(1) SUPERHERO CONSUMER REPORT. The Verge warns “Thanos’ almighty Infinity Gauntlet defeated by above-average oven heat”.
The most powerful weapon in the universe has a weakness: it cannot withstand the necessary heat to remove a cast iron pizza pan once warmed to 400-plus degrees. Reports of the weapon’s fragility have been making the rounds by way of Loot Crate, which shipped an Infinity Gauntlet oven mitt to subscribers in its May product bundle. Following many failed attempts to hold hot objects and presumably eradicate Marvel superheroes, the device has been dubbed defective.
CAUTION!!! Don't use your @lootcrate oven mitt! I burned my hand and melted it w/ the first use! #Lootcrate pic.twitter.com/9JeeG1pE3J
— Nick Borelli (@NicksComics) May 25, 2016
(2) RUNAWAY MIND MELD. When SF Signal closed, a couple of people were still at work on installments of its popular “Mind Meld” feature. James Aquilone has now posted the one he was curating, that asks participants the question:
Q: What are your favorite visions of the future in the SF genre?
Answers come from Sean Williams, Stewart Baker, Stephen Merlino, Matt Dovey, John Lasser and Christoph Weber, all published in the latest Writers of the Future anthology.
(3) FEELING BETTER? While the SF Signal blog is shuttered, somebody (John DeNardo?) is still issuing regular news tweets from the SF Signal Twitter account.
Kickstart your Summer reading woith these Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Horror books: https://t.co/zQhpeQzYG2 #Kirkus
— ???????????????? SF Signal (@sfsignal) June 4, 2016
(4) CAPTAIN MY CAPTAIN. Tom Smith’s protest filk “Just A Kid From Brooklyn” – a $1 download.
…You’ve heard about his shield, to keep him safe from harm,
And how he used it like it was an extension of his arm,
You’ve heard about his buddies, and how some paid the cost,
The woman that he loved, the childhood friend he lost.
But most of all, you’ve heard about the man behind the mask,
How fighting for our freedom was his most important task,
Sometimes it was a rescue, sometimes it was a fight,
But sometimes it was just his words and knowing he was right
And now you tell me… he’s a Nazi
You want to prove the best of us can end up like the rest of us
You’ve undone his whole purpose, and then shoved him off a ledge,
And tell us it’s so bold of you, how it’s oh so cutting edge….
(5) THE I-FILES. Gillian Anderson has a new gig says Variety, having been cast in Starz’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.
Anderson will play Media, the mouthpiece for the New Gods, functioning as their public face and sales representative, by taking the form of various iconic celebrities. She lives off the attention and worship that people give to screens — to their laptops, their TVs, to their iPhones in their hands while they watch their TVs. Ever the perky spokesperson, and always in control, she spins stories in whatever direction best suits her.
(6) PEACE BLIND YOUR WEAPONS. Police have warned those attending Armageddon 2016 in Wellington this weekend to cover their fake weapons to avoid public panic. The New Zealand Herald has the story.
Many of those attending the expo, which has been dubbed the Wellington Geek Event, arrive dressed in costumes which may include accessories such as fake weapons. While they were fake, they looked real, police warned this evening.
“Those attending the festival are asked that they be careful when they are walking to and from the events around Wellington and that they carry these ‘weapons’ with care so as not to scare members of the public.”…
Police had already today been called to Porirua after a man travelling to the expo was seen carrying a fake weapon.
(7) RALPH OBIT. SF Site News reports Patrick Ralph passed away.
Illinois fan Patrick “PJ” Ralph died on June 2 following a battle with cancer. Ralph was an active and was currently developing a game for market with some friends. He was part of the “Bermuda Triangle” hoax Worldcon bid for the 1988 Worldcon, which took second in a field of four.
(8) G.O.A.T. John Scalzi, who at age 8 knew Muhammad Ali was “The Greatest of All Time”, at age 47 has a far deeper appreciation why it was true.
But — and this is the second thing — you cannot love or honor Ali properly without acknowledging that blackness and Islam are at the core of his greatness. It seems to me, and I think the events of his life bear this out, that the greatness of Ali — who he was — was did not come out to you, was not there for you, and in a fundamental way did not care what you thought of it. It was there, and you could come to it or not, and if you did, you had to take it on its on terms. On Ali’s terms. And Ali’s terms were: He was a black man, in America and in the world. He was a Muslim man, in America and in the world. He was who he was. He did not have to transcend those things about himself. You, however, might have to overcome your understanding of what you thought of both blackness and Islam to appreciate him. People did or did not; Ali went on regardless.
(9) WHEN JIM BURNS MET ALI. Jim Burns posted this memory of meeting the champ in person:
I’ll always be grateful that I got to meet Muhammad Ali when he was still in the full height of all his many powers. The occasion was an odd one–a 1978 press party at the Warner Communications building on Fifth Avenue, heralding Superman Vs Muhammad Ali, a special edition “deluxe” comic book volume that DC Comics produced (in which aliens compel the two titans to tussle, “to save the Earth”).
(10) CARTOON SECTION. Today’s Close To Home by John McPherson concerns a hellish to-do list.
(11) MIKKI KENDALL. Tasha Turner pointed to Mikki Kendall’s “WisCon 40 Highs, Lows & What The Actual F*ck?”. Now I think I can see what was behind that committee tweet I wondered about.
That brings me to the “WTAF?” part of this post. We’re going to start with the Con Suite. Because I made the actual beef for it, and because it is an exceptionally glaring example of an overarching problem. Time & time again I saw people come in, take umbrage that a place staffed by volunteers serving free food had imperfect service. Not dangerous service, not unhealthy (AFAIK no one got food poisoning which I did from a place where I actually paid for the food), just imperfect. Because a delivery didn’t show up on time the menus had to be shifted around. Because two of the aging fridges went out food was in shorter supply than expected. Because there weren’t enough volunteers actually willing to show up & work when scheduled some things took longer than expected. You know..normal things that can go wrong at any event.
Now, there are a lot of theories about the entitled attitudes on display from some con attendees. Some of it was definitely about race & gender (funnily enough all the Black women serving in the con suite that I know have similar stories about rudeness despite being there on different days, I didn’t get a chance to check in with other POC, but I have some guesses based off stories relayed to me), some of it was about bizarre expectations and a total lack of home training (possibly related to reason #1) but at base none of it was okay. Here is where I remind you that Julia, the con suite chair pays for a flight & hotel from Boston to Madison to spend an entire weekend volunteering. To feed hundreds of strangers three meals and unlimited snacks every day. Here is where I remind you that con suite staff are all volunteers. Here is where I ask you why a con that prides itself on being at a union hotel can’t remember to treat volunteers like people.
(12) THE PERPETUAL CAMPAIGN. The BBC’s roundup of electoral futurism starts with the spectre of a holographic Trump campaigning in 20 places at once.
Then it moves on to a candidate with a strongly science-fictional view of the future.
Forty-foot coffin
“Why not?” offers Zoltan Istvan, an US independent presidential candidate who identifies as a futurist and transhumanist.
“Many other jobs are being replaced by robots. Why not our leaders?
“We’re about 10-15 years from having a machine that’s as smart as anyone in this room. It might make sense at some point to have a machine lead us.”
I met Istvan this week at the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, a gathering of companies working on augmented, virtual and mixed reality technology.
He certainly stood out. First, he’s built like an action figure. Second, he wants to live forever (that’s the transhumanist part). His presidential campaign is built around calls to fund further science that will – the movement hopes – one day make immortality a reality.
He, of course, is not going to become the next president. But that’s not the point. His campaign is designed to bring attention to his call for the US to put more money into research. This publicity drive is enhanced by his campaign bus – a 40-foot long coffin on wheels.
(13) CLICKBAIT. Tickld’s “30 Things You Probably Missed in Star Wars: The Force Awakens” are on 30 different pages, so a lot depends on how irresistible you find this kind of lure.
(14) BILLBOARD PROTESTED. Yahoo! reports “Rose McGowan is speaking out against a billboard of Jennifer Lawrence in ‘X-Men’ for an important reason”.
The purpose of a movie billboard is not just to give viewers an idea of what the movie’s about, but also excite them enough to go see it. That’s why some people are concerned about what’s going down on a current billboard in Los Angeles for X-Men: Apocalypse featuring Jennifer Lawrence‘s character, Mystique, and Oscar Isaac as Apocalypse. I know what you’re thinking: how could anything involving Oscar Isaac and Jennifer Lawrence be bad? However, actress Rose McGowan, and a handful of others, have pointed out that it sends a pretty weird message, and we can’t help but agree. The billboard shows Apocalypse with his hand around Mystique’s throat, strangling her.
Rose McGowan calls out the ‘X-Men’ billboard that shows Jennifer Lawrence being strangled https://t.co/lmh73vjAxn pic.twitter.com/HeHqDzWozL
— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) June 2, 2016
(15) TABLET HARDWARE. “Hello From Londinium: Oldest Handwritten Documents In British History Discovered” on NPR.
Archaeologists in London have unearthed the oldest handwritten documents in Britain — a collection of notes, bills and contracts dating back nearly 2,000 years.
The discovery, a collection of more than 400 Roman waxed writing tablets, was announced Wednesday by the Museum of London Archaeology. The tablets were unearthed in London’s financial district during excavation work for a new building.
The Guardian has more on the tablets’ discovery:
“The tablets were found under a 1950s office block in the still smelly, wet mud of the lost river Walbrook, as the site was being cleared for a huge new European headquarters for Bloomberg.
” ‘They give us a glimpse into a carpet-bagging community in the new wild west frontier of the Roman empire,’ said Roger Tomlin, the expert on early Roman writing who spent a year poring over the faint scratches on slivers of fir wood recycled from old barrels.
The Bloomberg tablets, as the museum is calling them, date back to as early as A.D. 43.
(16) THE LATE PLAYWRIGHT. Francis Hamit, in “Film Producer Reveals Truth About Christopher Marlowe’s Death”.
After years of intensive research Francis Hamit is satisfied that he knows exactly how and why the Elizabethan poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe died on May 30th, 1593.
“It was a hit,” Hamit said, “A political assassination for reasons of state, ordered by Queen Elizabeth herself. Marlowe professed atheism, which would have been no big deal if he had not been the most famous and popular playwright of the Elizabethan stage. His fame meant that the deed had to be done secretly. Marlowe was also one of her spies and worked for the Secret Service under Sir Francis Walsingham and Sir Robert Cecil. The other men in the room with Marlowe at the time of his death were all friends of his and long-time agents for the Crown.”
“Marlowe infiltrated the Jesuit Seminary at Rhiems as a spy in 1585, and probably did other missions. He was part of Sir Walter Raleigh’s group of freethinkers, the so-called ‘School of the Night,’ and gave a lecture about atheism. His former chambermate and lover Thomas Kyd was arrested for having atheistic literature and revealed under torture that the documents were Marlowe’s. Additional accusations from informers got Marlowe arrested by the Privy Council and he was under investigation and restrictions when he died.”
For the last six years, Hamit has been developing these details into a screenplay, now being produced by famed film producer Gary Kurtz in the UK. The film will be directed by American film director Michael John Donahue, DGA. The underlying material is Hamit’s 1988 stageplay “MARLOWE: An Elizabethan Tragedy”.
“Actually the whole thing was Mike Donahue’s idea,” Hamit said. “He read the original stage play and suggested we make the film. We decided to make it in the UK because of the locations, the very deep bench of acting talent, and the generous tax incentives.” To that end, Hamit and his partner formed The Kit Marlowe Film Co. PLC with offices in London as well as Los Angeles and negotiated a North American film and video distribution deal with Lightyear Entertainment in 2015.
Hamit has done several drafts of the screenplay and just added a scene where Queen Elizabeth orders Marlowe’s death. “She did it for the best of reasons from her point of view,” Hamit said. “Her authority as Queen was based upon the Divine Right to Rule. Saying there was no God was a direct challenge to that authority. Marlowe had to go, and as quietly as possible. She pardoned the man who murdered him a month later.”
[Thanks to JJ, Chip Hitchcock, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
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First first?
As long as American Gods does not prevent Gillian Anderson from being the next James Bond.
Nth to the 2nd!
#16: Of COURSE the docs were found in the financial district!!
After all, the Domesday Book, one of the oldest Anglo-Saxon docs, is mostly tax records and land/ag transactions. (My older brother the lawyer wrote his History MA thesis on it but hadn’t taken typing so he paid me to type and edit it for him. Yay 8th grade typing class in the pre-computer days!)
[ticky]
(13) Bah. I hate that 30 separate pages nonsense. Tickld is defeating their purpose; it turned me off so much I didn’t read beyond page 2.
Five is the magic number.
[clicky]
On one of my other browsers I have an extension that will put many (though not all) slide shows onto a single page, if I care enough to use it. Once in a while I do.
12. Zoltan Istvan – terrible book, ideas I’m not sure I agree with, but he seems like decent individual. And he at least tries to walk the walk…
Perhaps eight is the sleepiest number. Who knows? Maybe I will find out.
Best Christopher Marlowe book (not that I can recall reading any others dedicated to him to be honest. Everything else, he’s always a side topic in something about Shakespeare):
A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess.
His last book and still my favorite of his works. Highly recommended.
(2) RUNAWAY MIND MELD.
As one to live in, mine is still Iain M. Banks’ Culture. Sure, we’d be mostly pets of the Minds but we’d be living in a post-scarcity world, and we’d have the freedom to do most what we’d want.
(3) FEELING BETTER?
I’m guessing SFSignal is a hard habit to break. This is not a complaint.
(5) THE I-FILES.
This is getting my expectations up even higher.
(6) PEACE BLIND YOUR WEAPONS.
Umm, yeah. Armageddon is quite popular but clearly not everyone is aware of it.
(8) & (9)
“Greatest of all time” doesn’t come across as hyperbole when used to describe Ali.
The Pixel Scroll title credit is apropos: after a warmer than average summer & autumn, the cold season has finally arrived with a vengeance. The weather system from the Antarctic arrived a few days ago, bringing biting cold. #Winterishere
12) “We’re about 10-15 years from having a machine that’s as smart as anyone in this room.
What? No. Not even close. We can do neat tricks with pattern recognition and matching, but actual AI intelligence? No, not even close. Why would anyone say that nonsense?
identifies as a futurist and transhumanist.
Oh. That explains it. I probably could program Google DeepMind to emulate transhumanist rantng pretty easily.
(1) So much for product testing, QA, and other quaint concepts of the past. That is the most basic FAIL ever.
(2) I would very much enjoy living in the Culture. I don’t care if the Minds see me as a pet.
(11) WTAF indeed. PoC exist, get over it.
(12) Nope. Machines are still stupider.
(15) Neato.
Today’s read — Just One Damned Thing After Another, by Jodi Taylor
Historians at a facility that uses time travel to observe past events try to defeat a plot by evil time travelers to … um … do something bad.
After a promising start with an almost aggressively likable main character who reacts to time travel like an actual human who has heard of the concept before, the plot of this book dissolves into a series of events that make almost no sense given the established premise and characters. Example: after making it clear that anyone who tries to change history in even slight ways dies immediately in an implausible “accident”, the book quickly forgets this whenever it wants to introduce something like a massive dinosaur-hunting operation, or have time travelers from the future enact massive, world-changing events in the present, which the book somehow cannot seem to comprehend is their past. In fact, the book seems to have very little grip on the concept of time-travel in general, since, for example, a major action by the time-traveling good guys could have been foiled by the time-traveling bad guys switching around some documents at ANY TIME during a 1500 year period. But they don’t, because … I have no idea why they don’t. And it’s a novel about time-traveling historians that almost completely ignores everything interesting about that concept. I could go on. I will not be picking up any of the sequels.
After reading the Wiscon report, I keep asking myself: why didn’t anyone else in the room step up and offer to help?
I know the thrust of that piece was directed at racism/privilege, but this is the second time in a week that the File has reported an incident that includes attendees apparently not understanding what they are involved with.
You’re not buying a ticket to an entertainment. You’re buying a membership. You have OWNERSHIP of the con you are attending. Your responsibility is the same as those who organize and volunteer. Your minimum responsibility at the con is to make sure that you are not interfering with anyone else’s enjoyment. I’d hope you’d want to go beyond that, but there’s no obligation on you to do so.
I’d much prefer that everyone attending saw it as their number one priority to make sure that everyone else is having a great time. It doesn’t take much: holding the elevator door for someone; engaging in a conversation with a stranger; getting out of the way of staff who are trying to get something done; passing on (accurate) information about happenings; helping, supporting, engaging.
3) Yeah, SF Signal the twitter account is John DeNardo’s personal twitter account (and always has been, actually)
15) Coolness. One of the reasons why we know so much about the Romans is that they did write so much down, on everything. There is a museum in Rome that has thousands and thousands of Roman epigraphs, of every conceivable kind. One evening when I was on my Rome trip, I wandered through the place, and wondered when it was going to end. It was glorious
(14) BILLBOARD PROTESTED.
That is seriously screwed up. I can’t imagine who would have thought that would be a good promotional billboard, but I hope that it gets fixed tout suite. 🙁
(14) BILLBOARD PROTESTED. – Egads. So that’s what the kerfuffle has been about? Looking at some of the more neckbeard-y corners, you’d think it was the trailer as a whole, not a frickin’ massive standalone billboard. Good to see that the only-my-outrage-is-valid crowd are maintaining their usual reputation for perspective and even-handedness.
Gah. As a plate cleanser, 50th Anniversary Uhura-Barbie!
Also, happy Ramadhan to anyone fasting!
What bothers me about that X-Men poster is the fact that I thought Apocalypse and Mystique were going to have a bit of an argument and then sit down to have cake with Mister Teddy Bear and Mrs. Bunny Rabbit…and they lived happily ever after. What’s all this strangling stuff? Next thing you know, Jennifer Lawrence as a character in a movie that is also simply a CGI rendering of Jennifer Lawrence as a character in a movie is going to be punched so hard that she flies through the air and hits the side of a building? How dare they?!?!?!?!?!?
@Steve Davidson: because it’s not easy to tell someone face-to-face that they’re out of line — especially (IME) when the problem is social misconduct rather than an obviously stupid act like swinging a weapon (even a replica) in a public space.
I do wonder who was causing a hard time. Someone at their first fan-run convention may be at their first con ever, or have been to professionally-run cons (where attendees may be more interested in what they can get for their admission rather than helping make the con a good place); in either case they’d never picked up the we’re-all-in-this-together ethos. (You and I date far enough back to have come into fandom when commercial cons were less common; these days my SWAG is that far more people go to such conventions than to fan-run.) Wiscon, with its Friday-night dinner expeditions for first-timers, does more to acclimate people than many fan-run conventions do, but I doubt that those dinners turn into etiquette lessons.
Re: The Billboard
Yes, its a scene in the movie. Yes, its a movie, a superhero movie. Images send messages, though, and subconsciously, especially when taken out of their context.
So a billboard for X-Men: Apocalypse showing a dude choking a woman? A very poor choice in my opinion. Because it is out of context, and all someone driving or riding along sees is a guy choking a woman. Even if their skin colors are blue. That doesn’t make it any better.
I hardly know whether I’m looking forward to #16. A film with an atheist as a central character could be great or …not. Of course, if it’s not great, it will have a fair amount of company, so maybe it won’t make that much difference.
@Paul_A
Strangely enough, I must have missed all those promotional posters of Apocalypse beating down Xavier, or any of the other male stars of the franchise.
Also, perhaps you want to consider whether a single scene in the context of an action sequence has a different impact, or elicits a different response than the same scene preserved in a frickin’ standalone billboard.
Otherwise, yeah. How dare they…
(12) THE PERPETUAL CAMPAIGN.
I think I’m starting to get an idea why so many transhumanists think general intelligence is so simple.
Looking at some of the more neckbeard-y corners, you’d think it was the trailer as a whole, not a frickin’ massive standalone billboard. Good to see that the only-my-outrage-is-valid crowd are maintaining their usual reputation for perspective and even-handedness.
It’s a massive standalone billboard depicting violence against a woman.
If the public doesn’t like seeing violence against women on their morning commute, I think that’s a reasonable thing to be upset about.
A billboard is presented in a different context than a trailer. If you’re not interested in the film, all you’re experiencing is an image of a woman being choked to market a movie. Even if you are interested, maybe it’s too evocative of a distressing situation to want to see on a giant advertising sign.
@Rose Embolism
It still turns up routinely in short stories published in the top 10 major magazines (including the online ones). Fans (and even critics) love those stories dearly. Look at the response to Today I Am Paul, by Martin L. Shoemaker, which is included in three of the four big “Best of” SFF anthologies this year.
I should probably write an article about “ten unbelievable SFF tropes that are too popular to penalize stories for.” The humanlike-AI built with current technology would be near the top of the list. The variation where the intelligence arises by chance is even worse, but it’s pretty popular too.
Speaking of massive computing power, is anyone here part of the World Community Grid and looking for a team to join? I’ve recently started Flag of Convenience for anyone who doesn’t have a workplace-, college-, or club-based team of their own to join.
(And, for people who’ve never heard of the World Community Grid…)
It still turns up routinely in short stories published in the top 10 major magazines (including the online ones).
That’s why it is called science fiction.
@Rose Embolism: I probably could program Google DeepMind to emulate transhumanist rantng pretty easily.
I think that Visual Basic would probably be more than adequate to the task.
(15) So first-century Londoners were obsessed about money and beer. Not much has changed in 2000 years!
Here is one problem with that Billboard:
She looks helpless. Cowed.
Yes, you might show beaten male heroes, but would you ever see Captain America with such a defeated expression? So no, I’m not really happy with it. I think it was a bad stereotypical idea. Not that that is uncommon.
re (16)
The level of anachronism is astounding; even if it might make a damn entertaining movie. First, the anachronism as relates to English history – the English state had a famously lengthy and tortured road to modernity. They may have gotten there eventually in a way that allowed a small island of shepherds and charcoal burners to over-run a third of the planet, but the route there is dire, and for the purposes of plausible events in the 1590s, a lot of these words didn’t meant what they mean now – or didn’t even exist. The English are going to spend the first half of the 17th Century in direct dispute and open warfare over what the Crown can do. They will then take a short break and spend the second half in a somewhat less overtly violent of same.
“Reasons of state” and “secret service” are words yet to be invented yet. Walsingham’s and Cecil’s intelligence network was very much an ad hoc affair. The idea of them as some sort of 20th century secret police in great tights is anachronistic as all heck. And even past that, there’s Ockham’s razor: The Elizabethan and Jacobean stage was filled with a delightful cast of characters who made Byron look like a rank amateur at being mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Bill Shakespeare wrote half a play with an accomplice who was at various times an inn keep, fellow playwright, and loan shark. He may well have owed him money. (It’s as good a reason as any as to why someone could write and Hamlet and then Pericles.) Marlowe’s spectacular for his cheerful love of vice as well as his transcendent lyrics. There were many people with many reasons to put a knife in him.
These are useful people if you’re a gentleman on the Queen’s business. But the idea of them as dangerous? As mattering? A theater player, able to be a force or a threat in politics? These are the lowest people on the social ladder; they are beneath notice by definition. By the values of the time, it’d be like being afraid your dog was plotting kill you. Even when these people are executing Catholics for heresy, they want to know which Jesuit, which real person, is guiding the filthy peasants who be definition can’t be thinking for themselves. Fifty odd years on for this, the people who just had a King executed will look at egalitarian notions as unfathomablly bizarre. The nobility of the day had other reasons to twirl their mustaches and plot.
And now the next anachronism, which I guess hinges on one point: is atheism a sort of essential quantum of truth, grasped through the ages by people who opened their hearts the right way? Or is it a secular word for a secular phenomenon of our secular world? Because if the answer is number two, the word “atheism” really does not have its present meaning before the Enlightenment and roughly 1750 (and this is generous; the mid 19th is a *much* better founded place to draw any lines). The 16th and 17th Century is a time where atheism is often a word for heresy – one’s lack of conformance the cannon of a region is proof you don’t believe in the true God, much less any god, thus atheism. By the standards of the time, that argument made sense, even if its ridiculous today.
But by the standards of that particular time, the threat of wrong beliefs in England are Catholics who want to kill the Queen; the entire Elizabethan religious settlement is based off of the idea of “let’s keep it vague enough than anyone not a Catholic can be a loyal subject.” This is in contrast with the more doctrinaire Calvinism of Edward VI’s reign, or the more militant anti-calvinism of the first two Stuarts. Why you’d want to hunt down a player, a man who cannot be dangerous because he is not a gentleman, who isn’t holding the beliefs that have been the clear and present danger of much of the Queen’s reign, is a stretch.
And this then segues into the other big anachronism of (16), the one to me that calls to mind the inveterate USian fundamentalists attempts to back cast people of their beliefs back to the American Founding… or the Renaissance… the early Church… etc… even though the doctrines of what we now call “fundamentalism” are younger than humanity’s knowledge of electricity.* It is important to have right-beleivers with right-thoughts present to witness for the truth at all periods of history, regardless of the historical support. Whether Marlowe can be portrayed as martyr for this particular truth, given it’s a truth expressed centuries after his death, is… curious.
I think Marlowe the man has been criminally undermovied, TV-showed, etc. It’s a period of brilliant costumes, intellectual vitality, political intrigue, and a great love of filthy word-play. Marlowe would make a phenomenal anti-hero. But Bill Shakespeare sucks all the air out of the room, I’m afraid, and Good Queen Bess get’s the remainder. (16) could make for an entertaining entertainment. But to say with a straight face this idea of Marlowe, martyred for being a witness to the truths of atheism, is historical is about as historical as the most recent Oxfordian conspiracy movie, or X-men: Apocalypse’s decision to put the Giza complex on the eastern bank of the Nile.
re: X-man Apocalypse, posters
I was reflecting a scroll or two back about how Cinder Spires was the ultimate box check work: many tastes and tribes in fandom getting their shoutout, check, check, check, and it was like the novel version of the “four-quadrant” movie.
I think Paul_A has added something to that, because the poster at least is the people marketing the film checking the neckbeard box, knowing that the neckbeards will defend any violence against women as making things gritty and real.
*Much of modern Protestant fundamentalism in the anglophone is some version of the dispensationalism first really given form around the time of and just after American Civil War, cut with the pessimism of most Protestant theology following the Great War. They may like saying they’re the unchanged, ancient Christianity (and the secular part of their many detractors may see the percentage for making hay with that lie and calling them Bronze Age throwbacks) but John Nelson Darby was no ancient man.
PhilRM on June 5, 2016 at 8:19 am said:
Yeah, VBA or PERL would be more than adequate. It gets a bit repetitive doesn’t it?
@TYP: In my mind’s eye you drop a mic at the end of that comment.
@Henley
My knowledge of early modern England will be used for something, damnit!
I feel like there’s a great movie, or a five season HBO drama, in Kit Marlowe. The man was a queer(as much as the word means anything then) free-thinker (as much as the world means anything then) in a fascinating age. But I think there’s enough of Marlowe to make a Marlowe movie, and I’m not sure how dragooning the him into a particular culture war serves that.
(Okay, I realize that’s how most historical fiction get’s made – the past as stage for our present anxieties. But I’d like it to be good historical fiction! Boardwalk Empire cuts much closer to the history of the period than much other Prohibition-perioded entertainments do, and it made a richer tapestry. The Elizabethan has enough echoes of the present that I think a full commitment to accuracy could make a fascinating piece.)
@Petréa Mitchell: Thanks for mentioning World Community Grid; I’d forgotten all about it! I participated years ago, and apparently I still have an account and am on a team. Hmm, can we join more than one team? Maybe it had a different name back then. Probably I forgot about this when moving computers, and never reinstalled the software. Or I removed it while troubleshooting some issue and never put it back. Anyway, I’m rejoining.
Yep. The Culture or some similar trans-human, post-scarcity setting with impossibly perfect medicine, effective immortality, ridiculously easy interstellar travel, and relatively little violence (statistically speaking). Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth (post-Shining-Light-Mountain crisis–Void trilogy era would be nice), Dan Simmon’s Hegemony (pre-fall of the farcasters), Neal Aser’s Polity (when there aren’t problems with the Prador or Jain tech), inside Robert Reed’s Greatship, and the better of Vernor Vinge’s Zones of Thought. Other settings that aren’t quite up there on the technology (or lowish violence) scale but would be an interesting place to visit include Larry Niven’s Known Space, Charles Strosseses Eschaton universe, Ken MacLeod’s Engines of Light universe, Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space series, Pratchett and Baxter’s Long Earth series, and Karl Schroeder Candesce series.
(Note 1: I intentionally haven’t read the original article yet, so I don’t know how many of my answers were already given.)
(Note 2: Yes, I noticed that all my choices are from male writers. I’ve been trying to come up with a setting from a female writer that fits my criteria, but I’m drawing a blank. Ann Lecike’s Ancillary universe comes closest, but not near enough for my taste.)
Doris Lessing?
Hey, cool, I get to nominate for the World Fantasy Awards because they let members from the previous two conventions nominate. I didn’t realize that till I got the e-mail today.
My WF ballot’s smaller than my Hugo ballot, since the former’s only fantasy. On the plus side, I got to nominate a few things that just missed my Hugo ballot (like Daryl Gregory’s Harrison Squared and Amal El-Mohtar’s “Madeleine,” both of which I almost nominated for the Hugos), two novellas I heard after Hugo noms closed (like Angela Slatter’s awesome “Of Sorrow and Such”!), and non-Hugo categories (like “Tor.com Collection: Season One” for Best Anthology). 😀
Yay, award nominations!
11: What is the ticket price for WisCon? (I tried to google for it, but got little more than a suggestion that I really meant Wisconson.) I know that Worldcon is obscenely expensive (this coming from someone who thinks a $10 movie ticket is far too expensive.) There are two ways of thinking about the issue–one is “these are volunteers, cut them some slack”–the other is “I paid a lot of money for this, so if you screw up, I have the right to complain.”
If you buy something from the McDonald’s Dollar Menu I have little right to complain if it falls short of absolute perfection–but if you are at an expensive “dine-in” restaurant (which I never do–I’m very much a Dollar Menu person) you have every right to expect to get your money’s worth.
ETA: People really, really complain (at least here) if unpaid volunteers at a convention don’t provide perfect access for all disabilities and perfect protection from harassment–so why is it any different to complain about less than perfect food service from unpaid volunteers?
@Greg Hullender
“Today I Am Paul”, “Cat Pictures, Please”, “Damages”, “Ex Machina”, “Age of Ultron”, etc… are all good stories/movies (with certain flaws, but generally enjoyable), though it is notable that we’re seeing a cluster of AI stories/films at the moment.
However, that something makes for a good SFF story doesn’t necessarily make it plausible in reality. Unfortunately, there are people like the transhumanists of 12 who confuse the two.
@TYP
Oh, Hell yeah! That could be such an interesting series.
@Cora Buhlert
I agree. I think the key to getting people to suspend disbelief is to just present the humanlike AI as a fait accompli and not try to explain how it works. The ones I view as bad stories almost always spend a lot of words on hand-waving “explanations” of how the technology works.
As far as people believing in it for real, I think there’s some reason why this is a fantasy that a lot of people really, really want to believe in. Perhaps it makes an interesting mirror for human beings. “What if you had a person who was really logical, and really selfless, but had little common sense?”
@Darren Garrison
I assume this is because less-than-perfect food service is a minor issue compared to harassment and access for people with disabilities. In my head, I have a sort of hierarchy of importance for various issues. For example: If I order two burritos at a taqueria and ask for hot sauce and am only given one small container, I am annoyed. I don’t, however, feel the need to shout that out to the world or stop going to that taqueria. If I’m, let’s say, at a bar, and one of the patrons keeps grabbing me and getting up close and won’t leave me alone after repeatedly being told to do so, and I tell a bartender or security or whoever, and they laugh and say “Oh, everyone knows that’s how (that person) is. Just try to stay away from them,” there’s a good chance I’ll shout that out to at least some segment of my world, and a very good chance I won’t go to that bar again.
In one of those cases, I suffer a minor inconvenience. In the other case, the people who are supposed to be maintaining order are neglecting their duties and causing potential problems that could easily escalate – their serial harasser may get a bottle to the face, or the cops may be called, or whatever.
I rarely, if ever, complain to management or call people out publicly, but I can check off a few boxes I belong in that make my experiences in public generally less difficult than many people’s, so I try to empathize with those who, for whatever reasons, often feel unwelcome. In the boys-club/sausage party type scenes I’ve participated in, making those scenes more welcoming to all people in general has improved them, even if also more full of debate and compromise.
@kathodus: just what I was drafting, more articulately.
@Darren: see wiscon.net; registration for next year is $50. But even the $200+ for Worldcon covers so many things that being vile when con suite service is imperfect is not reasonable. Extending kathodus’s remarks: safety and access issues often show a failure to plan over months, not a failure to provide real-time perfection.
(6) PEACE BLIND YOUR WEAPONS. Police have warned those attending Armageddon 2016 in Wellington this weekend to cover their fake weapons to avoid public panic.
Well well. That Phantom guy, always so, so wrong about everything.
The Phantom: Hey, look on the bright side, in 12 more hours you’re scheduled to be right again!
@TYP: I think the whole School of Night makes for fascinating material.
Also, for the RPG crowd, there’s a terrific retro OGL/OSR game called Backswords & Bucklers available on Lulu. It’s low-fantasy adventure in the seedier corners of Elizabethan London, with some delightful class design. The basic game is free in PDF and the PDF of the all-but-mandatory Tavern Trawling supplement is a couple bucks.
12) “We’re about 10-15 years from having a machine that’s as smart as anyone in this room.”
Anyone who thinks this does not understand computers. At all. An actual artificial intelligence which is cognizant like a human being, not even on the horizon. Not even a glimmer.
Yeah, AI works in settings for stories, but basically the transhumanists have swapped the Rapture for “strong AI is going to save us”. I don’t think enough is known of how cognition works to be replicated into general AI. Pattern matching, etc, sure, super genius AI, not.
Although the “Amanfrommars1” commentator on TheRegister may be an early sign of emergent AI, unfortunately no-one can understand them.
My favourite Christopher Marlowe book is The Scholars of Night by John M. Ford, which anyone who can dig up a copy is strongly encouraged to read. Honourable mentions go to Howard Waldrop’s story “Heart of Whitenesse” and the movie-within-a-novel in Alan Brennert’s Time and Tide.