(1) IT BURNS. At Young People Read Old SFF, curator James Davis Nicoll has them reading Connie Willis’ “Fire Watch”.
As we’ve seen, past popularity means nothing to the young people of today, who insist on judging stories on their merits and not the warm feeling their grandparents may have had reading a now-venerable story. What did the Young People think of this classic story?
Mikayla definitely does not have a warm feeling.
I found the narrator’s reaction to communism ridiculous. As far as I can tell, the narrator is more upset by the idea of communism than by the Nazis actively bombing the city. The idea that someone so removed from these events would have such a personal hatred of communism, despite coming from the far future, makes this story feel very American and very dated.
(2) THE (BRAIN) IMITATION GAME. IEEE Spectrum has a special issue this month on the topic of current attempts to model the human brain: “Special Report: Can We Copy the Brain?” About half the articles are free to nonsubscribers.
Gregory N. Hullender says the key takeaways are:
- Artificial Neural Network software does have useful applications, but it has little in common with real brain tissue.
- Special hardware meant to model the brain has been developed but does not yet have any useful applications.
- Current brain simulations only simulate a fraction of a brain, and they run thousands of times slower than real brains do.
- Modelling 1 mm^3 of a rat’s brain is considered an ambitious undertaking.
- There is considerable debate as to whether we understand how the brain works at all.
I liked this quote from “Neuromorphic Chips Are Destined for Deep Learning — or Obscurity”
“It has often been noted that progress in aviation was made only after inventors stopped trying to copy the flapping wings of birds and instead discovered — and then harnessed — basic forces, such as thrust and lift. The knock against neuromorphic computing is that it’s stuck at the level of mimicking flapping wings, an accusation the neuromorphics side obviously rejects. Depending on who is right, the field will either take flight and soar over the chasm, or drop into obscurity.”
The article “Can We Quantify Machine Consciousness” makes some exciting claims about “Integrated Information Theory” (IIT). It’s less exciting when you realize that the authors are the inventors of the IIT concept and not everyone agrees with them.
(3) THE LONG HAUL. “Bias, She Wrote: The Gender Balance of The New York Times Best Seller list” — a statistical study of women writers based on analysis over time of the prestigious list. (Lots of graphs.)
Almost every category started out as heavily male-dominated, and many have stayed that way. These categories align with stereotypes about male interests: fantasy and science fiction, spy and political fiction, suspense fiction, and adventure fiction, have all been consistently male-dominated since their introduction to the list. A best-selling female fantasy/sci-fi author today is just as rare as a best-selling female literary author in the 1950s.
Then, there are the genres that have flipped. The horror/paranormal genre is now almost at gender parity, owing no small thanks to paranormal romance novels. Mystery is the most balanced genre over time, which shouldn’t be surprising given the genre’s history. The 1920s and 30s are known as the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction,” and were dominated by a quartet of female authors known as the Queens of Crime: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham.
Best-selling romance novels were mostly written by men in the 1950s, but in the 1960s women took over. By the 1980s, female authors solidly dominated the genre, probably because female writers had a natural advantage writing for mostly female readers about mostly female experiences of love and sex.
(4) SENSELESS DECISION. Io9 says Netflix has whacked fan favorite Sense8:
After a mere two seasons of streaming on Netflix, the Wachowskis’ Sense8 has been cancelled, according to Netflix VP of original content Cindy Holland.
(5) CARRIE FISHER ESTATE. The Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds Personal Property Auction will be held by Profiles in History on September 23. The catalog is not yet available online. Hardcover copies of this celebrity artifact can be pre-ordered.
Highlights from the upcoming auction include:
- Carrie Fisher’s life size “Princess Leia” with blaster statue in a vintage wooden phone booth. This is the figure that was featured by Fisher in her in her HBO special Wishful Drinking and the documentary Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds. Pictured left.
- Debbie Reynolds’ screen used “Kathy Seldon” lavender silk chiffon dress from the “You Were Meant For Me” musical sequence in Singin’ in the Rain. Pictured right.
- Carrie Fisher’s on-set chair with personalized chair back that is embroidered “Star Wars: The Saga Continues” used on Return of the Jedi. Pictured at bottom.
- Debbie Reynolds’ screen used “Annie” two piece stage costume from Annie Get Your Gun.
- Carrie Fisher’s life size C-3PO with electronic lighting elements. Pictured below.
- Carrie Fisher’s life sized bronze, limited edition Yoda statue by Lawrence A. Noble.
- Carrie Fisher’s vintage original 1978 Kenner Star Wars Princess Leia action figure, still in it’s original packaging.
- Debbie Reynolds’ personal, rare, vintage original half sheet movie poster for Singin’ in the Rain signed by Debbie and inscribed to her by Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor
(6) IT’S COMPELLING. The seventh issue of Compelling Science Fiction is now live. Editor Joe Stech lists the highlights —
I’m proud to present another five compelling stories by some amazing authors! The issue begins with the lengthily-titled “What’s a Few Years When You Get Money and Friends in High Places?” by R R Angell, a story about a bodybuilder who is offered a large sum of money to swap his body with a wealthy man (via head transplant). I was pleasantly surprised at the positive vibe the story manages to convey despite the trials of the protagonist (8400 words). The second story in our line-up, Michèle Laframboise’s “Thinking Inside the Box,” is an outlandish story about an alien race that requires constant environmental change in order to maintain psychological health (6400 words). Our third story, “Cogito Ergo Sum” by Mike Adamson, focuses on a conversation with an android about what it means to be human. It’s a well-known theme in science fiction, but I thought this story was executed particularly well (6950 words). Next we have “Integration” by John Eckelkamp, a very short story about a nascent AI getting its first taste of elementary school (1800 words). Our final story is an underwater tale, “Fathom the Ocean, Deep and Still” by David Bruns. The story is about a living bio-engineered city (6020 words).
(7) WHAT AN EDITOR DOES. Uncanny Magazine’s Lynne M. Thomas answers Katrina J.E. Milton’s questions in The Midweek:
Milton: Have you always loved science fiction?
Thomas: I’ve always loved to read, but I didn’t grow up reading much science fiction. I read mostly classics and some romance until I branched out more during college. My husband avidly read sci-fi and fantasy for years, though. Now I curate a science fiction and fantasy collection as one of 42 special collections at NIU. I need to know what’s happening in the field, so it’s crucial to know what is getting attention, and when to purchase books and add to the collection. … One of my favorite books has always been “A Wrinkle in Time.” I didn’t really think of it as science fiction at the time, but I re-read the book more or less annually. Meg Murry has always been a character I’ve really connected with. Being intelligent and kind were marked as more important than makeup and being pretty in that book, which was a powerful message to an awkward 11-year-old version of me.
(8) HUGO READING. Peter J. Enyeart has ranked his “2017 Hugo picks: Novellas”. Here’s what he has to say about his two top choices.
2. The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle The story of a young black Lovecraftian con man in 1920s New York. This is actually a retelling of “The Horror at Red Hook” and, in the spirit of “Shoggoths in Bloom,” is kind of a reinterpretation or even reclaiming of Lovecraft for those groups of humans (which seemed to include anyone not a male WASP) that Lovecraft despised. I found it absorbing and fun. It is interesting how many writers just can’t stop themselves from writing Cthulhu Mythos stories, despite the myriad reasons to dislike Lovecraft. (I was obsessed with him in high school, myself.) I suppose it’s because there’s a lot of breadth and depth there, and also the opportunity for a critical dialogue. Writing Lovecraft fan fiction seems respectable, even, and I certainly seem to enjoy reading it. Speaking of which…
1. The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson When one of her students leaves with a man from the waking world, a professor in Ulthar sets out after her. Well, this has a lot going for it that immediately makes me favorably inclined: (1) I’ve always adored this corner of the Mythos and thought it criminally underappreciated; (2) I’m a sucker for quest stories involving travel to varied and strange locales; and (3) I adore Kij Johnson. You never know what you’re going to get when you start in to one of her stories, but you do know you’re in sure hands. And this is no exception. If the LaValle piece is a reclamation of the Mythos for non-whites, this reclaims it for women. I enjoyed every word (and it’s littered with so many lovely ones, like gems in a magic cave). It also has a great ending, which is frequently the difference between a good story and a great one. The best of “escapist” literature gives you something to take back with you to the “real” world, a fresh view as if you’re questing through it yourself [3]. This is the best of escapist literature. Give it awards!
(9) TOUTED FOR NEXT YEAR’S HUGOS. The Hugo Award Book Club observes that Gregory Benford has never been shortlisted for the award’s Best Novel category (despite his Timescape having been so well-regarded it won the 1981 Nebula). They think “The Berlin Project (2017) Gregory Benford” might earn him a place on next year’s ballot.
There are reasons to believe his latest novel may be his best shot yet at finally adding that Best Novel Hugo to his list of accolades.
This book is Benford’s first novel as sole author in more than a decade, and it’s a departure for him. But in many ways, the Berlin Project feels like the novel that Benford was born to write.
His knowledge of the people he’s writing about shines through, and they feel like fully rounded human beings, in a way that some of the protagonists in his previous novels have not. These are people that Benford knows, and he writes about them with evident affection. While the science is front and centre (not unusual in a Benford novel), the characters do not take a backseat. The first 350 pages are a taught, meticulously researched alternate history that delves into the nitty-gritty technical details of the race to build an atomic bomb. It’s a believable departure from the real history. One small decision made differently that makes sense, and everything flows from that departure point….
(10) WONDERFEFE. The Washington Post’s Michael Cavna interviewed Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins, who talks about sexism in the film industry and how women should make sure their voices are heard: “Wonder Woman has been a warrior, a secretary and a sexpot. What version did the movie use?”
For Jenkins, fortunately, there was no wavering. She was determined to bring to the big screen the fierce-but-compassionate type of Wonder Woman she first saw on the ‘70s small screen.
“All these years, there’s been talk about Wonder Woman, and the thing I was very firm and steadfast about was: I only wanted to be involved in this if I can have a chance to bring back the Wonder Woman that I love,” Jenkins tells The Washington Post’s Comic Riffs. “I’m not interested in an alt-Wonder Woman; I’m not interested a new Wonder Woman. I’m interested in the Wonder Woman that I grew up with.
What Jenkins saw in TV’s bicentennial Wonder Woman was something close to the initial ideal of creator William Moulton Marston.
“It’s been interesting that she was created as such an idealized woman who is incredibly powerful who yet has everything about being a woman at her side,” Jenkins continues. “And it’s been funny: Lynda [Carter] was so that in the ‘70s with her Wonder Woman.”
(11) MORE MENTING, LESS DRINKING. Brenda W. Clough shares brief “SFWA Nebula Conference 2017” report at Book View Cafe.
I signed up to be a mentor, and was assigned not one but two mentees (the evolution of language here is especially notable; not only did I have mentees but we discussed our menting, as in “How did your menting go, did you ever catch up with your mentee?”). I got together with first one and then the other, and essentially tried to cram in tons of professional advice and answer all their questions. I also brought some pussyhats, because Grandmaster Jane Yolen demanded one, and we were photographed, hopefully for Locus.
(12) LOOSED A FATEFUL LIGHTNING. Abigail Nussbaum has eight books to cover in “Recent Reading Roundup 43”, among them a Civil War ghost story and this Hugo nominee —
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer – It’s interesting that in the space of a single year, Tor published two debut novels about non-dystopian, non-corporatist future societies in which the boundaries of national and ethnic identity have been replaced by global affinity groups, to which people assign themselves according to their interests and philosophy. For all my reservations about its technothriller plot, I have to say that I prefer Malka Older’s Infomocracy to Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning, largely because I find the world in that book more interesting, and more believable as a place where people like me might possibly live.
(13) THE HOUSE GROUSE. It’s bigger than your average bear — “Microsoft founder Paul Allen reveals world’s biggest-ever plane” .
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has shown off the “Stratolaunch”, a colossal aircraft he hopes can soon help to hoist satellites into low earth orbit.
Allen’s company of the same name has been working on the craft since 2011, with the help of Scaled Composites.
The result of their efforts is 238 feet long, 50 feet tall and has a wingspan of 385 feet [Allen likes Imperial measurements — Ed]. The wingspan is the largest ever built, topping even Howard Hughes’ “Spruce Goose” aka the “Hughes H-4 Hercules.”
The Stratolaunch needs that colossal wing, and six engines typically used for the Boeing 747, because Allen wants it to carry up to 550,000 pounds of payload. His plan calls for the plane to “take off from a runway and fly to the approximate cruising altitude of a commercial airliner before releasing a satellite-bearing launch vehicle.”
(14) ADS THAT SUBTRACT. Marketing puts their foot in it: “Chloe Moretz ‘appalled and angry’ over body-shaming Snow White animated film advert”
Chloe Moretz said she hadn’t seen the marketing and has apologised to fans.
Plus-size model Tess Holliday tweeted a photo of the billboard poster and tagged the actress in her post, saying it was basically body-shaming.
How did this get approved by an entire marketing team? Why is it okay to tell young kids being fat = ugly? ????????@ChloeGMoretz pic.twitter.com/PVhgwluGTM
— Tess H????lliday (@Tess_Holliday) May 30, 2017
(15) LASSO THE STARS. BBC gives Wonder Woman 4 stars out of 5.
In Wonder Woman’s reimagining of the princess myth, Diana, Princess of the Amazons, leaps through the air deflecting bullets with her bracelets. She enters a formal reception with a sword tucked into the back of her evening dress. But she differs from conventional princesses and superheroes in an even more pointed way — one that speaks to today’s fraught global politics. While Batman is motivated by vengeance for his parents’deaths and Superman is dedicated to saving those in peril, Wonder Woman wants nothing less than world peace. All this in a crisply executed action movie with an engaging narrative, and, in Diana (Gal Gadot), as swift and strong a heroine as anyone could have wished for.
(16) THE BALLAD OF TOLKIEN. J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, later adapted into a piece of The Silmarillion, now published in its original form: “JRR Tolkien book Beren and Lúthien published after 100 years”
Beren and Lúthien has been described as a “very personal story” that the Oxford professor thought up after returning from the Battle of the Somme.
It was edited by his son Christopher Tolkien and contains versions of a tale that became part of The Silmarillion.
The book features illustrations by Alan Lee, who won an Academy Award for his work on Peter Jackson’s film trilogy.
(17) INSIDE BASEBALL. A post for SciFiNow.UK, “Raven Strategem author Yoon Ha Lee on how his spaceships became bags of holding”, jokes about the reason before revealing a disability has something to do with it.
Bags of Holding…in SPAAACE!
When I first realized I had to deal with starship layouts in the hexarchate, I had two choices. I could either sit down (probably with my long-suffering husband) and make a loving diagram of a ship and its layout, and refer to it assiduously every time I had someone go from point A to point B. Or I could say, “Screw it,” and not deal with the problem.
Dear reader, as you have no doubt figured out already, I went with the second option.
(18) EVEN DEEPER INSIDE BASEBALL. Hmmm…
Sometimes it's a horrible mistake to let ten-year-olds name their own baseball team. Then again, sometimes they crush it. pic.twitter.com/I1jgDqrPfp
— Kevin Guilfoile (@kevinguilfoile) April 10, 2017
(19) THE CURE. Cream by David Firth is a short animated film on YouTube about what happens when a miraculous product that solves all medical problems is introduced and the violent reaction against it.
[Thanks to Stephen Burridge, James Davis Nicoll, Gregory N. Hullender, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Aaron Pound, Dann, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip W.]
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(17) That link doesn’t go to Mr. Lee.
I would so buy one of those ballcaps.
18
The cap. Or the shirt.
17
linky here:
https://www.scifinow.co.uk/interviews/raven-strategem-author-yoon-ha-lee-on-how-his-spaceships-became-bags-of-holding/
Fifth!
I see the younger readers have the same difficulty I had with “Fire Watch” when it came out (when I wasn’t much older than they). OTOH, I was asocial enough that the first-person person-who-learns-better was difficult; later it hit me, hard.
[second fifth]
[godstalk!]
9) I still find it hard to believe that In The Ocean of Night didn’t even get a Hugo nomination. That’s such a remarkable book.
Oops — Meant to post this on the new thread; apologies for double posting:
https://shop.lego.com/en-US/LEGO-NASA-Apollo-Saturn-V-21309?p=21309
Now you, too, can own a three-foot-tall LEGO Saturn V of your very own …
(17) I hadn’t heard of aphantasia, nor have I read anything by Yoon Ha Lee, but I will now. The idea of not being able to visualuze things is terrifying. I can’t imagine how someone with aphantasia could write fiction, much less have that fiction be nominated for multiple awards.
I don’t know whether to thank P J Evans for the correct link or curse him for the nightmares I am sure to have tonight.
von Dimpleheimer on June 1, 2017 at 8:22 pm said:
Same here on aphantasia – I can’t even imagine what it’s like. I live in a world where I can visualize scenes just from reading the words. (That and having a very audio-visual brain: I think in pictures and sounds.)
What killed my appreciation of “Fire Watch” was Willis’ version of Oxford.
[tick tock maybe I’ll get this one right]
*raises hand* I think in words.
My visualization skills are (I guess?) really weak, which (ironically) I think contributes to my success as an commercial artist, because I am NOT trying to match the perfect picture in my head, which means I can say “Good enough!” and boot stuff out the door.
I’m really unsure how clearly other people visualize things in their heads, but I compare mine to flipping at moderate speed through TV channels–an image stays just long enough for the viewer to recognize it, then hit the next button. If I try to grab one, I’m basically reconstructing it from what little I remember, and that reconstruction happens as easily on the page as in my head. I’ve talked to people who can take an image or a shape in their heads and rotate it in three dimensions and I’m like WHAT SORCERY IS THIS?!
I do often have intensely visual dreams…but I also frequently dream in words. Whole sections will become passages of words.
Sounds, though, are a foreign country. I remember music by the lyrics, am mostly tone-deaf, and don’t remember any sounds from my dreams.
ETA: Also, very faceblind. Once literally failed to recognize my own mother out of context. As a kid, I used to think those kids on milk cartons were a ridiculous concept because how could anyone possibly recognize someone from a picture like that?
I cannot rotate things in my head, which was a big hindrance in calculus. Okay, first I have to figure this out in 2D, and then imagine spinning it around an axis… which axis?… and figure out what it would look like in 3D? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WHY, AND DON’T WE HAVE COMPUTERS FOR THIS NOW? I did not pass the last semester. Twice.
Pretty good at visualizing stuff from words, as long as there aren’t so many words that I lose track of the first image/sound.
On the list of Hugo finalists that really probably didn’t need another review, Rogue One is almost certainly one. I reviewed the movie anyway, for anyone who cares to read it.
I almost never visualize anything – usually only to the level of many-colored moving blots. The same seems true about two famous Polish genre authors – Stanislaw Lem and Andrzej Sapkowski. Both claimed to never visualize anything and asked how their characters look like answered they don’t look like anything because they are only strings of words on paper.
I’m freaky good at those 3D rotation tasks in your head and spatial reasoning in general. As a superpower it isn’t that great 🙂
*raises hand*
I’m another who has extreme difficulty in visualising stuff. I don’t have visual dreams. I can’t close my eyes and pull up an image of a friend or loved one.
I’m reasonably good at visualizing spatial relationships… and also reasonably good at not getting too hung up on those sorts of details. Provided things are internally consistent – provided the author doesn’t say the hypomagnetic perfrangulator is next to the analeptic premodulator on p. 234, when p. 178 clearly says it’s between the dysphotic spremafulator and the cataspeptic disgrufulator – I’m prepared to build my own model of their spaceship in my head, and if it matches up with theirs, well, that’s a happy coincidence.
17 & comments: after reading all of that, I’m not sure I’m thinking at all….
I’m really confused by how many blog posts I see here throughout the year that argue that “such and such should win a Hugo” where the reason is NOT because it’s the best book written that year.
I’m fairly good at navigating with a topo map (which involves visualizing terrain from the map) so I don’t think I have the sort of visualization problems that Yon Ha Lee describes.
However, I generally don’t attempt to visualize scenes and people from textual descriptions. At least not in any detail – if I read a scene set in e.g. the great hall in a medieval castle, I might visualize that kind of room but I don’t attempt to make it an accurate match for the text. I also suspect I’m partly face blind – I have problems keeping characters in films and TV series apart and I have a tendency to not recognize people I’ve met before.
When I occasionally do try to visualize what I read, in particular when it’s not just a description of a place but an action scene – where the author describes people punching, ducking and spinning around each other – I’m often annoyed because I rarely find that it works out.
Visuals in my dreams have been pretty adequate for a while, knock wood. There was a time when it seemed most of my dreams were a bit like what I’d now call fever dreams, and it seems like when I most wanted a dream world I could really enjoy, my dreams were so feeble and unconvincing that all the props and actors might as well have been replaced by cardboard slabs with their names written on them in Magic Marker.
I’ve long felt that, for a graphic artist, my visual imagination is weak. Once in a while, it comes up with something, but seldom with convincing or consistent detail. There’s the flash of an idea (like the pre-verbal thoughts my brain then turns into words and insists on repeating), and then (as others have said) come the attempts to see it better, to nail it down, to realize it. Then it would appear I had managed to mislead myself again with a grandiose attempt to visualize something that failed.
Luckily, I have some things working for me here. Years of experience and practice have taught me procedures for trying to make something out of very little. And I’ve learned that if other people don’t know how far my attempt failed from what I thought I had in my head, they find success in what I regarded as a failure. As with some of my jests, they will misinterpret in a way that makes them better (“Yes, that’s what I meant to say, all right, all right!”), and I come to like them a little myself.
[ETA: Also, while I’m not completely face-blind, I do manage to embarrass myself with some frequency. I chalk it up to an unshakeable self-centeredness. Bugs the hell out of me.]
This comment sounded better in my head.
@tofu:
Here? Can you point to some examples please?
Omnia Scrollia divisa est in pixellae tres
tofu:
I haven’t seen any such comment and I fancied myself a regular! Sometimes it is confusing how much one can miss.
17 – Is it ironic that I visualize everything but yet can’t imagine what it’s like to not do that? Books play out like movies for me, to the point where movies/shows can be hard to me to like because if doesn’t fit with my own internalized visual of what it looks like in my head I find it off putting. While I found myself trying to find context to better imagine the first couple of chapters of Ninefox Gambit and struggling because the without those contextual edges to mentally grip onto it was difficult to imagine and harder to get into until I let go of trying. Yet oddly I never had trouble with what the spaceships of the book looked like in my head.
I suspect I’m mediocre at best when it comes to the visualization thing. I seem to have trouble keeping spaceship layouts, or buildings or railyards or topography (as in Western action sequences), straight in my mind, unless the author successfully takes pains to make it all very clear.
That’s actually one of the many things Donald E. Westlake/Richard Stark was good at, I think. To follow his caper stories it’s often necessary to have a good understanding of the physical layout of some setting, and I rarely if ever have a problem with that.
Matt Y on June 2, 2017 at 8:22 am said:
Your brain sounds like my brain.
12: Yes, I was struck by the similarity between the Palmer and Older works. For my part I found the Palmer – well, not more believable, but less obtrusively unbelievable: it’s clearly a work of the imagination saying ‘look how much I can imagine!’, whereas Older is trying hard to make it credible, so making it harder to take if it isn’t.
Both works are also about the threatened breakdown of that kind of structure, and the possibility of war. Both, too, leave you saying ‘Is that the end?’, though while the Palmer explicitly ends in mediis rebus, the Older seems to be suggesting that some resolution has been reached (though the story will continue).
The difference in visualization abilities seems to be a matter of degree, not of kind, but still… if Yoon Ha Lee can’t picture a red circle, how does red have any meaning? Is red just shorthand for light with a wavelength of 620–740 nanometers? How could strawberries be identified as red without holding up a red flashcard to compare? Is a circle just something that isn’t sharp?
Anyway, since File 770 seems to be a refuge for aphantasiacs as well as being a wretched hive of scum and villainy, here is a link to a NY Times article, which includes an email address for the one researcher studying aphantasia.
I do not have great visualization skills, which I have always blamed on not gettingglasses that I desperately needed until age 11. It’s been interesting to learn this may not be the only reason. I also listen to the TV more than i actually watch it.
On the Snow White movie, it’s worse than the print ad. The teaser trailer shows thin Snow White seductively removing her clothes while dwarfs watch from hiding. It gets worse from that point.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=%23&ved=0ahUKEwiGma2zyJ_UAhUrrlQKHSkwCCkQwqsBCB8wAA&usg=AFQjCNF1sHlk2z9QIx28jtvfnGP_UlkifA&sig2=wRkjKoqlE0B7LK486R15bA
I’m quite similar to RedWombat, I get an image but it is fleeting and I can’t hold onto it.
On the other hand I don’t seem to have any face blindness issues and instead am often the one looking up IMDB to figure out where I’ve seen a character actor before. Sometimes it turns out they just look similar.
It’s like the images are there but not easily available to my conscious mind. Putting a name to a face is much harder.
I’m generally pretty good with special visualization, and I dream in color, FWIW, but I’m terrible with associating names to faces, or even to recognizing people if I see them out of context; the primary example being years ago at the State Fair I chatted briefly with a nice, older couple who obviously knew me, and a couple days later a friend called and said, “So, you ran into my parents at the State Fair, right? And had no idea who they were?”
I often mentally transform books into comic books while reading. Still pictures of what is happening in every scene. Some books are not good for that and that is usually books that I find that I do not enjoy.
That my visual imagination often doesn’t fit to what is written in the books is another thing.
I have always preferred abstract or generic covers on books, because attempts to illustrate an actual character or scene from a book, however careful and accurate, always disagree with my internal visuals.
Movies usually bounce off if I have already read the book. Jackson’s LotR movies, for example, did not displace my images of hobbits, elves or dwarves. Movie Boromir is pretty good, but rather different from book Boromir, so, no.
Denethor (although a cartoon character compared to the book) made it into my head because a) John Noble is cool and b) for some reason, Denethor in my head was some character actor from Dr. Who, and easily displaced.
Movie Gandalf and Saruman are the only ones that really made it into my head, visually.
In another example, I quite liked that John Carter movie from Disney recently, but not one detail made it in. The Green Men were closest to my image, but every other detail was quite wrong.
My mental Hobbits have always been the ones from the Rankin-Bass cartoon, just because I saw that before actually reading Tolkien. (1977 — It was a very foundational year for me.)
On an unrelated note, we can’t say we weren’t warned …
http://onlyinamerican.com/2017/05/31/confirmed-31-women-contract-lesbianism-after-female-only-viewing-of-wonder-woman-3d/
A quick google says my mental Denethor image was John Woodvine as the Marshal of Atrios.
Hampus, that reminds me that I often ‘visualize’ by just sticking in an image I already have from a comic book or whatever. Mental clip art.
Lady Business has a link to this post showing the amount of publisher and reviewer PR devoted to male vs. female genre authors over the course of a year. It’s discouraging.
Every time File 770 has a post featuring a lot of embedded video, it crashes my browser at least once, often several times. Not a formal complaint, just FYI.
11) Excuse me, the term is “mentoring”. There’s no need for a new word here.
18) Those who are interested in buying merchandise, read down the comments on the tweet.
@ Matt: I don’t always get the “story scrolling thru my head like a movie” from books, but sometimes I really do. Allen Steele’s The Jericho Iteration was one that gave me that experience very strongly.
I do generally get a mental image of the settings of a book, but this can be overwritten by a media adaptation (cf. the BBC’s Brother Cadfael series). (I will note that the overwriting does not extend to characters if they are cast wildly off from the book’s description, cf. Hugh Beringar who is NOT tall and blond!)
Aside to Steve Wright: Are you still doing Hugo reviews? I’m not on LJ any more, so if you are I’d appreciate links over here.
@Lee: yes, I am, and they’re on my WordPress thing. So far I’ve done the novels, novellas, novelettes, related work and short stories.
I also have trouble visualizing things and recognizing people, I usually just skip over the descriptions of people or places in books. What’s strange is that I still form an impression of what they should look like based on their personalities, so when I see them later in a movie, I will have an opinion or whether they look right or not. Eg. I’m convinced Robert in Game of Thrones should not have a beard. Why not – I don’t know, but the beard is just not right.
Lee says Lady Business has a link to this post showing the amount of publisher and reviewer PR devoted to male vs. female genre authors over the course of a year. It’s discouraging.
I’m confused as she keeps using the term ‘newsletter’. Every book I get for review has a publicity letter in it, and every book from the publishing houses that GMR gets galleys and such are somewhere around three dizen imprints. And the publicists I hear from results, depending on the book, from one to three email, sometimes.
I never get newsletters, so I’m betting she’s talking about publicity mailings. And if so, it’s not the mailings are weighted towards but that writers on any imprint are more have more male writers.
We used to get a lot of physical catalogs. Tor/Forge/Minotaur alone was good for six catalogs a year, but that’s pretty much stopped as digital now rules.
Oh and the roughly forty or so publicists that we hear from are all women, many of them being either the head publicist or the equivalent.
Not saying I’m faceblind, but when The Revolution Comes and the triumphant mobs thrust me into my rightful role as Semi-Benevolent World Dictator, mandatory nametags in a large legible font (or maybe forehead tattoos; I haven’t decided yet) will be my #2 priority, right after I make library overdue fines tax-deductible.
I’m sorry, Bruce, but I cannot in good conscience support someone who only makes mandatory legible nametags for all their #2 priority. And you were doing so well!
I wound up having to watch each of the Ring Trilogy films twice, the first time to shake off my expectations from reading the books and the second to enjoy the films on their own terms. To be honest, I found the Boromir of the films to be much more sympathetic than the Boromir of the books, who just seemed like a bombastic jerk. The films did a better job of creating the sense of Boromir as tragic hero, at least for me. (I had a similar response to a lot of the characters in Game of Thrones.)
There were multiple Hugh Beringar’s in the tv series. I always thought the first one was the best, and wasn’t as tall and blond as the later incarnations.
I’m surprised — I don’t know anything about coding or how this works, but I’m just surprised that it has a different effect than any other graphic so long as you haven’t hit the play button.
@ Mike: More detail — it takes at least 5 videos for the effect to kick in, and it’s more likely to happen when I’m on the front page than when I’m on an individual post (although that’s happened too). Once the video-heavy post scrolls off the front page, it stops.
It’s quite possible that the issue is on my end. I tend to have a lot of tabs open all the time, and I’ve noticed that leaving a YouTube video open on a tab will sometimes do the same thing. I’m wondering if it’s a memory-handling issue.
I’m pretty sure it still loads flash-player even if you don’t hit play.
I’m going to distance myself from all the filers who aren’t good at visualization. I routinely develop mental images of data-flow in my day job as a software developer, and can’t imagine how much harder my job would be if I couldn’t do that! I also have very mild synesthesia, which helps in assigning colors and such to my mental models.
Working in a scroll-mine, going on down, down.
Working in a scroll-mine, whoops, about to tick down.