Pixel Scroll 8/5/20 Please Pixel Your Scroll In The Form Of A Question

(1) KEEPING THE PLUS IN DISNEY+. Disney+ will premiere Mulan on its platform – at an extra charge to subscribers reports Variety.

In another major blow to movie theaters, Disney announced Mulan will forgo its planned theatrical release.  Instead, the live-action remake is premiering on Disney Plus on Sept. 4 for a premium rental price.

The company believes that the release of the action epic will help drive subscribers while serving as a valuable test case to determine how much of their hard-earned cash customers are willing to part with in order to watch a movie that was originally intended to debut exclusively in cinemas.

Unlike the rest of the content available on Disney Plus, “Mulan” won’t be available directly to subscribers. Consumers in the U.S. and other territories will have to pay $29.99 to rent the movie on top of the streaming service’s monthly subscription fee of $6.99. In markets where Disney Plus isn’t available, “Mulan” will play in cinemas.

(2) SEE AURORA AWARDS CEREMONY. The Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association will hold the Aurora Awards ceremony online this year on Saturday, August 15 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern via the When Words Collide YouTube channel. The livestream will be open to everyone.

(3) LEADER OF THE PACK. HBO Max dropped a trailer for Raised by Wolves. Arrives September 3.

Mother was programmed to protect everyone after Earth had been destroyed. When the big bad wolf shows up, she is the one we must trust.

(4) BEUKES Q&A. NPR’s Petra Myers interviews author: “In ‘Afterland,’ A World (Mostly) Without Men: Questions For Lauren Beukes”.

Lauren Beukes’ new Afterland takes place in a world that exists not long after our own — a very near future in which a terrible virus has wiped out almost all the men in the world, leaving a scant few million, mostly held in government research facilities.

As the book opens, we meet Cole, who’s on the run after breaking her preteen son out of one of those facilities with the help of her sister, Billie (who has her own motives). Their journey will take them across a drastically different — but still recognizable — country, bouncing from utopian communes to religious sects to Miami sex clubs.

“I wanted to interrogate the preconceptions that a world of women would be a kinder or gentler place,” Beukes tells me over email, “especially if it was only a couple of years out from our current reality and the existing power structures, inequality and social ills. Because of course, women are full human beings and just as capable of being power hungry, selfish, violent, corrupt as much as we are of being kind, compassionate and nurturing as men are of all those things too….”

Why do you think the idea of wiping out all the men is so compelling? This isn’t the first no-men post-apocalyptic story I’ve read, but I don’t think I’ve seen any where women get wiped out.

I’ll be the first to cop to a world without men hardly being an original idea, from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 somewhat-prim women’s utopia, Herland, on up through Joanna Russ’ The Female Man in 1975 and, more recently, the hugely popular comics series Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, which gets a subtle nod in Afterland.

It’s an appealing idea because it allows us to explore how women could be without the centuries of oppression and misogyny (including the internalized kind), without the constant threat of violence and rape. It’s the joy of imagining a world where we could be safe walking at night (without having to be a man-killing vampire, as in the wonderful Iranian film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.)

The reverse has been explored in a much more limited away, including in a recent movie about a woman-killing plague with a father and his sole surviving daughter, and in Stephen and Owen King’s Sleeping Beauties, which puts all the women in the world into a coma.

I don’t think it’s as popular a conceit, because of the power structures. We live under patriarchy. And the horrific reality is that women are “wiped out” every day, usually by intimate partner violence. In South Africa, we have a devastatingly high rate of gender-based violence, including against gay and trans men and women. According to my friend Dr. Nechama Brodie, who wrote the recent Femicide in South Africa, four women a day are killed here by their partners or ex-partners. The most recent international stats I could find were from the Global Study on Homicide, which found that one-third of women killed in 2017 were victims of domestic violence.

(5) MISSING IN ACTION. Sir Julius Vogel Award winner Casey Lucas tells “How NZ’s best fantasy and science fiction writers got shafted on a global stage” on The Spinoff.

… But I’m going to do what the Hugo Awards committee was afraid to do and stop giving Martin airtime. Because I’m here to document a completely different phenomenon – one that has only been generating chatter once the immediate shocking aftermath of the Hugos’ disrespect to its own nominees had passed.

It began as murmurs in chat rooms, posts on social media platforms, questions posed on industry Slacks and Discords: say, where was the New Zealand representation at the Hugo Awards ceremony? The New Zealand presenters? What of the karakia, the acknowledgement of mana whenua? Aside from a few jokes, a ramble about our gorgeous country, an admittedly brilliant segment on the artists who crafted the physical Hugo trophies, and a stuffed kiwi on a desk, there was no New Zealand content.

Those who attended the WorldCon held in Helsinki, Finland in 2017 commented on the stark contrast. That ceremony, organised in part by the Turku Science Fiction Society, presented Finland’s Atorox Award alongside its international counterparts. So … what about our local awards ceremony?

(6) ISN’T SOMETHING ELSE MISSING? CoNZealand publications staff didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory here.

Since they didn’t print anything but his name, James Davis Nicoll thinks it would have been nicer if it had been spelled correctly.  

Souvenir Book editor Darusha Wehm apologized, however, Nicoll says he found that apology lacking.  

(7) YES, WE’LL EAT THE BREAD. Why certainly, giving a Hugo to people who hijacked the CoNZealand name is exactly the kind of move you might expect to see after the previous two news items.

But as a salute to their not using any WSFS registered trademarks I think we really should be voting them the DisCon III Shiny Pointy Thing.

(8) IF IT’S RIGHT IT’S A MIRACLE. Somehow Tor.com gets James Davis Nicoll’s name right in the byline for this fivesome — “Five SFF Stories Involving Secretly Supernatural Beings”. Was it a case of divine intervention?

Neighbours! Fine people, right up to the moment when they are overcome by xenophobia and assemble in a large mob (shouty), all too well supplied with torches (lit) and implements (agricultural). Of course, not all people are prone to hateful prejudice and fear against outsiders. Some might go the other way, lavishing unwanted adoration and attention on unusual people. It’s awkward either way, which is reason enough for some folks to carefully conceal their true nature.  Such as these five…

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born August 5, 1850 – Guy de Maupassant.  Fifty short stories for us, translated into Dutch, German, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish; three hundred in all, six novels, travel, poetry.  Second novel Bel Ami had thirty-seven printings in four months.  A father, many think, of the short story.  Managed to write both realistically and fantastically.  (Died 1893) [JH]
  • Born August 5, 1891 Donald Kerr. Happy Hapgood in 1938’s Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars which might be one of the earliest such films. His only other genre appearances were in the Abbott and Costello films such as Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy and Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man in uncredited roles.  (Died 1977.) (CE)
  • Born August 5, 1929 Don Matheson. Best-remembered  for being Mark Wilson in Land of the Giants. He also had roles in Lost in Space (where he played in an alien and an android in another episode), Voyage to the Bottom of the SeaThe Alfred Hitchcock Hour, an Alice in Wonderland film and Dragonflight. (Died 2014.) (CE) 
  • Born August 5, 1935 Wanda Ventham, 85. Mother of Benedict Cumberbatch. She’s been on Doctor Who three times, in “The Faceless Ones”, a Second Doctor story, in “Image of the Fendahl, a Fourth Doctor story and finally in “Time and the Rani”, a Seventh Doctor story. She also had roles in The Blood Beast TerrorProject U.F.O and Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter. She was often on British TV including Danger ManThe SaintThe Avengers and The Prisoner. And yes, she was on Sherlock where she played his mother. (CE) 
  • Born August 5, 1943 – Kathleen Sky, 77.  Five novels, eight shorter stories, translated into French and German.  The Business of Being a Writer with Stephen Goldin.  I realize I haven’t read “One Ordinary Day, with Box”, but since it came well after an all-time great Shirley Jackson story (“Had it for lunch”; he didn’t, of course, which is the point), it must –  [JH]
  • Born August 5, 1947 – Élisabeth Vonarburg, Ph.D.,, 73.  A score of novels, fifty shorter stories.  Editor of Solaris 1983-1986, contributor thereafter; also to CarfaxFoundationNY Review of SFTorus (hello, Lloyd Penney).  Ten Prix Aurora.  Grand Prix de l’ImaginairePrix du Conseil Quebecois de la Femme en LitteratureUtopiales Prix Extraordinaire.  Guest of Honor at WisCon 25, three-time Guest of Honour at Boréal (2004, 2007-2008), Guest of Honour at Anticipation the 67th Worldcon.  [JH]
  • Born August 5, 1948 – Larry Elmore, 72.  First professional illustrator at TSR (producers of Dungeons & Dragons).  Did Dragonlance.  Also Magic: the Gathering.  Also Traveller and Sovereign Stone.  Novel (with brother Robert), Runes of Autumn.  Artbooks Reflections of Myth (2 vols.) and Twenty Years of Art and Elmore: New Beginnings.  Two hundred covers, twelve dozen interiors.  Here is the Mar 85 Amazing.  Here is Chicks in Chainmail.  Here is 1632.  Here is Missing Pieces 5.  [JH]
  • Born August 5, 1956 Ian R. MacLeod, 64. Another author I need to read more of. I’ve read the first two in what’s called the Aether Universe series, The Light Ages and The House of Storms, but there’s a number of novels I’m intrigued by including Song of Time and The Great Wheel. Anything else y’all would recommend I read?  (CE)
  • Born August 5, 1966 James Gunn, 54. Director, producer and screenwriter who first film as director was Slither. Very silly film. He’s responsible for both Guardians of The Galaxy films, plus the forthcoming one. He executive produced both of the recent Avengers films, and he’s directing and writing the next Suicide Squad film. (CE)
  • Born August 5, 1968 – Carina Axelsson, 52.  Fashion model and author.  After modeling in New York and Paris went to art school, wrote and illustrated children’s picture book Nigel of Hyde Park, a frizzy-haired dragon (then fashion-detective Model Under Cover, then Royal Rebel; naturally World-Wide Web logs = blogs brought about video blogs = vlogs).  Three favorite books Jane EyrePride and PrejudiceRebecca, so she may really be a both-ist.  Website here.  [JH]
  • Born August 5, 1972 Paolo Bacigalupi, 48. I remember the book group I was part of having a spirited debate over The Windup Girl over the believability of the central character. I think he did a better job with characters in his next novels, Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities, but he’s really not about characters anyways. (CE)
  • Born August 5, 1988 – Manuel Sumberac, 32.  (The should have a caron over it, a punctuation mark like a little v, indicating a sound like English sh.)  Thirty covers, many interiors.  Here is The Nowhere Emporium.  Here is Tuesdays at the Castle.  Also animation.  Also Steampunk City, an alphabetical journey: see the letters O and P.  Here is an interior from Steampunk Poehere is another.  Website here.  [JH]

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) THREE-BODY. Now it’s going to be a TV series.

(12) THEY MADE A LITTLE CORRECTION. Somebody jogged the elbow of the folks at io9, who now have added this note to the bottom of their post about George R.R. Martin and the Hugos

Correction: An earlier version of this post misidentified File 770, a multiple award winner of Hugos for Best Fanzine, as being affiliated with “the Hugos’ official website.” io9 regrets the error.

Think of it as a corollary to Muphry’s Law.

(13) OVERCOMING. Vanity Fair chronicles how “Black Storytellers Are Using Horror to Battle Hate”.

Civil Rights leader Patricia Stephens Due adored scary stories, which baffled her family since she had experienced so many real terrors. While crusading against Jim Crow laws and segregation in the 1960s, she’d been threatened, dragged away, and arrested, and her eyesight had been permanently damaged when police threw a tear gas canister directly into her face.

Still, she loved tales of killers, monsters, and restless spirits, and purchased her daughter, the future novelist and scholar Tananarive Due, her first Stephen King book. “My dad thought it was kind of weird, but now I’ve come to think that she liked horror because she was a civil rights activist,” says Due. “There was something about horror—that thrill and anxiety when you’re watching something on a screen that isn’t real—that I believe was therapeutic to her, and helped her slough off some of that fear and anger.”

(14) CIVICS CURSE. “City growth favours animals ‘more likely to carry disease'”.

Turning wild spaces into farmland and cities has created more opportunities for animal diseases to cross into humans, scientists have warned.

Our transformation of the natural landscape drives out many wild animals, but favours species more likely to carry diseases, a study suggests.

The work adds to growing evidence that exploitation of nature fuels pandemics.

Scientists estimate that three out of every four new emerging infectious diseases come from animals.

The study shows that, worldwide, we have shaped the landscape in a way that has favoured species that are more likely to carry infectious diseases.

And when we convert natural habitats to farms, pastures and urban spaces, we inadvertently increase the probability of pathogens crossing from animals to humans.

“Our findings show that the animals that remain in more human-dominated environments are those that are more likely to carry infectious diseases that can make people sick,” said Rory Gibb of University College London (UCL).

(15) DEAD ON. “Horror effects icon Tom Savini: ‘My work looks so authentic because I’ve seen the real thing’”, he explains to The Independent.

Whether it’s Kevin Bacon unexpectedly getting an arrow through the throat while lying in bed in Friday the 13thTed Danson’s waterlogged walking corpse in Creepshow, or a zombie getting the top of its head sliced off by a helicopter blade in Dawn of the DeadTom Savini is responsible for some of horror cinema’s greatest moments. Yet not everybody realises that a lot of this iconic gore was inspired by the special effects guru’s traumatic time serving as a field photographer in Vietnam.

“I saw some pretty horrible stuff,” the horror legend, now 73, tells me soberly. “I guess Vietnam was a real lesson in anatomy.” While serving with the US military, Savini learnt details such as the way blood turns brown as it dries or how our bodies lose control of the muscles when we die. “This is the reason why my work looks so visceral and authentic,” he adds. “I am the only special effects man to have seen the real thing!”

(16) MARTIAN HOP. “SpaceX: Musk’s ‘Mars ship’ prototype aces 150m test flight” – BBC has the story.

A prototype of SpaceX’s next-generation Starship vehicle has successfully flown to an altitude of 150m (500ft).

The uncrewed test vehicle rose up on a plume of exhaust before deploying its landing legs and touching down softly.

The flight was carried out at SpaceX’s test site near the village of Boca Chica in south Texas on Tuesday evening.

It’s the first flight test in almost a year for the Raptor engine, which will be used to power Starship.

The stainless steel test vehicle, called SN5, has been compared variously to a grain silo and water tank.

But it could pave the way for a spacecraft capable of carrying humans to the Moon and Mars.

(17) ROUGH RIDE. “SpaceX: Nasa crew describe rumbles and jolts of return to Earth” – BBC story includes interview video.

Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley have described the rumbles, heat and jolts of returning from space in the Crew Dragon spacecraft on Sunday.

Behnken vividly described the clouds rushing by the window and jolts that were like being “hit in the back of the chair with a baseball bat”.

But Hurley and Behnken said the spacecraft performed just as expected.

They splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico, ending the first commercial crewed mission to the space station.

“As we descended through the atmosphere, I personally was surprised at just how quickly events all transpired. It seemed like just a couple of minutes later, after the [de-orbit] burns were complete, we could look out the windows and see the clouds rushing by,” he said at a news conference broadcast from Nasa’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“Once we descended a little bit into the atmosphere, Dragon really came alive. It started to fire thrusters and keep us pointed in the appropriate direction. The atmosphere starts to make noise – you can hear that rumble outside the vehicle. And as the vehicle tries to control, you feel a little bit of that shimmy in your body.

“We could feel those small rolls and pitches and yaws – all those little motions were things we picked up on inside the vehicle.”

(18) NO S**T, THERE THEY ARE. Er, correction, make that “yes s**t” — “Climate change: Satellites find new colonies of Emperor penguins”.

Satellite observations have found a raft of new Emperor penguin breeding sites in the Antarctic.

The locations were identified from the way the birds’ poo, or guano, had stained large patches of sea-ice.

The discovery lifts the global Emperor population by 5-10%, to perhaps as many as 278,500 breeding pairs.

It’s a welcome development given that this iconic species is likely to come under severe pressure this century as the White Continent warms.

The Emperors’ whole life cycle is centred around the availability of sea-ice, and if this is diminished in the decades ahead – as the climate models project – then the animals’ numbers will be hit hard.

One forecast suggested the global population could crash by a half or more under certain conditions come 2100.

(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] “Down And Out Kidney” on Vimeo is a cartoon by Dan and Jason about why you should worry about too much uric acid in the body (and yes, it’s entertaining!)

[Thanks to Daniel Dern, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Hampus Eckerman, Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, John Hertz, Chip Hitchcock, Michael Toman, James Davis Nicoll, Mlex, Martin Morse Wooster, Madame Hardy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew.]

103 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/5/20 Please Pixel Your Scroll In The Form Of A Question

  1. My Scroll is more of a comment than a question…

    6) further tweets and paging through by James found other errors and omissions as well. It’s not a good production at all.

  2. (5) MISSING IN ACTION

    Ask the ConZealand staff. Or rather add it to the list of things they did badly.

    I’m I was getting ready to go sample the programming this coming week when finally home as I’m being discharged Friday when I got an email that I had until the 8th to look at them as they were taking all offline as they apparently hadn’t gotten the participants to agree for them to be up longer. Oh really? I find that hard to believe in this age of everything being archived.

    Does this mean the Hugo Award ceremony disappears too? And everything else associated with this Con?

  3. Paul Weimer: I can’t believe they thought running mini-bios for some Hugo finalists while leaving any, let alone several, without one was okay in any way.

    I don’t know what went on behind the scenes, but if somebody had to fill in the blanks with Google research that’s what should have been done.

    I’m reminded that the last time I did Loscon program I asked all the participants to furnish bios. One guy just shined on my repeated requests. To cut to the chase — I wrote one for him. In CoNZealand’s case I don’t know what communications were made, who did what, but how can you put out a book looking like that?

  4. (6) If that was an apology, it was a startlingly poor one.

    (18) A penguin colony that can be spotted from space by its guano is probably a healthy penguin colony.

  5. Claire Rousseau’s reaction to the programme book:
    https://twitter.com/ClaireRousseau/status/1291167549242122241

    I was never asked to submit a blurb for this. There’s a blurb publicly accessible on my YouTube About page they could have used.
    I am never going to get another souvenir book from my first ever Hugo nomination. THIS. FUCKING. HURTS.

    Edit: She just posted a followup:

    So CoNZealand did send ONE email about this, on 5th April. No further reminders, either by email or via social channels.
    Let’s be clear, THIS IS AN ACCESS ISSUE. Some people struggle with executive function at the best of time, let alone in a pandemic, we shouldn’t be punished.

  6. Cat Eldridge wrote:
    I’m I was getting ready to go sample the programming this coming week when finally home as I’m being discharged Friday when I got an email that I had until the 8th to look at them as they were taking all offline as they apparently hadn’t gotten the participants to agree for them to be up longer. Oh really? I find that hard to believe in this age of everything being archived.

    Seriously? Most conventions’ panels disappear in the ether as soon as they’re done. I’m grateful I can work my way through the ones I had to miss for various reasons.

  7. @9 (Bacigalupi): interesting — my book group debated whether the science was totally unbelievable, or just partly, rather than the character.

    @16: cute header. Now if I can just get rid of the earworm overlaying the exhaust noise…

    @Cat Eldridge: somebody may have archived the panels covertly; that doesn’t mean CNZ is entitled to skate around its promises to the panelists by pointing to the archive (if they even know where it is).

    You can’t break even: The BBC reports that replacing an old “inefficient” building with a greener one doesn’t necessarily net-reduce ecological issues.

  8. OGH asks I’m reminded that the last time I did Loscon program I asked all the participants to furnish bios. One guy just shined on my repeated requests. To cut to the chase — I wrote one for him. In CoNZealand’s case I don’t know what communications were made, who did what, but how can you put out a book looking like that?

    You don’t. You do the research and generate the copy yourself if need be. I’ve done it for music festivals and you just find the material somehow. (Irish musos are the worst for getting written bio material from,) These folks are well known on the net, so you would’ve found what you needed.

  9. On the plus side, ConZealand are making me feel a lot better about my theoretical ability to volunteer for a Worldcon someday, because I can’t possibly do worse than some of the stuff that seems to have slipped through the cracks this time around. I am, for example, perfectly capable of googling finalists and paraphrasing the hell out of any online bio I find, even if the end result wouldn’t be terribly riveting. (See: most previous sales roundups for details.)

    (It’s a very small, mostly irrelevant plus side. All sympathies to the finalists.)

  10. @Cat Eldridge
    Regarding the videos, replays will be available through August 9 NZT.

    From the #chairs-office Discord:

    I don’t think we will be able to extend the post con availability. The participants on the recorded panels agreed to the recordings being available until the 9th. Extending that date would require written consent from all of the participants on the individual panels.

    I tried to gain a few extra hours by asking:

    Did it specify which time zone on the 9th?
    If you can use UTC, that gives 12 more hours than NZST without extending the “date”

    but they didn’t buy it.

    FWIW, I also asked about archiving the digital artifacts of the con for fannish history; panel recordings “will be archived at the Merill Collection of Science Fiction and Speculative works at the Toronto public library, in their offline, appointment only room. … The Merill Collection gets the panel recordings. We’ll also be looking at what we can donate to FANAC and an institution in New Zealand.”

  11. @Mike
    I recall that in 1984, we got photos from most of the nominees, and took them to a film place – Kodak, IIRC – in Hollywood to be converted to slides. We got back all of them except for Rotsler’s pic, where we not only didn’t get the original back, we didn’t get a slide either. And no apology for losing it. We weren’t happy.

  12. Meredith says On the plus side, ConZealand are making me feel a lot better about my theoretical ability to volunteer for a Worldcon someday, because I can’t possibly do worse than some of the stuff that seems to have slipped through the cracks this time around. I am perfectly capable of googling finalists and paraphrasing the hell out of any online bio I find, even if the end result wouldn’t be terribly riveting. (See: most previous sales roundups for details.)

    If you can write copy for anything. You can write bios. They’re not supposed to be exciting, just a reasonable summation of the person and why they’re being part of the Con. Six to eight lines usually.

    Btw if that booklet exists in digital form, it wouldn’t be that hard to fill in the missing bios and run a second edition.

  13. 6) When I got the souvenir book, I was surprised that several finalists did not have bios. When I heard that several people (James, Claire and others) didn’t know they were supposed to submit a bio, I dug though my inbox and found the respective e-mail dated April 5, 2020. This was the only e-mail I ever got about this – no follow-ups or reminders. We know that many CoNZealand e-mails never reached their targets, so they should have followed up with the people who didn’t respond.

  14. 6) James has a bio in Grenadine so you can’t even say the con didn’t have the information.

  15. (4) Interviewer Petra Myers wrote “… but I don’t think I’ve seen any where women get wiped out.”

    The only book my father ever tried to discourage 12-year-old me from reading (I’d already read all the Edgar Rice Burroughs books in his collection by that point) was World Without Women by Day Keene and Leonard Pruyn published in 1960, where 99% of all the women in the world have died because of a disease.

  16. I’m starting to wonder if there was some sort of warring-kingdoms problem at CoNZealand. Somebody collected pronunciation guides that didn’t make it onto the announcers’ cards. Somebody collected bios for the website that didn’t get shared with the publications staff. Somebody arranged for nominations packets for the Julius Vogel awards that weren’t passed on to the Hugo voters.

    I note that Darusha Wehm says “My team looked for appropriately licenced bios and headshots for everyone we didn’t get something from but I made the decision not to print anything that we didn’t have clear permission or the rights to print. I’m sorry that meant your blurb was left out.”

  17. (edit window closed) I’m not sure why they’d decide that the info on somebody’s website or blog wasn’t “appropriately licensed”, but there you go.

  18. Madame Hardy quotes I note that Darusha Wehm says “My team looked for appropriately licenced bios and headshots for everyone we didn’t get something from but I made the decision not to print anything that we didn’t have clear permission or the rights to print. I’m sorry that meant your blurb was left out.”

    Oh bull. How long would it have taken to contact each person and ask permission? It’s not just that the staff screwed up repeatedly, but that they clearly aren’t willing to accept responsibility for doing so.

  19. I recall a previous kerfuffle about con staff pulling bios (for Grenadine, IIRC) from questionable web sources that ended up being inaccurate. So I can understand being cautious about where bios and descriptions were sourced from. However that doesn’t excuse the apparent lack of follow-up requests, especially with finalists who have a significant online presence and aren’t likely to just be offline for months.

    (I still have not received my physical program book although at this point I am still inclined to blame postal delays. Have any Americans received theirs?)

  20. Medical update. The staphylococcus infection is mostly cleared up so I’m headed home on Friday afternoon. I’ll be taking two oral antibiotics in hopes of keeping it from coming back. I’ll have been in-hospital for fifty days.

    That’s the good news. The bad news is I’m on house confinement for the next month save medical appointments and at the end of the month I get a third surgery on the knee. The hardware will come out and the surgeon will decide if the kneecap can be repaired or if I’m going to need a replacement kneecap.

  21. Congratulations on going home at long last. I hope the knee turns out well.

  22. Madame Hardy says to me: Congratulations on going home at long last. I hope the knee turns out well.

    According to the surgeon, they’d never seen anyone actually break off pieces of the patella. And unfortunately it’s not healing hence the third surgery. I’ll do a lot of reading, watch tv and work on websites for the next month which is pretty what I’m doing now except I’ll see my cat finally.

  23. (9) Gardner Dozois was partial to Ian R. MacLeod’s work and often featured it in his annual collections. Two of these that I especially liked were the story “Snodgrass” and the novella The Summer Isles, both first-person Britain-set alternative-history tales but entirely different. (The latter was written as a novel and later became available in that form, but Dozois saw its potential as a shorter work, and it received some attention that way that it might not have otherwise.)

  24. @Cat Eldridge– I’m glad you’re getting sprung, and sorry it’s so limited! I hope the next surgery is a complete success.

  25. #4 – As memory serves, Herbert’s THE WHITE PLAGUE wiped out 99% of the women on earth. I can’t say the book was particularly memorable, though.

  26. Wanda Ventham was in UFO, the Gerry Anderson live action series (and a number of “films” that were fix-ups of episodes), not Project U.F.O, the US television ancestor of the X-Files. Her role was pretty significant, too.

    UFO is such a weird series tonally. I kind of like it.

  27. The pivot to an online Worldcon, in the midst of a global pandemic might go some way to explaining the number of times the ball was dropped. I was on programme staff for coNZealand so I got a sense of the heroic efforts that went into making it happen. It’s gutting to be finding out examples of the con failing so badly.

    I hadn’t planned on a big commitment, initially I was going to run a Pokemon GO walking Raid tour as part of the gaming track but that role went away with the decision to go online. So I ended in Programming doing more than I planned to (because I saw how big the challenge was) & also worked Ops as Room Host for various panels during the con. It was a monumental task to put on an online con in four months(!) and along the way we lost some key people & it looks like information didn’t get passed to the replacements. I don’t think it was due to malice that these things happened & I am deeply sorry to those we failed.

  28. gottacook on August 5, 2020 at 9:38 pm said:
    (9) Gardner Dozois was partial to Ian R. MacLeod’s work and often featured it in his annual collections. Two of these that I especially liked were the story “Snodgrass” and the novella The Summer Isles, both first-person Britain-set alternative-history tales but entirely different. (The latter was written as a novel and later became available in that form, but Dozois saw its potential as a shorter work, and it received some attention that way that it might not have otherwise.)

    I thought the Summer Isles novella was superb.

  29. The pivot to an online Worldcon, in the midst of a global pandemic might go some way to explaining the number of times the ball was dropped.

    Yes, this!

  30. Mike Glyer on August 5, 2020 at 6:24 pm said:

    I don’t know what went on behind the scenes, but if somebody had to fill in the blanks with Google research that’s what should have been done

    Indeed and they all had easily findable bios on the web. A five minute job.

  31. 7) I missed clearly when The Fringe group held a ransom note to the WSFS Mike. Hijacking feels a Fairly silly term to use. Free videos (which are still up) at times not competitions with NZ) On subjects the con didn’t cover seem a strange way to compete.

    I’m hoping this becomes a regular event and shows the con world a possible future dimension to explore

  32. (1) KEEPING THE PLUS IN DISNEY+

    I’ll stick to my animated Mulan on Blu Ray, thanks.

  33. 9: I don’t see any sign of Wanda Ventham having been in ‘Project UFO’, she did have a recurring role as Colonel Virginia Lake in the Gerry Anderson series ‘UFO’ though. An early example of a senior woman officer being part of the command team.

  34. (1) I didn’t have any great interest in Mulan, so I would have been fairly unlikely to watch on that first weekend anyhow. $30 though seems a lot. I’d expect to pay about $12.50 in UK money to see it in a cinema.

  35. Describing an attempt to provide discussions panels for NZ authors and Hugo finalists overlooked by the Worldcon programming as “hijacked” is a surprising choice.

  36. Nickpheasm says I didn’t have any great interest in Mulan, so I would have been fairly unlikely to watch on that first weekend anyhow. $30 though seems a lot. I’d expect to pay about $12.50 in UK money to see it in a cinema.

    The trade press made it very clear that this isn’t targeted at the individual who would go to see it in the Cinema, but the parents with kids. If you’ve got a familiy with two parents and just one child who wants to see it, it’s a bargain from a per person cost perspective.

    And because Disney isn’t giving the Cinema company thirty percent or more of the ticket price, they’ll likely recoup the entire costs of Mulan in just about a month.

  37. If you’ve got a familiy with two parents and just one child who wants to see it, it’s a bargain from a per person cost perspective

    Depends upon your cinema, here your family would be able to watch it twice in the cinema. So you’d better park the kid in front of the screen to make it worth it.

  38. (14) Given the speed with which diseases can evolve I think it most likely that they have evolved to be carried by the animals that are in close contact with humans. The idea that humans have shaped the landscape in ways that specifically favour animals that carry disease seems unlikely.

  39. 4) Not sure if it was mentioned elsewhere in the interview, but The White Plague by Frank Herbert is another story that wipes out nearly all of the women. The power dynamics at the end of the book are….interesting.

    Oof…RedWombat beat me to it. I found the book memorable.

    6) Sympathy for James. I use “Dann” as the result of a similar incident. Although in my case they had two chances to spell my name correctly and screwed it up both times.

    @Cat Eldridge

    Glad to hear that at least some things are improving for you. Hope the next surgery is the last surgery.

    Regards,
    Dann
    Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway – John Wayne

  40. 1) Slight point of clarification — it’s not a standard rental in the iTunes/Amazon Prime sense of “You have 30 days to start watching; once you start watching, it goes away after 48 hours.” But it’s also not precisely a purchase. Once you pay that $30, you’ll have unlimited access to the movie in perpetuity as long as you remain a Disney+ subscriber. So if you drop Disney+, you won’t be able to watch it any more.

    (Which also means that I’m not sure how that model would be copied by other studios — if they also try to tie theatrical rentals to their bespoke subscription services, well, I have bad news as regards the number of subscription services I’m willing to sign up for.)

    As somebody who lives alone $30 does seem steep, but that’s not to say I’d never, ever be willing to pay that much for a first-run, brand new movie.

  41. @RedWombat: Yeah, The White Plague gets rid of almost all women. “Houston, Houston, Do You Read” (by Tiptree) gets rid of all the men, and the Disappearance has both men and women left alone in alternate but otherwise identical worlds.

  42. @Joe H: Ohhhhh. Yeah, if I still had young kids, I’d drop $30 to put something new into the kids-watch-this-constantly rotation. And probably would have already subscribed to Disney+. Clever.

  43. (7) Haha Fair enough. I’d not thought about the trademark issue. In part because they were very clear in their communication that the Fringe was not affiliated with the Worldcon. They made no false representations about the nature of their event.

    So I do stand behind the idea of nominating ConZealand Fringe for a BRW Hugo.

    This is a group of fans who:

    1- Saw something they believed to be unjust

    2- Asked for that to be fixed

    3- Realized that there was insufficient time for regular channels to solve the problem

    4- Figured out a workaround that they could accomplish to reduce the injustice of the situation

    5- Put in the hard work to follow-through on their solution to the problem

    Frankly, I think that fandom should celebrate this process, which is much better than empty complaining and gnashing of teeth. ConZealand Fringe didn’t undermine the con, it supplemented the experience with positivity.

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