(1) DUBLIN 2019 WRITING WORKSHOP. To be led by GoH Diane Duane.
(2) IN THE BEGINNING. Here’s part two of Anne-Louise Fortune’s video series Worldcon 101 – Dublin 2019.
(3) MAD NO MORE. ComicBook.com originally reported “MAD Magazine to Cease Publication”:
MAD Magazine will cease publication later this year, according to reports. Blogger Jedidiah Leland reportedly discovered the news after a MAD editor confessed to the magazine’s doom in a Facebook group, and shortly thereafter, cartoonist Ruben Bolling seemed to confirm the report on Twitter….
But as it turned out, MAD – unlike the Wicked Witch of the West — is not really and completely dead: “Details Surface About Plans for MAD Magazine’s Future”:
MAD magazine will not be completely closing down, as previously reported — although most of its new content will cease, and availability for the iconic humor magazine will be reduced. Earlier tonight, the news broke that MAD was set to cease publication after two more issues of new content, with the magazine using archival content to fulfill its obligation to existing subscribers. This is a little true, and a little not, and ComicBook.com has heard from a source with knowledge of the situation who clarified what is going on.
MAD will be leaving the newsstand after issue #9, which will land on newsstands in early August with all-new content. MAD #10 will also contain new content, but will be available only via direct market comic book retailers and subscriptions. Rather than closing up shop, the plan at present is to continue publishing issues that will feature reprinted classic MAD pieces, wrapped with new covers art. Further, MAD will continue to publish its end of year specials, as well as books and special collections, capitalizing on the value of the MAD brand in spite of the loss of new content in the magazine
(4) FRIGHTENING FLICK. NPR’s Justin Chang reports that “‘Midsommar’ Shines: A Solstice Nightmare Unfolds In Broad Daylight”:
In the viscerally unnerving films of Ari Aster, there’s nothing more horrific than the reality of human grief. His haunted-house thriller, Hereditary, followed a family rocked by traumas so devastating that the eventual scenes of devil-worshipping naked boogeymen almost came as a relief. Aster’s new movie, Midsommar, doesn’t pack quite as terrifying a knockout punch, but it casts its own weirdly hypnotic spell. This is a slow-burning and deeply absorbing piece of filmmaking, full of strikingly beautiful images and driven less by shocks than ideas. It’s not interested in frightening you so much as seeping into your nervous system.
And like Hereditary, Midsommar is very much rooted in loss. It begins with a young American woman named Dani, played by the great English actress Florence Pugh, panicking over a family emergency that moves swiftly toward its worst possible outcome. As she tries to pick up the broken pieces of her life, Dani seeks solace from her boyfriend, Christian, and is surprised to learn that he’s about to go on a trip with some of his grad-school buddies. They’re headed to a remote Swedish commune that is holding a nine-day festival to observe the summer solstice. Dani presses him about why he didn’t tell her earlier, and an argument ensues.
They fly to Sweden and, after a few hours’ drive, arrive at a remote, centuries-old village where they are greeted by about 60 men and women wearing white robes embroidered with mysterious symbols. They are known as the Hårga, and they invite their American guests to participate in each day’s festivities, which include lavish feasts, silent meditations, exhausting maypole dances and the consumption of various mind-altering drugs. Aster has a gift for dreaming up fictitious subcultures, and he visualizes these ancient customs and artifacts with an almost anthropological attention to detail. The Hårga seem benevolent enough at first, and there’s something comforting about their strange rituals and their intimate communion with nature.
(5) MORE TOOLS FOR FINDING GOOD SFF. Rocket Stack Rank, says Eric Wong in “New Recommenders and Improved Scoring” “has added 10 more recommenders, improved how story scores are calculated from 13 awards, 12 ‘year’s best’ anthologies, and 11 prolific reviewers, and updated the Best SF/F lists for 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 YTD.”
(6) ASTRONOMY HISTORY, The Atlas Obscura Society can get you in to see “The Second Largest Public Telescope in the World” on July 6 and 7. It’s on Mount Wilson near Los Angeles. See schedule and details at the link. (Note: Observatory is not ADA compliant,.)
Collecting ancient light in a 60-inch mirror, the Hale Telescope reflects images in your eye of beautiful objects, some that lie millions of light years away from Earth.
Join Atlas Obscura for an exclusive evening of observation with Mount Wilson Observatory’s historic 60-inch telescope. Assisted by a telescope operator and a session director, you will investigate objects in the night sky and get up close and personal with our solar system. Depending on the evening’s weather conditions, you could get a glimpse of faraway planets, a staggeringly close-up look at the moon, or star clusters looming over Mount Wilson, where the seed of the idea for this groundbreaking scientific invention was planted.
In 1903, astrophysicist George Ellery Hale went hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains. Resting at the summit of Mount Wilson, he gazed at his surroundings and realized he had found the perfect place to build an observatory. Five years later, at the very same spot, he unveiled the world’s largest operational telescope, a 60-inch reflector that attracted preeminent scientists such as Albert Einstein and Edwin Hubble. In fact, it was with this telescope that Harlow Shapley discovered that the Sun’s position was not the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. It now operates as the second largest telescope made exclusively for the public.
(7) MOTION IN LIBRARY. NPR’s Bethanne Patrick finds “In ‘The Ghost Clause,’ 2 Marriages, A Missing Child, And Yes, A Ghost”.
Howard Norman writes elegant prose — but really, that’s because everything about Howard Norman is elegant. The Vermont-based novelist and scholar of Native American lore sprinkles his fiction with all the things that interest him, from literary to culinary to planetary. Like many of Norman’s previous books, The Ghost Clause pays attention to Japanese poetry, binge-reading Trollope, what makes an intimate supper (mushroom omelets, salad, cherry pie with ice cream), and varieties of Northeast Kingdom moths.
The denizens of Adamant, Vt. — was there ever a better place name? — have a lot going on, even if by “a lot going on” one simply means making sure to leave time to have your cranberry scone toasted at the local café presided over by grumpy Vanessa. The first two people we meet are newly minted PhD Muriel Streuth and her husband Zach, a private investigator at the Green Mountain Agency. They’ve bought an old house with a library room, and their modern security system keeps picking up “Motion in Library.”
Investigations into the unknown motion-detector blips don’t reveal much. Fortunately for readers, our narrator soon reveals all (and this is not a spoiler): He is novelist Simon Inescort, whose widow, painter Lorca Pell, sold the house to Muriel and Zach after Simon’s untimely death by heart attack on the ferry from Maine to Canada. He also informs us of the title’s meaning, which refers to a perhaps-apocryphal Vermont statute whereby if new owners of a building discover it is inhabited by a “malevolent presence,” the sale can be nullified.
(8) CASTING FOR MERMAIDS. Here’s who they caught: “Halle Bailey: Disney announces singer to play Little Mermaid”.
Disney has cast singer Halle Bailey in the starring role of Ariel in a live action remake of The Little Mermaid.
“Halle possesses a rare combination of spirit, heart, youth, innocence and substance, plus a glorious singing voice,” director Rob Marshall said.
Halle, 19, half of R&B sister duo Chloe x Halle, “said it was a “dream come true”.
The film, which will start shooting in 2020, will feature new songs written by Hamilton creator Lin Manuel Miranda.
(9) IN A HOLE IN THE GROUND. In 2015, Westword published an article about a community spawned from the Shaver Mystery: “Maurice Doreal and His Brotherhood of the White Temple Awaited the Apocalypse in Colorado”.
… The American science-fiction community was still in an uproar over the Shaver Mystery, “The Most Sensational True Story Ever Told,” according to Amazing Stories magazine, a publication whose circulation had skyrocketed after it published “I Remember Lemuria!,” a fantastic story purporting to be a memoir of the extraordinary subterranean-world encounters of writer/artist Richard Sharpe Shaver, in 1945.
…One of those letters, published in the October 1946 issue of Amazing Stories, came from Dr. Maurice Doreal, the Denver-based “Supreme Voice” for the Ascended Masters, super-evolved human beings who live below Tibet. Doreal had recently announced that he was moving his Brotherhood of the White Temple from central Denver to rural Colorado to wait out the coming nuclear holocaust. “Like Mr. Shaver, I have had personal contact with the Dero and even visited their underground caverns,” he now wrote. “In the outer world they are represented by an organization known loosely as ‘the Black Brotherhood,’ whose purpose is the destruction of the good principle in man…. The underground cities and caverns are, in the most part, protected by space warps, a science known to the ancients, but only touched on by modern science…. I note that many are wanting to enter these caves. For one who has not developed a protective screen this would be suicide and one who revealed their location would be a murderer….”
(10) TODAY IN HISTORY.
- July 4, 1865 — Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born July 4, 1883 — Rube Goldberg. Not genre, but certainly genre adjacent. Born Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg, he was a sculptor, author, cartoonist, engineer, and inventor who’s certainly best known for his very popular cartoons showing overly complex machines doing simple tasks in a terribly convoluted manner, hence the phrase “Rube Goldberg machines”. The X-Files episode titled “The Goldberg Variation” involved an apartment rigged as a Goldberg machine. (Died 1970)
- Born July 4, 1901 — Guy Endore. Writer of The Werewolf of Paris which is said by Stableford in the St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers as “entitled to be considered the werewolf novel”. He also wrote “The Day of the Dragon” which Stableford likes as well. He was a scriptwriter hence for writing Mark of the Vampire starring Bela Lugosi. He also the treatment for The Raven but never got credited. (Died 1970.)
- Born July 4, 1910 — Gloria Stuart. She was cast as Flora Cranley opposite Claude Rains in The Invisible Man in 1933, and 68 years later she played Madeline Fawkes in The Invisible Man series. She was in The Old Dark House as Margaret Waverton which is considered horror largely because Boris Karloff was in it. And she was in the time travelling The Two Worlds of Jennie Logan as well. (Died 2010.)
- Born July 4, 1949 — Peter Crowther, 70. He is the founder (with Simon Conway) of PS Publishing where he’s editor now. He edited a series of genre anthologies that DAW published. And he’s written a number of horror novels of which I’d say After Happily Ever and By Wizard Oak are good introductions to him. He’s also done a lot of short fiction but I see he’s not really available in digital form all that much for short fiction or novels.
- Born July 4, 1967 — Christopher McKitterick, 52. Director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, a program at the University of Kansas that supports an annual series of awards, lectures, classes, workshops, the Campbell Conference, and AboutSF, a resource for teachers and readers of science fiction. He’s also a juror for and Chair of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel from 2002 onward. And yes, he does write genre fiction with one novel to date, Transcendence, more than a double handful of stories, and being an academic, critical essays such as “John W. Campbell: The Man Who Invented Modern Fantasy and the Golden Age of Science Fiction” which was published in Steven H. Silver Hugo-nominated Argentus.
- Born July 4, 1977 — David Petersen, 42. Writer and illustrator of the brilliant Mouse Guard series. If you haven’t read it, do so — it’s that good. It almost got developed as a film but got axed due to corporate politics. IDW published The Wind in The Willows with over sixty of his illustrations several years back.
- Born July 4, 1989 — Emily Coutts, 30. She plays the role of helmsman Keyla Detmer on Discovery. She’s also her mirror universe counterpart, who is the first officer of that universe’s Shenzhou. (I like the series and am definitely looking forward to it when it jumps a thousand years into the future next season!) She was in one episode of the SF series Dark Matter and in Crimson Peak, a horror film but that’s it for genre appearances.
(12) COMICS SECTION.
- A court judge and Frankenstein help Bizarro live up to its name today.
(13) SANDMAN TO TV. Deadline reports: “Netflix Orders ‘The Sandman’ Series Based On Neil Gaiman’s DC Comic”.
Netflix has given an 11-episode series order to The Sandman, based on Neil Gaiman’s DC comic, from Warner Bros TV.
Allan Heinberg (Wonder Woman, Grey’s Anatomy) is slated to write and serve as showrunner on the series, with Gaiman executive producing alongside David Goyer.
(14) THE ITALIAN SFF SCENE. The subject is Italian Science Fiction when Arielle Saiber is interviewed by Lex Berman for the Diamond Bay Radio podcast.
Lex Berman is the publisher of Diamond Bay Press.
Arielle Saiber is a professor of Italian literature and romance languages, and also a big science fiction fan!
Recorded with Zencaster on 8th May, 2019.
Find out about the history of Science Fiction and fandom in Italy, and why flying saucers would totally land at Lucca!
(15) VOX DAY AT THE MOVIES. “I look forward to the shrieks and wails,” writes aspiring moviemaker Vox Day. The Rebel’s Run Teaser Trailer has dropped, publicizing that a movie based on one of Arkhaven’s Alt-Hero characters, is now in pre-production. A one-minute trailer is followed by Chuck Dixon extolling the comics, and even a shot of Vox smiling happily. So if any of that is the kind of thing you need a warning about, you won’t click.
(16) LIPLESS READING. Extra Credits devotes a video to Harlan Ellison’s story and game in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream – The End of the Apocalypse.
Harlan Ellison was a little dismissive of this short story that you’ve might only heard of because you saw it on a Steam summer sale, but at the time of its publication (1967) its ideas about the possibility of “evil AI,” as well as the possible degeneracy of humanity, were shocking and unexpected, and it set the stage for the wave of sci-fi we’ll talk about next season.
(17) WHAT’S BUZZING? Nature has a nice artist’s impression and short description of the drone proposed for use on Saturn’s moon, Titan — “NASA drone to soar across Titan”.
Named Dragonfly, the US$850-million mission will launch in 2026 and arrive at Titan in mid-2034. The nuclear-powered drone (pictured, artist’s impression) could traverse hundreds of kilometres during its two-year mission.
(18) IDENTIFYING PROS IN THE WILD. Orbit Books tweeted an amusing guide for telling two of its similarly-named writers apart.
(19) HARD WORK. Last Week Tonight With John Oliver ripped Amazon’s treatment of warehouse employees, now Amazon is trying to recover – Deadline has the story: “Amazon Calls John Oliver’s Report On Warehouse Work Conditions ‘Insulting’ To Employees”.
Amazon is calling John Oliver’s depiction of conditions at the company’s shipping and warehouse facilities “insulting” to Amazon workers.
Dave Clark, Amazon’s SVP Worldwide Operations, responded to a harsh segment that aired Sunday on HBO’s Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. In the 20-minute segment, Amazon — as well as other companies with quick online-delivery systems — was lambasted for the exhausting chores required of the warehouse workers.
“The injury and illness rate in the warehouse industry is higher than coal mining, construction and logging,” Oliver said during the HBO show, in which he called Amazon the “Michael Jackson” of shipping because they’re “the best at what they do, everybody tries to imitate them, and nobody who learns a third thing about them is happy they did.”
(20) CHARACTERS WITH AGENCY. TV Sins wants you to know “Everything Wrong With Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ‘Pilot’”
This week we head into the MTU by finding everything wrong with the pilot of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.! It’s was a show with a lot of promise, and also a lot of sins.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, JJ, Eric Wong, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Carl Slaughter, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, mlex, Chip Hitchcock, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories, Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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“CHARACTERS WITH AGENCY” is an unnumbered item – number 20? (I watched this Everything Wrong last night – good stuff).
First!
(15) VOX DAY AT THE MOVIES
Errr, I just went over to the production company whose logo he’s using. There’s no sign anywhere there that they’ve got anything to do with this film. And I seriously doubt he could afford their services as they’re definitely a costly affair.
First. Maybe. Possibly. Could be. Well not I see.
The British equivalent of Rube Goldberg was Heath Robinson, whose “inventions” were as absurd as Rube’s.
16) LIPLESS READING. Rotsler is credited as the source of the title of that story. It was adopted, with permission, from a caption of his cartoon of a rag doll with no mouth.
Cartoonist Tom Richmond gives an insider’s view of the end of MAD:
https://www.tomrichmond.com/the-end-of-the-madness/04/07/2019/?fbclid=IwAR0sroFapxxUNbPBxkufJugzAkCGFi3H1A0YjUJcwXFNalwbi8cmnjEbIBw
@11: Back to the Future had a Rube Goldberg machine that might actually work; IIRC they also show up in some “Wallace and Gromit”, although there I suppose they ought to be called Heath Robinson machines.
@19: “insulting”? I suppose that’s less of a lie than some other words he could have used.
Chip Hitchcock says Back to the Future had a Rube Goldberg machine that might actually work; IIRC they also show up in some “Wallace and Gromit”, although there I suppose they ought to be called Heath Robinson machines.
Though I didn’t include it, I came up with a list that included MacGyver, Looney Tunes, Wallace and Gromit, Edward Scissorhands, Back to the Future, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Goonies, Gremlins, the Saw film series, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Cat from Outer Space based on references to Goldberg online.
(11) Er…either Emily Coutts was actually born in 1979 or you’re trying to age her up before her time.
I Have No Ticktockman, And I Must Repent
Mythbusters had a working Rube Goldberg machine.
Our Pixels manned the air. They ran the Scrolls and took over the airports.
We hold these Pixels to be Self Scrolling. That all Filers are created equal.
File, Pixelty and the pursuit of Scrolliness
We Have Always Had Fun Storming This Castle
11) I’d only heard of Mouse Guard recently. An ex colleague posted this link explaining how the sizzle reel was developed in Unreal:
https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/wes-ball-on-mouse-guard-avatar-with-medieval-mice
@Cat Eldridge: Sadly Rebel’s Run is the first news item on Galatia Films’ blog and the only listing I can even find for Viral Films Media is some sort of DIY GoFundMe page for what will most likely be the absolute worst superhero film ever, if it gets beyond pre-production. Did I miss some other company/logo in the trailer?
KasaObake says Sadly Rebel’s Run is the first news item on Galatia Films’ blog and the only listing I can even find for Viral Films Media is some sort of DIY GoFundMe page for what will most likely be the absolute worst superhero film ever, if it gets beyond pre-production. Did I miss some other company/logo in the trailer?
Link please to their blog as I can’t find that.
(19) I don’t watch John Oliver regularly, but maybe I should. The Amazon video here was very well done.
I’m a little confused about Galatia Films provenance anyway. Their website looks very shiny and credible, but looking them up on IMDB shows only 7 items, none of which you;d switch channel to see, let alone pay money to see in a cinema.
@ Cat
https://www.galatiafilms.com/blog/
@ Cat: https://www.galatiafilms.com/2019/07/01/galatia-and-viral-films-media-to-produce-new-superhero-movie/
Appears I was ninja’d by nickpheas there! And to respond to nickpheas I poked around their site a little as well. Their “meet the team” page has social media buttons that link to a generic /# url on their site, so none of their links are actually working. I find it weird they only use first names in their bios as well.
I’m 99% certain they’re fellow travellers of Ted’s and this (as well as VFM) are likely fronts for Ted and his crew, but nevertheless I shot them an email from their Contact Us page to let them know the calibre of man they’re jumping into bed with. Just in case they’re actually oblivious.
Well I looked up their hosting and they’re hosted by VIEWDIGITALMEDIA.COM which has a website that’s strictly a place holder. I found their Facebook page which indicated that they’re really a local podunk media group that creates commercials for local businesses and organisations. They’ve certainly never undertaken anything on this scale. I think both companies are the same people under different names.
Is that Galatia or VFM?
Currently reading The Very Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan and jeez is it good. She deserves a lot more public recognition, given that she’s won a fair share of awards.
I assume Viral Films Media is just an oh-so-witty reference to the Vile Faceless Minions?
Anyway, let’s give credit where it’s due. VD has barely had time to rest after crushing Amazon, Tor, Wikipedia, Marvel and Youtube and he’s already at it again.
The SEC filing for VFM is enlightening. Chortling is expected.
Rube Golderg did strip titled BOBO BAXTER which was about a man who invents an aerial bicycle. I guess it counts.
Come on Martin, “who’s on first”?
Re: Mouse Guard. I’ve played the RPG, which is a lot of fun. A bit crunchy but it is built on a complex system (Burning Wheel) so that’s not a surprise.
Also from Rube Goldberg was a comic strip titled Lala Palooza. So there’s that creation (from 1937).
Paul Weimer says Re: Mouse Guard. I’ve played the RPG, which is a lot of fun. A bit crunchy but it is built on a complex system (Burning Wheel) so that’s not a surprise.
Quite some years back, I bought Mouse Guard action figures. Dark Horse I think was the company that made them. Though accurate, they were way too fragile and their legs wouldn’t carry their weight. Pity.
For a while there my elder son was obsessed with marble trick videos and domino videos, many of which which are Rube Goldbergs in miniature. My favourites are by Kaplamino, who lately has been taking advantage of a smaller working space to build table-top runs he can film in one take so they’re truly Goldbergesque. (A lot of the trick videos are screenlinks, ie film one set of tricks with the marble rolling offscreen, then another set the marble rolls into, so they can be done in separate sets.) Hevesh 5 has some good ones too, but she focuses mostly on giant domino builds which are less Goldberg and more just “Watch everything collapse”.
This led us to some weird examples of proper using random objects Goldberg machines.
For other Goldberg machines, there’s an OKGo video that’s a giant one, and one by 2dphotography that, while no doubt an ad of sorts, it pretty clever.
@Lenora Rose: Here’s a link to the OkGo video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w
The Walking Dead issue 193 is worthy of a Hugo nomination next year. It is a conclusion to the comic sprung entirely by surprise on the readership. To keep it under wraps, they solicited fake issues 194, 195 and 196 and made issue 193 a giant-sized finale at the regular price. Orders for those fake issues have been refunded.
Without spoiling the content, it’s a time jump that is intriguingly ambiguous about the proper lesson to take from the zombie apocalypse. I often find Robert Kirkman’s writing to be heavy on obvious dialogue that could go unsaid, but the story he’s told in 193 is effective. There’s one particular moment between two sons that will stick with me for a while. The art is exceptional, including some multi-page spreads that are as good as anything Charlie Adlard has ever done.
Kirkman ends the comic with a multi-page essay explaining the decision to end the story and the reason he did it so abruptly without the marketing hype and massive orders that would’ve come from announcing it many issues in advance. (The short answer is that he hates knowing when the end of a book, movie or TV series is coming because it lessens the impact.)
In the essay he concludes by thanking a lot of people. Surprisingly, one of them is original series artist Tony Moore, who was engaged in a seven-year legal battle with Kirkman involving the rights to the comic before they reached a confidential settlement in 2012.
@Cat Eldridge: what is particularly notable about the filing? The many zeroes in the financial summary seem plausible for a this-year startup; the big public offerings I’ve seen usually have years of business behind them (so the lines would normally be populated), but they’re also raising much more money — ISTM that this group is going straight to its public (which the Puppy ballot-stuffing makes clear exists) instead of trying to persuade mainline-conservative VC firms to put up the cash.
@KasaObake: I shot them an email from their Contact Us page to let them know the calibre of man they’re jumping into bed with. Just in case they’re actually oblivious. Helpful; back when NESFA bought its clubhouse, we found that the space next door was being rented to Scientologists, and the landlord had no idea what … caliber … of people he’d rented to.
@Lenora Rose: re Rube Goldberg videos, do you remember the Honda SUV commercial? (Skip to ~3 minutes into this video for outtakes and some bits about how it was made.)
(19) I have actually worked in an Amazon warehouse, albeit only for three days as part of a program required of all Amazon managers. From what I remember, the only real danger in the warehouse was being run over by a forklift if you didn’t look both ways before crossing into the main warehouse. (I never got to run the forklift–probably a good thing.)
The video deliberately tries to obscure the difference between conditions in warehouses in general (which don’t have A/C and really do involve heavy physical labor) and Amazon Fulfillment Centers, where very few workers ever pick up anything heavier than a can or two of dog food. As to the the amount of walking, a comfortable pace for a healthy adult is 3 to 4 miles per hour, so even if we believe the 17-miles-per-day figure quoted in the video, it’s not actually onerous.
I think the problem here is that although Amazon warehouse jobs are among the very best warehouse jobs (something the host actually admits at one point) they’re also the very worst high-tech jobs.
Greg, I’ve walked 10 miles in a day more than once, and afterward my knees and legs hurt. I was young and healthy then, too. 17 miles requires conditioning. (Do you remember the 20-mile hikes of the 60s? Those were all-day hikes. Average walking speed for most people is about TWO miles an hour.)
@P J Evans
Yep, you’d definitely have to work up to it. And I’m skeptical of the 17-mile-a-day number. Just doing some quick searches, I see unhappy ex-employees claiming they had to walk anywhere from 11 to 30(!) miles per day. The 11-mile-a-day guy used a pedometer, so I’m more inclined to believe him.
Here’s a site where people rate the “picker” job (it’s the most stressful one). It definitely seems that some people are just not physically up to doing this job, but there are plenty of people who are and even enjoy it.
My son reports that he noticed a few things working in an Amazon Warehouse. The cameras are everywhere. If a person steals something. It is noticed. But the person is not dismissed until repeated theft reaches a certain cash value and when it hits felony level, action is taken. The worker gets fired and turned over to the police.
@Robert Whitaker Sirignano
Yeah, theft is a big concern. It’s the only place I’ve ever been when you had to pass through a metal detector to get out but not in.
I was surprised at first that you can get fired for eating damaged food products. When you find a damaged product, you send it off to a discard pile, but people get fired from eating food from the pile. It turns out that if they don’t forbid this, people will break things on purpose so they can eat them.
They also have special restrictions on small things with high value, like jewelry. Those are isolated from the main warehouse. I wondered if they made the people in that section work in bathing suits or something. 🙂
The SEC filing makes it clear, I think, that this is a very speculative offering, with a lack of voting rights, subordination to the class A stock, high likelihood of further dilution, strictly limited ability to resell, explicit conflicts of interests among the principals, and a CFO whose prior experience is in cybersecurity, not finance. In other words, invest if you want to see the possibility of direct-to-internet video of the comic, and dream of more, not if you particularly need a monetary return.
And about the Amazon Warehouse; I always figure three miles an hour walking, but yes, it takes conditioning to be able to do this for hours on end.
The VFM section of the SEC filing looked more like a sales pitch than anything else, complete with images and loaded words.
P J Evans says The VFM section of the SEC filing looked more like a sales pitch than anything else, complete with images and loaded words.
It really simply says give us a million dollars and we’ll give you a crappy animated film that’ll lose tons of money. Look its hard to make money off animated films without major studio backing and a product that’s got major name recognition. All their crapping about forging a new path is actually a lie as they constantly referring to the Major Projects that principals have been involved in.
They say it will be a live-action film, not an animated film. I suppose if things go really badly they may end up with semi-animated storyboards, but it looks like their plan is live actors with computerized SFX.
David Shallcross says They say it will be a live-action film, not an animated film. I suppose if things go really badly they may end up with semi-animated storyboards, but it looks like their plan is live actors with computerized SFX.
My bad. Thanks for catching that. Still expect it to bomb if it ever actually gets made though I expect development costs could absorb almost everything thing raised. My cynical? Yes.
@Rob Thornton: Currently reading The Very Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan and jeez is it good. She deserves a lot more public recognition, given that she’s won a fair share of awards.
Word.
Anyone looking for a good description of working in an Amazon ‘fulfillment center’ should read Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland.
Finished Calculating Stars and man, that was great; and a very interesting companion to last year’s Seveneves.
Have now started Spinning Silver, which also promises to be very good, and I’m glad that I didn’t actually know too much about it going in.
(13) SANDMAN TO TV. Ooh! Well, we shall see how this goes. I’m hopeful it’s good, I mean, great!
(18) IDENTIFYING PROS IN THE WILD. Cute. 🙂
(19) HARD WORK. Oh, please. He’s not insulting the workers; he’s pointing out how Amazon is terrible.
@Andrew: His series tends to be that good. Sure, some of the pieces are fluffier than others, but this is typical, IMHO.
@Paul Weimer: “We hold these Pixels to be Self Scrolling. That all Filers are created equal.” – Lovely!
@Lenora Rose & @Andrew: Ooh I haven’t seen the OKGo video in a long time; I love that!
@Chip Hitchcock: Thanks for the Honda link; that was groovy! I was confused by a few tires on one ramp starting to go uphill and moving faster after they started, which seemed fake.
@Paul Weimer: P.S. Congrats – I see you’re contributing editor of the day in the 7/5 Pixel Scroll! 😉