,” Xing told CNN.
“I was not sure that (the trader) really understood how important this specimen was, but he did not raise the price.”
(12) POP CULTURE COINCIDENCE. Reuters reports a “Space oddity as Dr David Bowie treats ‘starman’ Buzz Aldrin in New Zealand hospital”.
In what can only be described as a space oddity, former astronaut Buzz Aldrin is being cared for in a New Zealand hospital by Dr David Bowie after being evacuated from the South Pole.
In a truly remarkable coincidence, Aldrin’s doctor shares the name of the late British singer whose greatest hits included songs such as “Starman” and others about space travel that could easily have been penned for the great American astronaut.
(13) FANTASTIC FICTION AT KGB. Reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Livia Llewellyn and Sarah Pinsker on December 21 on Wednesday, December 21 at the KGB Bar in New York. Event starts at 7 p.m. Details at the linked post.
Livia Llewellyn is a writer of dark fantasy, horror, and erotica, whose short fiction has appeared in over forty anthologies and magazines and has been reprinted in multiple best-of anthologies, including The Best Horror of the Year series, Years Best Weird Fiction, and The Mammoth Book of Best Erotica. Her first collection, Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors received two Shirley Jackson Award nominations, for Best Collection, and for Best Novelette (for “Omphalos”). Her story “Furnace” received a 2013 Shirley Jackson Award nomination for Best Short Story. Her second collection, Furnace was published this year.
Sarah Pinsker is the author of the Nebula Award winning novelette “Our Lady of the Open Road” and the Sturgeon Award winning “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind.” Her fiction has appeared in magazines including Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Uncanny, among others, and numerous anthologies and year’s bests. She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various independent labels and a fourth forthcoming. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland with her wife, dog, and a yard full of sentient vines.
(14) THE WORK THAT STORIES DO. Foz Meadows’ well-written piece “Unempathic Bipeds of Failure: The Relationship Between Stories and Politics” found a home at Black Gate:
In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need stories to act as emotional dry-runs for caring about different types of people, because our empathy would already natively extend to everyone. But we don’t live in that world; because if we did, somewhat paradoxically, we’d have less urgent need of its empathy, as its unequivocal presence would make it much harder for us to discriminate in the first place.
Which is precisely why stories matter; why they’ve always mattered, and will continue to matter for as long as our species exists. Stories can teach us the empathy we otherwise lack, or whose development is railroaded by context, and yeah, it’s frustrating to think that another person can’t just look at you, accept what you are, and think, human, different to me in some respects but fundamentally as whole and as worthy of love, protection and basic rights as I am, but you’ve got to understand: we’re a bunch of bipedal mammals with delusions of morality, a concept we invented and which we perpetuate through culture and manners, faith and history and memory – which is to say, through stories, which change as we change (though we don’t always like to admit that part), and in that context, the value of the impossible – of SFF as a genre – is that it gives us those things in imaginary settings, takes us far enough out of the present that we can view them at a more objective remove than real life ever allows, and so get a better handle on them than our immediate biases might otherwise permit…
And so I think about the UKIP supporter who empathized with a fictional refugee [in Dragon Age 2] but voted to dehumanize real ones; about the millions of people who grew up on stories about the evils of Nazism, but now turn a blind eye to swastikas being graffitied in the wake of Trump’s election; of Puppies both Sad and Rabid who contend that the presence of politics in genre is a leftist conspiracy while blatantly pushing what even they call a political agenda; about fake news creators and the Ministry of Truth; about every f***ing dystopian novel whose evocation by name feels simultaneously on the nose and frighteningly apropos right now, because we shouldn’t have to cite The Handmaid’s Tale to explain why Mike Pence and Steve Bannon (to say nothing of Trump’s infamous comments) are collectively terrifying, and yet see above re: unempathic bipeds of failure, forever and always; and yet …
(15) ORANGE CONE BY THE ROADSIDE. The discussion of Meadows’ main points, however, was drowned out by the reaction to several lines in her closing:
For the past few years, the Sad and Rabid Puppies – guided by an actual neo-Nazi – have campaigned against what they perceive as the recent politicization of SFF as a genre, as though it’s humanly possible to write a story involving people that doesn’t have a political dimension; as though “political narrative” means “I disagreed with the premise or content, which makes it Wrong” and not “a narrative which contains and was written by people.”
Vox Day reacted in a post titled “Please to remove the libel”:
I have written to John O’Neill, my former editor at Black Gate, asking him to remove this false, malicious, and materially damaging libel directed at me, and by extension, the Sad and Rabid Puppies. As I was a long-time contributor to Black Gate, Mr. O’Neill knows perfectly well that I am neither a neo-Nazi nor a National Socialist, I have never been a neo-Nazi or a National Socialist, I do not belong to, or subscribe to the tenets of, the German National Socialist Workers Party or any subsequent facsimile, and I do not appreciate the libelous attempts of Ms Meadows, to publicly and falsely assert that I am “an actual neo-Nazi”.
Vox Popoli commenters spent the day conspicuously scavenging the web for Meadows’ personal and financial details and lodging their finds as comments on Day’s post. Meadows Twitter stream also has been haunted by people unsuccessfuly trying to intimidate the author by sounding as if there could be ominous consequences.
Day made several updates to his post, one saying a resolution was in process.
UPDATE: As I expected, John was very reasonable about it and the matter is being resolved. Thanks for your support, everyone.
But in the hours since, Meadows’ text has remained unchanged nor has O’Neill added any comment.
(16) INVASION. In a New York Times article “California Today: Booksellers See a Threat in New Law”, the A.C.L.U. has an opinion.
A new law going into effect next month mandates that anyone selling a signed book for more than $5 must vouch for the autograph’s authenticity. That includes, among other things, identifying the previous owner.
“If you visit my bookstore to trade in that copy of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ you picked up at a book signing, I’ll need to take down your name and address and then provide it to whoever happens to buy the book from me,” said Scott Brown, who runs Eureka Books in Eureka.
The law was designed to protect consumers from the booming trade in fake collectibles. But it is written so loosely that some worry it might drag booksellers down.
“I can understand why booksellers are concerned,” said Michael Risher, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U. of Northern California. “The law is an invasion into privacy and should be amended.”
The legislation began with an effort by State Representative Ling Ling Chang to broaden a 1992 law about sports memorabilia. She joined forces with Mark Hamill, the “Star Wars” actor who kept seeing signed posters that were fake. Booksellers say they didn’t realize they were vulnerable until after Gov. Jerry Brown signed the measure in September.
Ms. Chang, who was unavailable for comment, has published on her Facebook page a statement that both “the letter and spirit of the law” do not apply to booksellers. Her reasoning is that the law is aimed at “dealers,” who are mostly in the business of selling signed collectibles. Since booksellers sell all kinds of books, many of them unsigned, Ms. Chang argues that leaves them off the hook.
But some booksellers worry that is not true….
(17) RATS! New Zealand’s 2017 national sf convention has opened a writing competition.
In our short story competition, you have the opportunity to channel your inner rodent, or world build a mischief of rats… Write us a short story which, in honour of our Ghost of Honour, Orville, includes a reference to a rat.
The competition is held in association with SpecFicNZ, who are generously contributing prizes, and judged by Guest of Honour Seanan McGuire. Get scratching!
We’re also running a drabble competition – 100 words of fiction based around a word you invented. If you’re new to writing, this could be a great place to start.
Find out more at www.lexicon.cons.nz/comps.php. Other competitions will be announced shortly; artists, filkers, and cosplayers, stay tuned.
(18) DEAL US IN. Tor.com’s Natalie Zutter has good news for Cards Against Humanity fans: “Patrick Rothfuss and Cards Against Humanity Release Special Sci-Fi Pack”.
For $5, this pack of 30 cards “poking fun at the Sci-Fi genre” (in Rothfuss’ words) will let you throw down the geekiest cards in your next game of CAH. All proceeds from the first two weeks of sales will go to Worldbuilders, Rothfuss’ nonprofit. What’s more, Rothfuss says, they’ll double that donation before passing it along to Heifer International, the organization that Worldbuilders supports.
Here’s everyone who contributed to the cards!
- Delilah S. Dawson
- Elizabeth Bear
- Jim C. Hines
- Myke Cole
- Martha Wells
- Catherynne M. Valente
- Patrick Rothfuss
[Thanks to JJ, Xtifr, Bonnie McDaniel, Cat Eldridge, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Redheadedfemme. (Yes, Bonnie, I held over a few you suggested last year.)]
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(7) – Wow Chuck Tingle really is the gift that keeps on giving, I am glad “he” is on the side of good or at least the side that likes to make fun of evil.
(11) – Feathery dinosaurs are my favourite! What a fabulous find! I would love if we could confirm one of the current theories that T.Rex had feathers too, I just love imagining him with little wings instead of little arms 😀 Or even something like this ha ha! http://coelasquid.tumblr.com/post/111317780763/gentlemanbones-we-cant-prove-they-werent-huge
(12) That is so adorable and random, I am definitely picturing this doctor in Ziggy Stardust makeup XD
(15) – Anyone who lets or even encourages their commentors to dox and stalk anyone they don’t agree with for the purposes of intimidating them, silencing them or ruining their life is disgusting, regardless of whether that site owner is a Neo-Nazi or not. Which isn’t even debatable at this point, VD’s views clearly and repeatedly align with Neo-Nazi ideology, I don’t even care what VD thinks makes his views NOT Neo-Nazi, that sort of weaseling “I believe these things that we have a name for but don’t you dare name me with that name” bullshit is just not worth giving a shred of attention to, it’s been refuted many times. Foz’ essay is very thoughtful and I’m glad the Black Gate hasn’t given in to VD’s sad attempts to censor them.
@RedWombat – I lol’ed, thanks for that ha ha
@Msb – just wanted to clarify, did you mean eye-opening in general or eye-opening with more of a social justice bent?
I think it might be more effective to just say “Vox Day, who insists that he’s not technically a Nazi, said today . . .”
Mr. Hullender just made me snort coffee out my nose and should have posted a warning.
I think you’re on to something Greg heh heh.
Worth remembering that Beale’s main objection to the term is due to the presence of the word ‘socialist’ in National Socialist. Because obviously the significant problem with the Nazis was the socialism.
Also worth remembering that he chose to include the ’14 words’ of neo-Nazism in his definition of alt-right philosophy, so yeah, enough of the fake outrage.
I normally am supportive of calling people what they want, but now is definitely not the time to call Neo-Nazis by their preferred title.
@Airboy – He isn’t President yet and already hate crimes are through the roof (I’m not going to respond to any replies comparing the few examples of violence against Trump supporters against the hundreds against marginalized people); his appointments each seem carefully chosen to 1) pay back favors and 2) most efficiently destroy whatever department they are heading; laws are already being passed (in Ohio) effectively making abortion illegal; Trump is repeatedly attacking private citizens through Twitter, acting like everybody’s favorite vanity publisher and neo-Nazi by sending his followers after anyone who dares speak against him.
I don’t see Trump taking our books away and throwing the “elite literati” into concentration camps. I could see a scenario where something similar to 9/11 happens and, since it’s Trump at the helm, he does send some population of US citizens to concentration camps (his administration is already saying it was justified in WWII). Mostly, he’ll be a disastrous President – more corrupt than any in my lifetime, I’m sure – at a time when we are still working to recover from our last disastrous President. That last one, most people I know said to themselves “well, it’s only 4 years and the economy is doing well for now. As long as nothing terrible happens, things won’t be too bad…” Then 9/11 happened and we had a vindictive child at the helm. You can’t blame anyone with a memory longer than a goldfish for freaking out a little.
I would be surprised if they didn’t have some type of feathers at some point in their lives (if nothing more than down feathers as chicks) because of phylogenetic bracketing. (Basically, if you know that humans have hair, and that hamsters have hair, then it is reasonable to think that the common ancestor of humans and hamsters had hair, and that all other descendants of that ancestor had/have hair.)
Greg Hullender said: “To be fair, when Reagan was elected in 1980, lots of my friends and I predicted he’d blow up the world, open concentration camps for LGBT people, and forbid teaching of evolution.”
To be even more fair, he did ignore a massive health crisis in the LGBT community that killed about 25,000 people by the end of his second term, as well as violating the Constitution, illegally selling arms to America’s enemies (which is literal treason), increasing the National Debt by 186%, and plunging America into a six-year long recession and unemployment crisis.
I’m a firm believer in fairness.
I am really, really, really done with 2016: RIP Greg Lake.
@PhilRM – Yeah, this is getting ridiculous.
@emgrasso – Final straw. I’ve installed Stylish. I dig the Black Gate color scheme, but damn does it hurt my eyes. Reminds me of the first (personal) websites I ever set up – I always used red, black, and silver as my color scheme (usually a black background, silver text, red links). I liked the look, but it hurt my eyes to read it.
Clicky. No clever statement attached; I’m being rushed.
With regards to Trump, what worries me most is that he will slow down all work against global warming. This has the possibility to doom whole islands, create millions and millions of refugees and with a worst case scenario of dooming humanity.
Even if he has to share that blame with many, many others.
Awareness of social issues… I have tried to think of any SFF-work that have raised my awareness or understanding of social issues and the only one I can think of is Those Who Leave Omelas. Otherwise it is mostly newspapers or non-fiction books that have enlightened me.
But Those Who Leave Omelas is one of those stories that never really leaves, that I keep on falling back to all the time.
@John Seavey: Reagan also pioneered the now-standard Republican tactic of appointing people to positions with the express purpose of undermining and destroying the agencies under their control, e.g., Anne Gorsuch at the EPA, James Watt at Interior. We’re going to see this X10 during the Trump presidency.
@airboy, I have been having the occasional conversation – with myself, mostly – about how it won’t be as bad as I fear, that generally people are decent and the worst rarely happens, but then I remember that I know history, the kind written by the victors and also the kind that gives tantalizing glimpses of what life was like for ordinary people when tyrannies were constructed. Add to that my experience of the way even ham handed demagoguery works on people and how eager we humans are to adjust to our slowly heating water and… Yeah, what @Camestros said.
Msb, I think the first real shock to my system was Suzy McKee Charnas’s Walk to the End of the World. I’m not sure why that one lifted me completely out of the world I knew into one with more and different possibilities, when The Left Hand of Darkeness, which I loved, did not.
@John Seavey
Yes, and that’s about the scale of disaster I’m expecting from Trump. We can already see that Climate Change will be his AIDS.
But I’m not really expecting a Reichstag fire, or a nuclear attack on someone, or death camps for Muslims, etc.
Continuing with our tradition of fairness, I’ll admit that I still wake up at 2 AM (including this morning) and can’t get back to sleep from worrying that I’m wrong and we really are seeing the beginning of the end of American democracy. But in the light of day, I’m okay again. 🙂
Let’s not forget his recent diplomatic bumblings around East Asia. I’m all for recognising Taiwan (I’ve been here for a month and it’s a lovely place) but maybe a situation like this calls for a light touch rather than the impulsive flailing of a tiny handed gibbon?
@Sunhawk
@Darren Garrison
I agree, but (as someone else told me recently) it won’t be a surprise if the big adult theropods didn’t have feathers, much as many big adult mammals don’t have hair.
(1)
It was so secret that the L.A. Daily News had a photo on their front page on Thursday.
If she must do something, Foz Meadows could always replace Neo-Nazi with “Racist Sexist Homophobic White Supremacist Vox Day”. He couldn’t complain of libel anymore….
Greg Hullender on December 9, 2016 at 11:50 am said:
Microscope views of the tail show that the feathers are like down, rather than the more rigid structures we tend to think of as feathers.
If sources are to be believed, there was nothing impulsive about it.
Many big adult mammals don’t have much hair. They all have some hair, except for adult whales and dolphins (though some adult whales do have a handful of hairs.)
Excellent point Darren! I love a good biology discussion, birds and reptiles are definitely my jam and their overlap with dinosaurs and each other has always fascinated me. Along with the feathers theory, just recently there were articles going around about the new idea that dinosaurs didn’t roar but may have cooed or honked like a goose lol
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/dinosaur-sounds-honk-growl-torah-kachur-1.3803212
This of course prompting some smart butts to make a video like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqxNpFgUojE
(I’m having a vague feeling this may have come up in a past pixel scroll? apologies if it has, I’ve been drifting in and out the past month or so while moving house so I may have missed it being posted)
@Darren: then I can only hope that they know what they’re doing here. I’m happy for a harder line to be taken on China, but I hope it doesn’t come at the expense of the Taiwanese people.
Whoops didn’t refresh to see Greg’s comment, I think there’s a case for there being just as many big mammals with hair as without, thinking of moose, ancient huge deer, wooly mammoths, etc. Of course, a lot of these animals are now extinct but that is neither here nor there, they still existed 🙂 So it could go either way I think! Dependent on whether it served some sort of survival purpose.
Birds are dinosaurs. Obviously!
Looks like Mike’s hosting went down for much of the day.
Mark-kitteh: Looks like Mike’s hosting went down for much of the day.
Yeah, there’s been quite a to-do over on Twitter from all the companies and individuals whose sites, administered by one of the biggest hosting companies (located in Provo), have been down for more than 12 hours. I saw a claim of hundreds of thousands of sites (don’t know if that’s true) and someone saying that it was due to a concerted DDOS attack (don’t know if that’s true, either).
Hmm, as the sage says, never ascribe to DDOS what can be explained by incompetence and/or power failure.
To amuse us in these scroll-less times: Zombies in Winter by Naomi Kritzer. Pretty much “So Much Cooking” but with added zombies!
Looking for a christmas present? How about Mars globes, complete with channels?
@Peer Tempting!
Does it show the locations of Helium and Zodanga?
Mark, thank you for the link to Zombies in Winter.
Sure, I’ll play: I predict the Trump administration brings us increased instability both economically and in international relations along with rising scapegoating of the ‘other’. The extent of the damage will be dependent on a lot of factors. We can only hope it takes the minimally destructive path.
Being ‘unhinged’ though, let me also predict: at the rectification of the electoral college they will choose a new form for Trump – that of a giant sloar…
—
On a different note:
HBO now owns all seasonal predictions:
Winter is Coming
@Greg: Reagan and Trump aren’t comparable; Trump combines the politics of Reagan with the good manners and honesty of Spiro Agnew. Reagan dogwhistled; Trump opens the floodgates to the nastiest people in the US. And while the damage of Gorsuch and Watts could gradually be cleaned up, Trump’s got paranoid lunatics running foreign policy; starting another foreign war (or even abrogating the Iran pact) is likely to cost us permanently. One crosses ones fingers that he missed yesterday’s Daniel Pipes op-ed, which said to tear up the agreement and tell Iran to shut down its nuclear program completely or we’d shut it down for them.
Hooray, everyone’s back! I spent several hours of yesterday living in an alternative universe where there was no File 770, and it wasn’t pretty.
What am I afraid he’ll do? Well, OK…here’s my “seems probable but God I hope not”
1. Trump attempts to privatize several key elements of government, is blocked, throws a temper tantrum, refuses to govern, throws gov’t into disarray. FOX news claims this shows real leadership.
2. Trump offends China for fun. China brings down another US plane. Trump loses his shit. China calls in some of their debts. Trump announces the US will default because that’s what worked in his business, and hey, what are they gonna do? Global economic turmoil ensues.
3. Trump does something weird & shitty, probably with Iran. Putin licks the Ukraine, claims that makes it his, Trump mutters something about not getting involved because he’s busy with Iran. Putin poses shirtless with a leopard.
4. Trump calls Pakistan, then India, then both, inflames tensions needlessly, possibly (God forbid) somebody nukes somebody else.
What I try not to think about:
5. North Korea gets in a mood and shoots a rocket at Japan. Trump nukes North Korea.
What I’m positive he’ll do:
6. Set climate change countermeasures back decades, put another asshat on the Supreme Court, make abortion even more difficult.
There’s my predictions/fears, take them as you will.
@Charon D
But were there airships?
@Greg Hullender much as many big adult mammals don’t have hair.
My brother-in-law is a big guy, and he’s the hairiest person I know.
@Mark: Of course. How could you scroll without them if there is no File770? And who did you think were causing the glitches? DDOS? Thats what they want us to believe.
Stupid airships! Dont even have proper contrails !
I finally looked over NPR’s huge list and found a few items of interest. One was A Promise of Fire by Amanda Bouchet – anyone read it? I skimmed the sample briefly and it seemed to have potential, although the book description on Amazon reads like a romance novel (fine if that’s what you’re looking for, but I’m not).
Unrelated web comic rec (that I found through another webcomic I read, Maximumble) – “BlackGrass”. I read the first almost-two-chapters last night and liked it a lot. The art’s pretty good and I like the story, etc. so far. Description from the about page:
Also, via Michael J. Sullivan, I learned of a multi-author holiday book sale with works by him, Bradley P. Beaulieu, Wesley Chu (my vote for best sale check-out code: bythepowerofgrayskull), Jason Hough, Kevin Hearne, Brian McClellan, and Brent Weeks. The sales apparently are directly from the authors, which probably explains why most are print-only. But especially good deals include Beaulieu’s ebooks (49 cents to $1.48), Hough’s Zero World ($10 hardback), and a couple of Sullivan’s ebooks ($3.20). (I’m sure I paid a lot more than $10 for my hardback of Zero World!) Anyway, FYI in case you’ve been eyeing these authors’ books.
Happy trails, folks – today is The Day of Three Dooms, I mean, The Day of Three Holiday Parties, which will take all the energy I (a shy introvert) have. Whee? 😉
@Peer Sylvester
Contrails? Ha, everyone knows it’s chemtrails from the invisible airships…
Trump: The grift that keeps on giving.
(Sunhawk’s remark about C. Tingle ‘way upthread knocked that loose.)
@ Sunhawk,
I meant books that introduced me to ways of being that I’d never heard or thought of. I was a late-blooming suburban kid, whose high school had 1 (one) African American, so I had a pretty limited white-bread upbringing. The Dispossessed, The ones who walk away from Omelas, Native Tongue, the Female Man, The Holdfast Chronicles, etc., etc. challenged me in wonderful ways. I imagine the mind as a muscle: the harder you work it, the stronger it gets. And because I am interested in how people live together, I love books that challenge my preconceptions and expand my ideas of the possible. One of my complaints about modern straight fiction is the “message” often seems to be: the world is broken. Well, duh. I’m interested in finding out how to put it together in better ways, and of course SF is great for that.
@ several people
Thanks for sharing your lists! I’m glad to see I’ve read a few of the works you mention, and will make notes of some others.
Sorry to reply so late; this was the first time I could get back to the site.
If your a cishet white male, things probably will be fine, outside of economic instability. In fact, Trump’s appeal is specifically to white identity politics.
But the LGBTQ community and PoC have strong reason to fear. The religious liberty bills the Republicans have been trying to pass would allow businesses and governments to deny services on the basis of gender and religion- and it would be all too easy to extend them to race.
Also, expect Roe vs Wade to go away, and possibly a national anti-abortion law. But hey, if you’re a white guy, you may get a tax cut.
@Bill
Are you sure he’s a mammal? Or even a vertebrate? 🙂
Be cautious about assuming cishet white males’s concerns are those of white identity politics.
Some of us cishet white males have families, daughters, trans kids, or work in industries that could be hard hit by a sudden disappearance of Obamacare, or have various other aspects to our lives that could make things not “fine,” regardless of how happy neo-Nazi shitheads are.
Unless you’re not a rich white guy. Then again, if you’re a well-to-do PoC or LGBTQ person, you may get a tax cut along with the well-to-do white guys, but that won’t mean either you or the white guy thinks things are fine.
Thank you, Kurt. I thought of some of that (the ‘rich’ part), but your thorough and coherent reply beats whatever I might have eventually come up with. Endorsed.
(Long as I’m typing, I’ll add that even if none of Trump’s program affected me or anyone I knew personally, I’d still be against his appeal to the worst in us. It’s evil.)
@Kendall
Thank you for the info! I was able to get two of Kevin Hearne’s paperbacks.
Bonnie McDaniel: Thank you for the info! I was able to get two of Kevin Hearne’s paperbacks.
Is there a link?