Pixel Scroll 2/18/18 The Turn Of A Friendly Pixel

By JJ:

(1) THE DOCTOR IS | IN | . Gallifrey One, the Doctor Who convention, is taking place in Los Angeles this weekend, and fans are posting some great photos:

(2) THE LEFT MENU OF DARKNESS. The Paris Review, which has previously interviewed Ursula K. Le Guin, has recently published an article by Valerie Stivers in which the author created a series of recipes based on food from Le Guin’s The Left Hand Of Darkness. Dishes include Hot Beer For Two, Batter-Fried “Sube-Egg” Porridge with Winter Vegetables, and others:

Overall, I found Winter’s low-food-chain ingredients easy to work with; they fit in well with our modern sustainability-oriented cooking, an approach Le Guin, a passionate environmentalist, would have welcomed. The sticking point was the drinks. The characters in The Left Hand of Darkness consume hot beer, which, Ai explains, may sound gross but “on a world where a common table implement is a little device with which you crack the ice that has formed on your drink between drafts, hot beer is a thing you come to appreciate.” Some research revealed that even on Earth, hot beer was common prior to refrigeration and often contained nutritious items like eggs or half-curdled cream. I tried several recipes that were uniformly undrinkable until coming up with an adaptation of something I read about in a Wall Street Journal story calling hot beer a trend. As improbable as it sounds, the results were wonderful, and I can only urge you all to try it. Remember, sometimes it’s nice to be speculative – in beers as well as in love and in fiction.

(3) IN MEMORIAM. In “Two Seattle Memorials to Ursula K. Le Guin”, Cat Rambo provides specifics for those who wish to attend:

Folio Forum: A Tribute to Ursula Le Guin
Tuesday, February 20, 2018, 7:00 PM
The Seattle Athenaeum, 314 Marion Street, Downtown Seattle
$10 at the door; $8 for Folio Members, SFWA Members, and Town Hall Members
Complimentary wine reception to follow
Noted local authors and fans honor the great writer, plus a recording of Le Guin, reading her famous story

 

Celebration of the Life and Work of Ursula K. Le Guin
Sunday, February 25, 7:00 PM
Blue Moon Tavern, 712 NE 45th St, Seattle, Washington 98105
$free (please support our venue by buying food and drink!)
Please join us for a reading to commemorate the words and worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018).

(4) ABUSER MANUAL. Lurkertype points to a graphic sequence where “Someone kinda like The Little Mermaid ‘splains how to fight sealioning”.

(5) ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERS TO THE ELDER GODS. In “Octlantis is a Just-Discovered Underwater City Engineered by Octopuses”, Ephrat Livni describes a revelation in octopod behavior:

Gloomy octopuses – also known as common Sydney octopuses, or octopus tetricus – have long had a reputation for being loners. Marine biologists once thought they inhabited the subtropical waters off eastern Australia and northern New Zealand in solitude, meeting only to mate, once a year. But now there’s proof these cephalopods sometimes hang out in small cities.

In Jervis Bay, off Eastern Australia, researchers recently spotted 15 gloomy octopuses congregating, communicating, dwelling together, and even evicting each other from dens at a site the scientists named “Octlantis.”

The discovery was a surprise, Scheel told Quartz. “These behaviors are the product of natural selection, and may be remarkably similar to vertebrate complex social behavior. This suggests that when the right conditions occur, evolution may produce very similar outcomes in diverse groups of organisms.”

(6) CAN’T LET IT GO. In “Why (some of the) Right Hates Elsa”, Camestros Felapton unpacks some of the criticisms of the Disney animated movie Frozen from conservative blogs, and tries to determine why, more than 4 years after its release, the film still seems to generate so much antipathy in some quarters:

The issue is not hard to diagnose. Frozen is mainly conventional Disney – in some ways even less than that. The plot is slight compared to other classic Disney films (e.g. the Lion King) and the songs (bar one) are unmemorable. Yet it does a few things and those things are interesting…

The story rejects romantic love as its central message and instead centres on the familial love of two sisters.

This being Disney, there really is zero implications about Elsa’s sexuality EXCEPT that at no point does she act out of desire for a romantic relationship with anybody of any gender. And with that we get to part of the multiple issues the right continue to have with the film.

(7) IF I COULD TURN BACK TIME. A new Kickstarter promotes the 6th Extinction Card Deck, a playable poker deck showcasing 54 extinct animals and birds from the ice age to the 1980’s, as illustrated by 34 different artists. One of the artworks featured is by Oor Wombat; her designated lifeform has not yet been revealed, but perhaps we can pry it out of her with a suitable bribe.

The Kickstarter has thus far achieved $843 in pledges toward a goal of $3,600, with 25 days left to go.

(8) GO MAKE ME A SAMMICH. Forget digging to China, here’s the new global craze: Earth Sandwich. (click on the photo on the left, then click on the right arrows to scroll through the gallery)

(9) CHALLENGE ACCEPTED, REDUX. The January 22 Pixel Scroll (Item #13) reported the viral campaign of New York native Frederick Joseph to set up screenings of Black Panther for children across the U.S. through the #BlackPantherChallenge. The website for the challenge is now live; donors can click on any of the icons on the map to see existing GoFundMe challenges and choose one to which to contribute. (unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a “list” view, so in areas with numerous challenges, zooming in on the map is required to differentiate between them)

(10) HOT COUTURE. On the Daily Dot, Gavia Baker-Whitelaw interviews Gersha Phillips, who designed the costumes for Star Trek: Discovery:

In the end, Discovery wound up with a more sleek and high-tech look. The new uniforms follow the classic idea of color-coded Starfleet departments (gold, silver and bronze accents for Command, Science, and Operations), but also take inspiration from contemporary athleisure brands.

Speaking to Gersha Phillips, we delved into Discovery’s fashion influences from Alien to Balenciaga. She’s a fount of knowledge about the canon background for costuming details like Klingon armor (Klingons have different internal organs!), and cosplayers have her to thank for the Mirror Universe’s beautiful gold capes.

(11) #BOWIEURCAT. Somehow, I don’t think that this is quite what the Thin White Duke had in mind.

(12) BIRTHDAYS.

  • Born February 18, 1919Jack Palance, Actor (Batman, Solar Crisis)
  • Born February 18, 1948Sinéad Cusack, Actor (The Ballad of Tam Lin, V for Vendetta)
  • Born February 18, 1984Genelle Williams, Actor (Warehouse 13, Bitten)

(13) MORE GALLIFREY ONE PHOTOS.

(14) FIRE THE CANON. Grant Snider, at Incidental Comics, asks “Who Controls the Cannon of Literature?”

(15) MAPPING THE WORLDS. Sarah Gailey contributes to what has now become a series of posts on cartography in SFFnal worlds with “Hippos, Worldbuilding, and Amateur Map-Making”:

About a year ago, I attended a panel on worldbuilding in young adult literature. All of the authors on the panel were young, brilliant, dynamic women. They wore flower crowns and they talked about mapmaking and spreadsheets. They were impressive as all get-out. I have never felt more intensely envious in my life.

I was jealous of their flower crowns, of course. I was also jealous of the easy way they talked about going in-depth on planning color schemes for each chapter they wrote, and the Pinterest boards they referenced for their character aesthetics. I was jealous of the way their worldbuilding all seemed to start from the ground up, because that seemed to me to be a whole other level of professional-writer-ness. My worldbuilding has always leached out from my character development – I write how a character moves, and their movement defines the world they live in. The women on this panel were talking about writing thousands of words about the world their characters inhabited, all before they put a single line of dialogue on a page. They were clearly worldbuilding masters. I was in awe.

It only took seven words for my awe to become fear.

(16) THE TOR BOYCOTT IS STILL TOTALLY WORKING. The Tucson Festival of Books will take place from March 10-11, and you can do your part for the Tor Boycott by checking out their author sessions. Tor/Forge and Tor.com Publishing authors Candice Fox, Nancy Kress, K Arsenault Rivera, Myke Cole, Annalee Newitz, Kristen Simmons, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., and Patty Garcia will be participating. A schedule can be found at the link.

(17) DEMAND EXCEEDS SUPPLY.

(18) BIRTHING PAINS. Jill Lepore, in a very long and very interesting essay at The New Yorker about childbirth, grief, and the de-feminization of Shelley’s best-known work, says in “The Strange and Twisted Life of “Frankenstein”: (content warning for miscarriage and infant death)

Because Shelley was readily taken as a vessel for other people’s ideas, her novel has accreted wildly irreconcilable readings…

“This nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good,” Shelley remarked about the creature’s theatrical billing. She herself had no name of her own. Like the creature pieced together from cadavers collected by Victor Frankenstein, her name was an assemblage of parts: the name of her mother, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, stitched to that of her father, the philosopher William Godwin, grafted onto that of her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, as if Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley were the sum of her relations, bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, if not the milk of her mother’s milk, since her mother had died eleven days after giving birth to her, mainly too sick to give suck – Awoke and found no mother.

(19) RULE 34 MEETS THE SHAPE OF WATER. (warning: this item is utterly Not Safe For Work) Doug Jones, who plays the fishman in Guillermo del Toro’s fantastical movie, admits of the glow-in-the-dark erotic accessory currently being marketed:

With a light chuckle, I can tell you it’s not exactly what I’d hoped for. After pouring my heart, soul, blood, sweat, and tears into this romantic, beautiful, magical role, the last thing I want to be remembered for is a silicone appendage that comes in two sizes.

(20) NOT EXACTLY WHAT I MEANT BY “SPIDEY-SENSE”.

 (21) UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE. The exhibit “A Conversation Larger Than the Universe: Science Fiction and the Literature of the Fantastic from the Collection of Henry Wessells” will run from January 25 to March 10, 2018 at The Grolier Club. Publishers Weekly describes the exhibition:

This erudite and altogether fascinating collection of essays from Wessells (Another Green World) explores the development of science fiction from its roots, focusing on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which the author considers “the point at which science fiction emerges from the gothic.” He then takes the reader on a personal journey through his favorite books, pointing out historic firsts such as Sara Coleridge’s Phantasmion (1837), the first fantasy novel published in English. He surveys the publishing history of some of the pillars of the genre, including Philip K. Dick, James Blish, Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Robert Sheckley, as well as highlighting the work of authors whose names are less well known by the general public, such as Avram Davidson and R.A. Lafferty.

(22) MAKE THE ROBOT HAPPY. An SF & Fantasy Humble Bundle from Angry Robot is currently available, including books from Anna Kashina, Carrie Patel, Christopher Hinz, Dan Abnett, Danielle L. Jensen, Foz Meadows, Ishbelle Bee, Jay Posey, Justin Gustainis, Kaaron Warren, Keith Yatsuhashi, Megan O’Keefe, Peter Mclean, Peter Tieryas, Rod Duncan, and Wesley Chu. 10 days are left to grab the bundle, which benefits humanitarian charity Worldbuilders (be sure to click on “Choose where your money goes” before going through the checkout process).

(23) GIVE MY REGARDS TO KING TUT. Io9 says, “You Can Now Watch the Original Stargate Movie for Free”:

Back in 1994, few could have predicted what Stargate would become. The original film was a hit, but what happened after is damn near unprecedented. Not a theatrical sequel, no, but several popular television series and a rabid fandom that far overshadowed the people who saw the original movie in theatres.

But it did start with that original movie, directed by Roland Emmerich, starring Kurt Russell and James Spader. And though it’s been available in multiple formats since its initial release, this week MGM put the full film on YouTube for free.

 

[Thanks to Camestros Felapton, Cora Buhlert, Greg Machlin, Hampus Eckerman, James Davis Nicoll, jayn, Juliette Wade, lauowolf, lurkertype, Mark-kitteh, Paul Weimer, Rob Thornton, and Robin A. Reid for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 Contributing Editor of the Day JJ.]

113 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 2/18/18 The Turn Of A Friendly Pixel

  1. @Dann:

    I could provide a similar laundry list.

    No, you couldn’t. Every previous time you’ve claimed this sort of equivalence you’ve been unable to show it. You’ll not be able to show it this time either.
    Lis Carey did the work you would never do concerning your assertion, but then there’s nothing about the political affiliation of the people doing the threatening. But your assertion that Pai is a partisan tool is noted.
    Also, head of federal agency is not any (slightly) feminist woman is not head of federal agency. Your purported equivalence fails so goddamn hard you should be ashamed.

  2. @Dann: “One is that there is a general trend of dismissing conservatives (and libertarians…just to hoist my personal flag) out of hand.”

    Bullshit. I dismiss you not because of your politics, but because – as Feline notes above – whenever someone challenges you to put up or shut up, you shut up so thoroughly that you don’t even acknowledge that a challenge was made.

    Case in point: My movie challenge. Did you think I’d forgotten about that?

    You went off on a typical tear about how liberal Hollywood is and how much they hate conservative values, so I challenged you to look at your nearby theaters for a realtime reality check. I did the work; I have my results right here, waiting to be pasted into a comment. You ghosted, apparently hoping the challenge would be forgotten and dropped.

    Of course, I can see what’s going on. You took a look at the state of the industry, saw theaters full of conservative-friendly American-heroes-beat-terrorists-and-gangs movies, and realized that you couldn’t support your claim that this is an industry hostile to those values. Instead of doing the honorable thing and acknowledging your error, though, you ran away.

    People who make a habit out of running away when confronted with inconvenient truths deserve to be dismissed out of hand. This is doubly true for people who openly admit to arguing in bad faith – something else you mysteriously “didn’t see” when I confronted you on it.

    In fact, now that I look, both of the people you have continued to engage with on these topics – Meredith and Lis – are women. I hope that’s not an indication that you see them as easier prey… but I don’t expect you to answer that. You’ve shown your true colors, you know I’m right, and you can’t bring yourself to engage with someone who sees through your bullshit.

    I’ve lost my patience with your cowardice and your dishonesty.

  3. In fact, now that I look, both of the people you have continued to engage with on these topics – Meredith and Liz – are women. I hope that’s not an indication that you see them as easier prey… but I don’t expect you to answer that. You’ve shown your true colors, you know I’m right, and you can’t bring yourself to engage with someone who sees through your bullshit.

    I’ve lost my patience with your cowardice.

    @ Bob

    I have differences of opinion with Meredith and Lis. They have responded in a manner that is civil. They have not demonstrated any ignorance by presumptuously tossing out baseless and scurrilous accusations about my character.

    ‘Nuff said.

    Regards,
    Dann
    My random tagline generator.

  4. Dann, sadly, Rev. Bob’s description of your behavior when you have differences of opinion with him no more contentious than with me or Meredith, seems all too accurate.

    And in fact you didn’t produce links for your claims about Ajit Pai; I had to do that. I did rather get the impression that I was supposed to be abashed and effectively silenced by the Horrid Revelation that didn’t even have a name attached, and not dare to pursue the subject any further, lest there be Even Worse Revelations.

    It didn’t work.

  5. @Lis Carey

    Curiously, that was not my intent. My sole purpose was to suggest that such abuse is a bi-directional problem. I assumed that you were reasonably well-read so that I need not include links or Ajit Pai’s name for you to know the instance to which I was referring.

    Regards,
    Dann
    Freedom works…each and every time it is tried.

  6. @Dann–

    Yet you didn’t present a case actually equivalent to the ones I pointed to. Ajit Pai’s case is very different is some hard to miss ways.

    A. He’s a government official, a fairly powerful one, setting government policy, not a private citizen exercising his 1st Amendment rights. Threatening him is absolutely unacceptable, especially threats directed at or through his children, but he’s got resources to protect himself and his family. Any threats that have real substance are federal crimes. Gamergate’s targets had real difficulty for a long time in getting anyone to take their reports seriously. Most women who are the targets of sexual harassment and rape threats online because we express opinions unapproved by the hard right are on our own. No one will listen except other women who have experienced much the same thing.

    B. He’s a member of the most nakedly subservient to corporate interests administrations ever–more so than Warren Harding’s, previously the hands down winner in that category. When he says “let’s kill net neutrality, he’s not just expressing an opinion. He’s setting policy.

    C. He’s told some major lies about the history of net neutrality, pretending the entire concept was a whimsical invention of that dumb Obama, and that there were no problems in a previous, idyllic, pre-net neutrality period. In fact, of course, net neutrality was how the internet operated for most of its history, and Obama enacted rules to defend it when internet provider companies started trying to mess with that, imposing slowdowns on services and sites that for their own profit they’d rather their customers ignored in favor of the ones they made more money from. Or charging sites high fees for favored transmission rates, to allow those sites’ customers reliable access.

    And that was starting to hurt innovation and the economic growth that flowed from it.

    D. Prominent leftists and liberals condemned the threats as the wrong thing to do and morally unacceptable. The insults, bullying, and threats against survivors and families of victims of mass shootings often come from quite prominent right wing pundits and “conservative” politicians. See, e.g., Erick Erickson calling David Hogg a bully, the constant litany from Republicans that all mass shooters are Democrats/liberals/progressives, the outraged complaints that Emma Gonzalez was “disrespectful” to Marco Rubio, when she didn’t meekly accept his canned non-answer.

    You’re setting some extreme reactions to one political figure determined to implement an economically harmful policy that’s widely opposed, against pervasive, persistent, attacks on private citizens exercising their rights as citizens, and being subjected to an onslaught intended to make us STFU and get out of the way of people who tell us we’re not real Americans and we need to stop inconveniencing our betters.

    Not gonna happen.

  7. @Dann – I don’t know that I’d go so far as ‘cowardice’, but you did just cut out an entire post explaining what something was based on, then try to claim that it was ‘baseless’. Call it what you like, but we can all see it when you do things like that.

  8. @Lis Carey & Maximillian

    Yup. I’m disinclined to get bogged down in the weeds of an endless tit-for-tat session of whataboutism. Perhaps it would have been better if I’d declined to offer any example at all.

    I agree that there are well-established incidents of abuse coming from the right. I’ve even criticized it here once or twice!

    The existence of that source of abuse does not excuse abuse coming from the left.

    You’re setting some extreme reactions to one political figure determined to implement an economically harmful policy that’s widely opposed, against pervasive, persistent, attacks on private citizens exercising their rights as citizens, and being subjected to an onslaught intended to make us STFU and get out of the way of people who tell us we’re not real Americans and we need to stop inconveniencing our betters.

    I disagree. IMHO, you are focusing on that one instance as being the only relevant counter to your longer list.

    There plenty of examples flowing in the other direction. Examples where the message to people not on the left is, as you suggest, “STFU”. I’m inclined to believe that you are well read on current events and shouldn’t need a laundry list of those events.

    Not gonna happen.

    Quite right.

    Regards,
    Dann
    The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection. – George Orwell

  9. Dann: There plenty of examples flowing in the other direction. Examples where the message to people not on the left is, as you suggest, “STFU”. I’m inclined to believe that you are well read on current events and shouldn’t need a laundry list of those events.

    Your inclination is wrong. If you’re going to make arguments, throwing out a bunch of unsupported accusations and then claiming that your point has been proven is just laughable.

    If there are plenty of valid examples, you will have no problem documenting some, instead of expecting people here to take your word on this, when you have been repeatedly demonstrated to be wrong about almost all of the other claims you’ve made.

    You haven’t earned the right to expect people to just take your word on things. In fact, you’ve earned exactly the opposite: people knowing that you can rarely provide substantial evidence to support your claims, and that the next claim you come out with is probably going to be bullshit, too.

  10. @Dann:

    They have responded in a manner that is civil.

    You should learn from them.

    My sole purpose was to suggest that such abuse is a bi-directional problem.
    No. Do I need to give you a goddamn grammar lesson? You said, and I quote you once again:

    I could provide a similar laundry list.
    This is an assertion that equivalent examples exist, and that you can provide examples, plural. There’s no suggestion there, it’s an assertion of facts that are not actually in evidence.

    Perhaps it would have been better if I’d declined to offer any example at all.
    Naked assertion of fact? These days, given you having form with this, the outcome would be similar.

    I disagree. IMHO, you are focusing on that one instance as being the only relevant counter to your longer list.
    The only instance you could muster. Don’t blame others for the weakness of your position.

    There plenty of examples flowing in the other direction.
    And here’s a naked assertion of fact from me, which you will of course accept without issue:
    No.

    I’m inclined to believe that you are well read on current events and shouldn’t need a laundry list of those events.
    And I’m inclined to believe that you are full of shit, and as it happens the history of your comments support that belief.

  11. @Dann I’m not interested in seeing you defend anything. You miss my point. You cut out several hundred words of in-depth explanation from someone’s post and then claimed that the remaining sentence was baseless. You then claimed to not be interested in whataboutism, when that was the entire point of your earlier post, claiming (paraphrased are mine) “but what about when the left hurts people’s feelings, that’s worse!”

    Maybe if you stopped contradicting yourself and stopped arguing points THAT EVEN YOU know are invalid, you’d have more luck getting people to sympathize with your viewpoint? Think about it, at least, please.

  12. @Dann: “I have differences of opinion with Meredith and Lis. They have responded in a manner that is civil. They have not demonstrated any ignorance by presumptuously tossing out baseless and scurrilous accusations about my character.”

    1. Dishonesty does not deserve a civil response. It deserves to be called out and exposed for the lie that it is.
    2. Tone policing from Mr. Freespeech? How hypocritical.
    3. “Demonstrated ignorance” – citation needed.
    4. “Presumptively tossing out baseless and scurrilous accusations” – I took you at your word when you announced that you argue dishonestly. Either you were telling the truth then about lying in the past, or that statement was itself a lie. Thus, every word of your “presumptively / baseless / scurrilous” accusation against me is false.

    You can’t defeat me on substance, so you toss that aside and attack my demeanor. How depressingly predictable… and how thoroughly dishonest.

  13. This is a needless, testosterone-fueled, toxic exchange. I’m locking comments on this Scroll.

Comments are closed.