(1) AN EAR FOR OLD SFF. James Davis Nicoll’s young people weigh in on another classic: “Young People Listen to Old SFF: Foundation by Isaac Asimov”.
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy1 was in fact three fix-ups of shorter pieces assembled into three volumes. Strongly influenced by Edward Gibbon‘s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the series set out to depict the collapse of the Galactic Empire and the attempt by scientists to shorten the ensuing dark age. The series is highly regarded: two sections have won retrospective Hugos and the trilogy as a whole won the Hugo for Best All Time Series in 1966.
The BBC’s radio adaptations are also highly regarded. Surely, combining a respected classic with the BBC’s resources must result in something that will delight and entertain my young readers. Right?
What are my other choices besides “Right”?
(2) SFWA GRANTS. Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has announced its Giver’s Fund Grants for 2019.
SFWA Giver’s Fund grants totaling $46,837 have been awarded to:
- Alpha, the SF/F/H Workshop for Young Writers
- Art & Words Collaborative Show in Fort Worth, Texas
- Can*Con Science Programming
- Clarion San Diego Workshop
- Clarion West Workshop
- Confluence Writing Workshop
- Deep Dish Reading Series
- Denver Science Fiction and Fantasy Reading Series
- I Need Diverse Games
- Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers
- Little Blue Marble
- Northern Illinois University, for their archives pertaining to science fiction and fantasy
- OutWrite Literary Festival
- Odyssey Writing Workshop
- Parsec Ink Young Editors Workshop
- Philanthropic Endeavors Futurist Conference in York PA
- Reel Stories screenwriting workshops
- SFF Workshop at the Center for Literary Arts, Frostburg State University
- Sirens Conference
- Turkey City Writing Workshops
- Willamette Writers workshops Flash Fiction Masterclass
- Wiscon Writing Workshops
- Young Writers Project workshop
Giver’s Fund grants are awarded to support programs that further SFWA’s mission, which is to promote, advance, and support science fiction and fantasy writing in the United States and elsewhere, by educating and informing the general public and supporting and empowering science fiction and fantasy writers.
(3) GUESS WHO’S NOT RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT OF SFWA. Lou Antonelli says he was going to run for President of SFWA (“Maybe some other day”) but there was one little problem – he isn’t eligible. He says SFWA Executive Director Kate Baker notified him —
Thank you for being willing to run for office. Unfortunately, your membership lapsed in the last two years which makes you ineligible to run for the board. Additionally, you would need to have previously served on the board in some capacity to engage a run for President.
(4) 2021 WORLDCON BIDDERS NEED TO FILE. Johan Anglemark reminded bids to host the 2021 Worldcon must be submitted by February 15, 2019, either to [email protected] or to Worldcon 2021 Site Selection, c/o Anglemark, Lingonv. 10, SE-74340 Storvreta, Sweden.
The required information includes:
• bid location
• bid facilities
• bid date
• committee chair(s)
• committee members.
Please also provide the bid website URL and a contact email address.
Refer to the WSFS Constitution – http://www.wsfs.org/…/WSFS-Constitution-as-of-August-21-201… – sections 4.6 – 4.7 for more details. The Dublin 2019 Site Selection team will send a confirmation email to the contact email address in your bid declaration when we receive your bid information.
NOTE: An online announcement, listing on the Worldcon.org bids page or web site is not sufficient to formally file your bid.
(5) AND STRAIGHT ON ‘TIL MORNING. For Tor.com readers, James Davis Nicoll analyzes the difficulty of “Mapping the Stars for Fun and Profit”.
When you read a novel, short story, etc., you may be given hints as to star locations and the distances from star to star. Most of us just take those vague gestures at maps as given and focus on the exciting space battles, palace intrigues, and so on. Only a few nerdy readers (ahem!) try to work out star positions and distances from the text. And only a few authors (like Benford and McCarthy) provide maps in their novels. There are reasons why maps are generally left out, and who notices an absence?
Roleplaying games (RPGs), on the other hand, have to give the players maps (unless all the action takes place in one stellar system). If you are plotting a course to Procyon A, you need to know just where it is and how long it will take to get there. Game companies have experimented with several approaches to the mapping problem; most are unsatisfactory.
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born February 1, 1908 – George Pal. Let’s see… Producer of Destination Moon, When Worlds Collide, The War of the Worlds, Conquest of Space (anyone heard of this one?), The Time Machine, Atlantis, the Lost Continent, Tom Thumb, The Time Machine, Atlantis, the Lost Continent, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, 7 Faces of Dr. Lao and his last film being Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. Can we hold a George Pal film fest, pretty please? (Died 1980.)
- Born February 1, 1942 – Terry Jones, 77. Co-directed Monty Python and the Holy Grail with Gilliam, and was sole director on two further Python movies, Life of Brian and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. His later films include Erik the Viking and The Wind in the Willows. It’s worth noting that he wrote the screenplay for the original Labyrinth screenplay but it’s thought that nothing of that made it to the shooting script.
- Born February 1, 1946 – Elizabeth Sladen. Certainly best known for her role as Sarah Jane Smith on Doctor Who. She was a regular cast member from 1973 to 1976, alongside the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) and Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker), and reprised her role down the years, both on the series and on its spin-offs, K-9 and Company (awfully done) and The Sarah Jane Adventures (not bad at all). It’s not her actual first SF appearance, that honor goes to her being a character called Sarah Collins in an episode of the Doomwatch series called “Say Knife, Fat Man”. The creators behind this series had created the cybermen concept for Doctor Who. (Died 2011.)
- Born February 1, 1954 – Bill Mumy, 65. Well I’ll be damned. He’s had a much longer career in the genre than even I knew. His first genre were at age seven on Twilight Zone, two episodes in the same season (Billy Bayles In “Long Distance Call” and Anthony Fremont in “Its A Good Life”). He makes make it a trifecta appearing a few years later again as Young Pip Phillips in “In Praise of Pip”. Witches are next for him. First he plays an orphaned boy in an episode of Bewitched called “A Vision of Sugar Plums” and then it’s Custer In “Whatever Became of Baby Custer?” on I Dream of Jeannie, a show he shows he revisits a few years as Darrin the Boy in “Junior Executive”. Ahhh his most famous role is up next as Will Robinson in Lost in Space. It’s got to be thirty years since I’ve seen it but I still remember and like it quite a bit. He manages to show up next on The Munsters as Googie Miller in “Come Back Little Googie” and in Twilight Zone: The Movie In one of the bits as Tim. I saw the film but don’t remember him. He’s got a bunch of DC Comics roles as well — Young General Fleming in Captain America, Roger Braintree on The Flash series and Tommy Puck on Superboy. Ahhh Lennier. One of the most fascinating and annoying characters in all of the Babylon 5 Universe. Enough said. I hadn’t realized it but he showed up on Deep Space Nine as Kellin in the “The Siege of AR-558” episode. Lastly, and before our gracious Host starts grinding his teeth at the length of this Birthday entry, I see he’s got a cameo as Dr. Z. Smith in the new Lost in Space series.
- Born February 1, 1965 — Brandon Lee. Lee started his career with a supporting role in Kung Fu: The Movie, but is obviously known for his breakthrough and fatal acting role as Eric Draven in The Crow, based on James O’Barr’s series. (Died 1993.)
- Born February 1, 1965 – Sherilyn Fenn, 54. Best know for playing as Audrey Horne on Twin Peaks. Her first genre work was in The Wraith as Keri Johnson followed by being Suzi in Zombie High (also known charmingly not as The School That Ate My Brain). Her latest work is Wish Upon, a supernatural horror film.
- Born February 1, 1984 – Lee Thompson Young. Victor Stone/ Cyborg on Smallville, Agent Stewart in the “Heavy Metal” episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Al Gough on FlashForward and Corporal Bell on The Event. (Died 2013.)
(7) THE MARTIAN PARTICLES. NPR is “Exploring The Mysterious Origins Of Mars’ 3-Mile-High Sand Pile”.
Scientists have evidence that a mountain 3 miles tall, in the middle of a crater on Mars, may be made largely from dust and sand.
To get the data for that surprising conclusion, the researchers MacGyvered a navigation instrument on the NASA rover Curiosity, and turned it into a scientific instrument.
The idea for repurposing the Rover Inertial Measurement Unit came from Kevin Lewis.
“It kind of frustrated me that we didn’t have a surface gravimeter on Mars,” says Lewis, a member of the Curiosity science team, and an assistant professor in earth and planetary sciences at Johns Hopkins University.
(8) WONDERFUL THINGS. “Tutankhamun’s tomb restored to prevent damage by visitors” – BBC has the story.
A nine-year project has been completed to restore the tomb of ancient Egypt’s boy king, Tutankhamun, and address issues that threatened its survival.
Experts from the Getty Conservation Institute repaired scratches and abrasions on the wall paintings caused by visitors to the burial chamber.
The paintings were also affected by humidity, dust and carbon dioxide introduced by every person who entered.
A new ventilation system should reduce the need for future cleaning.
New barriers will restrict physical access to the paintings, while a new viewing platform, lighting and interpretive signage will also allow visitors to better see the tomb and understand its historical and cultural significance.
(9) STARS LIKE… Is that a hidden galaxy in your pocket, or a grain of sand, or are you just happy to see me? Gizmodo tells how “Astronomers Accidentally Discover a Hidden Galaxy Right Next Door”.
One moment you’re investigating a globular cluster, and the next you’re unexpectedly writing a research paper about something else entirely, namely the discovery of previously unknown dwarf spheroidal galaxy. But that’s how it goes sometimes, and the authors of the new study, published this week in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, couldn’t be happier.
(10) SIPS OF FIRE. Charles Payseur reviews the short fiction in the latest Fireside — “Quick Sips – Fireside Magazine #63”.
There’s some big goings-on at Fireside Magazine in 2018, and January kicks off with five original stories plus an original poem. The pieces can be rather short (the poem might be longer than a number of the stories), but that doesn’t mean they pack less of a punch. The pieces range from deeply dark to lighter and so so cute, from epic and unexpected to unsettling and tense. The relationships that the pieces introduce, though, are complex and interesting and enlightening. From a father desperate to give his son a better life to a spouse unsure how to talk about what’s happening to them without draining those they care about. The piece looks at impossible situations, or situations that seem impossible, and shows how people move forward regardless. To the reviews!
(11) YA PERSPECTIVES. Vulture writer Kat Rosenfeld has organized the social media links, identified the players, and provided some analysis about the controversy around Amélie Wen Zhao: “The Latest YA Twitter Pile On Forces a Rising Star to Self-Cancel”.
Whether Zhao was guilty of any of the above is still up for debate, particularly in the absence of a finished book. (Blood Heir was not slated to publish until June; some reviewers had advance copies.) But unless we want to eliminate the Death Song trope from fiction or ding Tolkien’s own use of paraphrased Bible passages, the plagiarism allegations are shaky at best — and the charge of racism, led by a series of caustic tweets from YA fantasy author L.L. McKinney, relies on both a subjective interpretation of the word “bronze” and an exclusively American reading of scenes involving slavery. Nevertheless, the latter allegations caught the attention of social-justice-minded readers, and the controversy began to balloon. A smattering of one-star reviews cropped up on Zhao’s Goodreads page. Book bloggers began announcing that they no longer intended to read Blood Heir. In a tweet thread that did not name or tag Zhao but was clearly about her, well-known author Ellen Oh wrote, “Dear POC writers, You are not immune to charges of racism just because you are POC.”
It’s worth noting here that the role of Asian women within YA’s writers of color contingent has been a flashpoint for conflict before — one that led Zhao to butt heads with YA queen bee Justina Ireland in May 2018. After Ireland wrote a (since deleted) tweet that some readers interpreted as exclusionary gatekeeping of the “POC” label, Zhao launched a long thread asserting that Asian women are, indeed, women of color, including some pointed language about those who would suggest otherwise.
“You can delete your tweets, and we’re not going to come into your mentions, but ask yourselves why you wrote those/agreed with those in the first place, and why there is such an outcry. While we’re on the valid issue of anti-POC within POC groups, examine your own beliefs, too.” (She did not tag Ireland, but needless to say, everyone knew whom she was talking about.)
(12) SOUND FX. An old behind-the-scenes clip has surfaced of the foley work behind the sound of the malfunctioning for the Millennium Falcon (“Vintage Star Wars Video Explains the Sounds Behind the Millennium Falcon”).
The Star Wars franchise is full of some of the most recognizable sound effects to ever grace the big screen. Now, thanks to an unearthed video from 1980, the sounds that make up the Millennium Falcon failing to make it to hyperspace have been revealed. As is the case with nearly all other sound effects, the iconic ship’s sounds are made up of from more than one source and then mixed together to create something brand-new and unique. Hardcore Star Wars fans can probably already hear the iconic sound in their heads and don’t even need to pop in The Empire Strikes Back for reference.
A New Hope sound engineer Ben Burtt demystifies the Millennium Falcon failed hyperspace sound in a quick two-minute video. To make the noise, Burtt relied on five different sounds to achieve what he was hearing in his head. The inertia starter of an old 1928 biplane, an air jet recorded in a dentist’s office, the sound of an Arclight motor starting and stopping, the sound of a motor located in the turret of an armored tank, and the pipes underneath a broken sink in the bathroom at the recording studio were all used to make the sound in The Empire Strikes Back.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Daniel Dern, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, JJ, Chip Hitchock, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip WIllams.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
Claim jump first!
1) it was a different time, I guess.It’s been a long time since Psychohistorical Crisis…maybe the concept merits revisiting in the modern age.
6) So sad, still, about the loss of Elizabeth Sladen. Since she was in the first episode of DW I ever saw, she’s my first companion the same way Baker is my first Doctor.
9) Just saw that. That’s wild. The purloined Galaxy method.
(6): for a long time I thought Mumy played Andromeda on My Favorite Martian (a Cousin Oliver type), but I was mistaken – it was Wayne Stam.
7
I love the use of “MacGyvered” – they don’t explain it, they expect people to understand. Another fine example of SF going mainstream!
[click]
(6) Mumy played one of the adult townsfolk in the big screen remake of the episode he’d played a mutant kid in, ‘It’s a Good Life’. During one of the show’s revivals, he reprised the original role, with his own daughter playing the grown-up character’s child. More recently, he played the real Dr Smith in the lack-lustre Lost in Space reboot, dying in the first episode and having his identity stolen by the show’s new villain.
(1) Nicoll’s reasoning in that last paragraph, though he may not have been entirely serious, isn’t how things work. I listened to that adaptation in the early ’80s when I was about 12 years old. I loved the books (don’t know if I would now; I haven’t read any Asimov in a very long time). Also loved other BBC radio adaptations (Day of the Triffids was especially good). I did not like the BBC Foundation, not one little bit.
(6) I’m also quite fond of Mumy’s band, Barnes & Barnes, and their recording of their original hit, “Fish Heads,” which is not genre at all, but I seem to have mentioned it anyway.
(8) My first thought on reading the intro to this story was that they were protecting the pyramid by sealing it up. Go with what works, right?
Tsk. No edit window. Okay, I’ll go with what I put up there.
I never scroll… pixels.
(6) Sherilyn Fenn also showed up on The Magicians this week, but I don’t know if that’s a one-off or a recurring role.
@1: Was there something changed in the radio adaptation (which I am not going to take the time for), or did Mikayla miss a point? The books tell us repeatedly, starting IIRC fairly early, that psychohistory works because it’s a statistical operation; it can’t handle individual lives. Gung’f jul gur Zhyr guebjf n fcnaare vagb gur cerqvpgvbaf va gur zvqqyr bs gur 2aq obbx — gurer’f ab sberpnfgvat gur npgvbaf bs n fvatyr vaqvivqhny jub pna qevir znffrf.
@6: Everyone has the gout, I guess; I never thought much of LiS even when I was in 7th grade, and had zero interest in the movie. OTOH — Pal and Jones share a birthday? wow.
@P J Evans: I’m not sure I’ve ever seen any of Macgyver, but my impression (from others’ descriptions and the Wikipedia article) is that it wasn’t genre.
@Kip Williams: that was Mumy?!? I remember a couple of my concom “singing” that all over the first con I chaired; I don’t know whether I would have been less unhappy if I’d known the genre connection.
(3) Surely Lou is far too busy with secretarial duties for Society for the Advancement of Speculative Storytelling (as explained here) to be SFWA President also?
@Eli–With James Nicoll, when in doubt, it is far safer to assume deadpan humor than to entertain the idea he might be serious.
Especially if you find yourself saying, “That isn’t how things work.”
(9) Well, now they’re in trouble. That galaxy was hidden for a reason.
(No, I haven’t come up with one yet.)
@Chip
If he’s fixing stuff by inventing tools, or putting them together from whatever is at hand, it’s genre. (Because that sure isn’t how it usually works in the real world.)
Pixel heads, pixel heads
Scrolly poly pixel heads
Pixel heads, pixel heads,
Eat them up, yum!
Camestros Felapton: (3) Surely Lou is far too busy with secretarial duties for Society for the Advancement of Speculative Storytelling (as explained here) to be SFWA President also?
Surely, as a “respectable businessman”, he would have been well aware that he hadn’t paid his SFWA dues? But of course, no “respectable businessman” would submit what they know is an invalid campaign for President in order to get a “sorry, no” response for outrage marketing purposes. 🙄
@Chip: No, I’m quite sure the adaptation was faithful to the novel in that regard; that’s the kind of thing I would’ve noticed.
@Chip Hitchcock: My interpretation of what she said was that the predictions were far too accurate. And after all, these stories are about single people being in crucial roles in history. It doesn’t jibe.
But then I’m not sure of the details, because the last time I tried reading that steaming mass of “As you know Bob”, I was struck by the fundamental flaw in the premise that should have alerted me the first time I read it at age 16, that the whole concept was a scam. And after that, the carboard characters couldn’t hold my attention.
For those of us in the UK, this month’s Amazon Kindle bargains include Sue Burke’s Semiosis, which I think is worth checking out. (Review here: short version, I liked it.)
@Charon Dunn
“Ask a PixHead anything you want to,
They won’t answer, they Godstalk”
Eli says Sherilyn Fenn also showed up on The Magicians this week, but I don’t know if that’s a one-off or a recurring role.
No way to as the IMDb entry for that episode “ Lost, Found, Fucked” doesn’t even give her a character name. How’s the show?
I haven’t seen that particular episode yet (I generally don’t watch Magicians until I can buy the season on Blu-ray), but I’ve enjoyed the first three seasons very much. They diverge pretty significantly from the books, but for my money they generally diverge in good ways, and the cast (Eliot and Margo in particular) is outstanding.
Per Netflix, I know I saw Men Into Space back in 2008 or so, but I remember nothing about it.
I’m also quite fond of Mumy’s band, Barnes & Barnes, and their recording of their original hit, “Fish Heads,” which is not genre at all, but I seem to have mentioned it anyway.
As you should. That bit of absurd whimsy was a personal favorite when I was around 12. I have a recollection that it aired in Saturday Night Live.
@1: What are your other choices? How about “Riiiiiiiiight!”
@Lis:
The first one that occurred to me was that it was a different-tech version of Clarke’s Sentinel — but sinister imaginings can be so much more fun….
@P J Evans:
Just how radical are the tools he’s coming up with? There’s a lot of range between Scrapyard Wars and making a sonic screwdriver.
@Rose Embolism: my recollection of the books is that the predictions, and especially Seldon’s recordings-for-the-future, were quite general. e.g. (from memory) “You will have discovered the advantages of the sacred over the secular for manipulating power. This advantage is limited.”
@Lis @Chip Hitchcock: The real question is what are they using our galaxy to hide from?
@Cat: I’ve gotten to like the show quite a bit. I dearly love the books, so it did take me a while to get over the considerable differences in story (they rushed through the first book in what seemed like about 5 minutes, and changed some characters significantly) as well as tone – there’s often a flippant quality whereas the books, despite having a lot of humor, are basically melancholy – and the visual style isn’t the greatest. But I think they got a clearer sense of how to balance the tone with darker elements as they went along, and they’ve also found ways to pick up and repurpose stuff from parts of the books that they’ve already left behind. And the cast is excellent.
Chip says Just how radical are the tools he’s coming up with? There’s a lot of range between Scrapyard Wars and making a sonic screwdriver.
Oh I want to see a show making functioning sonic screwdrivers. Now that would be a true technological feat!
We just reviewed the Thirteenth Doctor’s Sonic Screwdriver prop replica that BBC did here at Green Man. We figure they’ll be popular with those who cosplay Her.
Scalzi has just been exposed as an author who writes books people enjoy (https://twitter.com/scalzi/status/1091664691397648384). The fiend. it sounds that the nuggets Scalzi supplies are reliably nutty, which was something that was described as just what science fiction should be, wasn’t it?
Andrew says Scalzi has just been exposed as an author who writes books people enjoy (https://twitter.com/scalzi/status/1091664691397648384). The fiend. it sounds that the nuggets Scalzi supplies are reliably nutty, which was something that was described as just what science fiction should be, wasn’t it?
So which Puppy is he quoting? And that person is wrong. It is quite possible to be both popular and good. I read any number of authors such as Seanan Mcquire and K.B. Wagers who do both. Just because the average Puppy genre writer can’t attract readers worth shit doesn’t prove that Scalzt is a bad writer because he does.
Larry Corrreia FOUNDED the Sad Puppies and he’s made more money from his books than MIke Glyer and everyone posting on this thread, including myself. COMBINED. Jon DelArroz is the biggest Sad Puppy agent provocateur and he’s making money hand over fist. Facts are stubborn things. Just because you don’t like someone doesn’t mean the facts are malleable.
Wait. Didn’t the Puppies think that more Hugo awards should go to popular space opera? I’m confused.
@Cat/@Nancy: To be fair, I didn’t look up the person who criticized Scalzi – he or she may not be a puppy at all. It’s still funny to see Scalzi criticized for these particular alleged sins – since others consider those sins to be virtues that Scalzi lacks.
Nancy Sauer: Wait. Didn’t the Puppies think that more Hugo awards should go to popular space opera? I’m confused.
It was always blindingly obvious that when the Puppies said that, they didn’t actually mean “Hugos should go to popular science fiction which is liked by a lot of fans”, they meant “Hugos should go to books and stories written by us”.
As evidenced by BT putting on the slate a bunch of works (many of which he hadn’t actually read) which were written by Puppies, or written/recommended by people that BT wanted to suck up to.
Lou Antonelli: Since you don’t know what anyone in the discussion makes from their books, beginning with Larry Correia, it’s clear you don’t feel constrained by the facts.
Lou Antonelli: Facts are stubborn things. Just because you don’t like someone doesn’t mean the facts are malleable.
Says the internet thug who used a bunch of lies to deliberately instigate a torrent of abuse on Foz and Toby Meadows and Camestros Felapton, and has still never apologized for that heinous behavior. 🙄
Andrew says To be fair, I didn’t look up the person who criticized Scalzi – he or she may not be a puppy at all. It’s still funny to see Scalzi criticized for these particular alleged sins – since others consider those sins to be virtues that Scalzi lacks.
It feels like a Puppy as they’ve been accusing Scalzi of such things for years now. Ok I don’t like them, aren’t going to like them, and think that they make Ayn Rand seem warm and fuzzy in comparison. Their fiction by and large sucks, their politics are abysmal and I suspect that they don’t like felines. I’ll take Scalzi and his fiction any day.
Oh, Lou.
I’m a retired librarian with a review blog. If Larry weren’t making more money from his writing, that would be very sad indeed.
More entertaining is the you Puppies go without missing a beat from “Scalzi is a complete failure, winning awards only by cheating, and Tor will go under any day now,” to “Scalzi is only making money and winning awards because he’s engaging in the nefarious practice of writing books people want to read.”
Which is it?
Oh, and regarding the subject of what puppies think or believe…
I know this probably hard for people from such close-knit and inbred social circles to understand, but most people think for themselves and have their own individual opinions and beliefs. People like you grow up mentally constrained by wealth, class or privilege. You can’t conceive of people thinking for themselves. Toss into that witch’s cauldron the left totalitarian political ideology you grew up in – which brooks no opposition – and you just spout nonsense like a bunch a mind readers who KNOW what other people believe and think.
So I don’t know what puppies think and believe. I know what I know and believe. And that’s that you’re pretty much what is wrong with this country and our society.
@Lou
Larry Corrreia FOUNDED the Sad Puppies and he’s made more money from his books than MIke Glyer and everyone posting on this thread, including myself. COMBINED. Jon DelArroz is the biggest Sad Puppy agent provocateur and he’s making money hand over fist.
Yes, so? If I’m misunderstanding you, please correct me, but you make it sound like the fact of their having MONEY is more important than anything else, including how they treat others (which is nothing to boast about, for either of the parties mentioned here).
Is that really what you’re trying to say?
It’s somebody named Rodental, on Reddit.
He or she doesn’t like “SJWs,” doesn’t like Nancy Pelosi and insists that America needs a wall and that therefore the shutdown can be blamed on the Democrats for not doing what Donald Trump orders them to do.
So, maybe not a Puppy, but certainly familiar.
No, Cat Eldridge wrote “the average Puppy genre writer can’t attract readers worth shit ” I was rebutting that.
As for the way people are treated, I would check out Matthew 7:5. That a reference to a chapter and verse in the Christian Bible. I’m just saying this to confuse you, since I really doubt you know what I’m talking about.
If Jon del Arroz is making money hand over fist, he’s going to have a hard time proving that Worldcon has damaged his career woefully.
But then, we’re dealing with a variant of Schrödinger’s President, where Obama was a calculating mastermind with conspiracies controlling everything, and an inept bungler who couldn’t accomplish anything.
Lou Antonelli: You can’t conceive of people thinking for themselves.
Sure I can. But Puppies’ behavior, just with regard to the Hugos, and on the MGC blog for example, indicates that they for the most part think, believe, and behave in lockstep, including some absolutely bizarre crazy-time conspiracy theories that even the stupidest person wouldn’t believe, such as that a blogger who lives in Sydney is the husband of a blogger who lives in Queensland (and yet they do believe those theories). So, you know, if they don’t want people thinking that they’re mindless brainwashed minions, they should probably try not to make such a concerted effort in public to prove that’s exactly what they are.
Lou Antonelli: So I don’t know what puppies think and believe.
And yet you claim to know what Filers think and believe. Got it. 🙄
A good combination the two sides of Bill Mumy is his song, The Ballad of William Robinson, written from the viewpoint of his Lost in Space character:
(Thanks to growing up in a city that didn’t have a CBS station available–either broadcast or on cable–until the late 60’s, I am privileged to have never seen Lost in Space…and don’t have any plans to change that. )
No, you weren’t. At least not logically.
First, you’d have to identify the average Puppy genre writer, to begin with, which is not the same thing as the guy who started the grift or one of the most persistent-but-ludicrous bandwagoners.
And when will you be taking the beam out, Lou?
@Lou
As for the way people are treated, I would check out Matthew 7:5. That a reference to a chapter and verse in the Christian Bible. I’m just saying this to confuse you, since I really doubt you know what I’m talking about.
Which is in no manner answering my question.
But hell, if we want to play Duelling Bibles:
Those who want to be rich, however, fall into temptation and become ensnared by many foolish and harmful desires that plunge them into ruin and destruction. 10 For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. By craving it, some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many sorrows. 11 But you, O man of God, flee from these things and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, perseverance, and gentleness.… (1 Timothy 6:9-11)
So again, Lou: What are you really trying to say here?
I’m saying my laundry is done so I gotta go and stop playing “Tease the morons on File 770”.
Lou Antonelli: Just in time, you’re due for a fresh diaper.
@Lou: People like you grow up mentally constrained by wealth, class or privilege. And you didn’t? ISTR a female Puppy about one step from Ayn Rand (in viewpoint and level of background) who claimed during the height of the mess that Patrick Nielsen Hayden was some sort of PhD’d snob, when in fact he has (IIRC) no degrees at all and had worked his way up the publishing industry just like his boss Doherty (who described an early job amounting to something like stocking book racks in non-book stores).
Mike Glyer: Just in time, you’re due for a fresh diaper.
I don’t know why he persists in coming back here, when every time he does, he ends up pwning himself horribly before scuttling back under his rock. It’s fascinating, in a cringe-y sort of way, to observe that sort of self-destructiveness.
Me, I’m wondering what “this country” means, when people posting on File770, and even in this thread, live in countries all over the world. This is an international forum. That’s one thing I really value about it.