Pixel Scroll 7/19/19 Ain’t No Pixel Like The One I Got

(1) NOVEL IDEA: READ THE WORDS. Audible’s new program to run text along side its audiobooks is now in beta testing — “Audible’s Captions Program Stirs Fears, Frustration Among Publishers”. Publishers Weekly posts quotes from those questioning whether Audible has these rights, and if the program violates copyright.

…At least one major publisher, Simon & Schuster, has already deemed the program illegal. In a statement released by a spokesperson, S&S said: “We have informed Audible that we consider its Captions program to be an unauthorized and brazen infringement of the rights of authors and publishers, and a clear violation of our terms of sale. We have therefore insisted that Audible not include in Captions any titles for which Simon & Schuster holds audio or text rights.”

The Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild issued statements that also said Audible’s contracts do not give the company the right to create a text product. “Existing ACX and Audible agreements do not grant Audible the right to create text versions of audiobooks, whether delivered as a full book or in segments,” the Guild statement noted. “The Captions program appears to be outright, willful copyright infringement.”

(2) DOODLE. The July 18 Google Doodle is a 4-minute animation of the Apollo 11 mission narrated by astronaut Michael Collins.

50 years ago, NASA’s Apollo 11 mission changed our world and ideas of what is possible by successfully landing humans on the surface of the moon?—and bringing them home safely?—for the first time in history. Today’s video Doodle celebrates this moment of human achievement by taking us through the journey to the moon and back, narrated by someone with firsthand knowledge of the epic event: former astronaut and Apollo 11 command module pilot Michael Collins.

(3) NOT THE A-TEAM. Too bad Jules Verne isn’t around to cash in on this: “French sci-fi team called on to predict future threats”.

The French army is to create a “red team” of sci-fi writers to imagine possible future threats.

A new report by the Defence Innovation Agency (DIA) said the visionaries will “propose scenarios of disruption” that military strategists may not think of.

The team’s highly confidential work will be important in the fight against “malicious elements”, the report states.

It comes amid efforts by the French to innovate its approaches to defence.

(4) CROWDFUNDING SUCCESS. Paul Winters closed the “Help Gahan Wilson find his way” GoFundMe to further donations, saying they have enough. They raised $63,165.

Thank you to everyone who donated to Gahan’s gofundme. The response was amazing. We have stopped taking donations. We think that we have raised enough to take care of Gahan. Negotiations have begun again with the State and we believe that in a few months time, he could be back on State aid. Gahan is doing well. He retains his sense of humor and he is well cared for with constant support from his family. This is, and continues to be, a hard road. I’m sure there are many of you out there who have gone through this (or, are going through it). Again, Gahan’s family thanks all of you for helping. We will keep the campaign up (without taking more donations) so that we can continue putting up the updates.

(5) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites you to slurp matzoh ball soup with Will Eisner Award-winning writer/editor Mark Evanier as his Eating the Fantastic podcast turns 100.

Evanier started his comic book career way back in 1969, and over the years has written issues of Blackhawk, Groo the Wanderer, DNAgents, and (like me) Welcome Back, Kotter. He worked as Jack Kirby’s production assistant, which eventually resulted in his award-winning book Kirby: King of Comics. He’s won multiple Will Eisner Awards, as well an an Inkpot Award and a Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award.

Our meal took place at Canter’s Delicatessen in Los Angeles, resulting in a sense of terroir greater than any other episode. As you’ll hear, he’s eaten there with both Jack Kirby and Stan Lee over the years — though not together — and he has plenty to say about both of them.

He’s also celebrating this milestone by introducing a new icon, one which better represents what the show’s all about.

By the way, those 100 episodes have featured 165 guests in 173 hours and 19 minutes of ear candy.

(6) OVERCOMING. Mary Robinette Kowal’s space article for the New York Times is now online — “To Make It to the Moon, Women Have to Escape Earth’s Gender Bias”:

If we do not acknowledge the gender bias of the early space program, it becomes difficult to move past it. One of the most compelling things about NASA is its approach to failure. Failure is not penalized in its culture; it is valued for the things that it can teach to save lives or resources in the future. As Bobak Ferdowsi, a systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has said, “our best mistakes are the ones we can learn from.”

What are the lessons to be learned from NASA’s failure to fly women during the Apollo era?

The most recent lesson emerged in April, when NASA had scheduled a spacewalk that was, quite by accident, staffed by two female astronauts. The agency had to restaff the spacewalk because it had only one spacesuit that was the correct size for both women.

This is not an indictment of NASA in 2019. But it does demonstrate a causal chain that begins with the Apollo program and leads through to present-day staffing choices.

And The Daily Caller called attention to the Times essay in “Going To The Moon Is Sexist, Claims NYT Article: Spacesuits Accommodate Male Sweat, Ladder Rungs Spaced For Men”, which also includes some other writers’ tweeted responses —

(7) MOON SUITS. The Washington Post’s feature about astronaut wear,“How To Dress For Space”, is a little less woke:

Explore five iconic spacesuits in 3-D and more than 50 years of spaceflight in a dialogue between The Washington Post’s space industry reporter Christian Davenport and fashion critic Robin Givhan.

…Christian: Unlike mission patches for other flights, the Apollo 11 patch did not have the names of the crew members. Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins felt their names should be left out because the flight represented all of humankind and the 400,000 people involved in the Apollo program.

…Robin: I love that there was so much attention paid to the idea that we are doing this for peace, for exploration and for scientific discovery. Despite how big and potentially intimidating this suit could be, it is not, it looks like a happy uniform. And the patches are so Boy Scout.

(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • July 19, 1972The Thing With Two Heads starring Rosie Greer and Ray Milland stalked into theaters.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born July 19, 1883 Max Fleischer. Animator, film director and producer. He brought such animated characters as Betty Boop, Popeye and Superman to the screen and was responsible for a number of technological innovations including the Rotoscope and Stereoptical Processes. (Died 1972.)
  • Born July 19, 1927 Richard E. Geis. I’m reasonably sure I met him at least once when I was living out there. Interesting person.  He won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer twice; and whose science fiction fanzine Science Fiction Review won Hugo Awards for Best Fanzine four times. His The Alien Critic won the Best Fanzine Hugo once in a tie with Algol), and once in sole first place. And yes, I enjoyed reading the Science Fiction Review. I’ve not any of his handful of genre novels, and certainly haven’t encountered his soft core porn of which there’s a lot. (Died 2013.)
  • Born July 19, 1937 Richard Jordan. Actor who was in Dune as Duncan Idaho, Logan’s Run as Francis, and the Queen of Air and Darkness help him, Solarbabies as Grock. He also the lead in Raise the Titanic as Dirk Pitt, a perfectly awful film as well. Not to mention he was Col. Taylor In Timebomb, a film that got a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 33%.  (Died 1993.)
  • Born July 19, 1947 Colin Duriez, 72. Yes, an academic, this time devoted to Lewis and Tolkien. Author of such works as  J. R. R. Tolkien: The Making of a Legend,  The C. S. Lewis Chronicles: The Indispensable Biography of the Creator of Narnia Full of Little-Known Facts, Events and Miscellany and, errr, Field Guide to Harry Potter. Well money is nice, isn’t it? 
  • Born July 19, 1950 Richard Pini, 69. Husband of husband-and-wife team responsible for creating the well-known Elfquest series. I’d say more but there’s nought information to be had on him.
  • Born July 19, 1957 John Pelan, 62. Committed (more or less) the act of opening serial small publishing houses in succession with the first being Axolotl Press in the mid-Eighties where he published the likes of de Lint and Powers (before selling it to Pulphouse Publishing) followed by Darkside Press, Silver Salamander Press and finally co-founding Midnight House. All have been inactive for quite awhile now and he’s been editing such anthologies as Tales of Terror and Torment: Stories from the Pulps, Volume 1 for other presses though even that has happened for some years. 
  • Born July 19, 1963 Garth Richard Nix, 56. Writer of children’s and young adult fantasy novels, to wit the Keys to the KingdomOld Kingdom, and Seventh Tower series. The Ragwitch which I read quite some time ago is quite excellent and being a one-off can give you a good taste of him without committing to a series.
  • Born July 19, 1969 Kelly Link, 50. First, let me note that along with Ellen Datlow, she and her husband Gavin Grant were responsible for the last five volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. They all did a magnificent job. All of collections, Pretty MonstersMagic for Beginners and Get in Trouble are astonishingly good. And she’s much honoured having won a Hugo Award, three Nebula Awards, a World Fantasy Award and received a MacArthur Genius Grant.
  • Born July 19, 1976 Benedict Cumberbatch, 43. Confession time: I really didn’t care for him in the Sherlock Holmes series, nor did I think his Khan In Star Trek Into Darkness was all that interesting but his Stephen Strange In Doctor Strange was excellent. He did do an superb job of voicing Smaug inThe Hobbit and his Grinch voicing in that film was also superb. I understand he’s the voice of Satan in Good Omens…

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Free Range reveals the head of the alien invasion force.

(11) ONE SMALL STAMP FOR… First publicized in March — “U.S. Postal Service Unveils 1969: First Moon Landing Forever Stamps” – the stamps are on sale today.

 In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing on July 20, 1969, the U.S. Postal Service is pleased to reveal two stamp designs commemorating that historic milestone. Additional details are coming about the date, time and location for the first-day-of issue ceremony.

One stamp features a photograph of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin in his spacesuit on the surface of the moon. The image was taken by astronaut Neil Armstrong. The other stamp, a photograph of the moon taken in 2010 by Gregory H. Revera of Huntsville, AL, shows the landing site of the lunar module in the Sea of Tranquility. The site is indicated on the stamp by a dot. The selvage includes an image of the lunar module.

(12) ROBOTECH REBOOT. Titan Comics announced at SDCC 2019 plans to publish Robotech Remix #1 – a radical reimagining of the sf mecha anime classic.

A new Robotech saga starts now! Robotech is reborn from the ashes of Event Horizon! New writer Brenden Fletcher (Motorcrush, Isola) and artist Elmer Damaso (Robotech/Voltron, Marvel Mangaverse) boot up Robotech: Remix, an all-new series that will take beloved characters and iconic mecha to places fans have never seen before

First airing in the USA in 1985, Robotech was the gateway to anime for many fans – capturing their imagination with its epic generational storyline involving war, romance, and, of course, the transforming Veritech fighters that defend the Earth against extra-terrestrial attacks.
 
Produced by Harmony Gold USA, the original 85-episode series delved into humanity’s struggle against a series of alien invasions, from the gigantic Zentraedi to the mysterious Invid, battling for control of advanced alien technology that crash-landed on Earth.

Robotech Remix #1 hits stores on October 9, 2019.

(13) SLIM PICKINGS. Galactic Journey reviews all the sff books published in June/July 1964 – which apparently is a grand total of four? “[July 18, 1964] Dog Day Crop (July’s Galactoscope)”

Thank you for joining this month’s edition of Galactoscope, where we plow through all the books that came out this most recent month of June/July 1964! Don’t thank us; it’s all part of the job…

Times Two

Time Travel has been a staple of the genre since before the genre had been formalized. H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine is still a classic, and it was written last century. In the Journey’s short tenure, we have encountered at least a dozen tales involving chronological trips, with notable books including John Brunner’s Times without Number and Wallace West’s River of Time, not to mention the stand-out tales, All you Zombies!, by Robert Heinlein (and his less stand-out tale, By His Bootstraps) and The Deaths of Ben Baxter, by Robert Sheckley.

This month, we have two variations on the theme, both invoking time in their title:

Time Tunnel, by Murray Leinster

(14) BIRD IS THE WORD. Once upon a time there was a sweet-tempered goose – no wonder the rest of them are so ornery. Atlas Obscura revisits “The Goose Who Wore Nikes, and the Mystery of Who Murdered Him” (a 2016 post).

… A few days before that fateful day in 1988, he had been visiting his sister-in-law’s farm when he saw something that got his heartstrings tugging and his wheels turning: a two-year-old goose who had been born with no feet, struggling to follow his fellow geese across a gravel road.

“Because I’m a Shriner,” Gene later told People magazine, “my natural instinct was to help him.” First, he tried making a fowl-sized skateboard, figuring the goose the could push along with one stump while balancing on the other, but no dice. The goose was patient, though, and Gene soon hit on a solution: a pair of patent leather baby shoes, size 0 and stuffed with foam rubber. By the time Jessica got home from school, the goose was running pell-mell around the yard, tugging at the other end of the leash. Soon, they were calling him Andy.

… Twelve-year-old Jessica may have been over Andy, but Gene’s friend at the Hastings Tribune, Gary Johansson, saw the goose’s potential. He wrote up a few lines, and almost overnight, Andy went 1980s-viral. “We had newspapers from all over the world contacting us and wanting to do stories,” says Jessica. He got on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where he shared billing with Isabella Rossellini and Martin Short. Reader’s Digest did a profile, and People splurged on a photo spread. When Nike learned that Andy preferred their brand of baby shoes, they sent him a crate, making him almost certainly the first goose to get a major sponsorship deal.

…But it couldn’t last. On October 19, 1991, Gene and Nadine got the kind of phone call every goose owner dreads. “Is Andy OK?” asked an anxious voice on the other end. A couple of Hastings residents had been out metal detecting in a local park, and had found a dead goose sporting telltale sneakers. The Flemings rushed out to the hutch. There were fresh footprints in the dirt, much bigger than size 0. Andy and his mate Paulie were nowhere to be found…

(15) THEY’RE EVERYWHERE. Let us pause in celebrating the moon landing to consider: “Flat Earth: How did YouTube help spread a conspiracy theory?” Video — and not a piece of tinfoil in sight!

All around the world, there are conspiracy theorists who believe the Earth is flat. And their community seems to be growing, judging by attendance at flat Earth conferences and events.

Flat Earthers say YouTube was key in helping them spread their message. One researcher found that of attendees at a flat Earth conference, nearly all said they first came to the idea through the video-sharing platform.

The Google-owned company says it’s taking action to prevent conspiracy videos from reaching large numbers of people.

So how – and why – did YouTube enable the flat Earth community to grow?

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Hampus Eckerman, Daniel Dern, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Terry Hunt, Scott Edelman, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Robert Whitaker Sirignano.]

57 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 7/19/19 Ain’t No Pixel Like The One I Got

  1. @Hampus Eckerman — you hadn’t started English at age 10? The story in the US used to be that European children were started on languages early enough that learning was easy, rather than waiting until age ~14 for serious work; I remember my sister (age 8) was expected to use only French after about a month in a Swiss school. Did Swedish schools start with other foreign languages, or were they less JohnStuartMill-ish?

  2. @Cora Buhlert

    my parents had taken me to the space museum in Huntsville, Alabama, a few years before and there we’d not ony seen rockets, moon rockets, a replica of the Eagle and the moon rover, etc.., but also a full size space shuttle (not sure which one – according to Wikipedia Huntville only has a mock-up these days) behind glass.

    I’ve lived in Huntsville since 1982, and my wife works for NASA (since 1987). There has never been a “real” shuttle on display at the museum. The Pathfinder mockup has been on display there since 1988, and has some flight-worthy parts.

    What you may be thinking of is Enterprise, which was an engineering test vehicle used for aerodynamic and other Earth-bound tests. It was flown into Marshall SFC (the NASA installation immediately south of the museum) in 1978 and tests were conducted on it for about a year.

    Admission to the museum can be upgraded to include a bus tour of NASA facilities (engine test stands, neutral buoyancy facility, etc.), and I would bet that when the Enterprise was in town, the tour included at least a drive-by of it.

  3. @bill
    Thanks for the info. I visited Huntville in 1978, so it probably was the Enterprise. I remember that it was in some kind of hangar and that we could see it through big windows. To five-year-old me, it was very big and very impressive.

    @Chip Hitchcock
    I don’t know how things were/are in Sweden, but when I went to school in the 1980s, starting English in 5th grade, i.e. at age 10, was standard. You’d then start a second language, Latin in my case, in 7th grade and occasionally a third, Spanish in my case, in ninth grade.

    Back then the prevalent wisdom was that one shouldn’t introduce a second language until the children had fully mastered the first. Teachers also didn’t like billingual kids, since it was believed they’d confuse the different languages. I already spoke English when I started school, because I’d lived in the US, but that was not welcome and the teachers told my parents they should speak to me in English or give me English books and the like. Luckily, my parents ignored them.

  4. Clip Hitchcock:

    “you hadn’t started English at age 10? “

    We started to learn English in third grade, so I of course had a few years of learning behind me, but I didn’t start to read english books more regularly until I was 13-14. So at that time, I mostly read the title and the descriptions by the pictures.

    Three years of English really isn’t good enough for learning scientific terms.

  5. I didn’t exist for Apollo 11, and wasn’t sapient yet for Apollo 17. I do remember watching coverage of Apollo-Soyuz, and I was already a space nut by then.

  6. (14) I lived in Hastings during the years of Andy the Goose and he was one of our most popular celebrities. He made appearances at the county fair and at various community events. Andy’s Café was a restaurant named after him and featured his picture on their sign. There was much grieving and anger around town when he was murdered.

Comments are closed.