(1) SOUL SURVIVOR. Peter Jones testifies: “Westboro Wannabees Picket Norwescon”
So, I’m in my hotel room at Norwescon. I don’t have a dealer table, and my panel appearances are kinda limited, so I’m making the best of it by getting a much done on Black Powder Goddess as I can. I’m deep into revisionland when all of a sudden a load, distorted voice from a megaphone starts shouting at me to repent my sins.
Now, understand something; I am on the tenth floor of the hotel. So this megaphone is putting out some serious decibels, if not clarity. I step out onto my balcony, and see that there are people with massive signs bouncing them up and down in front of the con hotel as megaphone-preacher predicts a future of eternal fire for me.
I admit, my first thoughts were of irritation. After all, I’m just trying to get some work done, here. Now I’ve got to listen to this moron shouting at me while I try to fix this little bit of dialogue, or that paragraph structure.
But other people begin to emerge onto their own balconies as well, and now we’re looking at each other. Occasionally, someone shouts something rude back at the preacher. One dude starts up a chant of “Live in sin” over and over again. There are catcalls, people fly the horns, etc. But even that starts to die down in the face of what appears to be a never-ending barrage of scripture.
And I’m thinking to myself; what the hell good can they possibly imagine this is doing?
I mean, is anyone going to say “Whelp, I was going to hit up a room party, drink like Bacchus, and compare various forms of magic and demons to one another, but now that someone I don’t know has yelled Bible verses at me through a megaphone I think I’m going to church instead?” No. That is a phrase said by nobody, ever.
Video of the protestors here.
(2) TRICORDER DESIGN WINS X-PRIZE. The Harris brothers — mentioned here a couple of weeks ago — beat nine other finalists, including some heavily-funded competition. IFL Science has the story — “Star Trek’s Tricorder Now Officially Exists Thanks To A Global Competition”.
Star Trek’s all-purpose medical device, the Tricorder, has also inspired a fair few people to recreate its near-magical ability to instantly diagnose a patient. As it happens, the non-profit X-Prize Foundation were so keen to get one invented that they started a global competition to see if any mavericks would succeed.
Rather remarkably, one team has emerged victorious in their endeavor. A family-led team from Pennsylvania, appropriately named Final Frontier Medical Devices, have bagged themselves a sum of $2.5 million, with a second-place prize of $1 million going to the Taiwan-based Dynamical Biomarkers Group.
The objective of the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE competition was to create a lightweight, non-invasive, handheld device that can identify 13 health conditions (12 diseases, and the very absence of disease) in 90 minutes to 24 hours with no additional help or counsel from medical professionals. Five vital health metrics, like heartbeat and respiratory function, were also required to be constantly monitored.
Beginning in 2012, 10 teams originally made the cut from an original starting point of 312 groups from 38 countries. Two finalists were announced last December, and six total were honored at the prize-giving ceremony in Los Angeles.
The team behind the winning design was headed by brothers Dr Basil Harris, an emergency physician, and George Harris, a network engineer. They came up with “DxtER,” a device infused with artificial intelligence, entire funded by themselves and two other siblings of theirs.
Concluding that one device alone was not sufficient to accurately and quickly diagnose various medical conditions in a patient, the team realized that they needed to link it up to a wealth of medical data….
(3) MORE POTTERCABULARY ON COURSE FOR THE DICTIONARY. Priya Joshi, in an International Business Times piece called “’Quidditch’ and ‘Potterhead’ could make their way into the Oxford English Dictionary”, says that the OED is considering these terms as well as “wrock,” which is short for “wizard rock.” However, “muggle” was added to the OED years ago.
“Potterhead”, which is a term used to describe a Harry Potter super-fan, is in the running, as is “Wrock” [short for Wizard Rock] a genre of music favoured by the pupils of Hogwarts. “Bellatrix” the name of one of Rowling’s characters, may also make it into the OED.
While it is rare for made-up words to find their way into the Oxford dictionary, they have to be in circulation for 10 years to be considered for this authoritative record of the English language.
(4) TODAY’S 3000. In the opinion of The Verge’s Megan Farokhmanesh, “Mystery Science Theater 3000 perfectly dunks on Stranger Things“.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 is back, and the first thing on its hit list is Stranger Things. Netflix has released a short MST3K crossover teaser that features the cast of the revival version of the show taking a break from their movie-centric entertainment to riff on the opening of Netflix’s breakout science-fiction thriller. Although the actual show is focused on questionable movies rather than viral-hit TV, the clip is still a brilliant bit of marketing.
(5) CROSSED SIGNALS. But wait, another writer for The Verge, Noel Murray, says the first episode is a sendup of the movie Reptilicus. Which The Verge also likes.
But Netflix’s revival version grasps something that most of the copycats miss: Mystery Science Theater was never just about sneering. The new Jonah Ray version of the series recaptures the original version’s handmade, “Hey kids, let’s put on a show” charm. The sets and effects look fussed-over and intricately detailed, but also inexpensive enough that any diligent, gifted community-theater tech could’ve pulled them off. During the first break in Reptilicus, Ray and the ’bots launch into a Hamilton-esque rap (penned by nerdcore songwriting duo Paul Sabourin and Storm DiCostanzo) about giant monsters around the world. In that song, Ray, Yount, and Vaughn hit every tricky, rapid-fire aural cue, but also knock over props and sing like spirited amateurs. The presentation throughout the first new episode is smart and energetic, but not always slick.
The main thing the Netflix MST3K gets right is the original’s giddy media deconstruction. During Reptilicus, there are jokes about the movie’s slow pace (“Feel free to begin the scene any time, guys”), and about the stock characters and casual sexism (“Brigadier General Military Industrial Complex, this is Miss Doctor Woman”). Ray and the ’bots have some fun with the poor quality of the source material itself (“Either this print is in really bad shape, or it’s raining tar”), and the movie’s distinctly Danish setting (“Protect the parfumerie!”).
(6) THAT OTHER TURING TEST. Emilio Lizardo never met the renowned codebreaker, but somehow Turing got interested in this saurian puzzler — “Color-shifting lizard’s skin morphs just as Alan Turing predicted”.
At least, when you take John von Neumann’s math into account…
There’s a particular type of lizard that changes the color of its spots as it ages — and researchers have just discovered the mathematical rules that govern this peculiar metamorphosis.
Meet the ocellated lizard, a 30-to-35 inch reptile that lives Europe. These lizards are born with unimpressive brown and white polka dots. But as they grow, they develop this beautiful, labyrinthine green and black pattern across their bodies. We don’t know exactly why this happens, but now, we know a little more about how. The lizard scales might be changing according to a particular mathematical model, reports a study published this week in Nature. The weird thing is, this model is somewhat different from the one that scientists have long believed to determine how animals get dots and stripes.
In fact, one overarching theory of how biological patterns form comes from an unlikely place: codebreaker Alan Turing. About 65 years ago, he proposed that stripes, spots, and even appendages like fingers may emerge from a series of chemical interactions between two hypothetical substances: an activator and an inhibitor. As both substances spread across a canvas like an animal’s skin at different paces, they compete with one another to give rise to patterns….
(7) TAYLOR OBIT. Robert Taylor, a pioneer of modern computing and the internet, died April 13 at the age of 85.
In the 1960s, Taylor was a researcher at the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, where his frustration with what he saw as inefficient communication led him to envision an interconnected computer network.
At ARPA, Taylor had three separate computer terminals in his office to communicate with his colleagues across Berkeley, MIT, UCLA and Stanford. Each terminal connected to a different computer in a different part of the country, he told Raz.
“To get in touch with someone in Santa Monica through the computer, I’d sit in front of one terminal, but to do the same thing with someone in Massachusetts, I would have to get up and move over to another terminal,” Taylor said. “You don’t have to look at this very long to realize this is silly. This is stupid. So I decided, OK, I want to build a network that connects all of these.”
That shared network, ARPANET, evolved into what would become the internet. To build it, Taylor assembled a group of smart people, like Bill Duvall at Stanford, Len Kleinrock at UCLA and the 21-year-old programmer Charley Kline.
(8) EFFECTS. “Ghost in the Shell Reel” on Vimeo is a demonstration of work by Ash Thorp about work he did for the 2017 movie.
(9) COUNTING EXERCISE. Lettie Prell and a white-hot adding machine tell about “Women Writers Winning Hugo Awards: A History”.
In sum, this analysis documents the large increase in Hugos going to women writers, from zero to a sweep of all four major fiction categories in 2016. I could have selected another award, or gathered other data, and documented the same upward trajectory, because what we’re really documenting here is the achievement of the broader women’s movement, which has been just one of the groups who’ve been working for a more inclusive culture. As for me, I’ve come to expect diverse voices, and I hunger for them as another dimension of the mind-expanding fare I’ve craved since high school.
(10) RATING YOUR UBER DRIVER. Buzzfeed fears that the Uber driver rating system gets people unjustly canned.
In a San Francisco Lyft car, there’s a chart taped to the back of the front passenger seat: “The Rating System Explained.” It details — in exaggerated terms — what Lyft’s one- to five-star rating scale really means to drivers.
Beginning at five stars — “got me where I needed to go” — the explanations quickly descend into parodic paranoia. Four stars: “This driver sucks, fire him slowly … Too many of these and I may end up homeless.” Three stars: “This driver sucks so bad I never want to see him again.” Two stars: “maybe the car had something dangerously wrong with it or he was doing 120 in a 40 mile zone.”
One star? “Threats or acts of violence possibly made, perhaps a callous disregard for his own safety.”
Though tongue-in-cheek, this rating system explainer touches on an essential truth of the gig economy: When companies like Lyft, Uber, and Postmates penalize workers who have low ratings, anything less than five stars feels like a rebuke….
(11) I GET AROUND. No beach for these boys, but plenty of sand — “’Star Wars’ Exclusive Sneak Peek: Hasbro’s Deluxe Luke Skywalker-Landspeeder Set”.
Luke Skywalker is all set to head down to Tosche Station for a rendezvous with Biggs, Windy, Deak, and Fixer in this exclusive first look at the latest addition to Hasbro’s premium Black Series line. The young moisture farmer can cruise the dunes of the twin-sunned planet, from Anchorhead to Mos Eisley, in his X-34 landspeeder.
(12) POSITIVE DEVELOPMENT. Blastr brings the good word — “Story by legendary sci-fi author Robert Silverberg being made into film”.
One of sci-fi’s greatest living legends is finally getting some love from Hollywood.
According to Deadline, John Ridley is set to write and direct a film for Miramax called Needle in a Timestack, based on a short story by Robert Silverberg. The story focuses on a man who sets out to save his marriage after it is destroyed by a rival using time travel to alter the course of history.
The involvement of Ridley, whose credits include writing and directing the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, as well as creating the acclaimed TV series American Crime and a new Showtime project called Guerrilla (he’s also still attached to write a mystery Marvel TV project), means it’s more likely to move forward than get stuck in development hell.
(13) SLEEPWALKING TO THE BANK. According to Looper’s Time Karan, “Upcoming Stephen King novel Sleeping Beauties already being developed for TV”.
It’s a scary great time to be Stephen King.
According to Empire, his upcoming novel Sleeping Beauties–which he wrote with his son Owen King–is already being developed into a TV series. The book is slated to arrive in September from Scribner. The TV series will be produced by The OA’s Michael Sugar and Ashley Zalta.
The novel is reportedly set in the relatively near future at a women’s prison in an Appalachian town. Here’s the official synopsis: “Something happens when women go to sleep; they become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If they are awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed or violated, the women become feral and spectacularly violent; and while they sleep, they go to another place. The men of our world are abandoned, left to their increasingly primal devices. One woman, however, the mysterious Evie, is immune to the blessing or curse of the sleeping disease. Is Evie a medical anomaly to be studied? Or is she a demon who must be slain?”
(14) HUGH JACKMAN SINGS THE MUSIC MAN. David K.M. Klaus supplies the introduction to this 2012 Tonight Show clip:
He still had it memorized from when he was 14, doing eight voices in rapid succession, the opening scene on a train. It’s a hoot! It shows that you can’t just walk in from somewhere and do superhero films — this is part of why he could master a role like Wolverine, through training as an actor and dancer. The opposite illustration of this would be Shaquille O’Neil playing Steel, from the Superman comics, and being an awkward disaster.
[Thanks to JJ, Cat Eldridge, David K.M. Klaus, Carl Slaughter, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day JohnFromGR.]
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3) it is rare for made-up words to find their way into the Oxford dictionary
“Made-up words”? As opposed to what?
(1) SOUL SURVIVOR. Tell me they’re not protesting SFF. Good grief!
(3) MORE POTTERCABULARY ON COURSE FOR THE DICTIONARY. I’ve never heard of the term “Wrock” – I’m one of today’s lucky etc. Adding “Bellatrix” seems odd, unless the OED puts a lot of fantasy character names in, I suppose (okay, even then, it seems odd to me).
(4) TODAY’S 3000. Heh, okay, that was cute, but it made me wonder if I should not be looking forward to “Stranger Things.” (J/K!)
@Mike Glyer: (11) “Landspeeer Set” ??? I’ll appertain myself something tomorrow; I need to hit the sack.
ObSFReading: I’ve read the free Hugo-nominated Novelettes & Short Stories. Go, me! (I know that doesn’t sound like much, but I take forever to get around to this stuff.) A lot of good stuff.
ticky: verb | \?tik?, -ki\
Definition: the act of checking a tick box
Origin and Etymology: made up.
Jim Parish on April 16, 2017 at 11:51 pm said:
Possibly as opposed to loan-words? I don’t know. But I’m betting that the “rarety” of made-up words being added to the dictionary is only true relative to the millions that are probably invented each and every year. Only a few hundreds or thousands actually manage to become accepted enough for lexicographers to take note. 🙂
A dead white dude got hundreds of words he made-up words into the dictionary. And then they shut the gate on the rest of us. Typical!
(1) SOUL SURVIVOR. And as the protest goes on, I start getting more stories. Here’s one from John Redmond:
“Was a GREAT teachable moment for my 8-year old girl when my sexy Harley-Quinn-themed wife walked past them and they essentially called her a whore. I said, right in front of them, that he had judged Mommy by appearance, not knowing she’s a fanatical member of our Church’s choir and faithful to her husband. Said 8-year-old said, “Isn’t it a sin to judge people?” RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM. “Absolutely, my dear. Jesus loved everyone except hypocrites. Hypocrites are the WORST sinners. Now turn the other cheek, just walk away from them. They’re evil.”
We got an applause from a good handful of people we were walking with.”
Just be careful — remember what happened to Falstaff.
Mike Glyer: Just be careful — remember what happened to Falstaff.
He appertained so much that he turned into a beer?
Organic, home grown, 100% gluten-free Words.
Words, handcrafted in the salt mines, by our forefathers
Words discovered in the jungles of Venus.
Words, torn by war, laying, bleeding on the Battlefield
Words given to us by stalked Gods
Pixelated words, born out of files scrolled
Bizzare words, twisted by Dark Magik from innocent letters by evil tortureres
Missed the most obvious: Misspelled words by Non-native speakers trying to be clever.
14) Jackman’s got singing chops.
Made-up words. :Sigh:
One of my fun examples of a “made up word” is a place name: Lake Itasca, the headwaters of the Mississippi. It’s non-Native American discoverer, Henry Schoolcraft, took the latin words veritas (truth) and caput (head) and came up with Itasca.
@JJ So THAT is what the lyric in the Sheryl Crow song is all about. Hunh.
1) Someone coined the useful word “evandalism” for this sort of activity – spreading the Good News in a way which would make even St Francis of Assisi punch you in the teeth.
@Jim Parish
I suspect they meant “words made up by an author for the purpose of a story.” Sometimes called “nonce words.”
(10) At first I read this as “caned” instead of “canned,” and I briefly thought “wow, this really is out of hand!”
The problem of a lop-sided rating system turns up all over. At Amazon, we had the problem that most people rating non-book products use 5 stars to mean “nothing was wrong with it” and then every rating down reflects increasing problems. So a three-star review ends up meaning “I was too lazy to return this piece of trash” rather than “quality was about what I expected it to be.”
Clicky.
“Made-up words? As opposed to what?”
All the words we stole from other languages: schadenfreude, rendezvous, mulligatawny, et cetera.
@ Soon Lee
If we’re thinking of the same guy, he probably stole some of those, too. But anyone who can come up with “the multitudinous seas incarnadine” can steal anything they like, as far as I’m concerned.
Dial P for Pixel
[box checked]
In the beginning there was THE word and THE word was: tingtangwallawallabingbang. All the parvenuferous neologoi since be but marketing-sprach designed to confuse the issue…
0) A contributing editor-ship! Gnarly! Tubular, even!
6) Glad to see John Conway’s work with cellular automata come up in the article. For further reading, Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha, etc) has done some interesting work with CA and the natural world. Several examples here at Wolfram Alpha.
Ratings – I’ve been told by construction workers and house cleaners that anything less than a five star rating from the customer is considered a problem.
All the words we stole from other languages: schadenfreude, rendezvous, mulligatawny, et cetera.
Those are just words made up by some furriner.
(Spellcheck objects to “et”, “cetera”, and “furriner”, but nothing else….)
In the beginning was the word, and the word was: “Aardvark”.
Those are just words made up by some furriner.
But we couldn’t have “Amok Time” without Malaysia….
@JohnFromGR
Cellular automata are cool! You may know this – if you google Conway’s Game of Life it triggers an Easter egg spawning a game (you want type it in though. For some reason copy-pasting the phrase doesn’t consistently fire it off). Also there’s an online simulator here.
@bookworm1398 on April 17, 2017 at 5:24 am said:
Ratings – I’ve been told by construction workers and house cleaners that anything less than a five star rating from the customer is considered a problem.
I’ve gotten that too from places–I think the shop where I got my car worked on recently said they’d send me a survey and anything below a 10/10 would be considered a failing grade. Which is nuts. If only perfection is acceptable then there’s something seriously wrong with your rating system.
I’m in trouble with Hugo Reading:
Tie in Short Story between Vaughn and Jemisin.
Tie in Novelette between Gilman, Vernon and Wong.
Tie in Novella between McGuire, Bujold and Johnson.
This used to be much easier…
Tonight: More Penric before starting on Novels and Series.
(14) is hardly a surprise, given that Hugh Jackman starred as Curly in the 1998 London revival of Oklahoma. It was recorded for broadcast and DVD; I remember seeing it on PBS.
My CPAP sends me detailed reports on how I slept, with a rating. Don’t think I’ve ever got less than 95%. Sadly, the correlation between that rating and how rested I feel isn’t great, except for one parameter: length of sleep.
@Peer:
Don’t forget small-batch words crafted through artisanal spelling. You only get those in the limited edition dictionaries, y’know.
Rating systems: I seldom give out perfect (or perfectly awful) scores. Those have to truly be earned. In a five-star system, three is “satisfactory,” four is “above average,” and five is “excellent.” Deliberately distorting that is a disservice to all involved, and I’ll have no part of that. I can’t be held responsible if someone I’ve never met decides to “unskew” my scores and thereby gets the wrong idea.
I always give top scores on everything when I’m asked to evaluate a human being’s performance by their boss, unless there’s been some truly egregious problem. I have exactly zero interest in giving someone’s manager a tool with which to whip some poor working stiff. Let the bosses do their own thinking and their own dirty work.
I’ve said a word or two directly to someone who flubbed their job somehow. Not often, but I have and I will again, as I have every interest in them doing better.
Mark Richards on April 17, 2017 at 6:42 am said:
not to mention LES MISERABLES
and WOLVERINE: THE MUSICAL
and for a fun medley Hugh Jackman’s Opening Number: 2009 Oscars
Complaining about the rating systems that expect perfect scores, is like complaining about how school grades are judged.
A: Minimum acceptable Did nothing wrong.
B: OK, how can we improve next time?
C: You failed, basically.
D:: Were you even in this class?
F: Oh. My. God. Did you attack the teacher?
This can vary quite a bit according to privilege of course, but for a lot of the applicants to elite programs or schools, 4.0 is a minimum.
1 – I’ve wondered the same thing when given pamphlets at the bus stop. Who is having a religious epiphany from being handed a Watchtower while waiting for public transportation, especially when that transportation can turn an optimist into a nihilist within two transfers? I like collecting some of the tracts though, occasionally they’re funny in a messed up way.
That’s a lot of PR energy being wasted through the wrong delivery method. Though in the described situation it feels less like an attempt to convert and more of an attempt to affirm their own self-righteousness.
it feels less like an attempt to convert and more of an attempt to affirm their own self-righteousness.
Being generous I would assume having passion they don’t understand the true impact of their actions. Passion overriding empathy is a marker for a lot of bad behavior unfortunately.
When I was stationed in Florida we had a group we called ‘attack Baptists’ that hung out around the base gates. They basically blocked the sidewalks trying to force conversation or at least pamphlet taking. I can’t imagine they had much success recruiting that way. If anything, the repeated hard sales attempts made us more anti-religious. I think Airplane summed up the feelings for most us:
Hugh Jackman is delightful, but…he didn’t exactly sing there. I’ve heard him sing. He sings real nice.
(3) @Kendall: Adding “Bellatrix” seems odd, unless the OED puts a lot of fantasy character names in, I suppose (okay, even then, it seems odd to me).
It would be especially odd, since Bellatrix (latin for ‘female warrior’) is the traditional designation of the 3rd brightest star in the constellation of Orion, preceding Rowling’s usage by about 600 years.
click-tick
Peer:
Slow Clap. Bravx!
Have we done “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Pixel Scroller” yet?
“The pixels that scroll in the spring, tra-la!”
ticky
Don Quixote, the Scroller of La Pixela
RE: review stars
I’m still working on reminding myself “3 stars means they liked it, 3 stars means they liked it, 3 stars means they liked it.”
@1: I wonder whether those losers specifically picked an SF convention as having many sinners, or came to the hotel on the assumption that it was a wretched hive of scum and villainy (or at least sin), or have been pulling this wherever they think they’ll get an audience. I’m surprised the hotel didn’t throw them out for trespassing; is the lot publicly owned, or do Washington laws not support it, or did they not get enough complaints from paying customers?
@Stoic Cynic: notice that non-religious beggars were also getting short shrift. IIRC, that was back when many airports had signs saying ~”[Members of various cults] are pursuing their First Amendment rights here in accordance with a court decision.” I haven’t seen such action in a while but don’t remember what led to its diminution; does anyone have cites?
@Rob Thornton: But we couldn’t have “Amok Time” without Malaysia…. or “yoyo” without the Philippines.
@Daniel Dern: I think few people knew of Jackman’s singing before Les Miz; after that a lot more did, especially when it came out that he not only sang his part himself but did it on the set rather than in the studio.
@Dawn Incognito: all right, Jackman didn’t exactly sing there. But he performed something difficult that he’d learned nearly 30 years ago and probably had no call for since (although I don’t know whether he and Leno discussed it beforehand, giving him time for a quick brushup). (No, I can’t verify the words — but he made every word clear and sound as if it was intended, which is half the battle in live theater.) I’m having trouble with a big speech I learned less than 10 years ago, and that’s just the text, not the moves (and I haven’t had to memorize anything else since then, so it shouldn’t be displacing. [[Stamps cane, waves foot]].)
Review stars: That’s probably why the great majority of my Goodreads reviews come in at 4 stars — I like to reserve 5 stars for the ones that really, really bowled me over (or that I can’t be objective about because I imprinted on them like a baby duck back in the day), and 3 stars feels a bit too much like “Eh, it was just OK.” I’ve done very, very few, if any, 2 or 1 star reviews — the only one I can think of was John Carter of Mars, which was 1 star for Giant of Mars and 3 stars for Skeleton Men of Jupiter averaged out. Since everything I’m reading is entirely of my own choice and for my own pleasure, I tend to steer clear of things I expect I’d actively dislike based on available evidence.
That dead white guy didn’t actually invent as many words as is often claimed!
* First, the commonly distributed lists include words and phrases. Of that, a fairly small percentage are actually words.
* Second, as many have probably guessed (I certainly had), the fact that he may have been the first to write something down doesn’t mean he invented it.
* Third (and this is the part the article above covers), in many cases, it turns out, he wasn’t even the first to write these things down! People have assumed, quite falsely, that the earliest attribution found in the OED was the earliest known–ignoring the fact that the OED was, until fairly recently, compiled by hand, without computers to aid in the searching or editing. Modern technology has been causing the number of words attributed to Shakespeare to fall steadily for quite some time. But, of course, once a rumor gets started, it’s nearly impossible to stop.
(And maybe this time I can remember to tick the box!)
Bellatrix is already in the OED, just not with its own entry. It appears in the etymology of Bellatrice, and in the quotations supporting Betelgeuse (Bellatrix is one of the other stars in Orion).
(1) I was at NorWesCon and this is news to me!
@Greg Hullender: I also read “caned”.
@Peer, please accept this slightly dented internet.
Would anyone who loves Leviathan Wakes like to give me a pep talk? I’m at 60 pages and just don’t care. Since there are 500 more pages in this book and multiple books in the series, it’s not looking so good.
It’s space opera and I love space opera, so does this pick up at all?
Re stars in reviews – I give 5 stars for anything like Uber where I know employees are being evaluated by their rating, except in the case of extreme incompetence.
On Goodreads, I give most books 4 stars, occasionally give a 5 when I’m completely blown away, and give 3 to meh books (often classics that didn’t age well). Anything less than a 3 would be due to something I have to read, like with the old days of the *Puppies taking over the Hugo ballot. Otherwise, I’ll quit reading. Basically, if I read the whole thing, given my lack of reading time, I really like it.
@Steve Wright
A useful word indeed, although around here, maybe the term should be… “godstalking”.