Pixel Scroll 1/4 Reach For The Pixels: Even If You Miss, You’ll Be Among Scrolls

(1) CONSUMER COMPLAINT. io9’s Germain Lussier reveals, “Rey Is Missing From New Star Wars Monopoly, And This Is Becoming a Real Problem”.

The problems of female characters being under-represented in geek merchandise is real. But when it’s a secondary character like Gamora or Black Widow, at least toy companies have an excuse. When the girl is not just the star of the movie, but of the whole franchise, that’s another story.

That character, of course, is Rey, the main character of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and the latest problem has to do with Hasbro’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens Monopoly. In the game, the four playable characters are Luke Skywalker, Finn, Darth Vader and Kylo Ren. No Rey.

(2) REWRITING CULTURE. Laurie Penny’s New Statesman post “What to do when you’re not the hero anymore”, while not about marketing oversights, covers some reasons why they should be taken seriously.

Capitalism is just a story. Religion is just a story. Patriarchy and white supremacy are just stories. They are the great organising myths that define our societies and determine our futures, and I believe – I hope – that a great rewriting is slowly, surely underway. We can only become what we can imagine, and right now our imagination is being stretched in new ways. We’re learning, as a culture, that heroes aren’t always white guys, that life and love and villainy and victory might look a little different depending on who’s telling it. That’s a good thing. It’s not easy – but nobody ever said that changing the world was going to be easy.

I learned that from Harry Potter.

(3) GATES KEEPERS. Bill Gates says “The Best Books I Read in 2015” included Randall Munroe’s bestseller —

Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, by Randall Munroe. The brain behind XKCD explains various subjects—from how smartphones work to what the U.S. Constitution says—using only the 1,000 most common words in the English language and blueprint-style diagrams. It is a brilliant concept, because if you can’t explain something simply, you don’t really understand it. Munroe, who worked on robotics at NASA, is an ideal person to take it on. The book is filled with helpful explanations and drawings of everything from a dishwasher to a nuclear power plant. And Munroe’s jokes are laugh-out-loud funny. This is a wonderful guide for curious minds.

(4) PHILISTINE TASTE. Cracked delivers “6 Great Novels that Were Hated in Their Time”. Number one on the list – The Lord of the Rings.

The New Republic described the book and its characters as “anemic, and lacking in fiber” which was apparently a real burn back then in the pre-Cheerios days.

(5) TEA TIME. Ann Leckie talks about “Special Teas”.

I am cleaning and organizing my tea cupboard because SHUT UP I DON’T HAVE A NOVEL TO WRITE YOU HAVE A NOVEL TO WRITE that’s why. Also, it had gotten to be quite a disorganized mess and I wasn’t sure what I still had. (Yes, the cats are up next, just gotta remember where I stowed the dust buster.)

Anyway. I came across a sad reminder of Specialteas.com. They were an online tea seller, and they had an East Frisian Broken Blend that was my go-to super nice and chewy for putting milk in tea, and they had a lovely, very grapefruity earl grey.

(6) SHE BLINKED. A video of Ursula K. Le Guin celebrating Christmas Eve at the Farm.

(7) OPEN FOR SUBMISSONS. Apex Magazine has reopened for short fiction submissions. Poetry submissions will remained closed at this time. Apex Magazine’s submission guidelines and the link to its online submissions form can be found here.

(8) COVER WEBSITE TO CLOSE. Terry Gibbons’ site Visco – the visual catalogue of science fiction cover art will go away when its domain name expires February 9, unless someone else wants to take over hosting responsibilities. He posted thousands of images online before moving on to other projects in 2005 – and for the moment, they can still be seen there.

I have tried to find time to do something about Visco at intervals since then but matters came to a head when I got a new Windows 10 computer recently and realised that I no longer have the technology to maintain it.  It was developed on a Windows 95 platform – remember that? – using Internet Explorer 3 and such and I guess it is a miracle that it is still accessible at all. But none of the software I used to build it now works on my current machine, so I cannot develop it further even if I had the time.

I could leave Visco sitting there indefinitely, or until advancing technology renders it unusable, but it costs a certain amount of money to run and, more to the point, it is a constant reminder of past glories. So I have decided to let it go to that place in cyberspace where once-loved web sites go to die.

(9) READING RODDENBERRY’S DATA. Joe Otterson at Yahoo! News tells how “’Star Trek’ Creator Gene Roddenberry’s Lost Data Recovered From 200 Floppy Disks”.

Although Roddenberry died in 1991, it wasn’t until much later that his estate discovered nearly 200 5.25-inch floppy disks. One of his custom-built computers had long since been auctioned and the remaining device was no longer functional.

But these were no ordinary floppies. The custom-built computers had also used custom-built operating systems and special word processing software that prevented any modern method of reading what was on the disks.

After receiving the computer and the specially formatted floppies, DriveSavers engineers worked to develop a method of extracting the data.

(10) SIDEBAR TO AXANAR. Kane Lynch’s article in comics form, “Final Frontiers: Star Trek fans take to the Internet to film their own episodes of the original series”, is based on an interview with someone who’s worked on both New Voyages and Star Trek Continues.

(11) BENFORD ON NEW HORIZONS. Click to read Gregory Benford’s contribution to Edge’s roundup “2016: What Do You Consider The Most Interesting Recent [Scientific] News? What Makes It Important?”

The most long-range portentous event of 2015 was NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft arrowing by Pluto, snapping clean views of the planet and its waltzing moon system. It carries an ounce of Clyde Tombaugh’s ashes, commemorating his discovery of Pluto in 1930. Tombaugh would have loved seeing the colorful contrasts of this remarkable globe, far out into the dark of near-interstellar space. Pluto is now a sharply-seen world, with much to teach us.

As the spacecraft zooms near an iceteroid on New Year’s Day, 2019, it will show us the first member of the chilly realm beyond, where primordial objects quite different from the wildly eccentric Pluto also dwell. These will show us what sort of matter made up the early disk that clumped into planets like ours—a sort of family tree of worlds. But that’s just an appetizer….

(12) PU 238. The Washington Post reports the U.S. has resumed making plutonium-238, in “This is the fuel NASA needs to make it to the edge of the solar system – and beyond”.

Just in time for the new year, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have unveiled the fruits of a different kind of energy research: For the first time in nearly three decades, they’ve produced a special fuel that scientists hope will power the future exploration of deep space.

The fuel, known as plutonium-238, is a radioactive isotope of plutonium that’s been used in several types of NASA missions to date, including the New Horizons mission, which reached Pluto earlier in 2015. While spacecraft can typically use solar energy to power themselves if they stick relatively close to Earth, missions that travel farther out in the solar system — where the sun’s radiation becomes more faint — require fuel to keep themselves moving.

(13) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS

Tales in the Grimm brothers’ collection include “Hansel and Gretel,” “Snow White,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Rapunzel,” and “Rumpelstiltskin.” The brothers developed the tales by listening to storytellers and attempting to reproduce their words and techniques as faithfully as possible. Their methods helped establish the scientific approach to the documentation of folklore. The collection became a worldwide classic.

  • Born January 4, 1643 – Sir Isaac Newton. Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me…

(14) ZSIGMOND OBIT. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who won an Oscar for his achievements in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and worked on a long list of major productions, died January 1 at the age of 85.

His genre credits included The Time Travelers (1964) directed by Ib Melchior, The Monitors (1969) based on Keith Laumer’s novel, Real Genius (1985), The Witches of Eastwick (1987), and The Mists of Avalon TV miniseries based on Marion Zimmer Bradley’s novel.

(15) THE YEAR IN COMPLAINTS. The Book Smugglers continue Smugglivus 2015 with “The Airing of Grievances”. (I’m getting a migraine from looking at those GIFS, and I don’t get migraines, just saying…)

SOMEONE IS (ALWAYS) WRONG ON THE INTERNET – PART II: THE SFF EDITION

Speaking of awards: Another BIG thing in SFF fandom happened when the World Fantasy award announced that it would be remodeling its award statuette, which had been a bust of the late HP Lovecraft’s face. (Lovecraft, if you did not know, was an openly venomous racist in his personal opinions and in his writings–both fiction and nonfiction.) This news–from one of the most prestigious international awards for Fantasy and speculative fiction, no less!–was a long time coming, and many of us within the SFF community celebrated this move… but there were people who were SUPER upset. Because, you know, by not using Lovecraft’s face on the award, we were all like ERASING HIM FROM HISTORY FOREVER LIKE MAGIC. Or something.

(16) MORE FEEDBACK. After what others have written about reconciliation this past week, the Mad Genius Club’s Dave Freer sounds practically mellow.

…To the other side this is life or death important. The clique of Trufen who pushed their favorites (and they’re a small, interconnected socio-politically homogenous group of the same people, over and over) have some short term motives in doing exactly what they did last year and the years before. Long term, for anyone with an intellect above gerbil there is a strong motive for the Trufen in general to get rid of that clique and to reach some kind of accommodation with the Sad Puppies. But that clique are powerful and nasty and regard WorldCon and the Hugos as theirs. They have no interest in a future that they do not control completely.

I don’t see the foresight or commitment to take any of the painful (to them) steps they’d have to take to give the Sad or Rabid Puppies a motive for reconciliation, to get them to sharing motives like going to WorldCon. As a writer I simply don’t see characters of sufficient strength or integrity who have the vision or the following to take those steps.

Besides this an election year, both sides will be heated and angry.

We all love sf.

But the motives for our actions are very different.

I am glad I don’t have to write a happy ending for this one. It’d take a clever author to do it convincingly.

(17) RECONCILIATION. Don’t be misled by the placement — I doubt Freer or Gerrold are commenting about each other, just about the same topic. David Gerrold wrote today on Facebook:

…I know that some people have talked about reconciliation — and that’s a good thing. But other people have pointed out why reconciliation is impossible, because for them, the past is still unresolved. I understand that — but rehearsing the past does not take you into the future, it just gets you more of the past.

The only conversation I would be interested in having is not about who’s right and who’s wrong, who should be blamed, and who needs to crawl naked over broken glass to apologize.

No. What a colossal waste of time.

The only conversation worth having is about what you want to build and how you want to get there — stick to the issues and leave the personalities out of this…

(18) PRE CGI. It’s like seeing a star with and without makeup. Bright Side has large format color photos comparing the scenes in “17 favorite movies before and after visual effects”.

(19) GET YOUR RED HOT FOMAX. Charles Rector heartily endorses his fanzine Fomax #7 [PDF file] hosted at eFanzines. Among other things, it has 8 movie reviews and a fair number of LOC’s.

[Thanks to Eli, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Nigel.]

249 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 1/4 Reach For The Pixels: Even If You Miss, You’ll Be Among Scrolls

  1. redheadedfemme: Planetfall. Gah. The ending to that book drove me nuts.

    I still say fur jnf abg gur bar jub perngrq gur zrff. Fur jnf gur bar chg orgjrra n ebpx naq n uneq cynpr ol gur gjb crbcyr jub qvq perngr gur zrff — gur fhvpvqr, naq gur thl jub vafvfgrq gung vs gur fhvpvqr jnf abg pbirerq hc, gur pbybal jbhyq snyy ncneg (juvpu, vapvqragnyyl, V guvax jnf gehr). Fur raqrq hc jvgu frirer CGFQ naq zragny vyyarff sebz gelvat gb qrny jvgu gur zrff gur bgure gjb unq perngrq.

  2. Echoing what others have said, Baen books are very difficult to find in Europe in general, since they don’t have regular bookstore distribution. You can buy them via Amazon and you can probably special order them, but very few bookstores carry them on the shelves. In Germany, I have only ever seen a single Baen book on a store shelf, a David Webber book.

    The only stores in Europe where I have seen Baen books on the shelves were Hodges Figgis in Dublin (a lot of Eric Flint, but also Larry Correia) as well as the bigger Forbidden Planet stores in London and Birmingham. The Birmingham Forbidden Planet actually did carry books by Larry Correia and Sarah Hoyt (as well as Baen books by Lois McMaster Bujold, Sharon Lee/Steve Miller, Catherine Asaro, John Ringo and David Webber), but not Torgersen or Williamson. I think they also had JCW, probably one of his Tor books.

    I also suspect that Correia’s brand of gun porn may not appeal all that much in the UK and the rest of Europe. In fact, I just checked whether Correia’s books have a German edition at all and found to my surprise that two of them have been translated with a third forthcoming. What is more, they’ve actually got good covers. So if you want to know what a Larry Correia book looks like with a cover that is not Baen eye-searing, here you are:

    http://www.amazon.de/Die-Monster-die-rief-Taschenbücher/dp/3404207556/
    http://www.amazon.de/Club-toten-Monster-Fantasy-Taschenbücher/dp/3404208072/

  3. @Cora:

    Ooh, those are some classy looking covers. If I were Correia I’d be very pleased with them.

  4. @JJ

    I’m not sure I agree with that, but that’s certainly a legitimate interpretation.

    (Nygubhtu V frrz gb erzrzore Era fnlvat gung gurl pbhyq erghea gb Rnegu, rira gjragl lrnef nsgre gur snpg, nygubhtu vg jbhyq gnxr rirel erfbhepr gur pbybal unq. Vg frrzf gb zr gurl pregnvayl pbhyq unir erghearq nsgre Fhu’f fhvpvqr, vs gurl unq whfg bjarq hc gb jung unccrarq.)

  5. @Cora wow, you wouldn’t know they were the same books. Those covers look very modern and urban. Good for LC.

    I wonder how much our perception of what we are reading is affected by the cover?

  6. Ansible‘s links column has turned up this report about a fake penguin! No, sorry, a fake Penguin employee! An independent author came up with a particularly cunning scheme to get book bloggers to read her new novel by posing as a “publicity assistant” for Penguin Random House and sending bloggers review copies of actual Penguin publications along with her novel.

  7. redheadedfemme: Nygubhtu V frrz gb erzrzore Era fnlvat gung gurl pbhyq erghea gb Rnegu, rira gjragl lrnef nsgre gur snpg, nygubhtu vg jbhyq gnxr rirel erfbhepr gur pbybal unq. Vg frrzf gb zr gurl pregnvayl pbhyq unir erghearq nsgre Fhu’f fhvpvqr, vs gurl unq whfg bjarq hc gb jung unccrarq.

    Ohg vg jnf abgrq gung nyy bs gurve sevraqf naq eryngvirf jbhyq unir orra qrnq ol gura, naq nf V erpnyy, vg jnf abg n pregnvagl gung gurl jbhyq znxr vg onpx vagnpg.

  8. Petréa Mitchell: Ansible‘s links column has turned up this report about a fake penguin! No, sorry, a fake Penguin employee! An independent author came up with a particularly cunning scheme to get book bloggers to read her new novel by posing as a “publicity assistant” for Penguin Random House and sending bloggers review copies of actual Penguin publications along with her novel.

    Wow, I went out and read the related tweets and the archive of her site with her faux resume. Her scheme is actually a bit clever, but of the “you know this is not going to end well” sort. She’s certainly given Stephen Glass a run for his money.

    I think that she is going to find out, tout suite, how expensive it is to fraudulently make unauthorized use of a major publishing house’s name and trademarks.

    ETA: And I’m pretty sure that her book mailings using Penguin letterhead open her up for a federal charge of Mail Fraud.

  9. Roddenberry didn’t use a custom-built operating system. He used CP/M, which (before DOS) was the most common operating system in use on personal computers. Among others, SF writer Piers Anthony used it, too, back in the day, which he discusses in Bio of an Ogre. (With a Dvorak keyboard, no less.)

  10. @Scott Frazer

    I’m not sure how I feel about this.

    Vg’f nyy tbvat gb or svar

    But which rot-X are you using? JUVPU BAR VF NALBAR HFVAT?!

    V’yy tb yvr qbja abj.

  11. Tasha Turner –

    @Cora wow, you wouldn’t know they were the same books. Those covers look very modern and urban. Good for LC.

    I wonder how much our perception of what we are reading is affected by the cover?

    Not sure how much perception is affected, but it certainly influences my buying choices. Sometimes the international covers are oddly much better, like Joe Lansdale’s Honky Tonk Samurai book has an amazing cover for the Italian version compared to the boring US one.

  12. @Cora wow, you wouldn’t know they were the same books. Those covers look very modern and urban. Good for LC.

    I wonder how much our perception of what we are reading is affected by the cover?

    I’m not sure if it would affect my perception and buying choices. But then I have gritted my teeth about horrible Baen covers on good books before. Plus, I tried to read LC’s Hugo nominee last year and know his work is not for me. But those are some great covers and Bastei-Lübbe, who are certainly no strangers to bad covers, did well by LC. I’m sure, if I had seen them at a bookstore and then checked out the author name, I would have done a double-take.

    BTW, I checked out the Amazon DE reviews (which are largely positive) and noticed that the most common sentiment was “fun read, but a total boy’s fantasy” and “well, he sure likes to talk about guns a lot and in great detail.”

  13. Mark-kitteh beat me to the link to MRK’s quotes from people who got the free memberships. And #5 is indeed lovely. There were a couple Puppy fellow travelers who were in there. Several of the winners had never voted for the Hugos before, so they weren’t in anybody’s cabal. Most of them seem to have applied for the free membership because they couldn’t afford to buy one — a lot of retired or disabled people on fixed incomes. $40 buys a lot of diapers, as that one mom said, or a lot of medicine as the people squeaking by on $500/month pointed out. Most of them sounded very thoughtful (I am not in there, because I didn’t, heh). I bet they dutifully slogged through the whole packet and voted their conscience.

    @Jim Henley: Epistemic closure, I think, is what drives a lot of Puppy poop. None of my friends voted for Mitt Romney, but I recognize that many of my fellow Americans nevertheless did. I don’t posit some shadowy cabal looming over them in the voting booth, and I’m sure I do business with them (I’ve stayed in a Marriott, and they’re buddies with Mitt), pass them in the street, and they’re perfectly nice people who love their children and their country. They aren’t TEH EBIL. And who gets to be POTUS is a WHOLE lot more important than who gets shiny rocket statues. See also Scroll Item (2), Rewriting Culture.

    (1) She’s the main character of the whole damn movie (and likely the next two). She should be in every single piece of merch there is! It’s like having Luke in only one or two Ep. 4-6 playsets/collections!

    (2) THIS.

    (4) Is “Catcher in the Rye” swinging back the other way again? These Kids Today (and myself as a girl back in the day) seem to think Holden is a whiny, spoiled, entitled brat who should just get over himself and deserves what he got. They don’t admire him at all. Maybe fratbros who end up in finance still do?

    (5) I think liquids are called “chewy” when they stick to your teeth and gums in the way chewy food does. So yes, tea and red wine are chewy.

    (6) Still delightful. Pun not intended, but I’m leaving it.

    I find the idea that anyone should tell booksellers what they should and shouldn’t carry reprehensible. If a bookseller decides to order or not order a book, they are perfectly free to do so. Either their customers will agree or they won’t. The holy free market will decide whether it was a good business decision or not. This is the very definition of a free country. No government is telling bookstores what to carry. No brick and mortar bookshop can carry everything, so the owners must prioritize. And since the Toronto case is hypothetical and unconfirmed (we have the word of one person), it’s WAY too early to speculate anyway. There’s “free speech” (what it says in the First Amendment/2(b)”) and “Freeze peach” (what idiots whine about online when they confuse the government with individual businesses and are suddenly made aware that actions have consequences).

    As other posters have noted, abortion is (still, barely) legal in the United States. Should fundamentalist Christian bookstores be forced to carry works extolling the lives and livelihoods of women whose futures were improved by it? Should they be forced to carry the works of Dan Savage telling how “It Gets Better” for gay kids who are in the closet because of their religion? Should they be required to also carry the Koran and the Gitas right next to the Bibles? Must they sell NC-17 rated DVDs, and the entire Girls Gone Wild oeuvre? No? Then, you’re wrong.

    Teddy says “I MEANT to do that” more than a supercut of house cats falling off high places. It’s somewhat less believable.

    I hope Gene’s machine was a CP/M. I had those till it was no longer feasible and I had to switch to Windoze. Still have my floppies, though I doubt my 80’s fanfic would measure up to Gene’s merest scribbles. But there were a LOT of CP/M machines, so not super-exotic.
    I recall at a job in the mid-80’s, someone sent in his stuff on Wang format (no snickering at the back) and nobody at my Major Bay Area University CS Department had the hardware to read it. I had to tell him to snail mail me a printout, and then retype the whole damn thing into our system. Everyone else, thankfully, sent theirs via email. Did Mr. Wang System And No Email get funded the next year? Guess.

    Stevie: V pbhyq ernq ebg13 va gur 90’f; V znl yrnea vg ntnva fbba.

    Fake Penguin: I hope she enjoys talking to the Postal Service and FBI. Mail fraud is a Federal crime. She won’t go to jail — it’s a small enough scam — but it’s going to go on her Permanent Record. IF she’s even actually a student, she’s going to be expelled for this. And she’ll certainly never work in Big Publishing.

  14. Lurkertype: Thanks for drawing my attention back to Mark-kitteh’s lines from this morning. I will put them in tomorrow’s Scroll. Meant to do it today, then a bunch of stories broke and I used that memory cell for something else…

  15. @Joe H yay! Occasionally fan outrage works. Maybe marketing will pay attention. Main female characters in film/books/games should be part of merchandising. Duh.

  16. Roddenberry didn’t use a custom-built operating system. He used CP/M

    Altair Niven used CP-M, too. (OGH will remember: the only member of LASFS to be donated to the club. I believe there were Rules Changed after that.)

  17. @Cora: Very nice covers for Correia’s German editions! Thanks for posting those links.

    @Petréa Mitchell: Wow, that’s pretty surreal. The post you linked to said her later e-mails came from a real Penguin address, implying she works there (but not, perhaps, in the capacity she claimed). Anyway, really bizarre!

    @Chewy People: I’ve only used this for certain red ports before. Good ones. 😉

  18. @bookworm1398, @redheadedfemme, & @JJ: I agree with JJ regarding Planetfall and Ren. Some more on how I took it below – obviously YMMV (and does).

    Era ena bss orpnhfr fur pbhyqa’g unaqyr guvatf; V zrna frevbhfyl, fur frrzrq oneryl noyr gb shapgvba, zhpu bs gur gvzr. V guvax guvf nyfb urycf rkcynva gb ure ernpgvba gb gur obql – juvpu, jr fubhyq erzrzore, fur xarj nobhg naq unq whfg fhccerffrq. Vg’f abg yvxr fur orpnzr fhqqrayl fnar naq shyyl-shapgvbavat ng gur raq. V pbhyqa’g cvpgher ure gelvat gb fnir gur pbybal (juvpu jnf cnfg fnivat cerggl dhvpxyl!). V qba’g oryvrir gur pbybavfgf jub jrer yrsg-ohg-abg-xvyyrq jrer qbbzrq nf vzcyvrq, gubhtu, qrfcvgr gurve bireqrcraqrapr ba fcrpvsvp grpuabybtl. Vg vf bqq gurl qvqa’g unir zber crbcyr uvtuyl vaibyirq jvgu fhpu pevgvpny fghss, gubhtu – Era frrzrq yvxr fur jnf cenpgvpnyyl vg, juvpu vf n ovg haoryvrinoyr.

    Nf sne nf Fhat, jr’er gnyxvat nobhg uvf zbgure; ur jnagrq gb xabj whfg jub qvq jung fb ur pbhyq znkvzvmr uvf eriratr V zrna guvf jnf onfvpnyyl unys gur cbvag bs gur vasvygengvba, sebz jurer ur fng, zrguvaxf. Nyfb, ur frrzrq yvxr n fbpvbcngu bapr vg nyy pnzr gb yvtug; gung fghss jrag jnl orlbaq ungr naq eriratr, VZUB, nygubhtu ungr naq eriratr (bguref’ naq uvf bja) perngrq uvz, fb vg nyy jbexrq sbe zr.

    The more I think about it, the more I love this book. I may have to listen to the audiobook sooner rather than later, as a re-read. 😉

  19. @idon’tknow

    You should probably work on taking people disagreeing with you less personally. Getting upset every time people fail to change their minds in response to your arguments isn’t a good way to go about anything.

  20. Cora:

    “Echoing what others have said, Baen books are very difficult to find in Europe in general, since they don’t have regular bookstore distribution.”

    Checked the Science Fiction bookstore here in Stockholm and they have Williamson and Correia at least.

  21. Yes, SF specialty stores sometimes carry Baen books, since they probably order them directly, but generalists usually don’t.

    Regarding 5, I live maybe a one hour drive from the heart of East Frisia, so I can get East Frisian tea blends in every single store. I’d send Ann Leckie a batch (and the rock sugar, too, since that’s probably hard to get as well), but I don’t know where she lives.

    East Frisian tea is a blend of Assam and Ceylon teas that’s pretty strong BTW and served in a particular way with rock sugar and a drop of cream, that is not stirred. And no, I’d never describe it as chewy. This page had more on the East Frisian way to drink tea: http://germanfood.about.com/od/drinks/tp/German-Tea.htm

  22. Petréa Mitchell on January 5, 2016 at 7:08 pm said:
    Ansible‘s links column has turned up this report about a fake penguin! No, sorry, a fake Penguin employee! An independent author came up with a particularly cunning scheme to get book bloggers to read her new novel by posing as a “publicity assistant” for Penguin Random House and sending bloggers review copies of actual Penguin publications along with her novel.

    Ye gods, she is targeting teenaged bloggers.

    Aren’t there child protection laws about this sort of online identity fraud?

  23. @cora Thanks for that link! I was drinking my EFBB the way I would drink a strong English Breakfast. I’ll have to try East Frisian style. (I read the thing about tea rations and recoiled in horror. Ten grams a month? You want about three grams for eight ounces of water. Darn straight they got extra ration cards for tea, there’d have been an armed insurrection otherwise. How can you live with only three cups of tea a month? It’s unpossible.

    And I would be hard-pressed to explain “chewy.” Like others, I also associate it with red wine. It’s a very full sort of mouthfeel, combined with a big flavor. Which isn’t the same as an intense flavor–I can think of several strongly or intensely flavored things I wouldn’t call “chewy.” Best I can do, I know it when I taste it. Not sure where I got the word, but I’m betting it came from my days managing bar orders at a former place of employment, and hence being deluged with samples and sales pitches. (And that, children, is why I am not a wine critic and why my reviews on Steepster so far are basically, “Um, I really like this one!”)

    And now I will disappear and it will be again as though I don’t actually keep half an eye on comments here.

  24. I remember the soundtrack for The Phantom Menace, which came out two weeks before the movie was released, has tracks called:

    SPOILERS (which can’t quite vote yet)

    “Qui-Gon’s Noble End” and “The High Council Meeting and Qui-Gon’s Funeral”

    So it’s nice they’re getting better at these things.

  25. snowcrash on January 5, 2016 at 7:56 pm said:

    @Scott Frazer
    But which rot-X are you using?

    I tend to use multiple ROTs for extra security. First do a ROT-5 then take the results and ROT-7 it, and then take those and ROT-1 them for good measure.

  26. Chewy teas: Some pu’erhs are chewy. Some black teas, especially with milk; my decaf Irish Breakfast, which steeps stronger than many full-caffs, is definitely chewy, while English Breakfast, my default tea, is not.

    Teavana has German rock sugar, which is probably East Frisian from a place that doesn’t care about the finer points of geography, I should try a cup East Frisian style — but how thick a cream is it? Cream has a surprisingly complex set of varieties, especially once you account for Atlantic crossing.

  27. Dammit, people, you were supposed to beg Ann Leckie for an Ancillary Gem Sphene and Zeiat spinoff while she was here. 😡

  28. Ann Leckie on January 6, 2016 at 7:52 am said:

    Squeeee!

    you were supposed to beg Ann Leckie for an Ancillary Gem Sphene and Zeiat

    ::looks around to make sure Neil Gaiman isn’t lurking around::

    Please give this to us!

  29. Ah, sorry, JJ, I don;t think anyone was minding this bit of the store when she was here. People were off on other threads talking about important stuff like, er, date formats and the correct way to shelve DVDs, and I think I was dogwalking (if I’ve got the difference between time zones sorted out properly).

    Or maybe everyone was sitting in front of their screens going squee, and unable to respond. Weak in the Presence of Leckie, as the song doesn’t quite have it.

  30. First of all, adding my squee to the others’. And yes, an Ancillary Gem Sphene and Zeiat spinoff would be great.

    Thanks for that link! I was drinking my EFBB the way I would drink a strong English Breakfast. I’ll have to try East Frisian style. (I read the thing about tea rations and recoiled in horror. Ten grams a month? You want about three grams for eight ounces of water. Darn straight they got extra ration cards for tea, there’d have been an armed insurrection otherwise. How can you live with only three cups of tea a month? It’s unpossible.

    Pretty much everything was rationed during and directly after WWII (as well as WWI). Tea and coffee were particularly rare, since neither grows in Germany. I know that they made substitute coffee from acorns, beets, barley or whatever else was available (it has a name I can’t write here, because it would trip the profinaity filter) and apparently substitute tea was made from strawberry and blackberry leaves and heather.

    Sometime during the latter years of WWII, my grandma had managed to procure real coffee for a family party. In the middle of the party, the air raid sirens went off and they had problems pursuading the guests to head for the shelter, because no one wanted to abandon the freshly brewed coffee.

    @Lenora Rose

    Teavana has German rock sugar, which is probably East Frisian from a place that doesn’t care about the finer points of geography, I should try a cup East Frisian style — but how thick a cream is it? Cream has a surprisingly complex set of varieties, especially once you account for Atlantic crossing.

    It used to be the cream skimmed off fresh milk (East Frisia is a farming region), but nowadays regular coffee cream/condensated milk are used. The liquid, not the powdered stuff, and preferably not low fat. The cream forms a cloud in the tea, if you don’t stir it, which looks lovely.

    An aunt and uncle of mine actually have the full East Frisian tea set with specially patterned handpainted china, specially patterned silverware, tea warmer and hourglass timer. I was supposed to inherit it someday, but then my Dad had a fallout with his brother, so I guess I’ll have to buy my own.

  31. I’m not sure I would want to see a Sphene and Zeiat series.

    Zeiat may be a treasure, but Sphene is not a nice person. She adheres to the ghastly racism of the purest of pure-blooded Raadch which thinks of everyone outside the Raadch as impure and not really human, unworthy to pollute the space of the real Raadch.

    Sphene sulks and cultivates resentment.

    Also, Sphene was one of the loudest to protest not having ancillaries and has my vote for most likely to sneak around murdering people to get them anyways.

  32. Peace Is My Middle Name: Zeiat may be a treasure, but Sphene is not a nice person. She adheres to the ghastly racism of the purest of pure-blooded Raadch which thinks of everyone outside the Raadch as impure and not really human, unworthy to pollute the space of the real Raadch. Sphene sulks and cultivates resentment. Also, Sphene was one of the loudest to protest not having ancillaries and has my vote for most likely to sneak around murdering people to get them anyways.

    So! Breq is faced with another mysterious and sinister situation: people are disappearing! The stability of the station is under threat! The populace is living in fear! Dramatic Tension: Where are the missing people disappearing to? What did they have in common? Side Mystery: Who stole the tea set?

    I mean, seriously, at this point, does anyone doubt that Leckie would be able to figure out how to make it work, and work spectacularly?

  33. @Scott Frazer:

    I tend to use multiple ROTs for extra security. First do a ROT-5 then take the results and ROT-7 it, and then take those and ROT-1 them for good measure.

    Oh that’s nothing. I use ROT-13, but then to be extra secure, I run ROT-13 again.

  34. Iphinome: you had me at Breq.

    Me, too. 😀

    (somewhere, an ancillary author is reading this thread and laughing her ass off at us)

  35. Anna Feruglio Dal Dan said:

    It’s capitalism, baby.

    Oh, god–you just reminded me of one of the Best Threads Ever at a different book forum. (A badly botched attempt at marketing an ebook.)

    (I’m ardeegee there.)

  36. (Apologies in advance for the bad pun that lies ahead.)

    Would it be fair to say that a good cup of tea is a vital part of a traditional Breqfast?

  37. @Camestros

    I think bookshops not selling books does have something to do with freedom of speech but when I examine those thoughts I find I do not have a clear way of expressing them consistently. So I’ll shut up 🙂

    I think I can meet you part of the way there… ‘Something, something, freedom of the press but only if you own a printing press…’

    I’m not concerned about the (alleged) boycott, but I was vaguely wondering whether I should.

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