Pixel Scroll 7/7

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Four news items, a tweet and a trailer in this collection of clippings for today.

A.V. Club

“Grant Morrison is the new editor-in-chief of Heavy Metal magazine”  – July 6

Grant Morrison

Much like an obscure background character in an old comic book who very few people remember and even fewer care about, Grant Morrison has suddenly shown up to reveal that he’s actually very important and everyone needs to listen to him if they want to have any idea what’s going on. Also, the obscure background character is actually Morrison himself, and all of this takes place in a miniature pocket universe that Morrison created, and also all of us are actually Grant Morrison. Anyway, the important news that Morrison wanted to pass on—which comes to us from Entertainment Weekly and not, for once, Morrison inserting a fictionalized version of himself into this Newswire—is that Grant Morrison has been named the new editor-in-chief of famed sci-fi/fantasy/boobs magazine Heavy Metal.

 

Lawrence Watt-Evans

”Projects” – Updated July 6

Ever wonder why I gripe when I come up with a new story idea? Here’s why — I already have all these and haven’t had time to write them.

These are things I’ve started, but am not currently seriously working on. I do hope to get back to them all eventually. I’m not listing short stories because there are simply too many of them; only longer works. Except for the Bound Lands, I’m also generally not listing more than one volume per new series; I’m not going to write a sequel to, say, The Dragon’s Price before I finish The Dragon’s Price.

(I’m making an exception for the Bound Lands, and to a lesser extent for Ethshar, because stories in those settings don’t need to be read in order.)

I posted the first-draft openings of several of these on my blog, and I’m linking to those where they exist.

 

Newsarama

Len Wein informed his Facebook followers, “Well, the secret is out. I’m gonna be doing Swamp Thing again, after the terrific response the character had in Convergence. I’m also gonna be doing Metal Men finally, one of my all-time favorite books. 2016 is gonna be a fun year.”

“DC Reveals 8 New Limited Series – Metal Men, Sugar & Spike, Metamorpho, More” – July 6

In 2016, DC will launch Swamp Thing, Metal Men, Raven, Firestorm, Katana: Cult of the Kobra, Metamorpho and Sugar & Spike. Some of the series will be written by the characters’ original creators. The list of titles and writers are:

  • Swamp Thing by writer Len Wein
  • Metal Men by writer Len Wein
  • Raven by writer Marv Wolfman
  • Firestorm by writer Gerry Conway
  • Katana: Cult of the Kobra by writer Mike W. Barr
  • Poison Ivy: Cycle of Life & Death by writer Amy Chu
  • Metamorpho by writer Aaron Lopresti
  • Sugar & Spike by writer Keith Giffen

“We want the best writers working on our characters, and these are the best writers for these characters,” said [Dan] DiDio.

Of Raven, Marv Wolfman says it’s a way to to tap into the renewed popularity of the character from the Teen Titans Go! animated series.

“When I go to comic conventions it thrills me to see all the young fans cosplaying as Raven from the Teen Titans GO! cartoon show,” said the long-time Teen Titans writer. “Because so many comic fans are boys, it’s wonderful that there’s something about her that connects with both girls and boys.”

 

George R.R. Martin on Not A Blog

“Buy Tor Now” – July 7

In one of the more recent developments, the Rabid Puppies and some of their allies and fellow travellers have declared a boycott of Tor Books. I say “Rabid” here because Beale is backing the boycott, while Larry Correia says the Sad Puppies are not boycotting anyone… though Correia and some of the other Sads certainly seem deeply sympathetic to the boycott. I am not, needless to say. Neither is most of fandom. Which makes this a perfect time to BUY SOME TOR BOOKS!!

…And, hey, you can even buy some AUTOGRAPHED Tor books by me. My Wild Cards series is published by Tor, as it happens, and we have signed copies of INSIDE STRAIGHT, BUSTED FLUSH, SUICIDE KINGS, FORT FREAK, and LOWBALL available through the Jean Cocteau… along with hardcovers of our award-winning anthology, DANGEROUS WOMEN, also published by Tor. You can find them all at the cinema bookshop, here: http://www.jeancocteaubooks.com/

[How’d that get in here?]

 

 

[Didn’t you people get the memo either?]

 

Mr. Holmes – in US theatres on July 17

[This trailer was released in May. I just saw it at a movie theatre last week.]

[Thanks for these stories goes out to Rob Thornton, Hampus Eckerman and Will Reichard.]

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127 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 7/7”

  2. @Fred Davis, @Pat Cadigan [hello again!]: (Twitter blocking)

    Twitter has two silencing mechanisms, mute and block, of which blocking is the most severe. Both prevent the affected user’s tweets from showing up in your timeline under normal circumstances. Neither renders that user completely invisible to you in all cases. For instance, you can still look up any user who has not protected their tweets (see below) – muted, blocked, or otherwise – and see all of their tweets. Yes, that means that someone you’ve blocked can retweet you, if they’re sufficiently motivated, in the same way that you can retweet any random stranger.

    Muting a user is very mild, and to my knowledge, there is no indication to them that you’ve done so. You can still follow a muted user, they can still follow you, and you will still see a notification if they mention or reply to you. Muting comes in handy if, say, somebody’s going to be tweeting a lot about something you’re not interested in. (“Oh, you’re live-tweeting a binge-watch of a show I care nothing about? Time to mute you for a couple of days…”)

    Blocking someone is much more serious. If he is following you, that link is severed, and he cannot reestablish it while blocked. (I believe that also works in reverse; if you follow him, blocking includes unfollowing. I have not had much reason to explore this end of things.) A blocked user who mentions you does not trigger a notification, but you may occasionally “hear from” them if someone retweets them into your timeline. Muting and blocking a user may plug that loophole, though; the combo certainly does no harm.

    Note that none of this stops them from being able to see your tweets. The only way to do that is to go full turtle and lock your profile, aka protecting your tweets. This makes your tweets invisible to anyone who isn’t following you, and requires new people to get your permission before being allowed to follow you. This is not considered a viable option for people who are on Twitter to communicate with The Outside World in general. 🙂 However, it is theoretically possible for a clique to join Twitter, follow each other, lock down, and proceed to use the service as their own private chat room. Kind of the long way around, but there you go.

  3. Hi everyone

    Dropping back – and not staying – to apologise for being an arsehole to various people here recently. Even when I felt I had legitimate grievances, I went too far in arguing my point. I wish particularly to apologise to Meredith on that score.

    Won’t be reading responses, but this has been weighing on my conscience. I hope this apology will be taken sincerely, but I don’t ask for forgiveness.

    Hope you are all still fighting the good fight, and thanks for highlighting the RequiresHate business again. Keep doing that.

  4. Thank you for your kind comments.

    BS can rant all she want – doesn’t make any difference to me and at least if she’s picking on Pat and myself she’s not going after someone more vulnerable, although she’ll probably do that as well.

    Now I’m going out for sushi! Well, not really. I wish I was.

    Enjoying the first lines, by the way.

  5. Favourite almost opening from Swordspoint:

    “Let the fairy tale begin on a winter’s morning, then, with one drop of blood new-fallen on the ivory snow: a drop as bright as a clear-cut ruby, red as the single spot of claret on the lace cuff. And it therefore follows that evil lurks behind each broken window, scheming malice and enchantment; while behind the latched shutters the good are sleeping their just sleeps at this early hour in Riverside. Soon they will arise to go about their business; and one, maybe, will be as lovely as the day, armed, as are the good, for a predestined triumph. . . .”

  6. First lines – the whole thing builds up, but the opening paragraph is a loving preview of insanity:

    The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory.  He’s got esprit up to here.  Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night.  His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air.  A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest, Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.

    from…well, what else?

    Pasta – give me shrimp aglio olio, or death.

  11. It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.

  12. Menin aeide thea Achiliadeos Peliadeo…
    (There is no good way of getting “wrath” as the first, separate word that way in English. )

  13. Ann: Whether you read this or not, I appreciate the heck out of that comment. Thanks, and good wishes from here.

  14. Forgiveness is easy, really, most of the time. The tricky bit is always trust.

    (For me, anyway. Everyone deals in their own way.)

  17. I did! \o/ Success! (And then I forgot to check my email and confirm the subscribe. Oops.)

  18. First lines- this is a bit longer, but it explains why I bought the book, Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell, on the spot despite having never heard of book or author before. It was well worth it, too. There’s one sequel out (Wild Thing) and I’m impatiently waiting more. It’s not SFF, more like Elmore Leonard crossed with Carl Hiaasen. Anyway here it is:

    “So I’m on my way to work and I stop to watch a pigeon fight a rat in the snow, and some fuckhead tries to mug me! Naturally there’s a gun. He comes up behind me and sticks it into the base of my skull. It’s cold, and it actually feels sort of good, in an acupressure kind of way. ‘Take it easy, Doc,’ he says.

    “Which explains that, at least. Even at five in the morning, I’m not the kind of guy you mug. I look like an Easter Island sculpture of a longshoreman. But the fuckhead can see the blue scrub pants under my overcoat, and the ventilated green plastic clogs, so he thinks I’ve got drugs and money on me. And maybe that I’ve taken some kind of oath not to kick his fuckhead ass for trying to mug me.

    “I barely have enough drugs and money to get me through the day. And the only oath I took, as I recall, was to first do no harm. I’m thinking we’re past that point.”

  19. Liz Williams —

    I’m not sure how one gets from an explicit statement that someone will not be doxxed to the assumption that they will be

    Near as I can tell, you have to intentionally re-order the sentence so that it reads “Obviously I hope she will not be doxxed by us,” tell your supporters that that’s what it says before they read it, implying that it’s irony, then when they do read it, they read it the way it’s already in their heads, and not the way it’s written.

    It probably helps if she’s had long contact with a given supporter and already prepped them with a bunch of similar exercises.

  20. Aaand the conversation has moved on. Er, first lines, um, I’m quite partial to this one:

    His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam.

  21. How about this one?

    I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.

    Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

  22. I don’t like the LeGuin opener at all. It’s a lot of throat-clearing. I would tend to flounce under it or trounce away from it or whatever the kids say.

  23. Jim Henley: I don’t like the LeGuin opener at all.

    Er. Okay. I do, very much, particularly the “Truth is a matter of the imagination,” and what it implies about the transformative power of Story. But no problem, different reactions are equally valid, and all that. (Would it help that the heading on the first chapter makes it clear that this is the beginning of a formal report being written by the character? The appearance of words on a page is part of the context, I think . . . anyway.)

    By the way, when I reading a few threads earlier, I wasn’t able to add my Congratulations! to your health news. It’s always heartening to hear new like that, and I thank you for sharing it.

  24. So snowcrash goes for the predictable opening line(s). Good call. I remember the rush I felt when I read those words for the first time and Neal Stephenson became a writer to buy on sight. Just started “Seveneves”. I may be some time…

  25. Greg: Just found your reply with the tip about Hoot-Suite. Thanks for that. You made my week.

    The problem with dealing with people like Voldemort––er, you know––is, spending even a small amount of time on them causes them to loom deceptively large. They can seem to swallow the internet. Of course, staring into a screen for while can be a bit hypnotic anyway––something about staring into a light source. Plus there’s the illusion of intimacy––you’re reading on a screen in the privacy of your own home.

    But cancer has been a fast refresher course in what’s really important. BS is among the small stuff I’m not going to sweat. I’ve been called worse by better people and it didn’t bother me half as much. Plus, once you get past sixty, it all starts to sound like, “Neener, neener, neener! Nyah, nyah, nyah!”

    Which is not to trivialise the effect she has had on so many people, some of whom are still too traumatised to speak out about what she put them through. I’m very sympathetic to them and I would never tell any of them to grow a thicker skin or toughen up or suck it up, buttercup. Life is tough enough without cyberbullying, which can drive people to suicide.

    But as I was saying, Greg: thank you. 😉

  26. Pat, that was a lovely bit of balancing “this is how I’m handling it” and “others don’t have to be just like me”. It’s encouraging to me just right this morning, as I work on balancing a different set of loads. Thanks. 🙂

  27. Mary Frances, thank you so much!

    Pat Cadigan: That was beautiful. I second the particulars of Bruce’s appreciation.

    I will say, re cancer, that I was struck by how quickly, “afterward”*, the same old little shit resumed bugging me in the same old ways. But some people probably do achieve a more permanent perspective on life than I managed.

    * To the extent there is an “afterward” beyond waiting for the next shoe to drop, says the man with one recurrence under his belt already.

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