Pixel Scroll 2/12/16 Little Pixels Made Of Puppy-Scroll, And They All Look Just The Same

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(1) THE TENTACLE RECONCILIATION. This just in — “Cthulhu Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize”.

OSLO, NORWAY — Dread Lord, and presidential candidate, Cthulhu has more to savor this week on the campaign trail than the vulture-picked carcasses of the campaigns of Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Martin O’Malley and others. Cthulhu has been officially nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, according to Henriette Berg Aasen, Nobel watcher and director of the Peace Research Cooperative of Oslo….

Aasen told the Kingsport Star Herald that Cthulhu has been nominated, as He is yearly, by the Campus Crusade for Cthulhu (known also as CTHU). Cthulhu joins a long list of historical luminaries nominated for the coveted prize like Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Rush Limbaugh, Henry Kissinger and Vladimir Putin.

Aasen says CTHU selected the independent candidate and demon god because “when He rises from the Deep, humanity will finally know peace and understanding. Our conflicts will disperse. Our prejudices will fade. The Truth of existence will fill us. And those of us left will join as one in praise of Pax Cthulhia.”

(2) TORT SOLO. The BBC reports “Star Wars prosecuted over Harrison Ford injury”.

The production company behind Star Wars: The Force Awakens is being prosecuted over the incident in which Harrison Ford broke his leg.

The actor was struck by a hydraulic metal door on the Pinewood set of the Millennium Falcon in June 2014.

The Health And Safety Executive has brought four criminal charges against Foodles Production (UK) Ltd – a subsidiary of Disney.

Foodles Production said it was “disappointed” by the HSE’s decision.

Following the incident, Ford was airlifted to hospital for surgery.

Following an investigation, the HSE said it believed there was sufficient evidence about the incident which left Ford with serious injuries, to bring four charges relating to alleged health and safety breaches.

(3) PUT TO THE QUESTION. The characters in Redshirts are out of jeopardy, but not out of Jeopardy!

(4) MORE RECOMMENDATIONS. Black Gate’s John ONeill points out “Gypsies, Paupers, Demons and Swans: Rich Horton’s Hugo Recs”:

I cover a lot of short fiction magazines and novels, but I never feel adequately prepared for the Hugo ballot. But that’s okay, because I know people who read every single short story published in English, and can point me in the right direction.

Well, one person. Rich Horton. Seriously, he reads them all. No, really. All of them. When he modestly claims he doesn’t, he’s lying. He’s read some of ’em twice.

(5) HORTON’S RECS. The recommendations originated at Rich Horton’s blog Strange at Ecbatan.

For the past few years I have avoided the sorts of posts I used to routinely make, listing my favorite stories of the year and making suggestions for Hugo nominations. There are several reasons – one is simply that I thought my Best of the Year Table of Contents served such a purpose by default, more or less, another is time. And a third, of course, is a feeling of skittishness about the controversy that has arisen, from several directions, on the appropriateness of nomination lists, or, Lord preserve us, “slates”.

But hang it all, almost all I’ve been about for my time writing about SF is promoting the reading of good stories. Why should I stop? Why should anyone? I don’t want people to nominate based on my recommendations – I want people to read the stories I recommend – and lots of other stories – and nominate the stories they like best. I don’t want to promote an agenda. I don’t want to nudge the field towards any set of themes or styles. (Except by accident – I don’t deny that I have conscious and unconscious preferences.) In fact, I’d rather be surprised – by new ideas, by new writers, by controversial positions, by new forms, by revitalization of old forms.

This is, indeed, mostly the contents of my Best of the Year collection, with a few added that I couldn’t use for one reason or another (length, contractual issues, etc.). And let’s add the obvious — I miss things! Even things I read. There have definitely been cases where a story I didn’t pick seemed to me on further reflection to be clearly award-worthy.

I recently made a post on potential Hugo nominees in which I briefly discussed potential Best Editor nominations. I mentioned John Joseph Adams, Ellen Datlow, Gardner Dozois, Jonathan Strahan, Trevor Quachri, C. C. Finlay, Sheila Williams, Andy Cox, Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace, Scott H. Andrews and Brian Thomas Schmidt. And in all honesty, I think any of those people would be wholly worthy nominees. They have all done first-rate recent work. But that said, let’s be honest, I was being a bit timid. Who would I really vote for? I wanted to be a bit more forthright, and plump for a few folks I am really rooting for….

(6) DEFERRED GRATIFICATION. “20 Year Overnight Successes: Writing Advice” is a set of Storified tweets from Maria Dahvana Headley about writing.

Mark-kitteh sent along the link with a modest disclaimer: “Obviously I have no way of knowing if they’re good advice or not, but as Neil Gaiman commented on then approvingly I’m assuming they’re good…”

She begins:

Gaiman’s comment:

(7) RANDOMNESS. Don’t know what this actually relates to, just found the stand-alone comment amusing.

https://twitter.com/Redregon/status/698283588756836352

(8) IAN WATSON. At SF Signal, Rachel Cordasco’s “Eurocon 2016: An Interview with Ian Watson”

RC: This Eurocon is taking place in Barcelona- what is the state of Spanish scifi today?

IW: Spanish SF (including, as I said, Fantasy and Horror) is thriving, but not nearly enough gets translated into English nor is published visibly enough. Félix Palma’s Map of… trilogy is certainly a best-seller in English (as the New York Times says) but consider a genre-bending author such as veteran Rodolfo Martínez, a major award winner in Spain: you can get a Kindle ebook of his novel

The Queen’s Adept in an English translation so good, of a book so good, that it reads like an original novel by Gene Wolfe, but you’ll find it in no bookshop in the USA or UK. (While on the subject of actual books, devour The Shape of Murder and Zig-Zag by José Carlos Somoza.)

Recent professional labour-of-love productions include The Best of Spanish Steampunk (big, edited and translated by James and Marian Womack, whose Nevsky press is based in Madrid), the crowdfunded Castles in Spain put together by Mariano Villarreal, and (in progress) the likewise crowdfunded competition-winners anthology Spanish Women of Wonder edited by Cristina Jurado, title courtesy of Pamela Sargent. Mariano Villarreal is also responsible for an admired series of original anthologies entitled Terra Nova, published by Rodolfo Martínez’s own Sportula press, of which one is in English translation: Terra Nova: An Anthology of Spanish Science Fiction. Ebooks only, these last three.

On the whole, things are humming.

(9) ALBERT FANDOM. Einstein is not only on a bubblegum card, he’s on a Star Wars gif too –

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

  • Born February 12, 1915 — Lorne Greene, who played Commander Adama.

(11) MEET THE RABIDS. Vox Day adds to his slate: “Rabid Puppies 2016: Best Graphic Story”.

(12) WRITERS OF THE FUTURE. The L. Ron Hubbard presents Writers & Illustrators of the Future Annual Awards Ceremony invitation was extended to LASFS members on Facebook. Information about the ceremony is here. The event is April 10, 2016 at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles. Doors open at 5:30 pm – Event starts at 6:30 pm. Party and book signing immediately follow. Black tie optional or Steampunk Formal. RSVP HERE

Past winners of the Writers of the Future Contest have gone on to publish well over 700 novels and 3000 short stories; they have become international bestsellers and have won the most prestigious accolades in the field—the Hugo, the Nebula, the John W. Campbell, the Bram Stoker, and the Locus Award—and even mainstream literary awards such as the National Book Award, the Newbery and the Pushcart Prize. The Illustrators of the Future winners have gone on to publish millions of illustrations in the field.

 

(13) CHARACTERIZATION. At All Over The Map, Juliet McKenna has some interesting advice concerning “The importance of thinking about ‘local values’ when you’re writing”.

On the other hand, you can turn this issue of local values to your writerly advantage, in the right place, for the right character. When I said minus three degrees or minus thirteen a few paragraphs back, I meant Celsius, because my local weather values are centigrade. When I come across temperatures given in Farenheit in US crime fiction, I always have to pause and do a quick mental conversion calculation. It disrupts the flow of my reading, so as far as I am concerned, that’s a bad thing.

But if I was a character in a book? If the author wanted to convey someone feeling unsettled and out of their usual place? Sure, that author could tell us ‘She felt unsettled by the unfamiliar numbers in the weather forecast’ but you could do so much more, and far more subtly, as a writer by showing the character’s incomprehension, having her look up how to do the conversion online, maybe being surprised by the result. It gets how cold in Minnesota in the winter?

(14) ALPHA HOUSE. To better organize the presidential candidates competing in the New Hampshire primary, Mic sorted each candidate into Hogwarts houses from Harry Potter. Still funny, even if the primary’s over.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Mark-kitteh, and James H. Burns for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jenora Feuer.]

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195 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 2/12/16 Little Pixels Made Of Puppy-Scroll, And They All Look Just The Same”

  2. Graphic Novel:

    I was relieved to see other people mentioning Stand Still Stay Silent and The Thrilling Adventures Of Lovelace and Babbage because I am new to the whole graphic novel thing and a bit insecure about my qualifications for nominating but these are definitely on my list.

    It occurs to me that the artists would also be eligible for Best Professional Artist, right? I mean if a book cover counts, surely an entire book would? And the first part of SSSS came out as a physical book last year if I recall correctly. (OTOH I think it may have been self-published–does anyone know how that affects BPA qualification?)

    If so that would round out my best professional artist noms nicely.

  5. It occurs to me that the artists would also be eligible for Best Professional Artist, right?

    Yes. I will probably be nominating more than one graphic novel artist in the Best Professional Artist Category.

    Somewhat related to the Best Related Work category, I have reviewed These Are the Voyages: TOS, Season Two. Although this volume was published in 2014, the final volume (for season three) was published in 2015, so one could conceivably nominate the three book series as a whole.

  7. A pixel in the hand is worth two in the scroll

    Out, damned pixel! Out, I say!
    Out, damned puppy! Out, I say!

    Any pixel’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Scrollkind.

    Art is the most passionate pixel within man’s grasp.

    No scroll was ever ruined by pixels.

  8. Inspired by the post about the Chinese Star Wars ripoff comic, I’ve been doing some web surfing for free English translations of Soviet-era Russian science fiction. Not much luck with the “English” part, but here’s a nicely illustrated comic still in the original Russian.:

    http://sverhrazum.livejournal.com/440726.html

    It looks to in around the same aspect ratio as the Chinese Star Wars comic, so originally I assumed that the Russians adopted the same comic format, but a Google Translate of the page shows that the images came from a filmstrip, so it was used in one of these.

    The story is something from a series of children’s stories called Alice, Girl From the Future

    http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/AliceGirlFromTheFuture

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alisa_Selezneva

    Here it is as a comic, and with the red tint removed.

    https://www.sendspace.com/file/8yayw9

  9. Rose Embolism asked:

    I’m in a fix, because all of my top Hugo mind in that category are all ongoing webcomics- do purely electronic comics count?

    Yes, they do! OTOH, they can be problematic regarding the serialization rule. (The one that says a serialized story is eligible as a whole only for the year in which it ends.)

    Schlock Mercenary and Girl Genius were webcomics nominated for the first few years of the Graphic Story category, but they were easy to nominate because they were organized into “books” with clearly marked boundaries (which would later be physically published as units).

  10. That TV Tropes page makes the “Alice, Girl from the Future” books sound like a lot of fun.

  11. A discussion about Best Graphic Story has broken out amongst VD’s commenters.(The first category that’s gotten much discussion on the nominees at all.) It may be harder to maintain voting discipline on a category where some of the dead elk have their own favorites. Some of the graphic stories mentioned have also been mentioned here and over on the Sad Puppy mill site.

    It is a file told by an idiot, full of scrolls and pixels,
    Signifying nothing.

  13. @Nate Harada,
    Don’t worry. He didn’t realize that it involved SUPRISE LESBIANS, so he’s considering changing it. Which, really, is just more proof that he’s not reading the stuff.

    As for Graphic Novels, I’ll definitely be nominating Bitch Planet , Autumnlands, and Sandman. I have to read Trees and Wytches, but have heard good things about both. I’m also looking at nominating Rachel Rising by Terry Moore, but I’m not sure that it’ll do much. I’d nom Wicked + Divine, but book one was end of 2014 so it’s out. Next year, I figure that Monster and Vision will be on my list, but neither of them have trades yet.

  14. “Too many pixels, Herr Glyer.”

    Hey, I wrote another short-short story vignette over at the New Pals Club Web-Log, estimated around 800 words. Be a pal and go read it, maybe give me a crit. Comments at the blog are always welcome and few.

    “It was that dream again…”

  18. If thou didst ever rank me in thy heart/Absent thee from pixelity awhile/And in this harsh thread file thy recs in pain/To scroll my story

  19. Wytches will be on my list, Trees are in my TBR pile. And regarding webcomics, lets remember that Zombie Nation was nominated and accepted.

  21. Here in the year 7638 I’ve got problems with In 770 did Filer Mike a stately pixel scroll decree; I’m sure it will turn up sometime.

    Having read the synopsis of Wylding Hall, I’m not going to be reading it; I actually spent some time in the 70s in a gothic mansion, surrounded by bleak wastelands in the middle of nowhere, with a party which included a folk/rock band trying to get it back together, and it is not an experience I wish to repeat.

    And I’m beginning to wonder whether all this involuntary time travel is File 770’s equivalent of the Sorting Hat…

  25. Is there anyone there? said the puppy,
    As he knocked on the SJ door,
    And his slate in the silence champed the books
    Of the pixel’s ferny scroll.

    This is starting to get silly.

  27. I am very doubtful about the idea of a secret slate. If the things VD is currently recommending – the good ones – get on the shortlist, they will either
    a. Win (thus proving he was right), or
    b. Lose (thus proving the the perversity of CHORFs, who voted against these excellent candidates just because they are on a slate).
    If he comes up with a secret list, on the other hand, it will just get a bunch of No Awards like last year’s, and not advance his cause in any clear way.

  28. I belong to Pixel,
    Dear old Pixel town;
    But what’s the matter wi’ Pixels,
    For they’r scrollin’ roun’ and roun’!
    I’m only a common old working chap,
    As anyone here can see,
    But when I get a couple o’ fifths on a Saturday,
    Pixels belong to me!

    Traditionally there should be some hiccups and slurring while reciting this…

  30. Once more unto the scroll, dear friends, once more;
    Or close the pixels up with our comment thread!

    or from the same play…

    I see you stand like pixels in the scrolls,
    Straining upon the fifth. The game’s afoot!
    Follow your pixels: and upon this charge,
    Cry — Scroll for Pixels! Glyer and Godstalk!

  31. Since I am a huge Waking The Moon fan, I went and checked out Wylding Hall on Amazon and it’s on sale for $3.82. Go figure….

  32. This is starting to get silly.

    “Not By the Pixels of My Scrolly-Scrolly-Scroll!”

    OK.

    Now it’s silly.

  35. More From Henry the second-Fifth

    This day is call’d — the feast of Pixel Scroll:
    They that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
    Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
    And rouse them at the name of Pixel Scroll.
    They that outlives this day, and sees old age,
    Will yearly on the vigil feast their friends,
    And say, “To-morrow will the Pixel Scroll;”
    Then will they strip their sleeve, and show their scars,
    And say, “These wounds I had from Pixel’s day.”
    Old fans forget; yet all shall be forgot,
    But they’ll remember, with advantages,
    What feats they did that day. Then shall our names,
    Familiar in their mouth as household words, —
    Wombat the Red, Henley, and Meredith,
    Kyra and Reid, Mark-Kitteh and Snowcrash,
    Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
    This story shall the good fan teach their child;
    And Pixel-Pixelscroll shall ne’er go by
    From this day to the ending of the world,
    But we in it shall be remember’d, —
    We few, we happy few, we band of filers.
    For they to-day that sings their filk with me,
    Shall be my villain; be they ne’er so vile,
    This day shall gentle their condition:
    And gentlefans in Fandom, now a-bed,
    Shall think themselves accurs’d, they were not here,
    And hold their fanhood cheap, whiles any speaks,
    That filked with us upon pixel-scrolls day!

  36. Hampus Eckerman on February 13, 2016 at 10:44 am said:

    Admist the mist and coldest posts, he still insists he sees the scrolls.

    I like this one but it is bugging me because I can’t fix what it is from.

  37. @ Camestros Felapton

    I was befuddled, but beginning to Google “he still insists…” pulled up this as the first hit, which suggests both an original and a musical reprise of the relevant phrase.

    Given this crowd, I’d give equal odds on which was being referenced!

  38. Camestros,

    In the novel IT by Stephen King, one of the character repeatedly says “He thrusts his fists against the posts, and still insists he sees the ghosts.” I think it has something to do with speech impediments

  39. Important question (paging OGH himself, or Kevin Standlee or Ben Yalow, or anyone, really ): What’s the rule on webcomic eligibility? (Since I was hoping to nominate Order of the Stick, Strong Female Protagonist, and probably Wilde Life). Is it correct that they also need to have had a book published in 2015 to remain eligible, or does the webcomic alone qualify?

    Also, I now have to read all the other graphic stories recommended in this thread in a category I THOUGHT I HAD SETTLED. THANKS, FILE770. 🙂

  44. @Greg
    A printed release is not essential. The issue with webcomics is that eligibility is based on when the story finished, and many webcomics aren’t finished yet.
    Some have well defined arcs, which may or may not be connected, but if collected they need too be collected quickly, or you get the Nimora case – story finished in 2014, book that brought it to general attention in 2015.

  45. Web comics are certainly eligible — the winner from Loncon 3 was Time from xkcd, which would be hard to print out.

    But I think there must be some sense that a story was completed in the relevant year. A lot of web comics are endless serials, so unless they are chopped into chapters or volumes, it’s hard to say anything in particular was completed. Digger was a complete story. The Girl Genius volumes weren’t, really. The Massively Parallel piece of Schlock Mercenary, nominated but not a winner, was a story in itself, even though part of something longer.

  46. All wi’ be scroll and all wi’ be scroll and all manner of things wi’ be scroll.

    Over the Pixels of the Moon and down the Valley of Shadow, Scroll, boldly Scroll…

    Two slates diverged in a yellow scroll…

  48. > “Thanks to all for the mentions of Graphic Novels. I was totally at a loss on this category for a nominee.”

    My list included The Sculptor, Oglaf, Ms. Marvel Volume 2: Generation Why, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, and Strong Female Protagonist Issue 5. Pretty sure all of those have been mentioned already, though.

  49. I have been studying how I may compare
    This pixel where I live unto the scroll.
    And for because the scroll is populous,
    And here is not a filer but myself,
    I cannot do it.

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