(1) LETTING THE GENE OUT OF THE BOTTLE. One of the field’s most esteemed writers delivers Whatever’s recurring feature today: “The Big Idea: Nancy Kress”.
At parties in my city—environmentally conscious, crunchy-granola, high-tech and socially activist Seattle—it is easy to start a flaming argument. Just walk up to a group, tilt your head, and say inquiringly, “What do you think of GMOs?” Then stand back to avoid being scorched.
Genetically modified organisms have passionate denouncers and equally passionate supporters. This is especially true for GMO crops, since the genemod bacteria and animals are usually hidden away in labs, ranches, or manufacturing facilities. But there is GMO food right out front on your table, plated in front of your kids. Everybody has an opinion.
Including me.
But I didn’t want my new novella from Tachyon, Sea Change, to be a polemic for one side of the controversy. I wanted to explore in a balanced way both sides of the myriad questions involved….
(2) HARRY POTTER READINGS. This edition is really cool.
(3) KEEPING AN EAR ON YOU. Mara Hvistendahl’s article “How a Chinese AI Giant Made Chatting—and Surveillance—Easy” in the June WIRED reports that iFlytek does a really good job of translation — and also allows Chinese authorities to track users by the sound of their voices.
When I mentioned iFlytek’s work to a friend in Shanghai, she said it reminded her of the story ‘City of Silence’ by the Chinese science fiction writer Ma Boyong. The story is set in a future society where speech is tightly controlled. The people are clever at adapting to each new limit, turning to homonyms and slang to circumvent censors, and in time the authorities realize that the only way to truly control speech is to publish a List of Healthy Words, forbid all terms not on the list, and monitor voice as well as text. Anytime the protagonist leaves the house, he has to wear a device called the Listener, which issues a warning when he strays from the list of approved words. The realm of sanctioned speech dwindles day by day.
Eventually the protagonist discovers the existence of a secret Talking Club, where in an apartment encircled by lead curtains, members say whatever they want, have sex, and study 1984, Feeling alive again, he realizes that he has been suppressing ‘a strong yearning to talk.’ This brief encounter with hope is squelched when the authorities develop radar dishes that can intercept signals through lead curtains. By the end of the story, there are no healthy words left, and the hero walks the city mutely, alone with his thoughts. ‘Luckily, it was not yet possible to shield the mind with technology.’ Ma writes.
(4) EMPIRE AT 40. “Star Wars drops 40th anniversary poster for ‘The Empire Strikes Back'” – Yahoo! Movies UK shared the image and some other interesting links.
This week marks the 40th anniversary of Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back.
Considered by most to be the blockbuster franchise’s finest moment, the second Star Wars film stunned audiences around the world with a killer twist and the ultimate downbeat ending.
To celebrate the film’s 40th year, Lucasfilm and Disney have gone all out, uploading a wealth of content to StarWars.com including a brand new interview with series creator George Lucas.
(5) YA GOTTA BELIEVE. Inverse has already mined that Lucas interview for a post: “George Lucas reveals a shocking connection between Yoda and Baby Yoda”.
…Frank Oz, the original puppeteer and voice behind Yoda, also created several Muppet characters along with Jim Henson. You don’t think of Oz’s Miss Piggy as a puppet, you think of her as a pig. And, it’s the same with Yoda and Baby Yoda: We think of them as whatever it is they are supposed to be, not as a kooky fake thing.
But, it turns out, that creating that illusion requires a very specific philosophy. And in a new interview celebrating the 40th anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back, George Lucas touched on one fascinating connection between the original Yoda in 1980 and Baby Yoda on The Mandalorian.
Over on the official Star Wars website, George Lucas is talking about The Empire Strikes Back. For diehards, there’s not necessarily a ton of new information in this interview, after all, people have been meticulously documenting the making of Star Wars movies since Star Wars began. But, in talking about the director or The Empire Strikes Back —Irvin Kershner — one detail about how Yoda was shot on set will raise your eyebrow if you’ve been following all the behind-the-scenes action on The Mandalorian.
From StarWars.com:
“Kershner treated Yoda like an actor on set, sometimes talking to the prop instead of addressing Oz down below.”
This is significant because nearly 40 years later, the exact same thing happened on the set of The Mandalorian. In the behind-the-scenes documentary series Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian, director Deborah Chow confirmed what was cropping up in several reports already; cinematic legend Werner Herzog spoke directly to Baby Yoda puppet on the set, and, like Kershner did on Empire, treated the puppet exactly like an actor….
(6) AURORA NEWS. Members of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association will want to know: “Aurora Awards – Voter Package Downloads now available”.
Awards voting opens June 20 and ends July 25 at 11:59:59 EDT.
(7) CASTAWAYS WITH ETIQUETTE. James Davis Nicoll lists “Four SF Stories That Are More Gilligan’s Island Than Lord of the Flies“ for Tor.com readers.
…It turns out that even castaway kids will flout convention, as this Guardian article reveals. With no regard for the feelings of authority figures, six Tongan boys spent over a year marooned on a deserted island without even one brutal murder. Instead they cooperated and survived; they even cared for one of the boys who broke his leg….
(8) MARTIAN MUD PIMPLES. The German Aerospace Center suspects there are “Lava-like mud flows on Mars”.
Laboratory experiments show that at very low temperatures and under very low atmospheric pressure, mud behaves similar to flowing lava on Earth.
Results suggest that tens of thousands of conical hills on Mars, often with a small crater at their summit, could be the result of mud volcanism.
(9) MOVING TARGET. The paradigm shifts! And CNN tries to sort it out — “J.K. Rowling stupefies fans by revealing the truth around the origins of ‘Harry Potter'”
The news came after a fan posted a picture on Twitter of the Elephant House, a coffee shop in Edinburgh which on its website describes itself as the place “made famous as the place of inspiration to writers such as J.K. Rowling, who sat writing much of her early novels in the back room overlooking Edinburgh Castle.”
The fan asked Rowling to explain “the truth about this ‘birthplace’ of Harry Potter.”
Rowling, who is known to drop various bombshells and unknown tidbits about the franchise on Twitter, explained that the real “pen to paper” birth of Harry Potter himself, happened in her flat.
“If you define the birthplace of Harry Potter as the moment when I had the initial idea, then it was a Manchester-London train,” Rowling tweeted.
“But I’m perennially amused by the idea that Hogwarts was directly inspired by beautiful places I saw or visited, because it’s so far from the truth.”
(10) CHECK YOUR SHELVES. “Harry Potter first edition found in skip sells for £33,000”. No, J.K. Rowling’s revelation above is not the reason that book got chucked. It happened a long time ago. And hey, the librarian was just doing their job when they dumped that worn-out volume!
A hardback first edition Harry Potter book which was found in a skip has sold for £33,000 at auction.
The rare copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was discovered by a teacher 12 years ago along with two paperback first editions.
The anonymous seller found the books outside a school while tidying its library before an Ofsted inspection.
After the paperbacks went for £3,400 and £3,000, the seller said: “To say I’m pleased is an understatement.”
They were sold during an online auction at Bishton Hall in Staffordshire earlier.
Only 500 hardback first editions of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone were printed in 1997, most of which were sent to schools and libraries.
(11) RITA RETIRED. The Guardian’s take on RWA’s new award, “The Vivian” — “Romance Writers of America aims for happy end to racism row with new prize”.
Romance Writers of America is attempting to turn the page on a damaging racism row, abolishing its top literary prizes and replacing them with awards in a new format it hopes will show “happily ever afters are for everyone” and not just white protagonists.
The association of more than 9,000 romance writers is developing proposals to encourage more diverse winners, including training for its judges, an award for unpublished authors and processes to ensure books are judged by people familiar with each subgenre.
The RWA has been at the centre of an acrimonious debate about diversity, criticised for the paucity of writers of colour shortlisted for its major awards, the Ritas, as well as its treatment of Courtney Milan after she called a fellow author’s book a “racist mess” because of its depictions of Chinese women.
(12) TODAY IN HISTORY.
- May 22, 1981 — Outland premiered. It was written and directed by Peter Hyams with production by Richard A. Roth and Stanley O’Toole. It starred Sean Connery, Peter Boyle, James B. Sikking, Kika Markham and Frances Sternhagen. According to the studio, it literally broken even at the Box Office. Critics in general liked it (“High Noon in Outer Space”) but audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes are meh on it giving a soft 54% rating.
- May 22, 2012 — Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls premiered. The fourth film in the franchise, it directed by Steven Spielberg and was released nineteen years after the last film. Produced by Frank Marshall from a screenplay by David Koepp off of the story by George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson. And starring Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen, Ray Winstone, John Hurt, Jim Broadbent and Shia LaBeouf. Despite the myth around it in the net that it was a critical failure, critics overwhelmingly loved it. And the audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it a 60% rating.
(13) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
- Born May 22, 1813 – Richard Wagner. His fantasies The Flying Dutchman (“fly” in the sense we still have in “flee”), Tannhäuser, The Ring of the Niebelung (four-opera series), Parsifal, are masterworks of music and theater. Complicated life and opinions less admirable. (Died 1883) [JH]
- Born May 22, 1859 – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Famous for Sherlock Holmes, in SF he wrote five novels, sixty shorter stories, translated into Croatian, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish. In fact his surname from birth records to his knighting was only Doyle. (Died 1930) [JH]
- Born May 22, 1907 – Hergé. He is best remembered for creating The Adventures of Tintin which are considered one of the most popular European comics of the 19th and 20th centuries. He is much less remembered for Quick & Flupke, a short-lived series between the Wars, and The Adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko which lasted well into the Fifties. (Died 1983.) (CE)
- Born May 22, 1914 – Sun Ra. In the avant-garde of jazz he played keyboards and sang, led a variously-composed band under names more or less like “The Solar Arkestra”, still performing; recorded dozens of singles and a hundred full-length albums with titles like We Travel the Spaceways, Space Is the Place, Strange Celestial Road. Said he was taken to Saturn in a vision, changing his life and art. (Died 1993) [JH]
- Born May 22, 1922 – Bob Leman. Fanzine, The Vinegar Worm; two pieces in The Best of Fandom 1958. Fourteen short stories in F&SF, one more in collection Feensters in the Lake, translated into French, German, Italian, Portuguese. With Gerald Bishop, “Venture Science Fiction Magazine” , a Checklist of the First American Series and the First British Series. (Died 2006) [JH]
- Born May 22, 1930 – Robert Byrne. Editor of Western Construction. Amateur magician, member of Int’l Brotherhood of Magicians. Billiards and pool teacher and commenter; Byrne’s Standard Book of Pool & Billiards sold 500,000 copies; columnist for Billiards Digest; seven instructional videos; Billiard Congress of America Hall of Fame. Eight anthologies of funny things people have said. Three novels in our field, five others. (Died 2016) [JH]
- Born May 22, 1938 — Richard Benjamin, 82. He’s here because he was Adam Quark on the all too short-lived Quark series. He also was Joseph Lightman in Witches’ Brew which was based off Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife novel (winner of the 1944 Retro-Hugo Award at Dublin 2019) though that’s not credited in the film. And he was in Westworld as Peter Martin. Finally, he did a stint on the Ray Bradbury Theatre as Mr. Howard in “Let’s Play Poison” episode. (CE)
- Born May 22, 1943 – Arlene Phillips. Dancer, choreographer including the film Annie and the Royal Shakespeare production of A Clockwork Orange, judge for Strictly Come Dancing and the U.K. version of So You Think You Can Dance? Ten credited film appearances. For us, six Alana, Dancing Star children’s books. [JH]
- Born May 22, 1956 — Natasha Shneider. Her entire acting career consisted of but two roles, only one of interest to us, that of the Soviet cosmonaut Irina Yakunina in 2010: Odyssey Two. Her other genre contribution was she wrote and performed “Who’s in Control” for Catwoman. Cancer would take her at far too early an age. (Died 2008.) (CE)
- Born May 22, 1968 — Karen Lord, 52. A Barbadian writer whose first novel, Redemption in Indigo, won the Carl Brandon Parallax Award and Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature for its inventive use of Senegalese folklore. I’d also recommend her The Best of All Possible Worlds novel as it’s as well done as her earlier novel but different and fascinating in its own right.
- Born May 22, 1978 – Tansy Rayner Roberts. Ph.D. in Classics from U. Tasmania. Hugo as Best Fan Writer 2013, Ditmar as Best Fan Writer 2015; nine more Ditmars, three of them Athelings (for SF criticism). George Turner prize for Splashdance Silver. WSFA (Washington, D.C., SF Ass’n) Small Press Award for “The Patrician”. A dozen novels, three dozen shorter stories. Served a term as a Director of SFWA (no one made SFWA into Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America and Australia; directors were no longer region-specific). Crime fiction as Livia Day. [JH]
- Born May 22, 1979 — Maggie Q, 41. She portrayed Tori Wu in the film adaptation of Veronica Roth’s novel Divergent, a role she reprised in its sequels, Insurgent and Allegiant. She played a female agent in a comedic version of the Jackie Chan fronted Around the World in 80 Days. And she’s in the recent remake of Fantasy Island that critics hated but was a box office success. On a brighter note, she voices Wonder Woman on the Young Justice series.
(14) COMICS SECTION.
- Lio references Harlan Ellison.
(15) SPEAK, MEMORY. So does Liza Fletcher McCall:
(16) HUMANITY IS NO LONGER ON TOP. Titan Comics has revealed the Horizon Zero Dawn issue #1 covers. The series, based on the award-winning game by Guerrilla, brings back characters Aloy and Talanah in a new story set after the events of the game. The series launches August 5, 2020.
Set on a far future Earth, where nature has reclaimed the planet but massive, animal-like machines now rule the land, Horizon Zero Dawn follows the story of Aloy, an extraordinary young woman whose quest to solve the riddle of her mysterious origins takes her deep into the ruins of the ancient past.
Titan’s new comic book series – co-created by Anne Toole, one of the writers of Horizon Zero Dawn, with artwork by fan-favorite artist Ann Maulina – takes place after the events of the game as Talanah, a strong and determined hunter, struggles to find purpose after her trusted friend Aloy disappears. When a mysterious threat emerges in the wilds, she sets out to hunt and to defeat it, only to learn that a whole new breed of killer machines stalk the land!
(17) NEW VIEWS. Nerds of a Feather hears about “6 Books with Rowenna Miller”.
4. How about a book you’ve changed your mind about – either positively or negatively?
How about a book that changed my mind? I’ve never been big on nineteenth century lit—there were books I liked here and there but so often they were just…dull. There, I said it. But I read Dickens’ Hard Times a couple years ago and it was such fun—witty and tongue-in-cheek, with obvious but not moralistic commentary on ethical issues—and found families and the circus! I’m finding that some of the lesser-known, non “canon” lit, and especially short fiction, from that period ticks more of my boxes than I realized.
(18) RANDOM ACCESS MEMORIES. Joe Sherry and Aidan Moher are on the party line in “The Modern Nostalgia of Dragon Quest XI: A Conversation” at Nerds of a Feather.
Aidan: Silent protagonists come under a lot of heat, but they’ve never really bothered me in older games. As the level of fidelity and detail grow, however, they make less and less sense, and it feels particularly odd in Dragon Quest XI. With so much voice acting in the game, every time the protagonist (who I’ll call Eleven) responds by awkwardly staring into space or making a weird little gasp feels uncanny. The characters all behave as though he’s this magnetic hero type, but so much of that is personality and charisma—and Eleven has none of that.
I recently replayed Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete (and a bit of Grandia before that) and one of the things that really stood out to me in those games was the personalities of the protagonists really shining through. By emphasizing their personalities, they felt like much more engage and proactive heroes, compared to, say, Crono from Chrono Trigger or Eleven from Dragon Quest XI. Those silent types require others to push the story forward and they act as sort of a… defining element for the protagonist’s actions and motivations. It’s almost like they’re the splash of paint revealing the invisible protagonist.
(19) IT’S ONLY NATURAL. CNN reports “A parasite that feeds off of the reproductive organs of millipedes is named after Twitter, where it was found”.
Biologist and associate professor Ana Sofia Reboleira of the National Natural History Museum said in a press release that she was simply browsing Twitter when she came across a photo, shared by her US colleague Derek Hennen of Virginia Tech, of a North American millipede.
Nothing unusual there. But then she looked closer….
(20) A NEW TWIST. “Jason Momoa is a Vampire and Peter Dinklage is Van Helsing in Action-Horror Movie ‘Good Bad & Undead’” – Bloody Disgusting has the details.
Check out this wild plot synopsis, billed as “Midnight Run in a Bram Stoker world“:
“Dinklage will play Van Helsing, last in a long line of vampire hunters. He develops an uneasy partnership with a Vampire (Momoa) who has taken a vow never to kill again. Together they run a scam from town to town, where Van Helsing pretends to vanquish the Vampire for money. But when a massive bounty is put on the Vampire’s head, everything in this dangerous world full of monsters and magic is now after them.”
Momoa and Dinklage are also set to produce.
(21) KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES. In addition to SpaceX’s planned launch, “Virgin Orbit hopes for rocket flight this weekend”.
British businessman Sir Richard Branson is looking to this weekend to debut one of his new space systems.
Virgin Orbit, based in California, will put satellites above the Earth, using a rocket that’s launched from under the wing of a jumbo jet.
The maiden mission, to be conducted out over the Pacific Ocean, could take place as early as Saturday.
Assuming this demonstration is successful, Virgin Orbit hopes to move swiftly into commercial operations.
It already has a rocket built at its Long Beach factory for a second mission.
British businessman Sir Richard Branson is looking to this weekend to debut one of his new space systems.
(22) COPYCATS. There’s no telling what’s likely to come over the transom these days –
(23) VASTER THAN EMPIRES, AND MORE SLOW. “Herd-Like Movement Of Fuzzy Green ‘Glacier Mice’ Baffles Scientists”.
In 2006, while hiking around the Root Glacier in Alaska to set up scientific instruments, researcher Tim Bartholomaus encountered something completely unexpected.
“What the heck is this!” Bartholomaus recalls thinking. He’s a glaciologist at the University of Idaho.
Scattered across the glacier were balls of moss. “They’re not attached to anything and they’re just resting there on ice,” he says. “They’re bright green in a world of white.
Intrigued, he and two colleagues set out to study these strange pillow-like moss balls. In the journal Polar Biology, they report that the balls can persist for years and move around in a coordinated, herd-like fashion that the researchers can not yet explain.
“The whole colony of moss balls, this whole grouping, moves at about the same speeds and in the same directions,” Bartholomaus says. “Those speeds and directions can change over the course of weeks.”
In the 1950s, an Icelandic researcher described them in the Journal of Glaciology, noting that “rolling stones can gather moss.” He called them “jökla-mýs” or “glacier mice.”
This new work adds to a very small body of research on these fuzz balls, even though glaciologists have long known about them and tend to be fond of them.
(24) KEEPING BUSY. “Bumblebees’ ‘clever trick’ fools plants into flowering”. Yes. Let’s call this “Plan Bee.”
Scientists have discovered a new behaviour among bumblebees that tricks plants into flowering early.
Researchers found that when deprived of pollen, bumblebees will nibble on the leaves of flowerless plants.
The damage done seems to fool the plant into flowering, sometimes up to 30 days earlier than normal.
(25) STINKERS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] I can pretty much guarantee you’ve never heard of some of these. And that’s a good thing. “The Worst Sci-Fi Movies Every Year Of The Decade (According To IMDb)” at ScreenRant.
8 Area 407 (2012) – 3.6
Who’d have thought a sci-fi-horror found footage film released in the year 2012 could possibly be a critical failure? Believe it or not, that’s exactly what Area 407 turned out to be.
Arguably the most obscure movie on this list, the fact that barely anybody saw this one is likely no accident. The film was reportedly shot without a script, being entirely ad-libbed by its actors during the movie’s suspiciously lean five-day shoot. Whether or not this was down to sheer laziness or a failed attempt to recapture the magic of classic found footage movie The Blair Witch Project is up for debate – but the movie is terrible, regardless.
(26) SEE SPOT HERD. “Robot dog tries to herd sheep” — video.
A robot dog designed for search and rescue missions has had a go at herding sheep in New Zealand.
Technology company Rocos is exploring how the Spot robot – made by US-based Boston Dynamics – might be put to work in the agricultural industry.
(27) MORE BITS, SCOTTY! BBC rushes to judgment! “Australia ‘records fastest internet speed ever'”.
Researchers in Australia claim they have recorded the fastest ever internet data speed.
A team from Monash, Swinburne and RMIT universities logged a data speed of 44.2 terabits per second (Tbps).
At that speed, users could download more than 1,000 high-definition movies in less than a second.
According to Ofcom, the average UK broadband speed currently is around 64 megabits per second (Mbps) – a fraction of that recorded in the recent study.
(28) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] “Fire (Pozar)” on YouTube is a weird film written, animated, and directed by David Lynch in 2015. (I can’t describe it–it’s just weird!)
[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Andrew Porter, JJ, Michael Toman, Contrarius, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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16) I don’t think Horizon Zero DAwn is out on PC yet, which is a pity because it looks great
13) Sun Ra’s decision to connect avant-jazz, Egyptian mythology, and science fiction was also one of the most important influences on the development of Afrofuturism.
Paul Weimer: I can tell you I was surprised when I went to number the items.
26) Robot dog isn’t a new idea in NZ – check out this April Fool’s piece from Country Calendar (part two at the link)
https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/country-calendar-spoof-special-1999
(26) That thing is so creepy. I think I’d like it better if they gave it some kind of head, even a boxy one.
(19) Heh. I’m on Twitter, but it’s particularly apt that a parasite was named after it.
@15: that takes some chutzpah, coming from a minor author about a major whose career surrounds his. I also wonder which convention that was at; the longlist matches my recollection that he was never GoH. Possibly ConAdian (1994), at which he was TM?
I can’t seem to find it online, but Harlan Ellison wrote a wonderfully scathing, gloriously detailed review of Peter Hyams’ Outland for Omni; I never read the magazine, but the piece (with photos) was reprinted in the large-format paperback anthology Omni’s Screen Flights/Screen Fantasies: The Future According to Science Fiction Cinema (1984).
The best part of the movie for me was Frances Sternhagen. She’s always great. I saw her in On Golden Pond off-Broadway, the original production, with Tom Aldredge (later Carmela Soprano’s dad) as her husband. That must have been around 1980.
Chip Hitchcock: that takes some chutzpah, coming from a minor author about a major whose career surrounds his
I don’t think it’s chutzpah, it’s him trying to come up with a gracious response which doesn’t actually say anything. And it was probably ConAdian, since a lot of people won’t see a significant distinction between GoHs, Toastmasters and MCs, and Special Guests.
I’ve seen an author from an Asian country describe themselves as a “guest of honor” at a U.S. con when they were just on the list of “also appearing”, and an author who described themselves as a “Paid Pro Guest” at a recent Worldcon, justifying their claim with the fact that they got a portion of their membership fee refunded after the con. 🙄 Sometimes the lack of distinction is due to a lack of understanding, and sometimes it’s deliberate self-aggrandization.
12) Outland is another one of those movies (like Alien) where I was too young to see it in the theater, so I had to content myself with the Alan Dean Foster novelization. When I did finally see it, many years later, I liked it well enough, exploding heads and all — kind of the same blue-collar space aesthetic as the original Alien.
For those who enjoy listening to music during the lockdown, a number of online media organizations are running “At Home” mini-concert series.
Rolling Stone’s In My Room concert series
Stephen Colbert’s Play At Home concert series
NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series
Global Citizen’s Together At Home concert series
(if you know of other series, please list them here, so everyone can enjoy them)
Audiences at Rotten Tomatoes are extremely wrong about Outland, as is Harlan Ellison, but that’s nothing new.
@JJ: You’ve got the main three I knew about, and one I didn’t (so thanks for that). The only others I can offer are more limited and specialized, but may still be of interest to some folks here. These are streamed live, which can add to the fun:
Jorma Kaukonen, lead guitarist for the Jefferson Airplane and the bluesier (and longer lived) Hot Tuna, has been doing weekly acoustic shows every Saturday on his Fur Peace Ranch channel.
Singer and multi-instrumentalist Grace Potter, who has played with Kenny Chesney, the Allman Brothers, and the Rolling Stones (and who may get genre points for having covered “White Rabbit”), has been doing a Monday Twilight Hour series on her channel, which usually features a mix of rock classics along with her own songs. She’s a bit of a goofball, and does things like taking requests off Twitter for songs she doesn’t know how to play. “Let’s wing it and see what happens!” It’s all a bit silly and sloppy, but fun, and she does have a great set of pipes!
Steve Vai (played with Frank Zappa, Whitesnake, Dave Lee Roth) is streaming guitar-related content every week:
https://www.vai.com/category/news/
Rock/blues guitarist Andy Timmons has been streaming virtual concerts:
https://www.stageit.com/andy_timmons/the_ballad_of_a_t/82062
And this little girl is just adorable, and very talented. (Genre-adjacent since it’s Fly Me To The Moon.)
Then a bunch of musicians joined in to giver some backing:
Click
Meredith Moment: Naomi Novik’s Uprooted is on sale for $2.99 from the usual suspects.
So, you have to wonder if this was a considered decision on the directors’ parts, something to make the puppet more real and affect the way the actors related to it, or if they just got carried away and forgot it was a puppet.
26) The dogs have got this. If they’re planning to make agbots, they need to look at harvesting, instead.
5) I remember when I first saw Yoda at the cinema I very much did think of him as a puppet.
The biggest distinction I can think of between a Worldcon Guest of Honor and the other “name” roles like Toastmaster and Special Guest is that (yes, I know there have been exceptions) is that in general, being a Worldcon GoH is considered a once-in-a-lifetime honor, whereas the others could be repeated, or followed by a GoH-ship. “Toastmaster” is a sort of “working” honor, moreso that GoH, as it comes with responsibilities that put you in a kind of staff role with the convention. Thus some Worldcons have used the title “Master of Ceremonies” because we don’t hold banquets anymore and thus “Toastmaster” is archaic usage.
(Again, in case some of you missed it earlier: there have been exceptions to this rule of thumb, and besides people who repeated in the same role like Heinlein, you can get cases where someone gets honored multiple times for different reasons, such as being a Fan GoH as well as some form of professional GoH.)
@JJ: I guess it’s a matter of tone & interpretation; I see “he has his uses” as a putdown — something one might say about an ordinary IT geek with no social skills, rather than a star. I’d also have expected a TM to be quick enough on their feet to come up with a more nuanced response, but IMLE TMs in recent decades have been chosen for some combination of presence and secondary honor more than for skills as an MC.
@JJ re music: Yo-Yo Ma will be performing the complete Bach suites for solo cello tomorrow afternoon on WGBH.
WGBH is worth following generally; they’re one of the oldest public stations and something of a nexus for public radio&TV. The live programming on WCRB (a classical station they bought some years ago to save it from being converted to something more … commercial) is nothing to write home about — it had been becoming more and more simplified for some time before the sale, and WGBH has not reversed that — but they do sponsor interesting links, e.g
(I’ve done Mass (not just a setting of the Ordinary; it’s subtitled “A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers”); I certainly wouldn’t give it an unqualified recommendation, but someone on my weekly choral Zoom said this was a great performance.) Locally, the Boston Philharmonic and the New England Conservatory are both putting up videos almost every week; I’ll try to remember to post where to subscribe to their emailed (~1/week) information.
NPR’s Tiny Desk is always worth looking for; recently they had John Fogerty and family doing some of his music, and a few months ago they had the full cast of Come from Away doing several pieces from the show, including Jenn Colella’s award-winning turn as Beverley Bass describing how she became American Airlines’ first female captain.
@xtifr: thanks for the Kaukonen link; I’ll have to look in on him this evening. Does it seem to you that he looks remarkably like Silverberg? A bit heavyset, maybe, but a huge change from the long-haired clean-shaven skin-and-bones presentation when he was playing in Jefferson Airplane (videos of whom have been showing up on YouTube — I’ve listened to at least three different performances of “The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil”)
And a note on reading: Paul Cornell’s “The Light Goes Out in Lychford” may be hard to get into without the previous three (short) novellas, but ISTM that they’re worth it as this one is a major step up. The setup: Judith is the resident wise woman of a contemporary English village, coping with threats both from relatively mundane sources with bits of magical backing and from magically-adjacent territories; she deals with her gradually-fading skill with the help of the (female) vicar and (in later stories) a (young, Black, female) apprentice. In this one her Alzheimer’s is getting worse; she figures how to leverage Story against a power that’s much more adept at it, but at a cost. I’d put the set on the Recommendations page, but this one came out last year and I wouldn’t bet on them having enough wordage for the Series category even when the next one comes out. Ends by wrapping the immediate story; feel free to skip the last page if you don’t like cliffhangers setting up subsequent stories. (ISTM he may be applying a lesson from comics scripts.)
I did see Outland in the theater, and I really liked it.
@JJ–Note that it wasn’t Longyear describing himself as a Guest of Honor. It’s someone who, as a kid, met him there. And if he was Toastmaster or some such, he’d have been prominent and important.
20) Am I the only one catching Ladt Dragonslayer vibes ?
5: Long time ago, the ITV company I worked for hired out the big studio to the Henson Company to make some of their “Mother Goose Stories” episodes. One thing that has stuck in my mind was one of the puppets ad-libbing an apology for fluffing a scene, something along the lines of “Sorry, I was looking that way when I should have been looking in the other direction” with accompanying getsures and body movements. This particular puppet was operated by a team of three who were sufficiently in tune with each other to be able to do that sort of thing on the spur of the moment, it’s very easy to forget the puppet isn’t ‘real’.
The Struts have been doing regular livestreams. They were the last band I saw live pre-pandemic and they put on a good show, check them out. I’ve been addicted to K-Pop streams from Seoul on V-Live but I’m kinda lukewarm on the next two weeks worth of bands. These are extremely professional 2-hour shows (and they cost about $30) with audience interaction and nifty 3D effects, last week there was a golden dragon flying over the stage. My Facebook feed is bringing me lots of performances by smaller acts and one that I can wholeheartedly recommend to everyone is Keith Kenny, a soloist fond of cool guitar effects. And Jorma Kaukonen of course; I’ve got a Gibson SG that allegedly belonged to him once.
Speaking of (1) GMO … during my last stretch of unemployment, I very briefly wound up at an intellectual property firm, with an old dragon of a secretary who made a point of asking me, early on, how I felt about GMOs. I replied, cautiously, “well, I like papayas.” (All papayas are GMO because a blight nearly wiped them out.) She pressed it and I threw caution to the wind and said, “okay, I wrote a science fiction trilogy once about a future where everyone is genetically modified.” Thus torpedoing the relationship and the job … but then I got a better job. Plus I based the villain in my latest book (which has GMO dinosaurs) after that secretary, so it wasn’t a total loss.
Nothing specific to comment on, it just feels like I’ve been quiet too long. Mostly I’ve been dealing with “quarantine brain” which leaves me exhausted and disinclined to engage much at the end of the day. (Probably at least part of it is that working my regular job from home means spending more time staring at a screen, rather than less.) I’m currently starting a week-long vacation and apologizing to the world that when I pledged to take at least one week of vacation this year that did not involve travel or attending events, I hadn’t realized I was jinxing the entire planet.
“But if CommentClicks were all I Scrolled, I’d rather File a Post”
@Kevin Standlee: A Toastmaster traditionally gives a speech. I got to see Martha Wells as Toastmaster at the World Fantasy Convention in San Antonio. After all the awards, Patrick Nielsen Hayden literally sprinted across the room to get first dibs and publish her speech on tor.com. If anyone wonders why we should keep having Toastmasters, it’s because they don’t just speak to us, sometimes they speak for us.
@Peer: that was my very first thought, too.
@Chip: I’m with JJ — I don’t read “he has his uses” as a putdown, and honestly I think it’s a stretch to do so.
Hmm, well, one, I’m not sure you need credentials to criticize Harlan. I’m pretty sure that’s something anyone is allowed to do. (Especially consideratin’–but we needn’t get into that.) If we’re going to start demanding that you show your publication history before criticizing an author, well, I’m going to be in big trouble, for one! 🙂
And two, no, I didn’t read that as critical in context. As a response to an indignant young fan demanding to know “why do you put up with him?”, it strikes me as remarkably diplomatic–neither denying nor affirming whatever their reasons might be for asking that question in that manner.
@27
Calling 64 Mbps a fraction of 44 Tbps is either an insult to Tb, or a compliment to the term “fraction.”
Honestly, “Why do you all put up with Ellison” was a question I saw asked at cons from the 80s onward. I myself tended to think if the fans didn’t already have one, they’d have to vote on a designated Ellison