76 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 3/21/19 I’ll File You, My Pixel, And Your Little Scroll Too!”

1. thanks for the title credit!

   [first]

   [click]

2. For my money, Timothy Dalton’s greatest genre role was as Prince Barin in the 1980 Flash Gordon.

   That tree stump monster scene still squicks me out.

3. [9] Teresa’s 63? Omigodi’mold! (Promptly crumbles to dust.)

   Be Scrolled and File Not

4. “Can’t Click, Scroll will eat me”

5. @Kip – She’s several years younger than me. I wish her many years of happy to come!

6. (3) MARGINALIZED VOICES IN YA.

   So an author who is black and queer, and tweets that women shouldn’t “profit” from writing gay men’s stories, decided that it was okay for himself to profit from a story about two Americans for which the setting is the Kosovo War, which involved Serbs, Albanians, and Montenegrans.

   Ohhhhhhhkay.

   I’m not disputing his right to tell such a story, just his hypocrisy in doing so — as well as his lack of good sense in thinking that a romance of two Americans in that setting would go over well with the people for whom that war was more than just a distant event on the other side of the world.

7. I just finished reading Raven’s Tower and now I’m depressed. Especially given the positive endings of her previous books, I wasn’t prepared for this.

8. bookworm1398: I just finished reading Raven’s Tower and now I’m depressed. Especially given the positive endings of her previous books, I wasn’t prepared for this.

   I thought that it was a very good novel, really skilfully-written. I admire the craft in it, but I did not love it. I had also figured out a fair bit of the ending’s revelations well before the end, which possibly diminished some of its effect for me. It’s more than a bit dark, but it’s terribly interesting, and I do recommend reading it.

   But yes, it made me want to go read the Ancillary trilogy again, to clear my palate.

9. 3) What stuns me about the Kosoko Jackson case is that absolutely no one seemed to realise a romance about two Americans that uses the Kosovo War, an actual bloody conflict that took place only 20 years ago and is still an open wound for those affected by it, might be a tad problematic. I also wonder why no one even thought to ask a Kosovan person to take a look at the book. After all, there have to be some Kosovans in the US, when I could easily find ten Kosovan immigrants in my not very big neighbourhood.

   9) Gustav Fröhlich did at least one other genre film, the 1948 movie Das verlorene Gesicht (literally, “The Lost Face”, though the US title was Secrets of the Soul for some reason), in which an amnesiac supposedly Tibetan woman is found wandering the streets of post-WWII Germany. She is taken in by a kindly doctor, taught German and falls in love with a young lawyer. They’re about to marry, but for some reason the husband-to-be wants to cast a face mask of his bride first. Once the cast comes off, the woman’s facial features have changed, she no longer appears to be Asian and she suddenly remembers who she is. She also doesn’t recognise her husband-to-be and turns out to be already engaged to someone else, namely Gustav Fröhlich. The cause for the woman’s strange condition is… drumroll… hypnosis. The guy she almost married while hypnotised tries to use hypnosis to win her back, since consent apparently doesn’t matter at all, and fails.

   The film is just as bonkers as it sounds, even though it was made Kurt Hoffmann, who is a very good director. Supposedly, it’s based on the true story of a faux Tibetan amnesiac which happened in the 1920s in Stuttgart. Apparently, there have also been other faux Tibetan amnesiacs found in Europe in the first half of the 20th century, so apprently this was a thing back then.

   And that’s it for today’s really, really weird old movie.

10. Joe H: Thanks for the FLASH GORDON link. Timothy Dalton has a great voice. In fact, there was a lot of good acting in that very crappy film.

11. bookworm1398: I just finished reading Raven’s Tower and now I’m depressed. Especially given the positive endings of her previous books, I wasn’t prepared for this.

    Well, it was modelled on a well known text, so the ending certainly wasn’t unexpected.

12. Lfex: Well, it was modelled on a well known text, so the ending certainly wasn’t unexpected.

    It borrowed some elements, but I wouldn’t say it was modelled on that text. And to me, those elements weren’t the depressing part.

13. Martin Wooster on March 21, 2019 at 9:03 pm said:

    Joe H: Thanks for the FLASH GORDON link. Timothy Dalton has a great voice. In fact, there was a lot of good acting in that very crappy film.

    very crappy but glorious film

14. “Which kickass literary investigator are you?”

    I think the word “kickass” pretty much excludes all possibilities for me. 🙂

15. @joe @martin

    Oh yeah, that monster is terrifying.

16. Luiza Salazar ??????
    @lusalazar
    Realized I have never gone back to draw the Firefly girls. Whedon is a master of creating amazing female characters

    Growl. And the talented female actors have nothing to do with the those amazing female characters? What a bloody stupid statement. They are the ones who actually make those characters come alive for the viiewers, not Whedon.

17. Very crappy but glorious, sequin-filled, and ever so slightly perverse.

18. “Pixelon File was dream given Scroll. It’s goal, to prevent another war by providing a place where humasn and aliens could comment out their differences peacefully.”

19. “But I don’t have a little scroll Toto.”

20. @Lfex What text is it based on?

21. I like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but what makes it genre? Is this the technicality of “There’s a ghost in Hamlet“?

22. @Cora That Tibetan amnesiac story reminds me of the other weird ethnicity-hopping personalities in German literature of early 20th Century, esp. Karl May, who had at least two alternate identities: Winnetou and Kara Ben Nemsi. From his Wikipedia entry, May sounds a bit nuts, but apparently his stories were popular and even inspired some sort of cos-play among his fans.

    Also, BTW, thanks for your great series on German SF!

23. Rosencrantz and Guilderstern realize that they’re in a play, which is an element that’s at least genre-adjacent (playing around with ideas of reality feels SFFish to me, anyway).

    “Clones to the left of me, Jockaira to the right”

24. @15: awwww! wuzzums!
    i.e., gentrification is not an unmixed blessing, but the loss of seedy areas isn’t something I mourn. (I also think he exaggerates; I went through PABT several times in 1970-71 and was never struck by its desperation.) One could argue various *isms in either the essay or the facts, as there are still plenty of seedy areas — they just aren’t as visible. (The extent to which they’d be better or worse without the economic revival of or focus on the core is not something I have the facts to argue either side of.)

    @Cora: I suspect finding a Kosovar in the US would be non-trivial; there’s a small matter of an ocean in the way, plus something like 5 times the distance to cover. I’m sure there are Kosovars — even Kosovars who either fled the fighting or had enough contacts during the fighting to comment authoritatively on the background of Jackson’s story — in the US; however I wouldn’t expect there to be enough that they would be easy to find — not to mention whether they’d speak up or try to be invisible if somebody announced a search for a Kosovar who could discuss the war. This doesn’t reduce the argument that using the war as a backdrop for outsiders is problematic, with or without knowledgeable advice.

25. And regarding Kosovars, you would need at least two of them. One from the serbian (or romani or jewish) minority and one from the albanian majority population. And they will have very, very different views. I would not want to stick my hand into that hornet nest. You would need to have very thorough knowledge to know what mines to avoid. Best to have lived there for a time.

26. Timothy Dalton was also in several episodes of the decidedly genre Chuck, and played the gleefully evil Simon Skinner in the not exactly genre but hilarious Hot Fuzz, the second film in the Wright/Pegg/Frost Corneto trilogy.

27. Rosencrantz and Guilderstern realize that they’re in a play, which is an element that’s at least genre-adjacent (playing around with ideas of reality feels SFFish to me, anyway).

    The curious thing is that this is also a preoccupation of literary fiction (really literary, not just general). I do sometimes feel that literary fiction and SFF actually have more in common with each other than with the wider fictional world.

28. @Lfex What text is it based on?

    Unzyrg. (ROT13)

29. Seedy neighborhoods will be with us always. They’ll just move.

    Ethnicity-hopping?

    It’s raining. Dora is on my lap. I’m going to read.

30. They’ve been showing Flash Gordon a lot on Comet TV and so I’ve been catching bits and pieces of it while I’m flipping around. My favorite detail is that Dr. Zarkov kidnaps Dale (and Flash) because he needs someone in the capsule to push down on the red pedal while his rocket blasts off. He can build a spaceworthy rocket in a greenhouse, but he didn’t think to make the controls usable by one person.

    In fairness, he was expecting his assistant Munson to travel with him, but Munson hoofed it and was killed by the plane that Flash crash landed.

    Random trivial: Melody Anderson, who played Dale, was also on one episode of Logan’s Run, one episode of Battlestar Galactica, and eight episodes of Manimal. Also a Chuck Norris movie.

    Pixel McCartney – Scroll of Kintyre

31. @bookworm
    I missed that “well-known source”, but was getting the story’s subtext really loudly. (Spent half the night after, thinking about it.) Didn’t find it depressing, so much as wanting “what happened after that”.

32. Guys, I know it’s a really vague spoiler, but I’d appreciate spoilers for the endings of recently published books being rot13’d in future, if possible.

33. Me too, Meredith. Me too.

34. Re Cat Eldridge:

    And the talented female actors have nothing to do with the those amazing female characters? What a bloody stupid statement. They are the ones who actually make those characters come alive for the viiewers, not Whedon.

    Well Whedon certainly made the job easier for them. Writers create the characters and decied who prominent they are. Yes in my opinion Whedon can be praised for creating those characters and the actors should be praised for how they played them. No need to make this either/or.

    Re Karl May: He was a smalltimecriminal who created his heroic alterego as whishfulfilment. He prefered that to reality. Kara Ben Nemsi was May in the orient, Old Shatterhand was him in the Wild West. It was outrate stated that they were the same person. And yes there are still popular today, exspecially amoung young readers.

35. 10) I see on the Carnegie Institution’s page on the contest (a) the official rules for naming moons of Jupiter, which are fairly restrictive, ruling out names like MooneyMcMoonface, and (b) a complete lack of any commitment to use the winning names for anything. But I don’t blame them for trying to crowdsource the search through Greek and Roman mythology for descendants or lovers of Zeus or Jupiter that haven’t already been used. Over 50 of Jupiter’s moons have already been named.

36. While on the subject of recently published (or otherwise released) books (or other things) not being spoiled: I managed to see Us last night without ever seeing a trailer or commercial or reading an article on it, an approach I found rewarding. Of it I will say only this: anyone can make a scary movie, but Us is the creepiest-ass movie I have seen in some time, and I recommend it to anyone to whom that sounds like a recommendation.

37. StefanB says Well Whedon certainly made the job easier for them. Writers create the characters and decied who prominent they are. Yes in my opinion Whedon can be praised for creating those characters and the actors should be praised for how they played them. No need to make this either/or.

    I didn’t make it either/or. The blogger left the clear impression that Whedon, and Whedon alone, is ‘a master of creating amazing female characters’ and that’s all there is to what we see on the screen. That’s bulllshit. The performer is much more important to the character than the individual writer is and that’s proven over and over on series that have multiple writers in any given season, something that most do, IMDb say Whedon only wrote five five episodes of Firefly, so who gets credit for fleshing out the characters on the other nine episodes?

38. @Lis Carey yes, I see what you mean, ‘ethnicity-hopping.’ I suppose it could be seen as Orientalism, Colonialism, racism. Apparently there were people (like Karl May) who invented fictional characters and then would appear as them, taking on their personality. I gather it was a sort of performance art. May posed, variously as Winnetou (a Native American elder), and people from the Near East and Far East. I suppose it may have been just a publicity stunt. But there is another interesting case, found in Tom Reiss’ “The Orientalist,” where Liv Nussimbaum (born in Baku) becomes the best-selling author Essad Bey, while taking on the persona of a Muslim prince.
    Anyway, I apologize for that odd-term; and seems worth further thought in today’s conversation about appropriation and representation.

39. The performer is much more important to the character than the individual writer is and that’s proven over and over on series that have multiple writers in any given season …

    File 770 is a strange place to be told that writers always matter less than actors.

    I don’t see why a show having multiple writers means the actor always contributes more to a character than any writer. The writers of individual episodes are guided by head writers/showrunners who often have more influence on a character than an actor.

    Did Matthew McConaughey matter more than Nic Pizzolatto in the characterization of Detective Rust Cohle in True Detective? As good as McConaughey was, I’d say emphatically no. Pizzolatto has a strong vision of his show and the characters who inhabit it.

40. @Cat Eldridge: “The performer is much more important to the character than the individual writer is…”

    Aside from the reasons you give, there aren’t any parts that play themselves. I love reading plays and know I’m not getting the real thing. Whereas the exaggerated compliment “I’d watch that actor recite the telephone book” is not untrue. What the writer gives is reach over time and space; a long-lived play outlives a long-lived actor.

    There was another paragraph here I’m tempted to leave, because of how brutally it turns on itself and destroys it’s own line of thought, but I hate gore, so away it goes.

41. One of the pleasures of episodic TV is watching the writers and actors come together to make a character work–I suspect much of what I see in long-running shows is a writers’ room figuring out how to write a character for a particular actor, though obviously we’re also watching that actor figure out how to inhabit the givens of the show and the character. I once got to watch our neice-the-actor run lines as she prepared for a part–it was much like watching a musician get inside a piece of music.

42. What I’m saying is that in series work individual writers are less important than either the prrformer or the colllective undertaking of the writing staff. Writing most series isn’t like writing a novel series even one like say the Expanse series as writing staffs tend to be large and scripts for individual shows are often farmed out.

    Her giving Whedon credit for these characters is like crediting Niven for all of the Man-Kzin writing that has been done since he laid down the premise of that conflict. Expect it’s even worse as we’ve got three performers who are clearly interpreting the scripts as all performers do.

    If Firefly becomes an animated series, do we not credit the voice work of the actors involved? And I doubt Whendon will be writing it, sonare these his characters? Or are they new characters?

43. I feel like this whole argument is a bit odd. In something like a show, it’s clearly a case of BOTH-ness. A head writer/director/show creator is a person without whom there would be no character idea at all for the actor to embody. But they are not the final authority – thank goodness, as some of Whedon’s missteps in his own shows and his shared speculation of the future events of Firefly as a show have indicated he doesn’t always have a consistent or unproblematic vision.

    Ultimately, we do almost always give the actor credit as well, for bringing the character into physical being — in many cases more credit. We don’t exclusively credit Gene Roddenberry for Kirk or Spock, after all. And we trade between the actors and the showrunners both when discussing the merits and flaws of different seasons of Doctor Who.

44. Cat: But you can’t talk about a creator/showrunner like Whedon as an “individual” writer who only did five episodes. He’s an uncredited co-writer of all episodes.

    I read an interview with Buffy writer Jane Espenson once, and the interviewer praised one of her episodes and she thanked him. He particularly liked one bit, and she said, “thanks, but I must admit Joss wrote that.” And he mentioned a good line, and she said, “that was Joss,” and something else was Joss, and then he mentioned something else, and she said “I wrote that!”

45. @mlex
    Karl May was con man who even did a stint in prison and eventually took up writing to great success. He passed himself off as a great world traveller and adventurer who’d travelled the Middle East as Kara Ben Nemsi (a.k.a. Karl, son of the Germans) together with his pal Hadschi Halef Omar Ben Hadschi Abul Abbas Ibn Hadschi Dawuhd al Gossarah (I had to look up what must be the longest name in German literature) and who travelled the Old West as Old Shatterhand and became friends and blood brothers with Winnetou, the noble chief of the Apache (who never existed. May made him up). All of these adventures were made up and never happened. But while Karl May liked posing in Old West trapper garb and in Middle eastern garb, he never pretended to be any ethnicity other than his own. Kara Ben Nemsi and Old Shatterhand were both white German guys from Radebeul in Saxony, just like May himself (and were both protrayed in the best known film versions by Lex Barker). His novels, which were still popular when I was a kid, though the dense Victorian style was getting unreadable, were basically the adventures of a Saxonian never-do-well who travelled the world.

    As for the fake Tibetans of the early 20th century, I found references to several cases in a contemporary (i.e. 1948) review of the movie Das verlorene Gesicht, but I couldn’t find any other references to those cases anywhere on the Internet. If such references exist, they require digging into newspaper archives (which I’m half-tempted to do, considering Bremen university library has one of Germany’s biggest newspaper archives).

46. It’s been said that reading Nancy is easier than not reading it. The strip Cathy is very much the opposite. I could see that it was well-written and often funny, but the effort of taking it in was too much for the payoff. The lettering is abrasive to me in some way, and there’s a ton of it. The drawings are particularly annoying because she’s been doing this strip for decades now, and never improved after the initial months. Still the same three faces, four expressions and five gestures. Most artists get better over time. They learn. They improve. Most of them.

    But reading Cathy every day was like trying to run through deep sand—everything in it worked in some way against taking it in and enjoying it. It was work. I finally gave myself permission to declare that the strip had won and I had lost, and I no longer had to keep looking at it, and I’ve been happier ever since. It’s possible I’d read a script version of the strip and get joy from it.

    File as scrolled as time

47. @Jeff Smith: interesting to hear; I was wondering how much we could ever know what parts of a character came from the writer (or more widely, the creator) and what were built up by the actor (cf “Dorothy Michaels” taking over the soap opera in Tootsie). My inclination given when Firefly came out is to give major credit to someone who tells the fossils-with-money “No, the women aren’t going to be weaker than the men; yes, it’s going to work” and makes them believe it. (After Buffy, Whedon may have been more able to do this than other creators.) That doesn’t mean that the actors have no effect — but ISTM that in the current system someone needs to make space for them. (For some values of “current” — Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, not to mention most of the non-title characters in Black Panther, may have opened up the field some.)

    @Andrew (not Andrew M): I’ve seen the movie (which I remember deviating, not always well, from the book), but only once and some time ago; did it make their being in a play clear? ISTM that the complaint at the end of the original script amounts to “If this were a play we’d have had more warning.”

    @Lfex: ISTM that’s a minor thread and inverted.

    @Patrick Morris Miller: your observation on Us amplifies what I’ve read; not that I was likely to see it anyway, but now I know I’ll give it a pass — just not my cup of tea.

    I see @Kyra has already added The Winter of the Witch to the 2019 Recommendations. I’m not sure about nominating it by itself — I had to find an online crib of the previous book to be sure I followed the first several chapters — but I’m not betting there will be anything better for a Best Series nomination. No cheats, no easy endings, just a very-well-done story.

48. @Chip: Honestly, it’s been decades since I read the play, so I may be exaggerating how much “fourth wall breaking” goes on.

49. Supernatural will be ending after the next season.

    https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/supernatural-end-season-15-cw-1196579

50. @Joe H – no!!!! Say it ain’t so! My wife, daughter and I are watching season 6 right now as they prepare signs for tomorrow’s anti-Brexit protest. We just got through the episode where Sam and Dean wind up in the alternate reality where they find themselves as actors playing hunters in a TV series called Supernatural. This awesomeness should never end!

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