Pixel Scroll 7/10/17 Humor Is A Thing With Feathers, Or Maybe Pixels

(1) HEATING UP AND COOLING OFF. The current edition of WNYC’s On the Media talks extensively on SF and climate change:

Science fiction has always been an outlet for our greatest anxieties. This week, we delve into how the genre is exploring the reality of climate change. Plus: new words to describe the indescribable.

  1. Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer, author of the Southern Reach Trilogyand Borne, on writing about the relationships between people and nature.
  2. Claire Vaye Watkins @clairevayetalks about Gold Fame Citrus, her work of speculative fiction in which an enormous sand dune threatens to engulf the southwest.
  3. Kim Stanley Robinson discusses his latest work, New York 2140. The seas have risen 50 feet and lower Manhattan is submerged. And yet, there’s hope.
  4. British writer Robert Macfarlane @RobGMacfarlaneon new language for our changing world.

Throughout the show: listeners offer their own new vocabulary for the Anthropocene era. Many thanks to everyone who left us voice memos!

(2) ECONOMIC IMPACT. Some businessman are paying attention: “How climate change will transform business and the workforce”.

Right now, the top 10 most-desired skills for getting hired, according to LinkedIn’s data analysis, all have to do with tech: think cloud computing, SEO marketing and web architecture. In the same way tech has transformed today’s workforce, some say that climate change could transform tomorrow’s.

One industry that already shows some of that evolution is energy. According to data provided by job listings search engine Indeed, in the first quarter of 2014 in the UK, job postings in the renewable energy sector – made up of bioenergy, geothermal, hydroelectric, solar, and wind – accounted for a third (32.9%) of all energy-sector job postings in the first quarter of 2014. In 2017, that had risen to over half of all energy sector job postings, or 51.5%.

(3) MORE ON BUTLER MUSEUM EXHIBIT. In “Octavia Butler: Writing Herself Into The Story”, NPR goes behind the scenes of the Butler exhibit at the Huntington.

“Octavia Butler: Telling My Stories” is an exhibit currently at the Huntington Library, in the Pasadena suburb of San Marino, Calif. Curator Natalie Russell went through some “8,000 manuscripts, letters and photographs, and an additional 80 boxes of ephemera” to create an exhibition that shows, in chronological order, how Butler’s career was born and evolved, and what influenced her.

Large glass cases hold early notebooks and drawings, report cards from her days at Pasadena City College and notes to herself about character development. Early copies of her first editions are here. So is the one-page letter from the MacArthur Foundation notifying Butler she’d been chosen as a fellow in 1995.

…She often made them up while sitting on the porch at her grandmother’s chicken farm, in the High Desert town of Victorville, Calif., where she dreamed about animals. The drawings of horses that illustrated one of her early stories are on the walls at the Huntington. After Devil Girl, though, Butler switched to science fiction, determined to make that her career.

Creating her own path

That was astonishing, because the world was not full of well-paid science fiction writers, and with very few exceptions, all of those were male and white. No one like Butler existed in the genre. And that didn’t seem to hold Butler back one bit. “I don’t recall every having wanted desperately to be a black woman fiction writer,” she told Rose. “I wanted to be a writer.”

(4) SHUFFLING INTO HISTORY. Here’s what Magic fans can look forward to at San Diego Comic-Con: “Magic the Gathering Reveal Their SDCC Exclusive”.

  • “Magic: The Gathering 2017 Planeswalker Pack”  – $180.00

Includes a 24” x 36” screen print of Nicol Bolas illustrated by Brandon Holt. Produced in collaboration with Mondo. Printed by D&L on Magic: The Gathering card stock. Nicol Bolas is an iconic Magic character who first made an appearance in the game in 1994 and has been a powerful fan favorite since.

  • 6 Planeswalker cards with exclusive artwork by illustrator, Vincent Proce

Characters include Gideon Jura™, Jace Beleren®, Liliana Vess®, Chandra Nalaar®, Nissa Revane™ & Nicol Bolas™

 

(5) FUTURAMA GAME. SyFy beats everyone to the story: “Neat! Futurama returns as a game and we’ve got the scoop”.

It’s been a painfully long four years since the last original Futurama episode graced our screens (insert Kif shudder), but good news everyone, the Planet Express-less universe is no more with the launch of the Futurama: Worlds of Tomorrow game available now on iOS and Android.

 

(6) WANTING MORE. At The Book Smugglers, Thea James advises readers “Where to Start with the Star Wars Expanded Universe”.

Star Wars inspires passion. Everyone has a different experience with the franchise, especially when it comes to opinions regarding touchy subjects like the prequel era, and the subsequent novels and shows to come out of said era.

My experience with Star Wars is probably very similar to many others of my generation: I grew up watching the original trilogy, which I loved very dearly. I watched the prequels when they were released in theaters starting with The Phantom Menace when I was fifteen, and… I enjoyed them. Sure, the writing was horrible and the acting not much better, but I ate it all up because it was more Star Wars. I bought into the prequel era, even as I felt it was falwed and lacking the emotional gravitas I so desperately wanted. I collected Pepsi bottles featuring different members of the galactic senate and other key characters, I obsessively played Rogue Squadron and, yes, Episode I: Racer, among others.

I bought into all of this because I was hungry for more of the universe I loved, and I wanted answers. I wanted to learn more about Dooku’s fall from grace and the rise of the Sith. I wanted to understand the corruption in the Senate beyond a cursory few scenes across three movies; I wanted to feel the cameraderie between Obi-Wan and Anakin, and understand how the Jedi could have been so blind to Palpatine’s machinations.

(7) ON TOP OF THE PILE. Nerds of a Feather finds out what the author is reading in “6 Books with Yoon Ha Lee”.

Yoon Ha Lee’s first novel NINEFOX GAMBIT was shortlisted for the Nebula, Hugo, and Clarke awards. He lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.   Today he shares his 6 books with us…

What book are you currently reading? 

I’m rereading John Wick’s PLAY DIRTY 2, which is by a game designer and features a collection of tips for tabletop roleplaying and game masters. I find a lot of the narrative tricks and discussions really useful for thinking about how to construct a narrative even in a non-game format. I don’t always agree with Wick, but he’s thought-provoking, intelligent, and interesting.

(8) BEASTLY TV. Echo Ishii excavates another ancient TV series in “SF/Horror Obscure: Beasts”.

Beasts is a short run anthology horror show by Nigel Kneale, the creator of Qatermass.

(If you don’t know Qatermass it was one of the first serious SF TV serials and inspired Doctor Who among other things.) Nigel Kneale has a long and distinguished career in SF and horror.

Beasts originally ran in 1976 on ITV, as six episodes (50min). They are connected by a loose them of strange creatures and horrific circumstances, but the real power lies in the often unsympathetic but completely compelling characters. There are many recognizable actors in the series including Martin Shaw (Inspector George Gently!!!) and Micheal Kitchen (Inspector Foyle!!). I’m a huge fan of British TV mysteries-I’ve watched more of Midsomer Murders than is healthy.

(9) J.K. ROWLING’S LOST MANUSCRIPT. In an interview with CNN, Rowling revealed that she has written yet another fairy tale — but this one may never be published.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: I read that you were considering writing a political book for children, young people?

J.K. ROWLING: Oh, that was a fairy tale …

But I — I will tell you this. On my 50th — the theme of my 50th birthday, which I held at Halloween, even though that’s not really my birthday, was come as your own private nightmare. And I went as a lost manuscript. And I wrote over a dress most of that book. So that book, I don’t know whether it will ever be published, but it’s actually hanging in a wardrobe currently.

(10) MORE REVELATIONS. In “The Potter Family” on Pottermore J.K. Rowling looks at the history of the Potter family going back to the 12th century and reveals that Harry Potter is actually the second person in his family named “Harry Potter” since his great-grandfather also had the same name.

Potter is a not uncommon Muggle surname, and the family did not make the so-called ‘Sacred Twenty-Eight’ for this reason; the anonymous compiler of that supposedly definitive list of pure-bloods suspected that they had sprung from what he considered to be tainted blood. The wizarding Potter family had illustrious beginnings, however, some of which was hinted at in Deathly Hallows.

In the Muggle world ‘Potter’ is an occupational surname, meaning a man who creates pottery. The wizarding family of Potters descends from the twelfth-century wizard Linfred of Stinchcombe, a locally well-beloved and eccentric man, whose nickname, ‘the Potterer’, became corrupted in time to ‘Potter’. Linfred was a vague and absent-minded fellow whose Muggle neighbours often called upon his medicinal services. None of them realised that Linfred’s wonderful cures for pox and ague were magical; they all thought him a harmless and lovable old chap, pottering about in his garden with all his funny plants.

(11) MAGIC IS TURNING MUGGLES INTO MONEY. Behind a paywall in the Financial Times, Emma Jacobs has a lot more info about Rowling’s business activities.  The news includes:

  • If you try to find Platform 9 3/4 at Kings Cross station, you won’t find the Hogwarts Express, but there is a Potter gift shop and Potter fans from around the world
  • One of the rules Rowling has imposed is that there are to be no Harry Potter tie ins with fast food.
  • “The challenge is to stretch the franchise without breaking it.”  Jacobs spoke to children’s marketing consultant Gary Pope, who says the Toklien movies–particularly the three Hobbit films– was a franchise “that got too complicated and grown up, and you can’t sell merchandising to adults.”

(12) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • July 10, 1981 — John Carpenter’s Escape from New York premiered.
  • July 10, 1985 Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome opened in theatres.

(13) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS

  • Born July 10, 1923 Earl Hamner Jr., of The Twilight Zone (“You Drive”) and The Waltons.
  • Born July 10, 1926 — Fred Gwynne (Herman Munster).
  • Born July 10, 1929 – George Clayton Johnson

(14) COMIC SECTION. John King Tarpinian recommends Brevity’s “cool” Star Wars joke.

(15) SCALZI COLLECTION. Subterranean Press has announced a new collection of John Scalzi’s nonfiction, Don’t Live For Your Obituary.

Between 2008 and 2017, author John Scalzi wrote fifteen books, became a New York Times bestselling author, and won numerous awards, including the Hugo, the Locus and the Governor’s Award for the Arts in Ohio. He also had book deals crater, lost more awards than he won, worried about his mortgage and health insurance, flubbed a few deadlines, tried to be a decent parent and husband, and got into some arguments on the Internet, because, after all, that’s what the Internet is for.

Scalzi wrote about it all—the highs and lows in the life of a working writer—and gave his readers, and other writers, a glimpse of the day-to-day business of navigating a writing life in today’s world. Sometimes these essays offered advice. Sometimes they commented on the practical business of publishing and selling books. Sometimes they focused on the writing issues, arguments and personalities of the day. And sometimes, Scalzi reflected on his own writing life and career, and what both meant in the larger scheme of things….

(16) CONVERGENCE PLAUDITS. Here’s a couple of highly complimentary threads about the just completed CONvergence:

As Standback says, “It’s really nice to see people highlighting a convention that knocks it out of the park.”

(17) THE FELAPTON FILE. Here’s Camestros Felapton’s take on the Hugo-nominated novellas:

  1. Every Heart a Doorway: Weird – I didn’t think this would be my number one when I read it. It has sort of got the spot by default. The novellas were a struggle between the familiar and the experimental and sometimes a struggle with making the experimental familiar or making the familiar experimental. None of them quite manged the achievements of the others but Every Heart came closest.

(18) HUGO REVIEWS. Edmonton’s Hugo Award Book Club has reached the short stuff: “Hugos 2017 — Short Stories”.  They say Wong and Wright are at the bottom of their ballot.

The most perplexing nominee — A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers by Alyssa Wong — is a frenetic time-hopping story about a girl and her sister who have magical (electrical?) powers. The story may be about suicide, or it may be about the end of the world. There’s very little overall narrative thread to hold onto. In portions of the text, it feels like Wong is stringing words together into paragraphs without the traditional intermediary step of sentences. We can appreciate the artfulness of this style of writing, but it is not to our tastes…..

An Unimaginable Light is probably the best John C. Wright story that we’ve read — in no small part because it’s based around a couple of interesting notions about the ability of robots to interpret Asimov’s Three Laws in ways that their creators never intended. Although the ‘twist’ ending seems to come out of nowhere, that ending is at least built around an interesting idea concerning what it means to be human.

That being said, Wright’s slightly didactic prose and aggressive thesaurus use isn’t to our taste, nor is the way he seems to delight in the sexual degradation of one of the characters. This won’t be at the top of our ballot, but we can understand why some fans chose to nominate it.

(19) SPINE OUT OF ALIGNMENT. I wonder how often this happens? The collaboration by Larry Correia and John Ringo titled Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge came out this month, unfortunately, on the spine it read: “Larry Correia – Monster Hunter Nemesis.” B&N College HQ distributed a warning: “Simon & Schuster has issued a “return in place” for the following book due to a production error – the spine has a different title listed than the front cover of the book. Ooops! Please destroy all inventory as soon as possible.”

Correia also blogged about it: “Monster Hunter Grunge came out while I was away. Apparently the cover and interior are fine, but they had the spine of Monster Hunter Nemesis. Publishing screw ups happen, so this print run is being destroyed and replaced.”

(20) CORREIA RECUSAL. The same post also reminded people to vote for the Dragon Awards, with this request:

So please, participate, go an nominate whatever you think was awesome. Except don’t nominate me for anything. I won one last year, so I’m recusing myself from now on. Share the love!

(21) GRACE HOPPER COLLEGE GETS SUITABLE ARMS. Following up the Scroll item some months ago about one of Yale’s colleges replacing John C. Calhoun’s name with a modern one: “Grace Hopper coat of arms”.

The Grace Hopper College coat of arms became official on July 1, 2017.

Grace Murray Hopper’s accomplishments and qualities of character offer rich opportunities for visualization, and for representing the College’s transformation. The blue of the shield reflects the colors of Yale and of the U.S. Navy, where Hopper rose to the rank of Rear Admiral. The dolphin – thought of in the early days of heraldry as the ‘sovereign’ and ‘guiding light of the sea’ – represents Hopper’s exemplary personal and professional record of leadership. The ‘semé’ of white circles and vertical rectangles – evoking zeros and ones in this case – recognizes her contributions to mathematics and computer science. The scalloped bar at the top of the design gestures at waves or horizon, and links the College’s visual history to the patterns and colors of a new time.

(22) STORMS AHEAD. BBC News has been highlighting the images the Juno probe has been taking of Jupiter. The images of the polar regions showing a multitude of storms, each larger than Earth, all pressed up against each other are spectacular.

(23) VIDEO OF THE DAY. SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival 2017 Trailer previews, in two minutes, 19 animated films that will be shown at the SIGGRAPH convention in Los Angeles later this month.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, Bill Burns, Dann Todd, Harold Osler, IanP, Michael J. Walsh, Chip Hitchcock, and Standback for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day lauowolf.]

85 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 7/10/17 Humor Is A Thing With Feathers, Or Maybe Pixels

  1. A nonspecific Meredith Moment on Amazon:

    Offer Details

    Buy a Kindle eBook today, earn 40% credit back towards your next book, up to a maximum of $20. Offer valid only once per customer.

    Credit must be redeemed by July 25, 2017. Credit can be redeemed on Print books sold by Amazon.com and Kindle eBooks.

    Within 24 hours of your purchase, you will receive an email that indicates the promotional credit has been added to your account. Terms and conditions below.

  2. If you read the novellas in the following order you get a weird novel about people who become gods, go slowly crazy, fracture their reality in a way that requires special keys and doors to travel:
    1. A Taste of Honey
    2. Penric and the Shaman
    3. This Census Taker
    4. The Ballad of Black Tom
    5. Every Heart a Doorway
    6. The Dream Quest of Vellit Boe
    The dad in Census Taker is making the keys that Vellit Boe goes looking for later.

  3. @microtherion: See, the last one in that section says “A moth, argent” but it looks pretty darn proper to me. Coulda had “on a chief sable, a moth argent” instead of the wavy lines left over from the racist’s coat of arms. Now I don’t recall what species the famed bug was, but someone knows, and thus it could have been “proper” on whatever tincture they wanted.

  4. In regards to Every Heart A Doorway, can I ask if anyone else was squicked out by the apparent promotion of naberkvn (rot13 in case!). I found it really really uncomfortable and it tainted what would otherwise be a potentially decent read.

  5. @Lurkertype, Msb: that was my thinking also. A whole handful of people must have seen the cover file – whether it’s physical or digital – and someone has to have signed off on the finalised art too.

    Oh well, the only time I ever come into contact with Baen in the wild tends to be in SE Asian used bookshops.

  6. @SamJ-

    In regards to Every Heart A Doorway, can I ask if anyone else was squicked out by the apparent promotion of naberkvn (rot13 in case!). I found it really really uncomfortable and it tainted what would otherwise be a potentially decent read.

    What about Every Heart a Doorway did you think was “promoting” anorexia? And why do you think an eating disorder needs to be rot13’d?

  7. @ Lis Carey

    Re Rot 13 I was being very cautious of spoilers …

    I felt that in EHaD a big deal was made of the viewpoint character not wanting to eat at several points. Also this was portrayed as being part of her struggle to be who she wanted to be and her disagreements with her caring but clingier-than-she-wanted parents. I understand there is story context to this and it’s linked to her experiences in her other world. But I really found it uncomfortable. I read this like a YA story given the characters and quests to be accepted as individuals and allowed to make their own choices so I personally found it disturbing to read because we are supposed to be sympathetic with a character who is starving herself.

    I found myself horrified and entirely in sympathy with her slightly helpless parents.

    Very personal response I know and I asked because I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else mention it but I found it ruined my reading experience.

  8. To clarify further (having missed the edit window) – my discomfort springs from the fact that I felt the story intended us to be actively sympathetic with the goal of a character who was starving herself.

  9. @Steven Silver: The fact that Grace Hopper’s coat of arms doesn’t include a moth demonstrates a lack of humour on the part of the college of arms. Which college? The College of Arms lacks jurisdiction and was probably not even consulted; this appears to have been done by Yale’s in-house designer, with help from a serious hobbyist. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that nobody in the process/chain knew the story; maybe someone knew and someone higher overruled, but ISTM that’s the sort of Geek Knowledge so spread in our circle that we don’t notice the blank looks just outside. It would have been very cute — not to mention a wonderful point for tour guides — but I think its absence was ~incompetence rather than ~malice.

  10. (4) Bit of MAGIC trivia: I created the character of Gideon Jura.

    I was hired years ago by Wizards of the Coast to write one of the Planeswalker media tie-in novels they were publishing at the time. Mine was about the character Chandra Nalaar, titled THE PURIFYING FIRE. (Based on my royalty statements and the company’s decision a couple of years later to discontinue the Planeswalkers book series, I gather the book didn’t do well.) Anyhow, in response to editorial suggestions (which were presented as suggestions, not orders), I created a male character whom WotC renamed Gideon Jura (one of many changes made after I delivered the MS; media tie-ins are the intellectual property of the media company, not the author, and the company changed some stuff and rewrote some chapters without my knowledge… which was their right, though I was then repeatedly asked by readers to explain sections of the book which I had not written and had to admit made no more sense to me than they did to readers).

    ANYHOW… that was the origin of Gideon Jura, who then became one of the cards/characters in the game. The company sent me the first card. As well as a bottle of red soda pop called The Purifying Fire, which was part of a product promo for the Planeswalkers. I still have the card and the soda sitting in my office… and I sometimes eye the soda warily, wondering if it will eventually explode. (Or does sealed soda go flat?)

  11. (15) I look forward to the release of DON’T LIVE FOR YOUR OBITUARY. I am actually more of a fan of John’s nonfiction than his ficiton, primarily because I’m not particularly a science fiction fan. (Of the 3 Scalzi novels I’ve tried, the one I really liked was AGENT TO THE STARS–because it was more of a satire on Hollywood than it was an sf novel, and therefore more aligned with my reading tastes.)

    (19) Spine out of alignment– Years ago, I gather anecdotes about production gaffs for my monthly NINK column. I wound up with so much jaw-dropping material, it wound up filling two months’ worth of column. Later used in my nonfiction book, Rejection, Romance, and Royalties: The Wacky World of a Working Writer.

    Among those anecdotes, my personal favorite (and probably still my all-time favorite) was really an editorial screw-up, rather than a production gaff. A writer I knew named Trish Jensen, then writing under a pseudonym (Graves, I think it was), delivered her completed MS to long-since-folded romance imprint at Kensington called Precious Gems. PG had a clause in the contract (one that is unusual outside of work-for-hire) that allowed them to rewrite in-house without the author’s permission. Well, Trish’s book included a secondary character, a troubled teenage boy whom the novel’s hero helps save from a life of juvenile delinquency by teaching him to read.

    The editor thought that mentoring a troubled boy by helping him become literate could be mistaken for pedophila. (?) And so she rewrote the character of the boy by changing him into… a raccoon.

    Yes, really.

    No, I am not making that up.

    The author found out only after the book was published.

  12. (19) @Kurt Busiek said:
    This is one of the reasons I don’t bother with Baen books unless there’s some reason to ignore the fact that they will almost assuredly be ugly and poorly edited.

    They don’t see the value in putting in the effort (and money) that it costs, and apparently that works for their audience. Some of us, though, it actively chases away.

    Exactly. But then Kurt and I aren’t the audience they’re going for. The last Baen book I read was an anthology, and I swear some of the stories weren’t even spell-checked. They’d obviously just chucked the text in from the files they got from the various authors, with no proofreading.

    Look, I know LC’s stuff is formulaic, but is it so formulaic that they can’t tell one title from another, with different words and extra author? That NOBODY noticed the spine title didn’t match the front cover until the entire run had been printed, bound, and delivered? And apparently distributed to some places? No way to run a railroad. (And then they wonder why Baen editors don’t win the Hugo.) How much does it cost to pulp a whole printing and reprint and reship?

    @Cam: sorry, even that way “Census-Taker” doesn’t make sense.

    @SamJ: That bothered me too. Making your own choices is fine, and it’s cool that there are characters of various sexualities — but sympathizing with starving yourself is Not Good. I’m sure that wasn’t the intention, but it came out pro-ana.

    @Laura: And the raccoon later became a Guardian of the Galaxy, thanks to becoming literate enough to fly spaceships and blow things up?

  13. What was perhaps even MORE bizarre was that after the author and her agent complained to the publisher, the editor did not lose her job. Or even her right to keep rewriting authors’ books.

  14. “Files Scroll good, like a good Pixel should” (aka “Lucky Scroll Means Fine Pixel” (LSMFP)

    /tickbox

  15. I did side-eye the food aspects of EHaD a bit, but ED-depiction is the strongest (literary) trigger I have* and it didn’t set that off (thankfully), so I’m not sure whether it would be a problem for people with more direct experience. It has a very different angle from most.

    *Even though I’ve never had one. It’s complicated, and I don’t really want to TMI explain it right now.

  16. I have this persistently running in my head:

    Pixeling files and scrolling fen always come to some bad end…

    Too ominous to offer as a title, but maybe posting it here will get it out of my head. Also quitting reading the M. R. James ghost stories might help as well.

  17. @Laura

    I don’t suppose there has been any news or ETA on whether your Esther Diamond books will be getting a UK ebook release..?

  18. Didn’t Baen also misspell an editor’s name on the cover of an anthology a couple years ago?

  19. (13) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS. Can it be that no one else mentioned the typo for “Herman Munter” (should be “Munster”)? 5-day-later appertainment still tastes as sweet (though 2nd-5-day-later’s even better). I’ll have some pie, thanks!

    (19) SPINE OUT OF ALIGNMENT. Ouch, someone’s in big trouble. That bites. 🙁 I have to say, though, it’s easy for people to look at things and see right past them, if you know what I mean. Especially when the books are all called Monster Hunter Word. At some point, all Words look the same, eh?

    (20) CORREIA RECUSAL. Oh lordy, if we’d given him an undeserved Hugo, he’d’ve gone away?! 😛

  20. (19) As I recall, I have a Baen anthology somewhere around here that lists John Ringo as a contributor on the cover, although he doesn’t have a story in it. I also remember a case where the wrong cover artist was credited – and these were several years ago.

    I’m well aware of how easily people overlook really basic things in templates. At my last web coding job, one of the innovations I made on the back end was to take a wide range of disparate product lines and redesign the underpinnings so that they used cascading templates. Visually, not much changed, but under the hood, maintaining the whole site and creating new lines got a lot easier due to the now-common code. Trouble is, one of my coworkers – who was in the office, not remote as I was – had this habit of making new lines by cloning one of my existing “lenses” and changing the key bits to reflect the visual changes.

    The problem was that he tended to leave in line-specific comments and skip right over the default page title, so a page designed for the new BazBar line would look fine on the screen, but the name on the browser tab would be unchanged from the FooBaz template he’d copied. It got to where, whenever I discovered that he’d made a new lens, I’d immediately go in and see what he’d overlooked that needed to be fixed. I told him a few times, but he kept right on making the same mistake. It was like he couldn’t see those lines in the code and never looked at the finished code render. But then, I’m picky that way…

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