Pixel Scroll 3/20/18 If You Are Stuck In A Kerfuffle, Pixel A Trench And Scroll Your Way To Freedom

(1) #METOO. Pat Cadigan opened up about her #metoo experiences in a public post on Facebook.

Heard Germaine Greer on BBC Radio 4 this morning, disparaging #metoo

Germaine should also talk about welding, engineering, astrophysics, and brain surgery, because she knows as much about them as #metoo

And just for the record: #metoo

I’ve talked about the first job I ever had after I graduated from high school. I lasted a week cold-calling people, trying to sell the photographic packages for a photography company. My supervisor was a woman struggling to be a single parent after her divorce. Her supervisor, who was onsite almost all the time literally chased me around the office, trying to get his hands on me.

When I complained to my supervisor, she said, “You better keep running, because if he catches you, it will be your fault.”…

(2) THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED. National Air and Space Museum will mark the 50th Anniversary of 2001: A Space Odyssey with an immersive art exhibit celebrating the film’s impact on culture and technology.

This spring, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum will host a special temporary exhibition of the immersive art installation “The Barmecide Feast,” a fully realized, full-scale reflection of the iconic, neo-classical hotel room from the penultimate scene of Stanley Kubrick’s and Arthur C. Clarke’s landmark film, 2001: A Space OdysseyOpen to the public April 8 – May 28, the installation will be the centerpiece of the Museum’s celebration of the film’s 50th anniversary. Museum visitors will be able to enter the re-created room in small groups for short periods to experience the surreal environment depicted in the film. The public will get its first chance to see the installation as part of the Museum’s Yuri’s Night celebration, a ticketed, 21-and-over evening event presented with Brightest Young Things Saturday, April 7

National Air and Space Society members will get a special sneak peak of the exhibition on April 5. There is no charge for this members-only event, but advance reservations are required.

(3) SIAM SOUVENIRS. A Filer’s relative actually attended the Siam Sinfonetta concert!

She said, “It was a great concert – ran about 3 hours. During the various pieces they had different characters wandering through the concert hall and sometimes lightsaber fighting. They all came out at the end (except the little ones who had probably already left to go home to bed).”

(4) STEM, STEP BY STEP. BBC reports a study: “Children drawing more women in science”, from 1% in 1960’s and 70’s to 28% today.

Children in the US are drawing more women scientists than in previous decades, according to a new study.

The “Draw A Scientist” test has been administered by sociologists in various studies since the 1960s.

Researchers at Northwestern University, US, analysed five decades of the test.

When asked to draw a scientist, less than one per cent of children in the 1960s and 1970s drew a woman. This rose to 28% between the 1980s and present day.

However, children are still far more likely to draw a traditionally male figure when asked to depict a scientist.

…Yet, the study highlights, by 2013 women were 49% of biological scientists, 35% of chemists, and 11% of physicists and astronomers in the United States.

(5) IN THE MIX. Camestros Felapton gives us a “Review: Black Lightning”.

I’m up to episode 8 of a 13 episode season and I think I can pull apart what I like and don’t like about it.

I’ll start negative. I don’t think it has yet managed to find the right mix of humour, gritty crime drama, family drama, superhero-antics. That’s not a surprise, as all superhero shows and movies struggle to find that sweet spot (and the right spot is going to vary among viewers). At times the show is quite violent (or suggestive of extreme violence) but within a show that feels more like it has been written for a more general audience. Like the Marvel Netflix shows, the central character regularly beats up criminals to get information but unlike those shows, the behaviour feels at odds with Black Lightning’s non-superhero persona.

However, there is also a lot to like about this show. The central character, Jefferson Pierce, is unusual for a superhero. He is an older man with a successful career as a high school principal. He has a family and responsibilities and ‘Black Lightning’ is something from his past. By having him as a superhero who is coming out of retirement (due to gang violence initially) is a clever way of avoiding a protracted origin story, while giving viewers an introduction to the character. We have not, as yet, been given an explanation for the source of his electrical powers – although there are hints in a subplot around the death of his journalist father some years ago.

(6) SENSITIVITY. The Washington Post’s Everdeen Mason looks at how Keira Drake changed her forthcoming Harlequin Teen novel The Continent in response to sensitivity readers, which included changing the name of one clan from “Topi” to “Xoe”  to remove any comparisons to the Hopi, making another clan less Asian-looking, and eliminating “savage,” “primitive,” and “native” from the text. The article includes many examples contrasting the original and revised text.

Drake and Wilson maintain that the book was never supposed to be about race. “The main theme of ‘The Continent’ is how privilege allows us to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others,” Drake said in a phone interview in February.

Wilson explained that when she originally edited the novel, she was looking for potential problems with pacing, plot and dialogue. “I was simply not thinking about things like racial stereotypes,” she said. “It’s almost mortifying to say that because it was so blatantly obvious when it was pointed out.”

The Washington Post compared the old advance copy with a newly revised copy received in 2018 and spoke with Drake about changes she made.

(7) BLOCK AROUND THE CLOCK. The Paris Review quotes Ray Bradbury: “On Writer’s Block: Advice from Twelve Writers”.

“I have three rules to live by. One, get your work done. If that doesn’t work, shut up and drink your gin. And when all else fails, run like hell!” —Ray Bradbury

(8) PARTY MAVEN. The website Gastro Obscura records Stephen Hawking’s champagne-laden effort to prove whether time travel exists or not:

It was a little unusual that when he threw a party in 2009, not a single guest attended.

A film of the event depicts a dismal cocktail party. Three trays of canapes sit uneaten, and flutes filled with Krug champagne go untouched. Balloons decorate the walls, and a giant banner displays the words “Welcome, Time Travellers.”

…By publishing the party invitation in his mini-series Into the Universe With Stephen Hawking, Hawking hoped to lure futuristic time travelers. You are cordially invited to a reception for Time Travellers, the invitation read, along with the the date, time, and coordinates for the event. The theory, Hawking explained, was that only someone from the future would be able to attend.

(9) COOLEY OBIT. Texas fan Earl Cooley III died March 20, his sister announced on Facebook:

Earl Cooley III

I am Earl’s sister, Dot Cooley. Earl left this world early this morning. He moved back to the San Antonio area 3 years ago when his health started getting worse and because of that Earl got to spend so much more time with me and our brother, Paul. Mom recently discovered Skype, so she got to visit with him more. We would love for you to share any thoughts or stories with us. Rock on ArmadilloCon!

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • John King Tarpinian encountered a Biblical joke in Shoe.

(11) MARVEL AT MOPOP. The Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle unveiled the official poster artwork for its upcoming exhibition Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes.

Designed by Marvel artist Nick Bradshaw, the illustration depicts some of the most iconic characters created during Marvel’s nearly 80 year history including Spider-Man, Thor, Black Panther, Ms. Marvel, Hulk, Iron Man, Black Widow, Captain America, and others. Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes is the first and most extensive exhibition celebrating the visual and cultural impact of Marvel Entertainment. The exhibition will debut at MoPOP on April 21, 2018. Tickets are on sale now at MoPOP.org.

Organized by the Museum of Pop Culture, SC Exhibitions and Marvel Entertainment, Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes will feature more than 300 original artifacts, including some of Marvel’s most iconic and sought-after pages, costumes and props, many of which have never-before been seen by the public. The exhibition will tell the Marvel story through comics, film and other media, taking place as it celebrates 10 years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and ahead of the 80th anniversary in 2019.  The exhibition will trace the story of the company and its influence on visual culture – including how it’s responded to historical events and addressed wider issues such as gender, race and mental illness – as well as uncovering the narratives of individual characters such as Captain America, Spider-Man, Black Panther and Doctor Strange. Immersive set pieces will bring the comic book world to life, and the exhibition will be accompanied by an immersive soundscape created by acclaimed composers Lorne Balfe and Hans Zimmer.

(12) DO-IT-YOURSELF. Lucy A. Snyder’s satirical “Installing Linux on a Dead Badger: User’s Notes” appeared on Strange Horizons in 2004, but it’s news to me. Very funny!

Reanimation puts most creatures in a foul mood, and the test badger woke up murderously angry, requiring a hasty launch of FleshGolem to get the beast under control. It is highly recommended to have the computer close at hand during the incantation.

(13) VACUUMING UP THE BITS. Via today’s Boston Globe: “Data storage beyond the clouds: Wasabi promises a super-secure system in space”. “…Which sure sounds like the start of a ‘what where they thinking/yeah sure’ techno-heist thriller,” says Daniel Dern.

In space, no one can steal your data.

Well, that’s the theory, anyway — one that the Boston data storage company Wasabi Technologies Inc. hopes to help prove.

Wasabi is partnering with a California company to create a database from outer space. The system, called SpaceBelt, will feature orbiting data centers capable of storing thousands of terabytes of information. SpaceBelt will be marketed to businesses and corporations that need instant access to their most valuable data, but who are also desperate to keep that data from being stolen or corrupted.

(14) ALL STROSS CONSIDERED. Joe Sherry describes a mixed bag in “Microreview [book]: Dark State, by Charles Stross” at Nerds of a Feather.

My experience of reading Charles Stross is a persistent struggle between the quality of his ideas and my perception of the quality of his writing, which is to say that I seldom find that the writing lives up to the promise of the ideas.

When I wrote about Empire Games (my review), I noted “the level of Stross’s writing is actually beginning to rise to the level of his ideas” and that once Stross got the story rolling, nothing distracted from the cool ideas of the world walking between the worlds we’ve already known and the opening up of new worlds and the drama of the how the United States interacts with the world walkers from a parallel universe.

Dark State picks up almost immediately after the conclusion of Empire Games, and despite the increasingly breakneck pace of the second half of that novel, Dark State suffers from some of the same issues that Empire Games did. Stross spends at least a third of Dark State resetting the playing field and planting the seeds for where the rest of the novel and trilogy will go. That’s fine, as far as narrative conventions go, but Stross is not at his best as a writer when working with a more deliberate pace.

(15) CHARACTER IN CRISIS. Adrienne Martini reviews The Genius Plague by David Walton at Locus Online.

In Walton’s hands, what could be a straight­forward “we must save humanity with science” thriller (not that there’s anything wrong with that), becomes, at times, a meditation on what makes us human and why that alone is a survival advan­tage. Those moments offer a chance to catch your breath before the next calamity, some of which our hero brings on himself. Walton makes Neil into a layered character, one who is frequently torn between family bonds and saving the world – and, frequently, making the situation worse because he is still working out that other people are also torn by their own layers. He’s also still learning that NSA security is never f-ing around.

(16) JEOPARDY! Andrew Porter was gazing at the tube during Jeopardy! and spotted this stfnal clue:

Answer: “Kardashians are reality TV stars; Cardassians are an alien culture in this sci-fi universe.”

No one got the question, “What is Star Trek”?

(17) YOU CAN GET THERE FROM HERE. You can now get to Gotham City, the Emerald City, Neverland, Middle Earth, and other places via roundabouts on the A4130 in Didcot, Oxfordshire reports the BBC.

A county council statement read, in part:

“We will investigate as soon as the weather improves. While on the surface amusing, it is vandalism and a potential distraction for drivers.”

The story also mentions:

Local resident Charlotte Westgate said she saw a hooded man in his 20s adding “Gotham City” to a sign on Friday afternoon.

She said: “He was on his own, and didn’t seem worried that anyone might be looking at him, but no one driving past did anything to stop him.”

(18) BARRAYAR BOY. Miles Vorkosigan posted the lyrics to “Dendarii’s Privateers” on Facebook. The first verse is —

Oh the year was 2978
(How I wish I’d stayed on Barrayar!)
When I flunked my military test
By breaking my legs, as I do best

(19) HOW IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN PLAYED FOR LAUGHS. From the folks at HISHE, “A Comedy Recap / Review of Pacific Rim voiced by How It Should Have Ended.”

[Thanks to JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Daniel Dern, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Martin Morse Wooster, Michael J. Walsh, Carl Slaughter, and MT Davis for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Elisa.]

 

63 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 3/20/18 If You Are Stuck In A Kerfuffle, Pixel A Trench And Scroll Your Way To Freedom

  1. (10) COMICS SECTION. ::groan::

    (13) VACUUMING UP THE BITS. A meteor shower and there goes my data? No thanks. Also: “instant access”? Hmm. I should tell my boss, about this, though. 😉

    [ETA: Proto-pseudo-eventual-almost-fifth-ish, which is to say, not at all.]

  2. (5) I think the last couple of episodes have made it pretty clear where Black Lightning got his powers. The info they’ve dropped in is a lot more than “hints,” even if it hasn’t been spelled out in an explicit infodump.

    (12) That book was my introduction to Lucy Snyder’s work. It’s a slim volume, but it packs a lot of geeky humor into the low page count.

    (17) I can’t help with Oz or Gotham, but anyone who can read a birdhouse in my neck of the woods knows how to find Fairyland. For those in more remote regions, load Google Maps and search for Rock City Gardens, Lookout Mountain, GA. The park itself is easy to find, but check out the nearby street names. They even have their own pharmacy and elementary school. It’s worth noting that several of the locals pronounce the first vowel more like an “uh” than a long A to downplay the name; not all of the fae welcome visitors…

  3. I’m not petty enough to leave a content-free comment just to snag fifth, am I? Naaah…

  4. Rev. Bob on March 21, 2018 at 12:03 am said:

    (5) I think the last couple of episodes have made it pretty clear where Black Lightning got his powers. The info they’ve dropped in is a lot more than “hints,” even if it hasn’t been spelled out in an explicit infodump

    Indeed!

    This article at Tor.com does a better job of discussing that than I did:
    https://www.tor.com/2018/03/20/black-lightning-is-a-superpowered-example-of-how-systems-dominate-black-bodies/

  5. There is an actual road in Galway named Rivendell, but having walked the dog all around it, I have not found a magic portal or heard any voices singing tra-la-la-lally.

    Toss me a pixel scroll, I think there’s one in my raincoat.

  6. Niall wrote:

    There is an actual road in Galway named Rivendell,

    Sing tra-la-la-lally,
    Not what I’d call a valley

  7. 2)
    oooh. Want to see!

    17) I guess “European Vacation” was right; If you can get left and get out of the roundabout, you (and Clark Griswold) can get to where you want…I was bemused when I finally got to visit London and discovered there is no roundabout at the location shown in the movie…

  8. My first title credit! Yay!

    No Emerald City here but Eden is a bit south of us and Halfmoon is off to the east, while even further to the east the town of Neversink is underwater at the bottom of the Neversink Reservoir.

  9. @ Paul Weimer:

    I could probably bore for at least half an hour about the geographical liberties taken in 28 Weeks Later, but I shall restrain myself.

  10. I seem to recall that computers that go to space have to be hardened against radiation. Are they hardening their data storage? And “instant” access to something that’s at least light-seconds away (and perhaps on the wrong side of the planet?) would be quite a trick. Anyway, people don’t, as a rule, steal data by walking into a data center and walking out with a computer under their arm….

    And you won’t have an onsite tech to kick the servers when necessary.

    I mean, I only just woke up and maybe I’m not seeing the advantages here, but frankly it doesn’t sound very useful, and it does sound very expensive. It costs at minimum a couple of thousand dollars per pound of orbital payload…..

  11. Ingvar:
    Geographical liberties are mostly of interest to locals, I’ve found. A movie shot in my home town had a number of impossibilities in it, and I only realized how dull I must have sounded describing them when I began to hear similar stories from others. Dang.

    When you scroll through the file, keep your pixels high
    And don’t be afraid of the bark.

  12. As Cassy B said, physical security of databases has never been an issue so I don’t see how it would help against thieves. It might help secure data against governments, since the data center would be out of everyone’s jurisdiction. Depends on how current cases shake out, there is a case in court right now where the US govt is claiming that they can access any data stored by a US company regardless of where the servers are – no idea what the result will be.

  13. Meredith Moments: Neverwhere and Reamde (I assume I don’t need to mention the respective authors) are currently $2.99 each.

    EDIT: Oh, and Joe Hill’s The Fireman as well.

  14. If I’m reading those signs correctly, three of them are at the same roundabout, just on different roads. The pic top right looks like the sign should have been installed about a foot farther to the left, though. (Something large, heavy, and moving at a good rate seems to have hit it.)

  15. With respect to geographical liberties, I’ve recently been amusing myself by analyzing the locations used in movies by a certain low-budget film studio. It’s surprisingly fun to study the different shots across multiple films and assemble a reasonably complete blueprint of the recycled buildings.

    I mean, I automatically took for granted that the generic exterior shots (which don’t show any of the cast) would be completely unrelated to the rooms. It’s more fun to spot when they use completely different establishing shots to represent the same place in the same movie (“Yes, it’s a castle, but the architecture and surroundings are completely different from what you showed half an hour ago, and neither of them even comes close to matching the sets!”), or when the exterior shows a single front door and the interior has double doors that look totally different. (Classic Whovians will recognize that syndrome from the TARDIS doors, I trust.)

    The niftier aspect is when I can recognize that a room I hadn’t thought I’d seen before turns out to be one I’ve seen from a different perspective, or when a small detail contributes to building a better model. For example, seeing an outdoor staircase in one scene from the back yard and spotting the top of it through the window of another room later: “Okay, that’s where that room is in the house.”

    It may be a silly, petty, pointless game, but it keeps me entertained and off the streets.

  16. Rev. Bob:

    There’s a Swedish action film (whose name I cannot remember) from the 70s(?), 80s(?) (it’s the one with the post office robbery, followed by a chase on foot through a school), where I have had the pleasure comparing film to the school building. It is indeed all in the same building (except possibly the scene in the gym hall), but they seem to have portal doors, or at least teleport, between floors and wings of the building.

  17. Location spotting is (for some people) a fun hobby – a lot of stuff gets filmed in or near my own neck of the woods, and it’s interesting to see when and how it turns up (my local parish church once guest-starred in an episode of Inspector Morse…. actually, now I think on, since I lived in Jericho in Oxford for a while, two of my local parish churches guest-starred in Inspector Morse, although only one of them keeps related press cuttings proudly displayed in the vestry.)

    I don’t live all that far from Avengerland, come to think of it.

  18. I live in Hollywood North, and it’s always entertaining to see how many times various mid-budget SF shows blow up the same alien planet building.

    For that matter how many completely different castles have played Xavier’s Mansion in various movies.

  19. @10: It would be interesting to find out what Sherry thinks is good writing, and how common it is; I have limits, but they haven’t been triggered by anything of Stross’s.

    @18: not bad, but ISTM the meter isn’t great and I’d like to hear how he bends the tune so he can sing 2 verses in a row — on Between the Breaks – Live! it points directly to the chorus. Can anyone comment on the date? ISTM too far based on comments (when visiting) about how long ago people left Earth, but the furthest clue I’ve found in my copies of Bujold is that the wormhole drive was discovered ~600 years before Miles’s birth (and this is only in Dreamweaver’s Dilemma — the works from Baen all refer only to the Quaddies being created 200 years back.)

    @various: is there any movie that does not take geographical liberties? One of these days I may try to figure out how much unshown territory would have to be covered to get the shots from the chase at the end of What’s Up, Doc? in the order shown. OTOH, I was amused that the original The Thomas Crown Affair had a shot of the building in which I was seeing the movie.

    @GiantPanda: good news!

  20. geographical liberties taken

    Such as landing on the beach at the foot of the White Cliffs just outside Dover and walking to Nottingham via Hadrians Wall (which appears to be the northern edge of the lands held by the Earl of Huntingdon) in a few hours?

  21. @12 is seriously demented — the more because of the absolutely straight-faced tone.

  22. Chip Hitchcock:
    There’s an amusing short film out there of an eager amateur subjecting Alfred Hitchcock (not shown, but heard) to his own magnum opus, in the style of The Master. At least parts of it are amusing. The thing I remember is the young filmmaker excitedly pointing out that he wanted to do a chase scene around a big landmark, so he shot it around Chicago’s Buckingham Fountain. The chase consists of two people running around and around and around the fountain, shot from a fixed camera. “And I edited it so that the parts where they’re around the other side are shorter!” boasts the auteur, as if the jumps in the film aren’t enough to tell us that.

  23. Rev. Bob and others:

    Many many years ago I was an extra for a film being shot in Pittsburgh. (I was either in high school or home between semesters in college.) They were filming some concert scenes and needed people in the audience, so my brother and his girlfriend and I went and spent the day sitting around a theater downtown, watching them set up shots and then standing and cheering when the actors walked on stage and singing along with them.

    (Which, because we didn’t know the songs they were singing, was…interesting. I’m sure they dubbed over us for the release, because what we were doing was not even remotely ready for prime time.)

    They filmed three scenes that day, only one of which was set in Pittsburgh. For the others, which were set in different cities, they changed the appearance of the theater by hanging different curtains and bunting around the stage. Then the actors would come on stage wearing different outfits, change their stage banter around (‘Hello, Scranton!’), and sing a different song.

  24. geographical liberties taken

    I remember watching James Bond – Tomorrow never dies in the cinema, purely because part of it was set in my home town of Hamburg. When Bond escaped from another iconic locatuon and walked to his car, a good chunk of the audience said “You are not allowed to park THERE!”
    That was neat.

    Scrolls? Why does it have to be scrolls?
    (Im sure that has been done before)

  25. geographical liberties taken

    The movie Juno, and the TV series Fargo, both allege to be set in western Minnesota, but exterior establishing shots frequently include mountains off in the distance.

    (And it’s not a geographical liberty per se but I was watching a series recently — Wynona Earp, maybe? — that had a scene set in a gas station/convenience store, and although they didn’t focus on them, the chip varieties in the snack aisle clearly came from somewhere north of the US/Canadian border.)

  26. I have small children. This sometimes affects my tv viewing.

    Which means that for the last *day* I have had this going around in my head:

    There was a file that had a scroll, and Pixel was its name-o….

  27. I love the movie The Blues Brothers, and I freely admit that it takes enormous geographical liberties with Chicago, especially during the chase scenes. Yet it’s also a sort of love letter to Chicago.

    (My husband’s photo studio is within walking distance of the putative location of the orphanage where Jake and Elwood were raised.)

  28. Location spotting is (for some people) a fun hobby – a lot of stuff gets filmed in or near my own neck of the woods, and it’s interesting to see when and how it turns up (my local parish church once guest-starred in an episode of Inspector Morse….

    I’m currently binging on Star Trek on Netflix, and playing a variant – identify that plant. The pampas grass is easy to spot – and it’s common in Southern California. But there are a lot of common landscaping and native plants that were altered to create alien vegetation – I’ve seen Joshua trees and Aurucarias spray-painted neon colors (that seems to be the most common way of alienizing them). It helps that we’ve imported a lot of Australian and South African plants, which look otherworldly to begin with.

  29. Plenty of locations near me that have been used for Outlander. Culross in particular, as it hasn’t changed much since the 17th century. But also Falkland palace (as Inverness) and Aberdour Castle.

  30. geographical liberties taken

    I was at university in the 1980s when an episode of a TV soap was set there. It was fasciating to watch how a character could climb the fire escape at the squash court on the south side of the university lake, go through the door and emerge on the group floor of a college on the north side of the lake.

    Has the battle in that Transformers film where the fighting in simultaneously at the Pyramids of Giza and the Jordanian city of Petra already been covered?

  31. Hoboken, NJ is evidently used occasionally to represent low-rise areas of NYC. Or maybe it just used to be? I haven’t noticed any filming recently. Hoboken may have changed too much, or gotten too expensive.

    Many years ago now I recognised the Hoboken location of a beer ad shown during some Olympics or other, when they pulled back to an exterior shot. They had changed the sign, I think, but not much else. It was exciting to me at the time.

  32. Here in Portland, we’ve recently seen parts of the city in Grimm, Here and Now (both of which were/are set here), The Librarians, Leverage (which was filmed here for four years, but only set in “Portland” during the last season) and The Flash (every aerial shot of “Central City” is Portland, although the rest of the show is filmed in Vancouver BC).

    When Leverage was on, I used to call my folks (who lived 100 miles to the south) after each show and tell them where every setting actually was in the city. One of my favorite geographic twists was when the crew was in a government building on the east side, went through a corridor and came out the door of a restaurant several miles away…on the other side of the river.

    There was a TV movie a few decades ago that had the owner of Lookingglass Books living in the Pittock Mansion (if, only!–it’s a large mansion in the west hills that was built by the then-owner of the The Oregonian newspaper) that overlooked the Pacific Ocean–some 75 miles away.

    Then there’s Bullitt, with its famous car chase scene through the streets of San Franciscon, where they turn a corner–and are suddenly in Sausalito.

  33. In “The Prisoner” which was filmed at Portmeiron (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmeirion) a rather small resort features chase scenes that will go up a particular ramp, and then a few minutes later, go down the same ramp in the other direction.

    “The City on the Edge of Forever” uses the same sets to represent Depression-Era NYC that usually portray Mayberry in the Andy Griffith show (in the AGS, they give the impression that all the buildings are single-story). Here’s the ad that shows the Mayberry/Star Trek connection (in case you haven’t seen it already) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfeenAf5phc

  34. This is sufficiently different from the permanent “Foolish Movie Geography” thread that I don’t feel bad mentioning it after I said I’d refrain.

    When I was 16, I took Driver’s Ed in high school. We had a trailer full of simulators out by the driving range. I had #13, the haunted simulator (which would drive by itself, causing the teacher to tell me to stop, before I was finally able to show him that it had a will that was not mine).

    One day, we were sitting in our fake drivers’ seats, steering and signaling and accelerating and braking along with the movie on the screen in front of the room, when I suddenly realized that things looked familiar. Chicago? Chicago area? Within a minute, I saw that Baha’i temple and knew that my guess had probably been right. For the remainder of the class, I happily ‘drove’ around the city we would see when we visited Mom’s family, every three years or so.

    (On a related topic, I was watching a late-night T&A pic on Skinemax, strictly for academic purposes, and recognized not only my favorite used book store in Norfolk, the Bibliopath, but even the owner, H.L. “Yeah, I got a few bucks for that,” he told me later. “Not a whole lot.” It was a brief scene. H.L. kept his clothes on.)

  35. @ Lenora Rose:

    I have small children. This sometimes affects my tv viewing.

    Oh, good. You can probably figure out the tune for this:

    Pixel Scroll, Pixel Scroll, we’ll file it on the double!
    Pixel Scroll, Pixel Scroll, from Earth’s core to the Hubble!
    No news too big, no fan too small!
    Pixel Scroll, we’re on a roll!
    Pixel Scroll, Pixel Scroll, Pixel Scroll. . .

    Which means that for the last *day* I have had this going around in my head:
     
    There was a file that had a scroll, and Pixel was its name-o….

    Replacing one earworm with another is good, right?

    /You’re welcome

  36. I feel like time travelers of the future might not get the word about Stephen Hawking’s party on June 28, 2009. Should I keep spreading the word in hopes of being the reason one of them hears about it, or is that now impossible?

  37. @Joe H. Wynonna Earp is actually SET in Alberta where it is filmed though. They’re a bit obscure about mentioning that, but there are maps etc on several occasions. Purgatory is basically Ghost Lake, and The Big City is Calgary. Which is kind of fun. I enjoy when Canadian-shot SF/F is actually set here.

  38. Owlmirror: my kids have actually had minimal exposure to Paw Patrol. Daniel Tiger gets frequent play though, which, since its theme is a deliberate variant on another we all know, can earworm everybody

    It’s a beautiful day in the pixel scroll…

  39. Downtown L.A. has been used – a lot – for NYC, and also for other cities, partly because so much of it was built in between 1910 and 1940, and hasn’t changed too much at street level.
    (It was always fun getting off the Red Line at Pershing Square, and discovering it was 5th Ave and 42nd street at street level.)

  40. @Rev. Bob

    (17) I can’t help with Oz or Gotham, but anyone who can read a birdhouse in my neck of the woods knows how to find Fairyland. For those in more remote regions, load Google Maps and search for Rock City Gardens, Lookout Mountain, GA. The park itself is easy to find, but check out the nearby street names. They even have their own pharmacy and elementary school. It’s worth noting that several of the locals pronounce the first vowel more like an “uh” than a long A to downplay the name; not all of the fae welcome visitors…

    I visited Rock City and Lookout Mountain as a very young kid with my parents almost forty years ago now, since my parents were eager to see America and thus visited a lot of weird and wonderful roadside attractions. Of Rock City, I mainly remember that they had a cave full of figures reenacting Mother Goose rhymes.

    @Peer

    I remember watching James Bond – Tomorrow never dies in the cinema, purely because part of it was set in my home town of Hamburg. When Bond escaped from another iconic locatuon and walked to his car, a good chunk of the audience said “You are not allowed to park THERE!”
    That was neat.

    He’s James Bond – he can park everywhere. Or maybe the City of Hamburg sent a parking ticket to the MI6.

    Bremen isn’t used all that often as a filming location, but several Tatorte and the film adaptation of Sven Regener’s novel Neue Vahr Süd took their share of liberties.

    Regarding faulty geography in literature, Roberto Bolano mentions my hometown of Bremen in 2666, when some of his characters attend symposium at the university and have dinner “at a restaurant near the river in neighbourhood with lots of Nazi era buildings”. There are three locations where that restaurant might be, though none of them fits the description exactly and none of them is anywhere near the university.

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