Pixel Scroll 8/13/18 I Can’t See Me Scrolling Nobody But You, For All My File

(1) SATURDAY AFTERNOON AT WORLDCON. Adam Rakunas is publicizing the availability of help for those who want it:

(2) NEWS CLIPPING. Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy reports that in 2019 Saga Press will publish Rivers Solomon’s novel inspired by a song from 2017 Hugo nominee Clipping,—a group that includes Tony-winner Daveed Diggs. Thread starts here.

(3) BEAM UP MORE GOLD. Borys Kit, in “Chris Pine and Chris Hemsworth ‘Star Trek 4’ Future In Doubt as Talks Fall Through (Exclusive)”  in The Hollywood Reporter says that both Pine and Hemsworth (who was supposed to play Captain James T. Kirk’s father) have said they won’t be in Star Trek 4 because of pay issues.

The deal points came down to the usual suspect: money. Pine and Hemsworth, among Hollywood’s A-list when starring in DC or Marvel movies, are said to be asking the studios to stick to existing deals. Paramount, according to insiders, contends that Star Trek is not like a Marvel or Star Wars movie and is trying to hold the line on a budget.

The actors, according to sources, insist they have deals in place and that the studios are reneging on them, forcing them to take pay cuts as they try to budget a movie that is following a mediocre performer.

Pine, at least, has had a deal in place for several years. The actor, now a key player in the Wonder Woman franchise, signed up for a fourth movie when he made his deal for 2016’s Star Trek Beyond. Hemsworth has been attached to Star Trek 4 since Paramount, then run by the previous regime headed by Brad Grey, announced the fourth installment in 2016, although his exact status remains murky.

(4) SIGNING STORIES. Delilah S. Dawson gets a lot of great answers. Thread starts here.

Includes a RedWombat sighting –

(5) IT’S THAT DAY. In Pogo, Walt Kelly had a running gag: “Be careful, Friday the 13th falls on a Sunday/ Monday/ Tuesday, etc. this month.” Friday the 13th falls on a Monday in August.

(6) A MODERN SAGA. Brought to you by Amal El-Mohtar.

(7) THE BEST OF. James Davis Nicoll looks back at Del Rey Books’ “Best of…” series in “A Survey of Some of the Best Science Fiction Ever Published (Thanks to Judy-Lynn Del Rey)” at Tor,com, although some of the humor made me wonder if he really liked all the collections. (Which I suppose he did, otherwise why write the piece?) Like this note:

John Brunner’s fiction covered a spectrum ranging from morose to intensely gloomy. Readers intrigued by this collection who want to enjoy his strengths at novel length should seek out Brunner’s thematically-related SF standalone novels: The Jagged Orbit, The Sheep Look Up, Stand on Zanzibar, and The Shockwave Rider. Each book tackles One Big Issue (racial conflict, pollution, overpopulation, and future shock, respectively).

(8) HUGHART OKAY. The query about author Barry Hughart’s well-being in the August 4 Scroll (item 5) has been answered, and the news is good. Bill Schafer of Subterranean Press replied today —

Dear Mr. Glyer,

In response to your recent thread about Barry Hughart’s whereabouts…

I am happy to report I just got off the phone with Barry Hughart, who is very much still with us. (He is terrible about responding to emails, which led me into my email archives to dig out his phone number.)

Oddly enough, we’ve been doing business for ten years or more, and this is the first time we’ve spoken.

Best,

Bill

(9) ROHAN OBIT. A note about the passing of Michael Scott Rohan (1951-2018) at the SF Encyclopedia.

Michael Scott Rohan died in hospital in his home town of Edlnburgh on 12 August 2018; he was 67. Although his first novel Run to the Stars (1983, pictured) was a lively science-fiction adventure, his considerable reputation rests mainly on the Winter of the World fantasy sequence beginning with The Anvil of Ice (1986) and the Spiral science-fantasies beginning with Chase the Morning (1990).

Speaking personally, Mike Rohan was an old and valued friend whose unexpected death leaves an aching hole in the world. — David Langford

(10) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • August 13, 1942 — Disney’s Bambi premiered in New York City.
  • August 13, 1953 — The original War Of The Worlds was released in New York City.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

  • Born August 13, 1899 – Alfred Hitchcock. Let’s see… The Birds and Psycho. Y’all think anything else might be loosely be genre which I include horror in?
  • Born August 13 – Kevin Tighe, 74. First genre role was in This Immortal series, nearly fifty years ago; appeared also in The Six Million Dollar Man, Tales from the Crypt, Escape to Witch Mountain, The Outer Limits, Star Trek: Voyager, Strange World, The 4400, Lost and Salem. 
  • Born August 13 –Danny Bonaduce, 59. First genre role was in The Ghost & Mrs. Muir; later roles included acting in Bewitched, Shazam!, Fantasy Island (original series), Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and Bigfoot. Voice work includes Dr. DolittleFred Flintstone and Friends and Goober and the Ghost Chasers.
  • Born August 13 – John Slattery, 56. Howard Stark in the MCU film franchise, appeared in The Adjustment Bureau film based loosely I suspect of the Philip K. Dick short story ‘Adjustment Team’, 3rd Rock, From the Earth to the Moon miniseries and Flashpoint.
  • Born August 13 – Michael De Luca, 53. Producer, second Suicide Squad film, Childhood’s End, Ghost Rider and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Dracula Untold, Lost in Space, Blade and Blade II, Pleasantville and Zathura: A Space Adventure which is not a complete listing. Also writer for an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, the first Dredd film (oh well), the Freddy’s Nightmares series and the Dark Justice series which though not genre was rather fun.
  • Born August 13 – Sebastian Stan, 36. Bucky Barnes / Winter Soldier in the MCU film franchise; also appeared in Once Upon a Time series, The Martian, The Apparition, Ares III, and Kings, a contemporary alternate-history series about a man who rises to become the King of his nation, based on the biblical story of King David.
  • Born August 13 – Sara Serraiocco, 28. Currently in Counterpoint, a cross-universe Cold War thriller. That’s it.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

(13) MEDICAL ADVICE. At Dorkly, “Two Doctors Figured Out How To Treat A Centaur Having a Heart Attack”. I hope Rick Riordan is taking notes.

Case in point: centaurs – what’s THEIR deal? Half man, half horse, and ALL anatomical mysteries. See, the way centaurs are broken down is that it’s the torso ‘n up part of a human combined with the whole body of a horse (minus the head and neck). But that presents a problem, because (anatomically-speaking) the two halves share a whole bunch of organs, namely the heart.

So a doctor (@FredWuMD) took to Twitter to ask fellow medical professionals an incredibly important question – if a centaur was in the midst of a cardiac arrest, where would you presume the heart is? Where would you use defibrillator pads?

(14) WHAT’S ON HIS MIND? Mike Alger says: “Weekend project: By combining a 3D scan with an MRI (don’t worry I’m fine), I can now step out of my body and legitimately look into my head at my own brain.”

Thread starts here. Mlex says, “This reminded me of Ted Chiang’s story, ‘Exhalation’, in Lightspeed Magazine.”

(15) COSTUMING HISTORY. The International Costumers Gallery continues its series, “Convention Costuming History: The Post WWII Years – 1946”.

…The Pacificon Convention News, issue #2 promised a Costume Ball, essentially acknowledging how much a part of the convention wearing costumes had become. Hearkening back to the pre-war events, it anticipated “BEMs and MONSTERS from every solar system and dimension; famous characters from the stories you have read and loved and every kind of costume that the fertile mentalities of fen (the best fertilized minds in existence) do be able to thunk up<sic>.”(2) Whether it was actually a “ball” or just a party is not clear.

Participants and costumes reported were Myrtle Douglas winning first prize for her Snake Mother dress (3)(4) and Arthur Joquel II (5) dressed as a “high priest”, winning a prize for “characterization”. Fan and fanzine writer Dale Hart’s “Gray Lensman” costume was judged “most ingenious”. (6)

(16) THE GREAT WALL OF HYDROGEN. The New Horizons probe is looking for evidence of it: “NASA spotted a vast, glowing ‘hydrogen wall’ at the edge of our solar system”.

There’s a “hydrogen wall” at the edge of our solar system, and NASA scientists think their New Horizons spacecraft can see it.

That hydrogen wall is the outer boundary of our home system, the place where our sun’s bubble of solar wind ends and where a mass of interstellar matter too small to bust through that wind builds up, pressing inward….

What New Horizons definitely sees, the researchers reported in a paper published Aug. 7 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, is some extra ultraviolet light — the kind the researchers would expect such a wall of galactic hydrogen to produce. That replicates an ultraviolet signal the two Voyager spacecraft — NASA’s farthest-traveling probes, which launched in the late 1970s — spotted all the way back in 1992. [Images: Dust Grains from Interstellar Space]

However, the researchers cautioned, that signal isn’t a sure sign that New Horizons has seen the hydrogen wall, or that Voyager did. All three probes could have actually detected the ultraviolet light from some other source, emanating from much deeper in the galaxy, the researchers wrote.

(17) SEEING SPOTS. Lasers been berry berry good to me. NPR: “Growers Are Beaming Over The Success Of Lasers To Stave Off Thieving Birds”.

During every berry-picking season in the Pacific Northwest, blueberry and raspberry growers fight to prevent birds from gobbling up the crop before harvest. This year, some farmers are trying something new to scare away the thieving birds: lasers….

The lasers cross over in erratic patterns. The sweeping green laser beams emanate from what look like security cameras atop metal poles.

They also work during the daytime. But in sunlight, the human eye can only see green dots dancing across the berry-laden bushes.

(18) SFFANZ 500. Congratulations to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand (SFFANZ) on their blog’s 500th post – “SF Writer at the Manawatu Writers Festival + 500th Post”.

A heads up for SF fans about the Manawatu Writers’ Festival (Sept 7 – 11, 2018). This year they have a session with one of NZ’s longest running successful writers, Lyn Mc Conchie.

Lyn McConchie is an internationally successful author, who has had 44 books published, 300+ short stories, and 150+ articles. Her work has appeared in English, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and from publishers there as well as in America, Australia, New Zealand, and the Irish Republic. Lyn isn’t in any ruts, she writes mysteries, SF/F, animal tales, post-apocalypse, YA, picture books, and humorous and scholarly non-fiction and she has no plans to stop any time soon. Lyn’s latest book, Coal & Ashes, is is one of her apocalyptic stories, set in Australia, one of a series.

(19) THERAPEUTIC POOH. The LA Times profiles Christopher Robin: “With ‘Christopher Robin,’ Winnie the Pooh faces his greatest challenge yet: A marriage in crisis”.

So many Disney films follow a child or young adult suddenly thrown into a grown-up world and forced to overcome all of its headaches. “Christopher Robin,” however, turns a childhood hero of those who grew up admiring A.A. Milne’s “Winnie the Pooh” tales into a depressed and overwhelmed adult — a man whose youthful imagination ultimately proved no match for the realities of war, fatherhood and a thankless job.

In the film, an old and familiar pal comes to the rescue, but is Winnie the Pooh — a plump stuffed bear whose biggest bothers often involved stealing honey from a bee — ready to fix the life of a workaholic whose marriage is entering crisis mode? Or, perhaps more accurately, are Pooh fans ready to see it?

Those who worked on “Christopher Robin” say the mission was to tap into the original Milne template, one that mixed comedy and complex emotions to deliver patient life lessons. The ultimate goal of the film: to dispel any notion that Winnie the Pooh is simply kid stuff.

“I wouldn’t be ashamed to be a grown man going to see a ‘Winnie the Pooh’ movie in the theater with no child next to me, so let’s make sure we’re making that movie,” said Alex Ross Perry, a filmmaker with several acclaimed indies under his belt and one of three credited screenwriters on the picture. “It has to be completely logical in that Pixar sense, where adults can go see it in a roomful of kids, but it doesn’t feel like you’re seeing a kids movie.”

(20) NOW YOU’RE TALKING. John Scalzi boosts a great idea —

(21) EYE-OPENING COLLECTIBLE. Something to find a Worldcon 76 –

(22) THE TRAVELER. Galactic Journey’s Gideon Marcus will interrupt his daily commute to 1963 in order to appear at Worldcon 76 –

(23) RADIO ACTIVITY. SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie tuned into BBC Radio 4 this weekend. He picked out highlights you can access online.

Looks like Dan Dare is a full blown radio series consisting of a number of linked  two-part adventures. Next up next Sunday will be on Radio 4 Extra and shortly after for a month on BBC i-Player linked off here.

Episode 1

Dan Dare, The Red Moon Mystery Episode 1 of 2

4 Extra Debut. Infected by the Mekon’s virus, Dan’s crew orbit Earth until the Inter-Planet Space Force orders them to Mars. Stars Ed Stoppard

Next Sunday 18:00

BBC Radio 4 Extra

Also this weekend we had on BBC Radio 4

Open Book  “Claire Fuller, Neil Gaiman, Iranian fiction”

Claire Fuller talks to Mariella Frostrup about her new novel Bitter Orange and the appeal of the crumbling country house as a setting.

Neil Gaiman explains why forgotten classic Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees deserves a wider readership.

What does the combination of sanctions and censorship mean for Iran’s writers? The Guardian’s Saeed Kamali Dehghan and publisher Azadeh Parsapour discuss.

And Carrie Plitt, agent at Felicity Bryan Associates recommends Sally Rooney’s Normal People for our monthly Editor’s Tip.

This is available to listen to for next 4 weeks

[Thanks to JJ, David Langford, Jonathan Cowie, Chip Hitchcock, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, Andrew Porter, Leo Doroschenko, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories, Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]

129 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/13/18 I Can’t See Me Scrolling Nobody But You, For All My File

  1. WRT to the Disney Princesses in Wreck It Ralph 2 — several fans on tumblr have already been kicking around the “Princesses 13” heist plot for fanfiction. So John can’t QUITE claim first dibs.

    OH LOOK, autopopulate is working again! Mike, what did you do?

  2. 2) Very exciting!

    9) As noted elsewhere, very sad.

    16) Just as long as it doesn’t hit a glass wall around our solar system.

  3. 5
    It’s even worse when Friday the 13th done come on a Friday. (Using the Pogo terminology. …Why, yes, I did grow up reading Pogo.)

  4. 11) Family Plot dipped into fantasy/the supernatural near the end of the film. Unfortunately, it was a pretty forgettable film, overall.

  5. 6) Seems dubious. Not having any difficulty finding bog standard Hellman’s here. It is true that they’ve added a slew of bizarre variations though.

  6. 6) Seems dubious. Not having any difficulty finding bog standard Hellman’s here. It is true that they’ve added a slew of bizarre variations though.

    Hellman’s is an eastern thing: it’s Best Buy out in the western US. Its sorta like the difference between the shapes of butter sticks – long and narrow back east, short and stubby in the west. I’d love to see a map showing where they change.

  7. @Lin McAllister
    Not “Best Buy”, just “Best Mayonnaise”. (Or “Best Foods”, for the name of the company.)

  8. (11) Some episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour had fantastic elements. See, for instance, “The Sign of Satan” (TAH Hour, S2E27).

  9. 7) having been reading James Nicoll for lo these 20 years I think, a phrase like “a spectrum ranging from morose to intensely gloomy” hardly means he doesn’t like something. After all, it’s presumably a relief from whatever his latest brush with death or dismemberment (talk about a good Austen title!) might have been.

  10. Rich Horton: I imagined it was meant to be a joke on the order of ‘actor Dale Robertson’s range of facial expressions’, and since there are few admirers of Robertson interpreted it in those terms. Now I see you’re right, Nicoll is happy with bleak. Wait, I don’t want to overstate in the other direction, he didn’t say happy… Maybe pleased?

  11. Hellman’s is an eastern thing: it’s Best Buy out in the western US. Its sorta like the difference between the shapes of butter sticks – long and narrow back east, short and stubby in the west. I’d love to see a map showing where they change.

    Many years ago, my sister was married to a man who was stationed at the Air Force base in Minot, ND. She was always happy when my parents visited her, because they’d bring her Best Foods mayonnaise (North Dakota was Hellman’s territory). She swore they tasted different, even though the company’s marketing says the only difference is the label.

  12. @Adam Rakunas: Need another addition to the t-shirt squad?

    @James Davis Nicoll: I considered Shockwave Rider not overly bleak, nor even Stand on Zanzibar, really. Perhaps I was New Waved into insensitivity to the relentlessly depressing.

  13. @John Lorentz–Do not discount the importance of correct label in comfort food. Realky, it’s like that startling and objectively probably scary orange color in Kraft Deluxe Mac & Cheese.

  14. I don’t consider bleak necessarily bad. And while we’re at it, I consider pulp a neutral descriptor.

    7) having been reading James Nicoll for lo these 20 years I think

    Possibly 25. 20 only gets us back to 1998…

  15. 6) That article came across my FB feed and ghod help me, I went and looked. Basically, it’s an old white woman who can’t accept that she’s just not as good a cook as her mother was, and who hates ethnic condiments (which she refers to as “identity condiments”, I only wish I were kidding). It’s a slimy mix of Millennial-bashing, white fragility, and denial of change. Kind of like mayonnaise. 🙂

    20) SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!
    … or maybe not, if the fanfic gets there first.

  16. Using the word “identity” or the phrase “identity politics” seems to be a popular method of virtue signaling nowadays.

  17. David Goldfarb: Using the word “identity” or the phrase “identity politics” seems to be a popular method of virtue signaling nowadays.

    “Identity politics” is on my list with “political correctness”, “virtue signalling”, and “SJW” as terms which indicate conclusively that the person using them (in a non-ironic manner) has no credibility whatsoever. It makes identifying irrational idealogues and clueless whackjobs extremely easy.

  18. There’s a family story that’s sort of about mayonnaise and identity.

    My family are NYC Jews. When my mom was a little kid, they moved to Shreveport, LA when my grandfather took a job with United Gas. They were very much a rye bread and chicken schmaltz kind of family. So there they are in the Deep South and one day my mom comes home from a friend’s house to announce that she’d just been given a wonderful new snack food – white bread and mayonnaise.

  19. (6) OMG.

    That woman is insane.

    And a quivering mass of irrational resentment.

    I loves me some mayonnaise in a sandwich. I really do. And I’m not always fond of some of what she rather bizarrely calls “identity condiments.”

    But even with my rather restricted moving around, I’ve lived places where the oregano and garlic without which in fairly sure no one in my family can cook, were still new, exotic ingredients. I survived, and the people who thought they were alien imports survived.

    And I routinely eat and enjoy things that are normal to me, but were intimidatingly new and alien to my mother. She never willingly ate them, but she didn’t regard it as the breakdown of civilization that her daughters did.

    Yes, tastes change over time. And sometimes, Young Persons do even forget who is entitled to make the Get Off My Lawn rants! Shocking!

    But this woman, who thinks her mother’s probably imperfectly replicated recipes are The Last Word in respectable eating, also thinks Jello mold “salads” qualify as edible food that deserve to be consumed rather than decently forgotten.

    Yeah, Kids Today won’t pass on all the same recipes my mom made. And will pass on cherished favorites that I hope they politely overlook me declining to consume.

    Woop de doo.

  20. (6)
    Can someone explain jell-o salad?
    (I mean I might try it for a novel food experience, but I doubt I would go back for seconds.)

  21. @Soon Lee–No one can explain Jello salad, but here’s a description of some common variants.

    There are also Jello molds in which veggies and possibly other stuff may be added before the Jello is chilled. These are blessedly fading memories from childhood, when in our area they were already becoming an embarrassment,but I here rumors that in some parts of the country they persisted longer.

  22. @Soon Lee: It’s an aspic, except it’s fruit flavored instead of savory. It’s an inexpensive delicacy. Not really my thing, but I can see why people like it.

  23. If Hellman’s was so great, they would have had their own jingle and not used the one that was written for Best Foods, which makes sense for Best Foods but not them.

    (7) I bought a number of those books in the 80s and 90s at used book stores, because I couldn’t afford them in the 70s.

    James’ reply at #10 in the comments there is a delight, and he didn’t even mention that Judy-Lynn herself counts as diversity. Not only have there been very few SF women editors of her influence, but she was a little person, born with achondroplasia.

  24. @ Soon Lee: IMO, “Jello salad” is badly misnamed, because most of the variants you run into are sweet and should therefore be classed as desserts. I will cheerfully eat a serving of Jello salad as dessert, especially if the formal dessert alternatives are things I don’t care for (such as pumpkin pie).

  25. @Soon Lee: Just as there’s only a single fruit loaf that is interconnected across time and space to all other (ostensibly separate) fruit loaves, I maintain that there is only one universal jello salad that manifests in sundry places. On the evidence of my own family, I think it’s a crypto-Lutheran substitute for Catholic guilt and repentance, a Protestant embodiment, if you will, of penance for, y’know, pretty much anything and everything: Your suffering is the important bit. The Anglican equivalent is, of course, the careful removal of crusts from sandwiches, because they must not have character, which is extravagant and could lead to popery.

    On the equally vital mayonnaise question, having seen the light during college in New Jersey and embraced the holy trinity of the blessed hoagie, the pastrami on rye, and the South Philly cheesesteak, I acknowledge that there is no legitimate place for mayonnaise in food, though perhaps it can fruitfully serve as a more than adequate spackling paste.

  26. Thank you all. on the whole Jell-O salad thing, especially after Rick Moen’s explanation I think I can safely say that my opinion is not yet set.

  27. Hey, um. This has nothing to do with anything on the Scroll except maybe item 1. Hope no one minds. (Also, I don’t seem to be logged in, or at least I’m not seeing my little tortie avatar. [edit: there she is!] But maybe some of you will remember my handle from the handful of comments I’ve made here.)

    I’m in the SF Bay Area, so I decided to get an attending membership to WorldCon, figuring that this opportunity to attend without having to pay travel/hotel costs wouldn’t likely be around when I actually felt ready to go to a con, which will probably be another decade or so. This will be nearly my first convention (I went to MAGfest a couple years ago, but mainly to meet up with friends there), and I am terrified. Some of this is anxiety from external issues (several kitties with moderate to serious health concerns right now, and I’ve missed a lot of work because of that), but a lot of it is that I have a hard time with crowds, I’ll be by myself, and I don’t know what to expect. It doesn’t help that in the last few years I’ve read about SF rather than actually reading it. (Starting with the puppy thing, I’ve read here fairly regularly, but inevitably slip behind. I’m currently somewhere in mid-May. That’s why I almost never comment.)

    So…as the above parenthetical comment implies, I haven’t read any recent Scrolls yet. And I was wondering if there’s a F770 meetup happening this year that I could crash so there would be actual people I could potentially interact with. I’m not sure when I’ll actually be at WorldCon, due to the aforementioned kitty concerns, but presumably the weekend at least, though my husband may have to shove me out the door.

    If anyone could drop me a link to recent threads discussing who here is going to WorldCon/what to look for there, I’d appreciate it. I’d search for them myself, but it’s 2:30a and I need to take a cat to the vet in 7 hours and if I go looking for more things to read right now Bad Things Will Happen. Sorry to ask this so close to the event.

  28. Basically, it’s an old white woman who can’t accept that she’s just not as good a cook as her mother was, and who hates ethnic condiments (which she refers to as “identity condiments”, I only wish I were kidding). It’s a slimy mix of Millennial-bashing, white fragility, and denial of change.

    It seems more like a humor piece to me.

    I grew up eating lots of sandwiches and hamburgers on mayo, but in adulthood decided that it is gross. Aioli snuck past me a few times until my wife ratted it out. Only in chicken salad and tuna salad do I intentionally consume the gloop of my youth.

  29. (6) I was going to read the article this is based on a few days ago but rolled my eyes so hard at “dead of summer” I closed the tab.

    Anyway, from this Millennial’s point of view, I think it’s just because most commercial mayo is extraordinarily bland and why would we have just plain ol’ mayo when there’s a couple-dozen more interesting and tastier condiments and/or sauces to have? (some of which are even mayo + [other thing] anyway!) That said I like the occasional tuna-mayo sandwich as long as the ratio is good (ie it should be tuna bound together with mayo, maybe with some diced red onion mixed in for flavour and topped with cheese of some sort and whatever salad ingredients you fancy, rather than a bit of tuna swimming in an ocean of mayo and nothing else going on).

  30. 11) Alfred Hatchplot’s TV series features story adaptations from Ray Bradbury and John Collier, just to offhand name two. And Roald Dahl. And Harlan Ellison…

    Wonder how he would fare in the MeToo# era?

  31. @Robin Whiskers, I’m not, alas, going to Worldcon myself, but Steve Davidson has volunteered to use the Amazing Stories booth (presumably in the Dealer’s Room?) as an informal File770 meetup place and message board where you can leave and pick up messages.

    With regard to planned Filer meetups, Rick Moen posted THIS (on Page 2 of the August 7 pixel scroll, if the link doesn’t work) with times and places for Filer dinners on Thursday and Friday. Not sure if anything is planned for Saturday or Sunday, but messages left with Amazing Stories will probably be good for getting a group together. Or even just someone to go to panels with. <smile>

    I know how dreadfully worrying it is to have sick cats; I hope that you enjoy the convention despite that and that you meet some lovely people there.

  32. … why would we have just plain ol’ mayo when there’s a couple-dozen more interesting and tastier condiments and/or sauces to have?

    Mayo’s also 11 grams of fat and 100 calories per tablespoon!

  33. 11 grams of fat and 100 calories per tablespoon!

    ….and that’s a 10-gram tablespoon.

  34. @rcade: oh I knew it wasn’t the healthiest thing but that sounds absurd! I had a friend who could only be tricked into eating healthy things if they were slathered in mayo (the food, not the friend) so I guess nobody was doing him any favours by indulging that little vice.

  35. @Robin

    I’m also a solo-Worldcon-goer. I’ve found that doing interactive activities is a good way to make some “nod in the hall” acquaintances, which is nice. (This is the part where I plug the “learn to play D&D” sessions I’m running on Friday and Saturday). Even without any structure, I’ve found that one does start getting recognized (“oh, hey, that’s that person I sat next to in X panel!”). Worldcon has crowds, but it’s “a large high school” rather than “a small city” level of crowding.

    If you’d like a partner to grab breakfast/lunch with on one or more days, I’d be down for that! If nothing else, it would give you a friendly face to nod at in the hall every time we crossed paths. It’s amazing how much that combats the alone-in-a-crowd feeling.

  36. No-one can figure out if the mayo article is satire or not, but it’s doing a super job of getting clicks, so I guess it’s a success.

    Meanwhile: what are good places close to the Convention Center to get lunch? Will there be food trucks? Will the concession stand be Grease-O-Rama? I’m particularly interested in eating places that have rice-based dishes in case my gut decides to kick up rough.

  37. As we say to Millennials round these parts, when you’re done killing Mayo, set your sights on Offaly.

  38. @Soon Lee
    Modern versions of the 19th-century food-in-aspic, I think. They were big on molded dishes of various shapes.
    In my family, Jell-O was fruit flavors with fruit cocktail (and frequently banana slices) in it, more dessert than salad.

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