Pixel Scroll 5/21/19 The Pixelyon Fifth Project Was The Last Best Hope For Scrolls. It Filed

(1) STICK A FORK IN IT. The second official trailer for Toy Story 4 dropped today. Features Keanu Reeves, who adds Canadian content to the movie as stuntman Duke Caboom. The film comes to U.S. theaters on June 21.

Woody has always been confident about his place in the world and that his priority is taking care of his kid, whether that’s Andy or Bonnie. But when Bonnie adds a reluctant new toy called “Forky” to her room, a road trip adventure alongside old and new friends will show Woody how big the world can be for a toy.

(2) ARF SAYS SANDY. The Dick Tracy strip seems to be starting an arc involving Annie and Daddy Warbucks. Daniel Dern says, “I’ve been following sundry daily strips via GoComics but it appears to have started a week ago here.”

(3) SFWA’S AGENT. Michael Capobianco penned “An Appreciation of Eleanor Wood” for the SFWA Blog.

SFWA thanks Eleanor Wood and Spectrum Literary Agency for more than twenty years of service to the organization….

I still vividly remember how much Eleanor helped when SFWA’s auditor found a serious discrepancy in how Pocket Books was paying royalties for Star Trek books exported to the UK and Australia – they weren’t paying anything, contrary to the language in their boilerplate contract. SFWA complained to Pocket but was met with repeated demurrals; it was only when Eleanor took over that they capitulated, not only paying a fair compensation to all the authors affected, but getting the contract changed to more fairly pay authors in the future….

(4) THE SPIDER SYNDROME. Maurice Broaddus delivers today’s “The Big Idea” at Whatever.

The Usual Suspects is a bit of a departure for me. It’s a middle school detective novel (think “Elmore Leonard for kids” or, as it was pitched, “Encyclopedia Brown meets The Wire”), because I work a lot with children who want to read what I write and, frankly, most of my stuff isn’t “age inappropriate.” In fact, I originally wrote the book to both entertain my oldest son and chronicle some of my children’s antics (it’s the only thing of mine he’s read and he still refers to himself as my original editor). The premise of the story is The Big Idea: when something goes wrong in the school, they round up The Usual Suspects….

(5) AI AT BARBICAN. This is from a review by Simon Ings behind the Financial Times paywall of the “AI:  More Than Human” exhibit now showing at London’s Barbican Centre through August 26.

AI is part of the Barbican’s ‘Life Rewired’ season of films, workshops, concerts, and talks.  What is emerging from the project is less that we must learn how machines think and create, and more that we must stop carelessly running down our own abilities.  Human values and practices persist well beyond the moment we learn to automate them.  Music has been produced algorithmically since Bach’s, and Mozart wrote generative algorithms to power street organs.  Chess computers do nothing but encourage the playing of chess.

The first tented spaces in the Barbican’s gallery do a good job of exploring and to some degree disarming our anxieties about being taken over by thinking machines.  We are shown how the west, under the shadow of Rabbi Loew’s 16th century Golem, adopted a strictly instrumentalist view of human intelligence.  The US science fiction writer Isaac Asimov can be heard channeling the Abrahamic tradition when he insists that ‘A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.’

(6) INSIDE THE SUIT. Patch O’Furr continues a deep dive into furry fandom with “How furries resist a commercialized fandom (Part 2)”.

Furry fandom often has DIY ethics (intentional or not). That can mean nonprofit volunteer-led events, and directly supporting each other’s art instead of just consuming corporate products. A Daily Beast reporter asked about it and I shared lots of info that didn’t all make the news — so here’s a followup in 3 parts.

Fandom is big business in the mainstream – but furries have their own place apart. Why does this fandom grow independently? Let’s look at unique expression at the heart of it. Of course furries do a lot more things than this story can look at, but one aspect brings insight about decentralized structure.

Some subcultures rise and fall with media they consume. But the influences seen in Part 1 didn’t make one property in common for every furry. They didn’t rise with a movie like Zootopia. Instead, this fandom is fans of each other….

(7) GHOST OF COLAS PAST. This is hilarious. Food & Wine reports “‘New Coke’ Is Coming Back This Summer, Thanks to ‘Stranger Things'” – a product I definitely feel no nostalgia for, at all.

Season three of the spooky Netflix series takes place in 1985, the year of the soft drink brand’s most infamous product launch.

What Crystal Pepsi was to the 1990s, New Coke was to the ’80s. With the cola wars in full swing, the competition to out-do one another meant multi-million dollar, celebrity-filled ad campaigns and some less-than-successful product innovations. In 1985, the Coca-Cola Company made an ill-fated attempt to improve its core product by changing the formula up….

Starting at 5 p.m ET on Thursday, May 23, 12-ounce cans of New Coke will be available as a gift with purchase at CokeStore.com/1985, which will also feature limited-edition, numbered Stranger Things-themed glass bottles of Coca-Cola and Coke Zero Sugar.

(8) CELEBRITY CREDENTIALS. Ten cats from SFF movies made Business Insider’s list — “RANKED: 15 of the best movie cats of all time”.

15. Jonesy in “Alien” (1979) and “Aliens” (1986) is a survivor.

In the space thriller “Alien,” Jonesy the orange tabby cat is a source of comfort for protagonist Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) as her spaceship and crewmates are viciously attacked by an elusive alien creature called a Xenomorph.

Toward the end of the film, Jonesy and Ripley remain as the lone survivors on the spaceship, which means Jonesy is one tough cat.

Jonesy also made a reappearance in the sequel “Aliens” after he and Ripley traveled in hypersleep for 57 years, officially making him the oldest fictional cat on this list.

(9) ALIEN SPOTTED. A UFO will beam up this rare creature any moment now.

(10) TODAY IN HISTORY.

Another big day in genre movie history.

  • May 21, 1971 Escape from the Planet of the Apes premiered in theaters
  • May 21, 1980 Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back hit theaters.
  • May 21, 1981 Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior debuted in theaters.
  • May 21, 2009 Terminator Salvation opened theatrically.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born May 21, 1889 Arthur Hohl. He’s Mr. Montgomery, the man who helps Richard Arlen and Leila Hyams to make their final escape in Island of Lost Souls, the 1932 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau which is considered the first such filming. (Died 1964.)
  • Born May 21, 1903 Manly Wade Wellman. I remember reading the John the Balladeer collectionKarl E. Wagner did and then seeking out the rest of those stories. Amazing stuff! Read the Complete John Thunstone a few years back — strongly recommended. What else by him should I read? (Died 1986.)
  • Born May 21, 1917 Raymond Burr. Speaking of lawyers, we have the Birthday of the man who played Perry Mason.  It looks the 1949 film Black Magic with him playing Dumas, Jr. was his first genre performance. Bride of the Gorilla was his next with Lou Chaney Jr. co-starring and Curt Siodmak directing. He goes on to be Grand Vizier Boreg al Buzzar in The Magic Carpet before being Vargo in Tarzan and the She-Devil. And finally he’s in a Godzilla film, Godzilla, King of the Monsters! To be precise, as Steve Martin. And unfortunately he played the same role in Godzilla 1985 which earned him a Golden Raspberry Award. (Died 1993.)
  • Born May 21, 1945 Richard Hatch. He’s best known for his role as Captain Apollo in Battlestar Galactica. He is also widely known for his role as Tom Zarek in the second Battlestar Galactica series. He also wrote a series of tie-in novels co-authored with Christopher Golden, Stan Timmons, Alan Rodgers and Brad Linaweaver. (Died 2017.)
  • Born May 21, 1974 Fairuza Balk, 43. She made her film debut as Dorothy Gale in Return to Oz. She later Aissa in The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Mildred Hubble in The Worst Witch.

(12) KNITTING UP THE STEEL WOOL. Cora Buhlert does an exhaustive review of GoT’s conclusion: “And the Iron Throne Goes to…”. The executive summary is —

…So in short, Game of Thrones got a better ending than at least I expected. It’s maybe not the ending most fans wanted or expected, but it is an ending and a surprisingly satisfying one.

(13) GAME OF GROANS. Daniel Dern asks, “Given GoT’s dragon-strafing episode, combined with family tree revelations, is/was Jon Snow referring to Daenerys as ‘Aunt Misbehaving’?”

(14) CONFESSIONS OF A DRAGON RIDER. Sarah Larson, in “Daenerys Tells All!” in The New Yorker, has an extensive interview with Emilia Clarke, including how whoever had the Starbucks cup on the set wasn’t a member of the cast (they don’t drink Starbucks) and telling children named Daenarys, “Work it, girls!”

“I see this vision, this angel, this incredible woman float towards me,” Clarke recalled the other day. “I can’t quite control myself. And Beyoncé says to me, ‘Oh, my goodness, it’s so wonderful to meet you. I think you’re brilliant.’ I just couldn’t handle it! I was on the verge of tears. I could see myself reflected in her eyes. I could see her go, ‘Oh, no. I misjudged this. This girl is crazy and I’m not going to have a real conversation with another celebrity. I’m having a conversation with a crazed fan who’s looking at me like a rabbit in the headlights.’ Which is exactly what I was. I said, ‘I’ve seen you live in concert and I think you’re amazing and wonderful! Wonderful!’ And all I wanted to scream was ‘Please, please still like me even though my character turns into a mass-killing dictator! Please still think that I’m representing women in a really fabulous way.’ ”

(15) FROM GRRM HIMSELF. George R.R. Martin shared a few of his feelings about “An Ending” at Not A Blog. Here are a couple of the less spoilery lines —

..Book or show, which will be the “real” ending?   It’s a silly question.   How many children did Scarlett O’Hara have?

How about this?  I’ll write it.   You read it.  Then everyone can make up their own mind, and argue about it on the internet.

(16) GOOD TO THE LAST BOOK. Bustle knows the way to work this dilemma for some clicks: “The New ‘Game Of Thrones’ Book May Not Be Finished, But These 15 Fantasy Series Definitely Are”.

If you’re a fan frustrated by the incompletion of one of the fantasy series listed above, or you’re waiting on the return of a different series entirely, this list will help you choose your next reading project. All of the fantasy series on the list below have been completed, which means you won’t have to wait to read the next book — unless you want to.

(17) TRIVIAL TRIVIA. You would be hard pressed to find a household that doesn’t have a microwave. But do you know how the beloved appliance came to be? In 1945, a Raytheon engineer was walking around a radar test room with a chocolate bar in his pocket. The bar began to melt when he got too close to a magnetron tube. His curiosity was peaked and he began experimenting with other things like kernels of corn and eggs. Soon after, Raytheon employees began sampling “microwaved” food and thus began the evolution of what we now know as the microwave. (Source: Business Insider)

Jon King Tarpinian includes a postscript: “A family friend worked at Raytheon, in Chatsworth/Canoga Park.  Her family had one before they were offered commercially.  Everybody raved about a grey steak.”

(18) BEYOND BAKING SODA. More than a science-fair project: “To Safely Study Volcanoes, Scientists Bring The Blast To Them” (includes video.)

Volcanoes have been crucial to life on earth. Oozing lava helped form the earth’s land masses. Gasses from volcanoes helped create our atmosphere. But despite the growing field of volcanology, there’s still a lot we don’t understand about volcanic eruptions.

That’s partly because volcanoes aren’t easy to study. Getting the right equipment into remote locations under unpredictable circumstances can be difficult. More importantly, studying active volcanos can be dangerous.

Which is why a group of 40 scientists and engineers from all over the world came together to simulate volcanic eruptions. We tagged along with them as they conducted their experiments at the University at Buffalo’s Geohazards Field Station, a former ballistics test site for military weapons in upstate New York.

The scientists simulated volcanic eruptions by detonating underground explosives. They wanted to study what happened during rapid fire eruptions in a safe and controlled environment. Although big eruptions are often what make the news, small rapid-fire volcanic eruptions are far more common.

(19) SPAM FROM THE CAN. BBC introduces us to “The pun-loving computer programs that write adverts”.

Machines are now writing advertising copy as well as basic news reports, but are their efforts any good and can they be taught to be more inventive?

“Have a suite stay” read an ad for a hotel offering all-suite rooms. A neat – if obvious – pun you might think.

But what made this ad noteworthy was that it was created by an automated copywriting programme developed by Dentsu Aegis Network, the marketing giant.

The firm launched its natural language generation algorithm last year to increase output after changes were made to Google’s advertising system, explains Audrey Kuah, the firm’s managing director.

The programme creates 20 to 25 full ads a second in English and is “trained” by feeding it thousands of the kind of ads it is meant to produce, she says.

(20) ARCHIE MCPHEE. What does this have to do with sff? If you know, leave your answer in comments.

(21) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In Perspective on Vimeo, Fernando Livschitz dreams of really odd forms of transportation.

[Thanks to Daniel Dern, John King Tarpinian, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew.]

46 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 5/21/19 The Pixelyon Fifth Project Was The Last Best Hope For Scrolls. It Filed

  1. (7) Let’s see if Stranger Things fans behave better than the sauce-seeking Rick and Morty fans from a couple of years ago.

    Thanks for the title credit – that was a quick pick, since I posted it only an hour ago (not a record I’m sure, but I’m still pleased).

  2. (11) Raymond Burr is the narrator (and a cast participant) in a 1950s CBS radio version of “The Little Prince,” which also stars Richard Beals as the Prince, and includes Hans Conried in the cast. It’s available at Archive.org, and I like it just fine. I’d already read the book, and I found the radio version was at once faithful to it, and at the same time a little more involving. I think the illustrations in the book distanced me from feeling much for the characters, as if they were dolls. (And this was before TOY STORY, so I wasn’t much into the inner lives of toys, except my own.)

    Give a little pixel, and always let your conscience be your scroll.

  3. 16) I still think as I said on twitter, that Game of Thrones fans should be reading the other Western European fantasy whose first volume was published in 1997 (same year as AGOT) and was completed in 2006. And that would be Kate Elliott’s CROWN OF STARS series, starting with KING’S DRAGON

  4. I watched Fairuza Balk’s The Worst Witch I don’t know how many times when I was a kid. My sisters and I loved that film.

  5. (9) And on the anime side JiJi makes the list (though sadly Luna from Sailor Moon nor Meowth from Pokemon do not make the list).

  6. @Paul Weimer

    16) I still think as I said on twitter, that Game of Thrones fans should be reading the other Western European fantasy whose first volume was published in 1997 (same year as AGOT) and was completed in 2006. And that would be Kate Elliott’s CROWN OF STARS series, starting with KING’S DRAGON

    What about the Steven Erikson’s ten-book series Malazan Book Of The Fallen, which began in 1999 and finished in 2011? That might be worth a shot.

  7. Lis Carey says
    Life continues!

    Hugo reading continues.

    I have experienced a declining need for my pain meds.

    Progress continues

    Good for you.

    I’m off tomorrow to see what the blood work I did last says about my severe anemia. I’d been complaining about being very cold to Jenner which made her check my copius recorded blood word. Copius being on the order of biweekly work for the last two years and daily in-hospital for a period of forty three days, then weekly since getting out.

    They showed, yes, I’ve got severe anemia. So she ordered the standard blood work panel while cautioning me that more blood work would be needed.

    It’ll make for an interesting conversation tomorrow morning.

  8. Cat, I hope all goes well, and they find a good solution for you. Even here in the distant future of 7550, medicine is still as much art as science.

  9. 8) Other favourite movie credentials:
    *) Black cat in Coraline.
    *) General in Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye.
    *) Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland

  10. RHUBARB the film isn’t a very good film. It whimpers out with stock footage. The cat redeems itself in COMEDY OF TERRORS, which is a far better film and people have actually seen it.

    & that cat in THAT DARN CAT was pretty good.

  11. @Paul Weimer, I second your recommendation for the Crown of Stars series.It vas seven volumes, and they are all complete! Kate Elliott is an underappreciated writer. Her Crossroads and Spiritwalker series are also very good, complex visions of alternate worlds.

  12. 7) My wife tasted the “New Coke” and on the same day she learned that Theodore Sturgeon had died. The association did not help “New” Coke at all.

  13. I always think of the movie The Craft when it comes to Fairuza Balk

    Same here. She was unforgettable in that role and a big reason it became a cult hit.

  14. And of course Fairuza Balk was also in the TV adaptation of The Best Christmas Pagent Ever, which they sadly do not show on tv anymore.

    Working my way through the various Hugo categories. The DC Public Library had a lot of the books, many of which are now in my apartment. The Ursula Le Guin book in the Best Related category is currently on hold for me and will be picked up tonight and I’m #2 in the queue for the Into the Spiderverse art book.

  15. Hampus Eckerman says Good luck, Cat!

    It turned out to be very serious but treatable. The staphylococcus infection which landed me in the in-hospital for forty three days basically completely depleted my iron so I need to take a supplement for the foreseeable future until I start building up iron naturally which means eating lots of beef and greens.

  16. I saw an item the other day where a radio telescope in Australia had been having mysterious signals appearing from time to time, mystifying its operators. Some sort of ET transmission? Something like 17 years after its first appearance, the source of the mysterious signal was finally tracked down a short while ago: the microwave in the observatory’s lunch room.

  17. Cat: As ever with this ongoing saga of health, we send good wishes and Jedi Hugs. I “love” that to help determine what’s going on, they need to remove even more blood from a severely anemic person…

    Cathy: “The DC public library” had me briefly thinking that you were focusing entirely on the Graphic Novel category. (Wrong DC, and I don’t recall they have any current contenders).
    ________________

    It doesn’t help that, aside from Jim C Hines’ newest (Finished now, with only a few giggles but much enjoyment), a second attempt to get through Ninefox Gambit (which is at least Hugo adjacent) and a chance to finally get to finish The Invisible Library (I left my copy at the Urgent Care Centre a few years ago – I am now borrowing Mom’s), I’ve been on a graphic novels kick lately.

    I really do need to catch up on Hugo reading. Though the graphic novels overlap some: I have sampled Abbott and Black Panther: Long Live the King (The latter might suffer a bit for not having read any other BP books to see how it diverges, though I can see a certain amount of interrogating the idea of Kingship just on its own), and On a Sunbeam is queued up.

  18. Lenora Rose notes rather correctly Cat: As ever with this ongoing saga of health, we send good wishes and Jedi Hugs. I “love” that to help determine what’s going on, they need to remove even more blood from a severely anemic person…

    I’ve been giving lots of blood pretty much biweek now for almost two years. Now I’m doing it every week. Even the phlebotomist at the Martins Point lab was surprised today that I was back this morning to give yet more blood. Apparently they don’t get a lot of that sort of repeat business.

  19. As you all may have noticed in the last, oh, 5 minutes, I just changed my Gravatar to one which is a bit less outdated (What with the whole “That baby is 4 years old” bit). This also matches the one I use on twitter.

    (It’s part of a mural on my elder son’s wall. It’s also obvious in the full sized version that the mural is unfinished, as there’s just green, no grass, around their hooves – the hooves themselves are not entirely there because there should be grass in the way – and such. So I may update it if I ever do any of the grassy stuff.)

  20. 2) Dick Tracy‘s current team, Joe Staton and Mike Curtis, have made guest stars a regular part of their run. In addition to a previous Annie visit, these have included the Spirit, the Green Hornet, and Brenda Starr, among many others.

  21. A short and unscientific search shows there are no books about cats in the cinema. That’s one for someone with those inclinations.

  22. @Lenora Rose, the DC Pubic Library does have an extensive collection of graphic novels. I have already borrowed and returned Abbot and Black Panther: Long Live the Kiing, and On a Sunbeam is atop Mt. Hugo TBR. I was also able to check out dvds of most of the BDP Form as well.

    I’m sure there must be a cap on the number of items you can have out, but I haven’t hit it yet. I’ve also checked out audiobooks of half the Lodestar nominees.

    And my local branch of the library is open 7 days a week, and recently reopened after being completely rebuilt over the last year and half. It’s a really nice building and the staff are great.

  23. (11) Re The Little Prince – Netflix has a lovely recent (2016) animated version/sequel : From IMBD: “When an overscheduled girl befriends an eccentric aviator, he regales her with tales about the adventures of an unusual boy who lives on an asteroid.”
    Starring:(voices of)Jeff Bridges, Rachel McAdams, Paul Rudd.

  24. I just finished Rebel Dream by Aaron Allston from 2002. It’s the first of two books he contributed to the 19-book The New Jedi Order series in the old Star Wars Expanded Universe.

    Here’s my low-to-no spoiler, 1,000-character GoodReads review:

    As a fan of Aaron Allston going back to his earliest RPG designs for Car Wars and Champions in the 1980s, I liked this book but felt like his creativity was constrained by the plot requirements required of the 12th book in a 19-book series (which I haven’t read prior to this installment). The novel follows the fall of Coruscant to the Yuuzhan Vong. Starfighter squadrons and Jedi commanded by Wedge Antilles must take and hold the planet Borleias to help Coruscant refugees escape and regroup. Luke, Leia, Han, Lando, Mara Jade Skywalker and Jaina Solo participate in dogfights and one covert mission to set up book 13. Most of the novel’s appeal was seeing familiar faces engaged in expected derring-do, but the Yuuzhan Vong are as appealingly weird a foe as The Borg in Star Trek. They loathe tech and instead rely on pervasive and sadistic bioengineering. My favorite scenes were told from their perspective. Allston, who died in 2014 at age 53, was one of the best media tie-in writers in SF/F.

  25. 11 Not genre, but Burr also was in Airplane! Which is just a great movie

    Pardon, Peer… but surely you are referring to Airplane II: The Sequel, which took us to the moon.

  26. Robert Whitaker Sirignano says A short and unscientific search shows there are no books about cats in the cinema. That’s one for someone with those inclinations.

    I’ll bet that there is and I know I can find given an hour or so. In the mean, The British Film institute picks their ten best cats in film list.

  27. @Paul Weimer
    I’ve liked some of Kate Elliot’s short fiction, and I recently read her “Cold Magic” trilogy, which was good fun, so I went ahead and bought “King’s Dragon.” Thanks for the suggestion!

    @Rob Thornton
    Considering how popular Malazan is on Reddit, that does look like a material omission. I’ve read the first four or five books in the series (following the “Malazan: Reread of the Fallen” series on Tor.com) and they were fun, although getting up to speed on such a complex universe was challenging.

  28. Re: Malazan. There is a ton of material there to be sure, although the CGI budget would, in short order, be really really strained.

  29. @ Greg Hullender

    Yeah, Steve Erikson grabs the reader by the scruff of their neck and tosses them into the middle of Malazan Book of the Fallen. And on top of that, he will abruptly drop a plot in one book and pick it up in another book with little comment.

    Without enthusiasm, determined persistence, and a little bit of Google, it’s all too easy to give up. But the series is very rewarding and well written, so there you go.

  30. (11) I met Hatch once or twice at conventions. He was extremely nice and cheerful and seemed to really enjoy just being around fan stuff, regardless of whether he was the center of attention.

  31. “A short and unscientific search shows there are no books about cats in the cinema. That’s one for someone with those inclinations.”

    There are a couple of largely photographic books that were titled “Hollywood Cats” that you can find at Amazon or elsewhere. “Famous Felines” also turns up some more text-oriented books about famous cats (including cats that appeared in the movies, in some cases).

    Movie cat books aren’t super-common, but have been pubished enough for there to be a Library of Congress subject category for them, “Cats in motion pictures”. (I found some of these titles by searching WorldCat on that subject.)

  32. John Mark Ockerbloom: (I found some of these titles by searching WorldCat on that subject.)

    Well played, sir!

  33. Greg Hullender on May 22, 2019 at 12:51 pm said:
    Kindle’s search feature (which works across multiple books) is critical to enjoying Malazan, I think.

    I think the Kindle weighing less than umpteen kilos also may help. I quite fancy doing a read-through of Malazan at some point and there is little chance of that happening in dead tree format – I don’t want to lug those massive paperbacks around while commuting or travelling.

  34. Kindle’s search feature (which works across multiple books) is critical to enjoying Malazan, I think.

    The search feature is very handy for finding previous passages. But for series I think it could do with an upgrade: I want a choice for “Search all books by this author” and/or “search all books in this series” as a middle ground between “search this book” and “search all text.”
    (I want this enought that I’ve tried to find somewhere to send it as a feature request to Amazon, but I failed to find an appropriate contact form.)

  35. There is a Wil Vinton animated THE LITTLE PRINCE. it’s a little quirky.

  36. @Johan P

    I want a choice for “Search all books by this author” and/or “search all books in this series” as a middle ground between “search this book” and “search all text.”

    Really? I’ve never had a case where I really needed that. For unusual names, I never get hits outside the series I’m reading anyway, and even for more common ones, I have no problem picking out the volumes of the series I’m reading.

    The feature I want is to be able to download and remove entire series at a time. When I’m reading a long series, I’ll download all the books in it that I’ve read so far (otherwise the search won’t work), but when I’ve finished the latest book, I’ll eventually remove them all from my device so I’m not constantly having to skip over them. When a series gets to have more than 5 volumes, though, this becomes tedious and error prone.

  37. Pardon, Peer… but surely you are referring to Airplane II: The Sequel, which took us to the moon.

    Oh yes, you’re right! Surely I meant that!

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