Pixel Scroll 8/10/19 The Square Of The Pixel Is Equal To The Sum Of The Squares Of The File And The Scroll

(1) LISTEN UP. At the Horror Writers Association blog, Matthew W. Quinn cites many examples of “How Podcasting Can Help Writers Learn and Network”.

Firstly, podcasts provide great opportunities to work with other writers. Thanks to The Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast, I learned hostess Lindsay Buroker had opened up her Fallen Empireuniverse to other writers through Amazon’s Kindle Worlds program. From this one podcast episode came my short novellas “Ten Davids, Two Goliaths” and “Discovery and Flight.” I also got the opportunity to help Ms. Buroker further organize the back-story, something that proved helpful for everybody involved in the Kindle Worlds project. Thanks to The Horror Show With Brian Keene, I was able to connect with authors Brian Keene and Wesley Southard, who both blurbed my forthcoming horror-comedy novella Little People, Big Guns. After buying ads on The Horror Show and the related podcast Cosmic Shenanigans, Project Entertainment Network owner Armand Rosamilia agreed to blurb The Atlanta Incursion, the forthcoming sequel to my Lovecraftian novel The Thing in the Woods. I also learned about Dan Wells’ “I Am Not A Serial Killer” series from Writing Excuses. Not only did I find books I enjoyed, but I also reviewed two of the three books in the first trilogy and the movie adaptation of the first novel and blogged about a DragonCon panel featuring Wells in which I got the chance to talk with him about the book and the film. Finally, thanks to regularly listening to the Bizzong podcast, I have an interview with host Frank Edler to promote LPBG slated for this fall.

(2) IN MEMORY YET GREEN. The Irish Times profiles a writer on his way to Dublin 2019: “George RR Martin: ‘Science fiction has conquered the world’”.

…Instead I ask why fantasy and sci-fi writers seem so much more intimately connected to their fans than writers of other genres do.

“Science fiction, for much of its history – and this goes back to before I was born – was not considered reputable,” says Martin. “It was seen as cheap gutter entertainment. I was a bright kid, but even I had teachers say to me, ‘Why do you read that science-fiction stuff? Why don’t you read real literature?’ You got that kind of snobbism.

“So the early science-fiction fans, in the 1930s and 1940s and early 1950s, felt that very much, and they gathered together, and it was sort of an ‘us against the world’ thing. ‘We know this is great stuff, and you on the outside might make fun of us, and mock us, but we’ll band together.’ And the writers started coming to the conventions, and many writers came out of fandom; they started out as fans.”

Where does he think that patronising attitude to genre fiction comes from? “You can go back to the literary quarrel between Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, ” he says, “and that’s really where you see a split between high literature and popular literature. Before that it was just literature.

…“But essentially, in the opinion of most university lecturers for 100 years, James won that argument, and literature had to be about something serious and real life, and if it was about pirates or space travel or dragons or monsters then it was something for children.” He laughs. “That’s all changed. Now science fiction, far from being this little persecuted genre that it was in the 1950s, has conquered the world.”

(3) TOLKIEN ESTATE SETS LIMITS. According to The Guardian, “Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings ‘cannot use much of Tolkien’s plot'”.

…Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey, who is supervising the show’s development, told German fansite Deutsche Tolkien that the estate has refused to allow the series to be set during any period other than the Second Age of Middle-earth. This means Amazon’s adaptation will not cross over at all with events from the Third Age, which were dramatised in Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning trilogy and sees hobbit Frodo Baggins destroy the One Ring.

Spanning 3,441 years, the Second Age begins after the banishment of the dark lord Morgoth and ends with the first demise of Sauron, Morgoth’s servant and the primary villain in The Lord of the Rings, at the hands of an alliance of elves and men.

Shippey said that Amazon “has a relatively free hand” to add details since Tolkien did not flesh out every detail of the Second Age in his appendices or Unfinished Tales, a collection of stories published posthumously in 1980. But Shippey called it “a bit of a minefield – you have to tread very carefully”, saying that “the Tolkien estate will insist that the main shape of the Second Age is not altered. Sauron invades Eriador, is forced back by a Númenórean expedition, is returns to Númenor. There he corrupts the Númenóreans and seduces them to break the ban of the Valar. All this, the course of history, must remain the same…

(4) BENNETT’S VIGILANCE. NPR’s Jason Heller tells us that “‘Vigilance’ Imagines A Chillingly Familiar Future”

Robert Jackson Bennett has a wicked sense of humor. His 2013 novel American Elsewhere trained a satirical eye on small-town America even as it straddled the boundaries of science fiction and horror. Yet with his latest work, a novella called Vigilance, the Austin-based author and two-time winner of the Shirley Jackson Award tackles one of the most deadly serious — and sadly relevant — topics of all: mass shootings. As in American Elsewhere, there’s both science fiction and horror in Vigilance. There’s also that wicked Bennett sense of humor. He spares no disturbing absurdity or twinge of cognitive dissonance in his examination of gun mania and the new normal of everyday massacres in America.

Make no mistake: For all its satire of government, entertainment, society, and violence, Vigilance is a sobering read. It takes place just a few years in our future, in a United States that’s simultaneously unrecognizable and chillingly familiar. Texas is in flames. The governor of Iowa is an open white supremacist. Warfare has become almost entirely remote, done with robots and drones, so that the bloodlust and sense of martial duty fostered in people by American society — as well as the noble, heroic ideal of the valiant solder — has nowhere to be vented or expressed. And the younger, more liberal generation has almost entirely fled the United States for other nations with stricter gun control, leaving the older, more gun-favoring population behind.

What that population has done is blood-curdling. John McDean is a producer for a popular television show called Vigilance, in which mass shootings are broadcast for public consumption to those who wish “to witness violence and fear, but always from safe refuge.” His target demographic is the American pistol-owner. As McDean coldly, cruelly calculates, “Pistols are for killing people. Pistols are for urban environments. Pistols are for defense.” They are the perfect choice of what McDean calls his Ideal Person, “isolated within a huge suburban house, wary and suspicious of the outside world, listening to the beautiful woman on the television warn them of horrors and depravity in the lands beyond the borders, of corruption creeping into our cities.”

(5) KAIJU VACATION. Lorelei Marcus is back from Japan where she saw the latest (in 1964) Godzilla movie: “[Aug. 7, 1964] Rematch! (Mothra vs. Godzilla)”.

In June this year, 1964, my family and I took a three week vacation to the island nation of Japan. Though I have been many times before, this was the first time I felt changed as a person after coming home. Perhaps it was the fact that I was finally old enough to appreciate the world around me; or perhaps it was because we’d chosen to stay in a new place: Hiroshima was still under construction, but I could tell it was going to become a beautiful city, despite the air of tragedy. Regardless, I saw Japan in a new light, and it has brought me to see the world in a new light as well.

I also got to see Mothra vs Godzilla, and it was incredible…

(6) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • August 10, 1960 Dinosaurus! premiered on this day.
  • August 10, 1962The Brain That Wouldn’t Die had its theatrical debut
  • August 10, 1984 — The Banzai Institute reminds us:

It was 35 years ago today that Dr. B. Banzai, while conducting a supersonic test of his remarkable Jet Car, breached the dimensional barrier with his experimental Oscillation Overthruster and made contact with the 8th dimension. Congratulations to Dr. Banzai, as well as to the filmmaking team that documented this extraordinary event. 

  • August 10, 2004 — Donald Duck received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 10, 1896 John Gloag. His first SF novel, Tomorrow’s Yesterday, depicts a race of cat people from the distant future observing human society. It was one of five SF novels and a double handful of short stories he wrote in the Thirties and Forties. Only A Short Dictionary of Furniture, one of his non-fiction efforts, is available digitally. (Died 1981.)
  • Born August 10, 1902 Curt Siodmak. He is known for his work in  genre films for The Wolf Man and Donovan’s Brain, the latter from his own novel. ISFDB notes the latter was part of his Dr. Patrick Cory series, and he wrote quite a few other genre novels as well. Donovan’s Brain and a very few other works are available in digital form.  (Died 2000.)
  • Born August 10, 1903 Ward Moore. Author of Bring the Jubilee which everyone knows and several novels more that I’m fairly sure almost no one knows. More interestingly to me was that he was a keen writer of recipes as ISFDB documents four of his appeared in Anne McCaffrey’s Cooking Out of This World. Kidneys anyone? Or tripe anyone?  (Died 1978.)
  • Born August 10, 1931 Alexis A. Gilliland, 88. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1982, edging out Brin and Swanwick for the honor. Gilliland also won four Hugo Awards for Best Fan Artist in the early Eighties and won the Tucker Award for Excellence in Partying in the late Eighties. What the Hell is that?  He’s got two series, Rosinante and Wizenbeak, neither of which I’ve read.
  • Born August 10, 1939 Kate O’Mara. Her films included two Hammer Horror films, The Vampire Lovers and The Horror of Frankenstein. She also appeared on Doctor Who as The Rani during the Era of The Seventh Doctor in a recurring role. She reposted that role in the charity special, Doctor Who: Dimensions in Time. (Died 2014.)
  • Born August 10, 1952 David C. Smith, 67. He is best known for his fantasy novels, particularly those co-authored with Richard L. Tierney, featuring characters created by Robert E. Howard, most notably the six novels which involved Red Sonja. Those novels are available on iBooks but not on Kindle. 
  • Born August 10, 1955 Eddie Campbell, 64. Best known as the illustrator and publisher of From Hell (written by Alan Moore), and Bacchus, a series about the few Greek gods who have made to our time. Though not genre, I highly recommend The Black Diamond Detective Agency which he did. It’s adaptation of an as-yet unmade screenplay by C. Gaby Mitchell. 
  • Born August 10, 1965 Claudia Christian, 54. Best known role is Commander Susan Ivanova on Babylon 5, but she has done other genre roles such as being Brenda Lee Van Buren in The Hidden, Katherine Shelley in Lancelot: Guardian of Time, Quinn in Arena, Lucy in The Haunting of Hell House and Kate Dematti in Meteor Apocalypse. She’s had one-offs on Space Rangers, Highlander, Quantum Leap, Relic Hunter and Grimm. She’s Captain Belinda Blowhard on StarHyke, a six episode SF comic series shot in ‘05 you can see on Amazon Prime. 

(8) HELP PICK THE EXPANSE TOYS. Bonnie McDaniel alerts Filers to Amazon’s page where you can vote on toys and dolls to be included with their upcoming box set of The Expanse. “Needless to say, I voted for the swearing Avasarala doll.” 😀

Some of you wanted a statue of Madam Secretary; others wanted this to be much more “playful.” We’re going to start with the idea of a highly decorated doll. We’ll dress her in her red tunic and include all the proper accessories. We’ll put her in a whimsical toy box for display. And, most importantly, she’ll come with attitude. Press her back and hear her favorite adult-rated sayings. Approx. 12” high.

(9) TUNE INTO SFF. BBC Radio 4’s Stillicide is a futuristic mini-series. Each episode is only 15 minutes and will be on i-player for a month.

Stillicide

Episode 1 of 12

Cynan Jones’ electrifying series set in the very near future – a future a little, but not quite like our own.

Water is commodified and the Water Train that feeds the city is increasingly at risk of sabotage. And now icebergs are set to be towed to a huge ice dock outside the capital city – a huge megalopolis that is draining the country of its resources.

Against this, a lone marksman stands out in the field. His job is to protect the Water Train…

From one of the most celebrated writers of his generation, Stillicide is a moving story of love and loss and the will to survive, and a powerful glimpse of the tangible future.

Available now — “Episode 1: The Water Train”

(10) SHOOTING THE MOON. Let’s also mention Gideon Marcus’ profile of the latest Moon exploration efforts of 55 years ago. This job is not that bleepin’ easy! “[August 1, 1964] On Target (The Successful Flight of Ranger 7)”.

…Never mind them.  Rangers 3-5 were the real lunar probes, even including giant balsawood pimples on the end, which housed seismometers that could survive impact with the Moon.  It was more important than ever that we know what the lunar surface was like now that President Kennedy had announced that we would, as a nation, put a man on the Moon and bring him safely back to Earth before the decade was out.

Easier said than done.  Ranger 3, launched in January 1962, missed the Moon.  Moreover, it sailed past while facing the wrong way.  The probe took no useful pictures, and a failure of the onboard computer prevented the acquisition of sky science data….

(11) THE WATCHERS. On the National Public Radio website, Annalisa Quinn reviews a new novel, The Turn of the Key (Ruth Ware), that updates Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw for the current digital and surveillance age. (“We’re All Haunted In ‘The Turn Of The Key'”)

     In Henry James’s ambiguous, paranoid novella The Turn of the Screw (1898), a governess is left in charge of two children in an isolated Essex country house. Over time, she becomes convinced the children are communing with the ghosts of former servants, who appear to them, at first at a distance and then ever closer, threatening to lead them to damnation. By the end, a child is dead, but we still don’t know: Were the ghosts real, or were they in the governess’s head?

     With The Turn of the Key, Ruth Ware (The Woman in Cabin 10) offers a clever and elegant update to James’s story, one with less ambiguity but its own eerie potency. Rowan Caine accepts a nannying job at a gorgeous house in the Scottish Highlands, wired with a smart home app called, horribly, “Happy,” that lets its owners surveil every room in the house from afar, control the lights, heat, and locks — and even talk through speakers in the walls.

(12) EVERYBODY WAVE AT LARRY. Larry Correia tells people he never reads this blog, yet it’s important to him to know what’s being said about him here and to respond to it because he has the thinnest-skin and the biggest ears of anyone in the field. “House of Assassins Is A Finalist For The Dragon Award For Best Fantasy” [Internet Archive link].

(13) GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN. In July, Greg Bear blogged about his experiences “Meeting Epstein”. He met him at a conference in 2011 to which he was invited at the behest of AI researcher Marvin Minsky. Bloomberg’s article says Virginia Giuffre has named Minsky as someone Jeffrey Epstein sent her to when she was 17, according to an unsealed deposition in Federal court.

…On a couple of occasions, we had face time with Epstein, who seemed, to me, an eccentric and possibly brilliant financier with weird ideas about economics–but hell, he was paying all the bills, so we were polite. One of our observations about his entourage was they consisted mostly of attractive young women in their twenties or early thirties, at most, brought over from his private island near St. John, where it seemed they staffed his house. We had been dangled the possibility of being taken out to that island to see the sights, but most of us did not get that opportunity.

The women, by my instincts, were of a uniform and somewhat inaccessible temper, and I got the impression that Epstein was their lord and master, and they did not range far in their daily lives. But they were all adults.

At one point during the conference, with Epstein in the room, some imp of perverse in me made an analogy (I cannot remember my exact point, or the reason for the analogy) to Dracula coming down out of his castle to ravage the young women of the village. That put an end — though not abruptly — to our face time with Epstein, and the conference ended on schedule. We had a great time with Marvin and his wife, Gloria, loved the islands and towns, and never heard from Epstein or his people again. No further conferences were arranged, at least with me involved….

(14) ON THE CHEAP. Getting up-to-date images is easy when the satellites are cheap enough that you can put up a lot of them: “Iceye satellites return super-sharp radar images”.

Finnish space start-up Iceye has once again given an impressive demonstration of its novel technology’s capabilities.

The company’s radar satellites are now returning sub-1m resolution images of the Earth’s surface.

This level of performance is expected from traditional spacecraft that weigh a tonne or more and cost in excess of one hundred million euros.

But Iceye’s breakthrough satellites are the size of a suitcase and cost only a couple of million to build.

The Helsinki-based outfit is leading a group of “New Space” companies that aim to fly constellations of such radar imagers.

This is something that would have seemed technically very challenging and prohibitively expensive just a few years ago.

(15) STANDING UP. ComicBook.com sees the pursuit of truth and justice: “Superman Joins Twitter, Dives Into Immigration Debate”.

Few things are as debated at the moment in America as Immigration, and while there are a myriad of opinions about how we should handle it, I don’t think anyone expected Superman to jump into the fray. That’s exactly what DC did though when Superman got a Twitter account, and the hero didn’t waste any time establishing who he is and what he’s always been about. DC shared a video featuring a classic Superman PSA from 1960 titled Lend A Friendly Hand, which put a spotlight on two children looking down on another child because he is a refugee, and Superman breaks down what’s wrong with their thinking.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Meow Wolf–Awakening Creativity for the Masses” on Vimeo is an interview with Meow Wolf CEO Vince Kadlubek where he talks about Meow Wolf’s nethods of creating art and how they can inspire creativity ine everyone who experiences a Meow Wolf production.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, Cliff Ramshaw, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, James Bacon, James Davis Nicoll, Bonnie McDaniel, Mike Kennedy, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Ingvar.]

55 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/10/19 The Square Of The Pixel Is Equal To The Sum Of The Squares Of The File And The Scroll

  1. Cooling my heels at DFW, waiting on my late night connecting flight to Dublin.

  2. (12) That guy should have a chat with my old friend Larry Correia who once told me: “You can always spot the dishonest dismiss attempts because no matter how righteous your claim or how much you’ve actually been wronged, they always paint their opposition’s words as ranting, whining, You Sound Angry, so on and so forth. It’s very predictable.” or in this case “flipping out”. Wise words Larry, wise words.

  3. 12) Since I was I think the only one dissing him on that post, I’ll take full credit for his tirade.

    Larry, if you’re listening in now, I’ll say it again: I really, really don’t think your novel is worthy of being considered for a Best Fantasy Novel Award. Spinning Silver easily got my vote.

  4. @7: the Rosinante series is not as doctrinaire as some libertarian SF, but it seemed to me at the time to make assumptions about human behavior (and the agreement of the universe to it) that were more doctrine than fact; it also has a couple of ~sex scenes that will squick some readers and cause others to hurl the books aside with great force. Aside from these, the story was interesting and some of the treatment of AIs seemed original — not as childlike as Mike or Harlie.

    @12: surely there are other contenders for thinnest skin in SF?

    Today’s strange science: Scientists Find Out How Leaping Maggots Leap — up to 30 times their length, and despite not having the anchoring structures used by (e.g.) crickets. Includes a short low-contrast video

  5. Another brief book comment: Tasha Suri’s Empire of Sand (noted here as this year’s Brave New Words winner), is indeed a good book despite being an uncomfortable read — an intensely patriarchal empire that despises a dark-skinned tribe but uses them to twist natural forces in the empire’s favor, a ~cult leader with the vicious charisma and unthinking followers seen in many cults in recent decades, and hurtful family and tribal politics/dynamics. (Not as painful to read as The Fifth Season but getting there.) There’s one deus ex machina I found hard to swallow; OTOH, the book is ~complete rather than the first part of a story — the blurb for the next book says it features the barely-of-age heroine’s kid sister when she’s old enough to be not just married but widowed.

  6. I see Larry Correia’s still the pitiable wounded bird who can’t enjoy anything without complaining about how mistreated he’s been. If he genuinely valued getting a Dragon Award nomination he wouldn’t be whining about the Hugos or File 770 at all (show me anyone, ever, whose first response to getting a Hugo nomination was to rail against the Dragon Awards).

    But I can’t blame him for being underwhelmed about an award that won’t release its nomination and vote totals, which makes a mockery of his claim that it’s a “popularity contest for all of fandom.”

    Correia has been nursing a grudge against OGH for so long that even his commenters are bored. The best part is the reason for his impotent sputtering rage: His fee-fees were hurt because his blog was quoted accurately.

  7. Chip Hitchcock: Well, how often have you seen a writer post multiple obscenity-filled pleonasms about a fan? And his bottom-feeding sycophants know they only have to mention something from here to get him to fly off the handle. If there’s another contender for the title, I hope I never hear about them.

  8. Chip Hitchcock on August 10, 2019 at 7:09 pm said:

    @12: surely there are other contenders for thinnest skin in SF?

    See!? There is a conspiracy! You’re all trying to deny poor Larry another of the awards he so richly deserves! Larry does have the thinnest skin! Don’t try to steal that the way you stole his Hugo! 😀

  9. Xtifr says: See!? There is a conspiracy! You’re all trying to deny poor Larry another of the awards he so richly deserves! Larry does have the thinnest skin! Don’t try to steal that the way you stole his Hugo! ?

    I’ve said before and I’ll say it again here. No one is entitled to an Award. If you get one, be grateful that you did so. Even being humble would be a good idea. Well that rather obviously leaves Larry out. Like JDA, it’s rather obvious that he believes there’s a conspiracy started here to deny him what’s his.

  10. Oh, JDA! Yeah, I guess Larry does have some competition for that thinnest-skin award. But JDA seems too much like he’s engaged in a series of publicity stunts–for honest, straight-up thin-skinned behavior, my vote still goes to Larry! 😀

  11. (7) Eddie Campbell also illustrated Neil Gaiman’s historical fantasy story “The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains,” which I liked quite a bit, although Campbell was trying out a color style that I don’t think he had quite figured out yet (or maybe I’ll just always prefer his ink drawings).

  12. Eli comments Eddie Campbell also illustrated Neil Gaiman’s historical fantasy story “The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains,” which I liked quite a bit, although Campbell was trying out a color style that I don’t think he had quite figured out yet (or maybe I’ll just always prefer his ink drawings).

    I’d forgotten about that.I thought the color style therein wasn’t his best effort but overall it was an interesting work. I remember that it sold exceedingly well at the local bookshop.

  13. Jon’s feelings can get hurt, but I agree that most of his posturing online is calculated book promotion. By his account, it works pretty well for him. The Amazon Sales ranks seem to bear this out. But it’s not a strategy a thin-skinned person could pursue.

    I’ve never met Larry or corresponded with him, so can’t claim to know anything about him, but from what I can see online, he doesn’t seem to be using the same approach at all, nor does he seem to have the temperment for it.

  14. There were some other contenders, but the only one that has been so consistent, so long-lasting and been so filled with rage and general oafishness is Correia. Taken all together, he looks like the winner.

  15. Feel a bit lost here in Dublin, in one day, I have had three places where they haven’t accepted credit cards. I haven’t paid with anything in cash for half a year or so in Sweden and to be honest, I don’t really have a clue of what notes and coins are valid still.

    So now I have to start looking at all these coins and make sense of them.

  16. So now I have to start looking at all these coins and make sense of them.

    Yeah, we were shocked when the taxi driver from the airport required cash. Luckily Eric keeps a stash of cash from places we visit often, so we had just enough Euros to pay him.

    At a pub in Edinburgh last week, I couldn’t read the coins in the dim light, and I was reduced to just handing the bartender a handful of coins and letting him sort it out for me.

    I haven’t paid with anything in cash for half a year or so in Sweden. . . .

    I went to the ATM back in the US last month for the first time in two years. I still carry cash when I leave the house, but only bills; any coins go into a bucket, and that bucket only has a handful in it. (I know someone who claims he throws coins into the trash, but I’m not that far gone yet.)

    John Brunner, in Shockwave Rider, wrote about a future where most people lived in a cashless society where the unit of account was called a “credit,” but there was an underclass who lived in a cash-only society where the currency was “sovereigns.” For the first time, I think we might actually end up that way.

  17. Hampus Eckerman says There were some other contenders, but the only one that has been so consistent, so long-lasting and been so filled with rage and general oafishness is Correia. Taken all together, he looks like the winner.

    Certainly anyone who thinks we’re effecting his sales is clearly in need of serious help. I’m reminded of local conservatives that read our liberal newspaper and then rail in its online forums about it being liberal.

    Larry, many of us don’t like you nor do we care for your fiction. That’s our right. It’s also your right not to read File 770 and a wiser person than you wouldn’t do so. Go bask in the adoration of your fans elsewhere. Me, I’ll go on reading Cat Rambo, Seanan McGuire and Mary Robinette Kowal who are far better writers than you’ll ever be. And far more entertaining as storytellers too.

  18. Handy guide to Irish coinage
    5 pence = 1 shilling
    2 shillings = 4 bob
    6 bob = 9 florins
    5 florins and half a bob = a tanner
    8 tanners = 10 white heifers
    100 white heifers = a taoiseach.

    You usually end up having to buy a coddle in the shop to break a taoiseach because the buses only take heifers.

  19. 4.) I’m flinching at that one, not so much because it does hit the mark, but because from my perspective, it doesn’t. It’s basically Hunger Games for grownups.

    Then again, I am NOT AT ALL INTERESTED in writing such a thing. Shoot, I started writing a happy ending for a cli-fi I’d gotten the rights back to. Just your little optimist over here, brooding in her cage….not at all interested, not at all interested, oh geez, there goes the morbid imagination again….

  20. 2) I thought this was a very good interview, and tried to leave a comment with some egoboo, but unfortunately you have to be an Irish Times subscriber to leave a comment on their site.

  21. Hampus, I’ve been reading that UK paper money (pounds) and coins were changed relatively recently, but is the same true for Euros?

  22. (4) BENNETT’S VIGILANCE

    Vigilance is an excellent story that I wish I’d never read.
    I’ve started a review of it several times, but just can’t express my simultaneous admiration of and revulsion at what Bennett managed to write.

  23. @Jerry

    UK currency (ETA I should be more specific; Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own notes) has been slowly changing over the last decade or so. Several of the coins have been redesigned to be smaller, and the more common banknotes have been redesigned as polymer notes rather than paper. It’s not been a ‘big bang’ changeover though, probably because of the amount of moaning whenever a change is made.

    On the wider point of cash versus card, my UK perspective (i.e not applicable to Ireland) is that all but the smallest of businesses take cards nowadays, and also the adoption of the newer contactless tech has been really quick. (I wouldn’t be shocked if experiences differed in more rural areas though) One area that’s been notably slow is public transport – buses and taxis, so Greg’s experience doesn’t suprise me. Taxis are rather grudgingly moving to offer card payments in areas where services such as Uber are putting them under pressure to modernise. Buses seem to be moving to contactless options once they’ve realised it’s fast and convenient for both sides, but takeup is patchy.

  24. Chalk my comment up to American ignorance of the EU and the Eurozone. I was pretty sure Sweden is part of the EU but thought all EU countries used the Euro. I’ve now looked this up, and will need to have many useful conversations in Dublin and Belfast about why so many countries have retained their own currencies. (Read “useful” ironically, please.)

  25. According to Apple Maps, Apple Pay[1] is almost ubiquitously accepted in Ireland… but when I bought my transit pass at the airport, it didn’t work – according to the clerk, because there’s a maximum value at that place for contactless payments. And then my credit card wanted to be processed as chip-and-sign, even though I’d gone to the bother to get it set up for chip-and-PIN.

    [1] I typed this apple as the apple glyph, as is my wont, but it got turned into a question mark. So sad too bad.

  26. Mark: Vigilance is an excellent story that I wish I’d never read. I’ve started a review of it several times, but just can’t express my simultaneous admiration of and revulsion at what Bennett managed to write.

    My thoughts exactly. It’s a good story, but far, far too close to current-day reality, and utterly believable. Definitely not recommended for those who have no spoons available.

  27. (6) Hard to believe it’s been 35 since Buckaroo drove through that mountain. What a time to be alive.

    (16) I was made aware of Meow Wolf because they’re the home shirt sponsor for New Mexico United FC. Certainly one of the cooler shirt sponsors. Sadly, I think the team store is sold out at the moment.

    The Irish pound was a punt in Irish which looked strange to Americans who are only familiar with a punt coming on 4th and long.

    Why is there a pixel scroll there?
    I’ll tell you later.

  28. @Jerry Kaufman
    Not all EU countries use the Euro. Some, like Sweden or the UK, prefer to keep their own currency. Others, usually in Eastern and South Eastern Europe, don’t yet meet the financial criteria to qualify.

    Anyway, in Ireland you can pay with plain old Euros and Northern Ireland uses the pound like the rest of the UK. The pound notes have recently been redesigned and I got a batch of new and different looking ones from my bank. Though I think the old ones will still be valid for a while.

    There have been some minor changes to the Euro notes and the design of one side of the coins is up to the discretion of the country in question, which makes collecting Euro coins a popular hobby (the Vatican state Euros are the rarest and I’ve never seen one in person). If you have a batch of Euro coins, check the reverse side and you’ll see that there are many national variations, though in Ireland, the Irish harp should be the most common one. But the design doesn’t affect the validity. If it’s a Euro, you can pay with it in the Eurozone.

    If you try to pay with Irish pounds though, you’ll run into problems.

  29. Taxis are rather grudgingly moving to offer card payments in areas where services such as Uber are putting them under pressure to modernise.
    Interesting, taxis in NZ accepted Credit Cards relatively early (despite high fees), presumably because convenience is so useful for both parties. The relative cheapness of the Debit Card (‘EFTPOS’) system means many small retailers don’t accept CC’s, and note this on their scanner/keypad. Contactless (‘Paywave’) is common enough that those that don’t accept it often have a note also. CC’s are chip-and-PIN, Paywave has NZD80 (~USD50) limit, over that you have to PIN to confirm.

  30. (Waves at Larry, in the hope that he will focus on his own writing career and his life instead of comments made on an internet board).

  31. 7) I knew Alexi A. Gilliland for his fanzine cartoons when I was more active in the 1970’s and ‘80’s, but I never heard of the Tucker Award for Excellence in Partying. If such an award is named for the late Bob Tucker (the Big Name Fan who wrote professionally as Wilson Tucker), I guess that would be appropriate, from what I knew of his reputation. But I can’t find anything online about the Tucker Award, except in Gilliland’s Wikipedia posting. It is probably NOT the same as the Richard Tucker Award, named for the 20th century operatic tenor, which honors up-and-coming American opera singers. This year’s winner is the soprano Lissette Oropesa, and I’m sure she’s a wonderful singer, but is she any fun at a Dead Dog Party?

  32. @Jerry Kaufman (detailing @Cora Buhlert): when I was in Croatia 3+ years ago, they were looking forward to replacing their currency with the Euro, but in the ~3 years since being admitted to the EU they hadn’t gotten their economy in acceptable shape (for values of “acceptable” that I’m not nearly clued enough to explain, let alone argue).

    @Cora Buhlert: as a physics follower who visited Greece many years ago, I was amused on the above trip to find that the reverse of small-change Euro coins in Greece said “lepta” (the subdivision of the former currency) instead of “cent”. Unfortunately, the amusement erased any memory of the rest of the design.

    @errolwi: credit-card handling must have been more convenient in NZ than elsewhere; my last US taxi ride (last November) was the first time the driver didn’t have to fumble with a balky machine — and I have no idea how much it cost him (a common reason US non-mobile small businesses don’t like cards).

  33. @Chip Hitchcock
    Croatia has officially applied to join the Eurozone and is currently in preliminary stage where their currency is firmly linked to the Euro. Ditto for Bulgaria.

    And a couple of East European countries such as Slovakia, Slovenia and the three Baltic States already have the Euro. Though the criteria to join are pretty strict with regard to spending, deficits, national debt and the like to keep the currency stable and to avoid costly emergencies like the near collapse of Greece.

  34. @Chip Hitchcock,
    New Zealand adopted EFTPOS early & basically kept going. In general, it’s an early adopter of technology*. I was surprised a few years ago when trying to pay by credit card in Australia that they made me sign for it. In New Zealand the de facto has been PIN for years.

    *A contributing factor may be that New Zealand is a bit of a test bed, being a developed country with a small population. There have been a number of instances where we have experienced changes in e.g. Facebook that don’t get rolled out until quite a bit later to the rest of the world.

  35. I always bring a fair amount of local money, because
    – often it’s the only option, e.g. small towns, small stores, farmers markets, flea markets, individuals
    – sometimes the c.f. or atm .machines aren’t working or are out of money or the line is too long or there is a problem with my card
    – I enjoy it
    – sometimes fastest
    – giving to street people

  36. Jim Meadows says I knew Alexi A. Gilliland for his fanzine cartoons when I was more active in the 1970’s and ‘80’s, but I never heard of the Tucker Award for Excellence in Partying. If such an award is named for the late Bob Tucker (the Big Name Fan who wrote professionally as Wilson Tucker), I guess that would be appropriate, from what I knew of his reputation. But I can’t find anything online about the Tucker Award, except in Gilliland’s Wikipedia posting. It is probably NOT the same as the Richard Tucker Award, named for the 20th century operatic tenor, which honors up-and-coming American opera singers. This year’s winner is the soprano Lissette Oropesa, and I’m sure she’s a wonderful singer, but is she any fun at a Dead Dog Party?

    It is wiki so it’s entirely possibly that this is a piece of fantasy on the part of the wiki writer. Like you, I couldn’t find any mention of it elsewhere but was hoping someone deep in fandom might know of it. Maybe a future WorldCon will add it…

  37. late addition: from what I remember at the time, Wizenbeak was the name of the wizard in Gilliland’s often-amusing single-panel cartoons; the reactions to the attempt to turn this bits into a novel did not encourage me to read it. (vaguely cf the best part of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown being the songs — and that had the advantage of existing ministories.)

  38. Daniel Dern – giving your local money to street people is okay in my book, but even better is buying a newspaper they produce and sell. In Seattle we have Real Change. I found that in Dublin, it’s Ireland’s Big Issue. http://www.irelandsbigissue.com/

  39. For accessing taxis in Dublin, there’s an app called Free now that works basically like Uber, but is slightly less evil. You can put your card details in there and just request a taxi via it and not worry about payments afterwards.

  40. Vicki Rosenzweig on August 11, 2019 at 6:05 am said:

    No groats?

    Groats were demonetized some time ago because they were so easily counterfeited. Dublin 2019 acquired a bunch of them to use as tokens for volunteers to use for buying food/drinks in the convention centre.

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