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

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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:

https://twitter.com/HibaIssa/status/964606320350453760

https://twitter.com/rileyjsilverman/status/964941825407512576

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

(13) MORE GALLIFREY ONE PHOTOS.

https://twitter.com/CA_Young/status/965117361345806337

https://twitter.com/wintersweet/status/965140836211019778

(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”.

https://twitter.com/lokivy/status/964542271302651905

 (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.]

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

  1. (8): the link doesn’t work for me, but googling “Earth sandwich” gives me the idea of what’s going on – very nice.

    Red Scrolls in morning, Filers take warning, Red Scrolls at night, Pixel’s delight

  3. (2)

    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.

    So that’s where the expression, “What do you want, egg in your beer?” comes from!

    One of Earth’s great mysteries solved.

    And some people say you can’t learn anything useful from science fiction.

  5. 23) Still one of my favorite movies. 🙂

    &) “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.”

    Shouldn’t that be Our Wombat?

  6. (1) I love that little girl in her Who costume! Apart from being so cute, I think it says volumes about what a great role model the new Dr. Who is.

    (4) Also love the Sealioning cartoon! Just reposted to my FB wall. I have been tangled up by sealions on a number of occasions. It incenses me when people treat my questions as dumb, so I try to treat other people’s questions with respect… which is exactly the mentality sealions take advantage of, and they have wasted my time on too many occasions. I find sealioning genuinely offensive, precisely because of how it warps and pisses on the important practice of encouraging honest questions and treating people’s questions with respect.

    (5) An undersea city of gloomy octopuses (octupii?) sounds more like R’liyeh than like “Octlantis.” Elder Gods, indeed!

    (6) Until I read this post on Camestros’ site, I was happily unaware of the seething obsession with FROZEN. I guess…. great art inspire a reaction? (And I am still tickled that ol’ whatshisface uses phrases like “an expression of pure Crowleyian evil” when talking to his children. So much grander than saying to your kids after seeing a Disney movie, “I liked the singing tiger.”)

    (7) That sounds wonderful. I must check out this Kickstarter.

    (16) & (17) LOL! Who but the Puppies/MGCers/whatdotheycallthemselvesnow could make me root for Tor Books (where my experiences were so bad that I would quit writing rather than deal with them again) and SFWA (of which I am not a member)? Glad to see that both enterprises are doing well despite Puppy boycotts, curses, predictions of doom, etc.

    (18) Going to go read the Frankenstein article now.

  12. 19) Come to think of it, a better title would have been “The Shape of Things to Come”.

  13. (13) MORE GALLIFREY ONE PHOTOS. I love that last photo! 😀

    Okay, and I loved that Spider-Man thing, too. 🙂

    I used up my brain commenting on the previous Pixel Scroll, but many thanks to @JJ and @Mike Glyer for Scrolling on.

    Oh one very short SFReading note: I finished Provenance by Ann Leckie in the wee hours this morning. It was very good! It was a much bigger story than I expected, while still being an intimate one as I thought it was going to be, if that makes any sense. No? Okay then. Anyway, it’s a little disturbing how so far, nyy gur nyvraf jr’ir zrg va guvf havirefr fbegn-rafynir naq trargvpnyyl znavchyngr uhznaf. (V pna’g jnvg gb zrrg gur Eeeeeee!) [sp?] At least, that’s how I see it. Interesting and bizarre. 🙂 I very much look forward to Leckie’s next novel – I hope there is another one coming! Be it in or outside of this universe, or in another genre, I’m there! Though I wouldn’t mind another, what do we call it, Leckieverse? Raadch-verse? Conclave? novel, I admit. 😉

  14. @Hampus Eckerman: “Come to think of it, a better title would have been “The Shape of Things to Come”.”

    ROFL.

  16. (6) I forget who it was, but someone was grousing a few days ago about how what Frozen really lacked, its crucial plot hole, was some kind of scene or subplot (at least a training montage) where Elsa learns to use her powers without hurting others. After revisiting the material and scrutinizing it most carefully, I’ve discovered* the presence of precisely such a scene.

    It’s cleverly concealed* as the “Let it Go” song.

    Watch the video on CF’s page, and the (self-)training montage is undeniable. Elsa starts with a crude form (Olaf from his early “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” appearance), gets her bearings with a few glittery flourishes, then moves on to a rough-hewn staircase. As with many songs in musicals, the rest of the scene is largely a montage in disguise; construction of the ice castle actually would have taken much longer than a few minutes, providing her with countless opportunities to hone her skills. This scene differs from the Rocky “jogging up stairs and punching meat” montage primarily in that the latter cuts between different scenes to more obviously show Time Passing; it is fundamentally the same cinematic process at work.

    Oh, she might still be worried about losing control and harming someone else, but that’s a self-imposed block; when push comes to shove, she’s taught herself all the control she needs over her ice powers. What remains is her own fear and impulsiveness, which naturally drives the rest of the story. At the big climax, that’s what remains to be overcome, and doing so shatters those remaining blocks to put her in full control.

    * Okay, I snark. Just a little, though.

  17. (8) I am perhaps being thick, but does it make sense to have an Indian/Minnesotan sandwich? Does it work if both bits of bread are in the northern hemisphere? Won’t the planet just squeeze out when Galactus takes a bite?

  18. 2) I’ve never seen it in the wild, but if we’re looking for hot beer then there are plenty of mulled ale recipes still around.

    I’d also expect there to be more fat than grain in gichy-michy, since I read it as a stand-in for pemmican. Though I could be completely wrong, given that there aren’t many sources of hard fat on Gethen. Maybe more of a nut bar?

    (According to the notes at the back of “The Language of the Night”, LeGuin’s recipe for “Fresh gichmichy (or to be honest about it Nituke)” was published in “Cooking Out of This World” in 1973… but it turns out Nituke is braised macrobiotic vegetables, so I don’t think it’s the same thing.)

    4) On sealioning, I finally tracked down this quote that I’ve been searching for, which has wider applications than racism:

    “The function, the very serious function, of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language, so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”
    – Toni Morrison, “A Humanist View”, 1975

    The thing about sealioning is that, whether you address it or ignore it, it still works to keep you on the back foot. In fact, one of the key purposes of safe spaces is to make it possible to have conversations that don’t keep getting derailed by ignorant or malicious questions.

    6) Camnestros is clearly right here, and I also wonder if, on a more basic level, they just don’t like the way singing “Let it Go” gives girls a chance to be loud and visible.

  20. (18)

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

    “But there are subtler alternatives to the flat denial of agency: She didn’t write it; he did. One is: It wrote itself. This is highly unlikely, and yet the plot is used … about the author of Frankenstein, according to Ellen Moers: ‘Her extreme youth, as well as her sex, have contributed to the generally held opinion that she was not so much an author in her own right as a transparent medium through which passed the ideas of those around her. “All Mrs. Shelley did,” writes Mario Praz, “was to provide a passive reflection of some of the wild fantasies which were living in the air around her.”‘”

    — Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing

    It never stops, does it.

  21. I judged FROZEN as “not to be watched” based on the ugliness of the snowman mascot. This seemed to have worked for that film that had “gurgee” in it. The less likeable the mascot, the worse the film is.

  22. As I’ve told my children, Let It Go is an expression of pure Crowleyian evil

    I bet you bloody well did and all you prat.

  24. @RWS: “I judged FROZEN as “not to be watched” based on the ugliness of the snowman mascot. The less likeable the mascot, the worse the film is.”

    So likeability equals physical attractiveness now?

    At least you’re forthright in saying you think this. Should save you a lot of money on dates.

  26. @Rev. Bob
    If “Let It Go” doubles as a training montage, that would also better integrate it into the story than many other Disney songs.

    Also, I’ve heard from quite a few people that they refuse to watch an animated movie, because the characters and/or the animation are ugly, so it’s definitely a thing. The latest example was when someone complained about Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs”, the opening film of this year’s Berlin film festival, that it looked ugly and besides, it was for kids and why wasn’t there was some other opening film that was more relevant.

    @Kyra
    A few years ago, I came across a paper where a (male) academic tried to prove that Percy Shelley and Lord Byron really wrote Frankenstein, but it isn’t possible that a woman wrote it and one so young at that.

    Sadly, How to Suppress Women’s Writing is as accurate as it ever was.

  28. @Robert Whitaker Sirignano

    This seemed to have worked for that film that had “gurgee” in it.

    “The Black Cauldron”

  29. @ Kyra @ Cora
    I don’t know if this is something unique to Mary Shelley or women. There are plenty of people claiming that Shakesphere didn’t write Shakesphere also. Or that he wrote it, but it was just a retelling of older stories.

  30. Andrew: I recalled the Lloyd Alexander title a short time later. I like the actor/comic who voice “Gurgee” (John Byner) , but his gushing of self pity didn’t help a film crippled by some awkward directing.

  31. @bookworm1398 I don’t know if this is something unique to Mary Shelley or women.

    “In a nominally egalitarian society the ideal situation (socially speaking) is one in which the members of the “wrong” group have the freedom to engage in literature (or equally significant activities) and yet do not do so, thus proving that they can’t. But alas, give them the least real freedom and they will do it. The trick thus becomes to make the freedom as nominal a freedom as possible and then—since some of the so-and-so’s will do it anyway—develop various strategies for ignoring, condemning or belittling the artistic works that result. If properly done, these strategies result in a social situation in which the “wrong” people are (supposedly) free to commit literature, art, or whatever, but very few do, and those who do (it seems) do it badly, so we can all go home to lunch.”
    – Joanna Russ, “How to Suppress Women’s Writing”

    The Shakespeare-authorship theories were similar in that they were rooted in class prejudice – a lowly actor obviously couldn’t have written such sublime literature – but they were only ever considered fringe theories and never (as far as I know) made it into academic discourse.

  32. @bookworm1398

    It is not “unique”, no, but it is much, much, much more common for this to be done to female writers. Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Mary Shelley, Margaret Cavendish, and Virginia Woolf, among many others, were all accused of being fronts for male (always male) authors, and that’s before we even get into weird analyses like, “OK, maybe Mary Shelley wrote it, but she didn’t WRITE IT write it, she used some kind of magic to make it just appear on the page.” It gets done to minority authors as well.

    Seriously, this is a Thing.

  33. @ Robert Whitaker Sirignano

    Andrew: I recalled the Lloyd Alexander title a short time later. I like the actor/comic who voice “Gurgee” (John Byner) , but his gushing of self pity didn’t help a film crippled by some awkward directing.

    Pardon the nitpick, but I believe that the book refers to that character as “Gurgi.” Judging from the Google search, it looks like the movie does too.

  34. @Valoise: Great Weeping Angel photo! The Angel looks disgusted with the wine. 😉 Probably a Chardonnay.

  35. I’m familiar with those batshit theories from studying literature at uni; thankfully none of my lecturers actively espoused them, but merely pointed them out as bizarre curiosities (or that’s how I took them anyway)

  36. There is quite a bit of evidence that Zelda Fitzgerald wrote many of the short stories published under her husband’s name, so the removal of women from literary history works both ways.
    A similar thing happened with female painters in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Their work was attributed to their husbands as matter of course because women just don’t paint!

  37. @bookworm1398:

    I think it’s relevant that the “Shakespeare didn’t really write his plays” stuff credits them to other, usually higher-status men.

    What we don’t see is people publishing, and having taken seriously, claims that X novel couldn’t possibly have been written by a man, so it must have been his sister, or wife, or mother’s work. Or that a man was merely plucking inspiration out of the air: when a male artist draws on the zeitgeist, or is inspired in part by his relatives, that’s just the normal creative process.

    Young men are recognized as capable of doing good work, including creative work: the “prodigy” is a recognized narrative. We aren’t told Mozart’s work must be by someone else because he was only in his teens.

  38. @Ghostbird – That Toni Morrison quote. Wow. Somehow I’d thought sealioning was a relatively new phenomenon brought on by internet discussions a la usenet, forums, blogs, Twitter, etc..

    @Rob Thornton – Thanks for looking that up. I remembered that spelling, as well. Never saw the movie, but recently re-read the books. Gurgi’s self-pity is laid on pretty thick in the books, as well.

    Also, if anyone is thinking of (re-)reading the Chronicles of Prydain, I did so a couple years ago and found the reverse suck fairy had hit it. Taran, to my adult eyes, is a smug, selfish brat (who grows into a compassionate adult through the series), while Eilonwy (who I found annoying and *ahem* shrill as a child) is clever, resourceful and heroic throughout the books, despite being constantly underestimated and the many attempts to sideline her. May be rage-inducing to people who have had to deal with that all their lives, but I was surprised to find how much an adult perspective flipped the story.

  39. The person who questioned the authorship of Shakespear’s plays was a mentally ill woman named Delia Bacon in the mid 19th century. She was the beginning of the questioning, which has seen no end.

    Has anyone gone on to compare the stylistic nuances of Shelly’s novel FRANKESTEIN, with her other novel, THE LAST MAN, and her various short stories?

    Mozart was writing music when he was six, as I read somewhere.

  40. Of course, some of us didn’t care for FROZEN just because we didn’t like the film–it had nothing to do with political agendas or the cuteness//ugliness of the animated characters.

    (I just thought it was boring. Give me a Pixar film any day.)

  41. @Kathodus

    Thanks for the recommendation about the Prydain series. I’ve been debating it and was leaning towards reading the first book just to see how it goes.

    In other news…ahem…I did finish Damien Black’s “Devils’ Night Dawning” and enjoyed it enough that I plowed on into the second book in the series; Warlock’s Sun Rising. In terms of storytelling and character development, book 2 continues at the same high level as book 1.

    However…..book 2 isn’t for everyone. As with other books in the grimdark subgenre, a lot of dark things happen to a lot of people. If books that include a fair amount of rape and murder are not your thing, then book 2 is not for you. It crossed far enough over the line for me that I wouldn’t want to lead someone towards the series and let them be “surprised”.

    I do look forward to Damien’s future projects. He has the writing chops to go far.

    Regards,
    Dann
    Give the American people a good cause, and there’s nothing they can’t lick. – John Wayne

  42. @kathodus: “reverse suck fairy” – heh, great! I seem to recall both Taran and Eilonwy as being “reach exceeds their grasp” types, Taran a bit bumbling to start off and Eilonwy being a bit full of herself at first, but both growing into mature people along the way.

    IIRC, I picked up some of the audiobooks? all of them? Gah, I can’t remember (not at my own computer) and can’t recall whether I actually listened-as-reread to them yet – maybe they’re just waiting patiently for me. But it’s an old favorite and your comment makes me want to re-read/listen to them. 🙂 They’re short, methinks, so maybe I can squeeze them in between other audiobooks.

    @Dann: I enjoyed the Prydain books immensely as a kid and later re-reads as a younger adult, though I’m not sure when I last read them (maybe many years ago?). They are very definitely children’s books – not YA – just FYI, in case you weren’t aware.

    ObSFReading: Thanks to @arifel’s enthusiastic rec, I tried the sample to In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan a little while ago and ordered it. It arrived recently, and now that I’ve finished the great Provenance, I’ve jumped into it and am LOLing and enjoying it. 🙂

  45. (10) I liked the uniforms, but they had some significant issues, to my mind:

    1) Gold/Silver/Copper for the piping is all very well and good, but it was really hard to ‘read’ as a viewer. In particular, it was crazy-difficult to tell the difference between the gold and the copper.

    2) Putting the rank insignia on the starfleet badge was a great idea, but – again – it was really hard to see on-screen. When TNG debuted, I could read the relative ranks of the various characters almost immediately on a 19″ standard-definition TV. DIS had me pausing and backing up on my 55″ HDTV.

    All of that is setting aside the issue of the existing Star Trek canon, of course. Given the end of the last episode, I sincerely hope we have an answer to that part in the near future. And I very much hope that they do some uniform tweaks for Season Two.

  46. > “Has anyone gone on to compare the stylistic nuances of Shelly’s novel FRANKESTEIN, with her other novel, THE LAST MAN, and her various short stories?”

    (Just as an aside, I know you didn’t mean anything by this, but Mary Shelley wrote about seven novels, not just the two. I thought it particularly important to bring this up in light of the current conversation because reducing the discussed output of women writers to only one or two works is another of the ways that women’s writing has been suppressed; see also the fact that most people have no idea that Charlotte Bronte wrote anything other than Jane Eyre, the obscurity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poems other than Sonnets from the Portuguese, etc.)

  48. “Shakespeare’s plays were not really written by him, but by someone else with the same name.”

    Hmm. I was sure that was in “The World According to Student Bloopers,” but now I can’t find it. It still has this great bit though:

    Queen Elizabeth was the “Virgin Queen.” As a queen she was a success. When Elizabeth exposed herself before her troops, they all shouted, “hurrah.” Then her navy went out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo.

  49. @Lis: the use goes a long way back; in Henry IV part I (read in 11th-grade English) Falstaff is offered this and responds “I’ll no pullet-sperm in my brewage.” Isn’t it amusing how a bizarre expression will stick in one’s mind for half a century (although I had to look it up to correct my insertion of a verb).

    @Vicki Rozenzweig: good point in general, but Mozart is the wrong person to invoke; I understand there is plenty of testimony that he could compose brilliantly, on the spot, on a theme someone else came up with — i.e., he wasn’t just pulling a prior composition out of his memory — when young.

    @Rev Bob: I don’t know whether Disney intended it, but the sequence clown-crude-castle does suggest stepwise learning — although doing it by herself could still be a hole in alt-Right readings of the movie.

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