Pixel Scroll 8/1/16 If You Like It, Put A Ringworld On It

(1) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOOK. George R.R. Martin looks back on “The Long Game… of Thrones”, which came out 20 years ago today.

…Reviews were generally good, sales were… well, okay. Solid. But nothing spectacular. No bestseller lists, certainly. I went on a book tour around that same time, signing copies in Houston, Austin, and Denton, Texas; in St. Louis, Missouri; in Chicago and Minneapolis; and up the west coast to San Diego, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Portland, and Seattle. Turnouts were modest in most places. The crowds didn’t reach one hundred anywhere, and at one stop (St. Louis, if you must know), not only was attendance zero but I actually drove four patrons out of the bookshop, allowing me to set my all time “bad signing” record at minus four (on the plus side, I had the time for long friendly talks with the readers who did show up).

But my oh my, things have changed a bit in these last twenty years….

(2) OBAMA ON BEING A NERD. “President Barack Obama on How To Win The Future” at Popular Science.

PS: Do you consider yourself a nerd and, if so, what’s your nerdiest pastime?

BO: Well, my administration did write a pretty detailed response to a petition, explaining why we wouldn’t build a real-life Death Star, so I’d like to think I have at least a little nerd credibility built up.

What’s remarkable is the way “nerd” is such a badge of honor now. Growing up, I’m sure I wasn’t the only kid who read Spider-Man comics and learned how to do the Vulcan salute, but it wasn’t like it is today. I get the sense that today’s young people are proud to be smart and curious, to design new things, and tackle big problems in unexpected ways. I think America’s a nerdier country than it was when I was a kid—and that’s a good thing!

(3) SWAP HIS SCARF FOR THE GARTER. John Harvey has started a petition at Change.org calling for Tom Baker to receive a knighthood.

After reading a recent edition of Doctor Who Magazine, the stark realisation set in that after a life time in entertainment and tireless charity work, visits to hospitals and hospices, the living legend that is Tom Baker has not been officially recognised in any way shape or form.

Tom Baker’s commitment to the role of the 4th doctor and his many charitable acts since and brightened the lives of children and adult’s everywhere.

In an age where the like’s of James Corden can receive honours so early in their career, I think it’s a travesty. I’d like to try to change that and right this wrong.

(4) LOCUS POLL. The July issue of Locus published the survey rankings – Black Gate posted the top 10 in the magazine category.

  1. Asimov’s SF
  2. Tor.com
  3. Fantasy & Science Fiction
  4. Clarkesworld
  5. File 770
  6. Lightspeed
  7. Analog
  8. Black Gate
  9. Uncanny
  10. Strange Horizons

(4) MORE ON JOYCE KATZ. As big a loss as it is to fanzine fandom, there are gaming journalists who felt Joyce Katz’ death just as keenly. Chris Kohler of WIRED paid tribute: “Joyce Worley Katz, Pioneering Videogame Critic, Has Passed Away”.

Joyce Katz, who along with her husband Arnie Katz and friend Bill Kunkel founded the first magazine devoted to videogames, has passed away at the age of 77.

Katz, who wrote professionally under her maiden name Joyce Worley, was senior editor of the magazine Electronic Games from its founding in 1981 until just prior to its shuttering in 1985. She went on to take senior editorial roles at gaming publications throughout the 1990s, including Video Games & Computer Entertainment and the relaunched Electronic Games…..

Joyce had continued to write about games regularly until the closing of the second run of Electronic Games in the mid-90s. In the August 1994 issue of that publication, Katz made note of the industry’s worrying shift away from “games for everyone” to a hyper-violent boys’ club: “Tetris and Shanghai charmed women, Mortal Kombat did not.”

It was a prescient column in more ways than one. Katz looked forward to a future in which online gaming would make women “feel less threatened by on-lookers who might tease or criticize their performance in a game.” Sadly, it did not turn out to be that simple. But she also predicted that easier-to-use hardware coupled with better software design would keep girls gaming their whole lives, a future she did live to see.

“Somewhere between age 9 and 12, we lose the ladies,” Worley wrote. “We may never get back the teenaged girls, but hopefully we can arrange gaming so that we won’t lose them in the first place.”

(5) JUST. ONE. BOOK. Margaret Elysia Garcia and friends are still processing the avalanche of donations that came in response to their appeal for people to send books to a rural California school library.

I am bone tired and weary. I have biceps I haven’t had since my kids were toddlers. I am happy to say we have only 20 more boxes to open at the library–and hopefully none will come tomorrow. We are few people and we need to catch up. The generosity is overwhelming.  Thank you. Thank you cards have begun and imagine they will take the better part of the fall semester to complete. I hope a thank you here is also enough as some boxes came in damaged in parts and addresses were not always readable. Please be patient. I’ve had a few emails from people thinking perhaps that we have 200 people and a sophisticated technology set up to respond. Alas we have a couple dozen people who donate time when they can. And we have one very exhausted me who has some reinforcements coming this week thank goodness.

(6) SPACEDOCK. See how the original model Enterprise was restored.

This is a short film showing the process of the detail paint work on the restoration of original U.S.S. Enterprise miniature. The work was done between the 11th and the 23rd of April 2016 at the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy facility. The model is now on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.

 

(7) IT’S TOO LATE, BABY, IT’S TOO LATE. Yesterday, when it wasn’t, Timothy the Talking Cat posted, “Timothy says: Hugos! Vote! Vote now! Before it is TOO LATE!”

So I say to you all: Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government! You have nothing to fear but the lurking horror in your basement! We shall fight them on the bleachers! Countrymen lend me your ears! But above all in the immortal words of Theodore Cruz: Vote yourself conscious!

(8) THE HORROR. Jason P. Hunt did a roundup of all the horror genre news that came out of San Diego Comic-Con at SciFi4Me.

“Want to see something really scary?”

Remember that line from The Twilight Zone? Well, we have a scary big pile of news on the horror side of things from Comic-Con International in San Diego.

(9) TITLES TO BE UNLOCKED. Thanks to Petréa Mitchell we know the list of achievement trophies in No Man’s Sky:

No spoilers, other than the names of the trophies themselves. They’re all named after sf works. There’s a mixture of old and new, classic and obscure, Puppy-approved and degenerate SJW… even one (out of 23) written by a woman.

For example,

Babel-17

Attain ‘Confused’ status in Words Collected

The Star Beast

Attain ‘Archivist’ status in Uploaded Discoveries

(10) WHALE OF A TAIL. This will unquestionably float somebody’s boat — “Channing Tatum to Play Mermaid in ‘Splash’ Remake for Disney”.

Disney is moving forward on a remake of the 1984 film Splash with an interesting twist: Channing Tatum will star as the mermaid character that was played by Daryl Hannah while Jillian Bell will play the character originally played by Tom Hanks.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

  • August 1, 1819 – Herman Melville. It took John Huston to get Ray Bradbury to read the book.

(12) SFWA GRANTS. Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is taking applications for grants for worthy projects until October 1.

Last year the Givers Fund received enough donations to provide grants to projects such as the LaunchPad astronomy program, the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers, the Clarion West Writers Workshop, and the SFWA Star Project, among others, in the program’s first year.

The Grants Committee evaluated the multiple proposals on a number of criteria, the most important of which was how well they served the genre community and its writers. For example, the SFWA Star Project looks for a crowdfunded initiative each month to support by spreading the word as well as with a small donation. The innovative effort underscores SFWA’s leadership in new publishing models, including being the first writing organization to take crowdfunding as professional credentials.

This year we are continuing to provide grants to worthy projects. If you have a nonprofit project that you think would benefit the writing community, please submit it to [email protected].

Apply Here

Application forms must be submitted by October 1st. Decisions on recipients will be finalized in November of this year and applicants notified by year’s end.

(13) CHEER YOURSELF DOWN.

(14) TOR EBOOK. The Tor.com Free eBook Club Pick for August is The Just City by Jo Walton.

Sign up for the Book Club, or sign in if you’re already registered, to download the book (available only from August 1 through 7).

(15) WHAT IS PLANNING. Nigel Quinlan’s “Outline Planning Permission Part 2” went up on Writing.ie today.

…I challenged myself to PLAN. I wrestled with the big issues. What was planning? Was coffee planning fuel? What did it mean to plan? When was I getting another cup of coffee? Wasn’t planning just writing, only without the fun? (No, that’s making radical revisions because you wrote without a proper plan, Nigel.) I drank coffee. I read up on planning. Some was useful, some wasn’t. It became apparent that I was going to have to devise a method that worked for me.

This is where I’m at, by the way. I’m, er, making up my planning as I go along.

I got loads of notebooks and spread them around my desk in a very satisfactory manner.

Then I wasted time on the internet. Then I stopped because procrastination gets depressing after a while.

I wrote out the story so far.

I filled a big page with the names of all the characters so far and indicated roughly their relationships.

I made a tentative list of characters who have yet to appear and gave some indication of their roles and relationships.

I made a list of settings and gave rough ideas of how the story moves from place to place and what occurs there. I gave detail where I had them and left things vague where I didn’t, and decided not to worry about the vague bits – that’s rather the point of planning: find the vague bits and fill ‘em in.

I made a list of words I associated with the story as a whole. Random words, some reflecting theme, some mood, some character, some representing nothing yet.

I wrote out my ideas for the rest of the story, asking questions, posing alternatives, highlighting some of the stuff that needed work and trying to remain calm at the vast spaces that remained vague and undefined.

I sat and surveyed what I had done. And it was a start….

(16) DISCWORLD CON. The North American Discworld Convention 2017 announced yesterday –

Hotel Contract Signed!

We are delighted to announce that the North American Discworld® Convention 2017 will be held in New Orleans, LA, September 1–4 next year. Membership and hotel details will be announced in the next month, but for now, save the dates and start contemplating which costumes you’ll want to wear as you attend The Genuan Experience!!

(17) DID THE EARTH MOVE FOR YOU? Speaking of the earth moving (as we did in a recent Scroll), the BBC just did a report on continental drift accompanied by speculative animated maps tracing their movement back 750 million years and forward 250.

Science calls it “Pangaea Proxima”. You might prefer to call it the Next Big Thing. A supercontinent is on its way that incorporates all of Earth’s major landmasses, meaning you could walk from Australia to Alaska, or Patagonia to Scandinavia. But it will be about 250 million years in the making.

For Christopher Scotese at the University of Texas at Arlington, the fact that our continents are not stationary is tantalising. How were they arranged in the past – and how will they be positioned in the future?

“Fifty million years from now, Australia will be in collision with southeast Asia to a much larger degree,” he says. Africa will also be pushing right up against southern Europe, while the Atlantic will be a far wider ocean than it is today.

(18) GLAZE NOTE. In case anyone wondered if it was possible, the BBC explains “How to break glass with sound”. Step one: not with one’s voice.

You’re probably familiar with the urban legend: the opera singer ascends the stage and clears his throat. His audience cheer and wave their champagne flutes in anticipation. He opens his mouth – and a roomful of glasses smash to pieces. We have no record that this has ever actually happened, but there were rumours that the legendary tenor Enrico Caruso could quiver a glass into a million pieces.

(19) SHARKNADO 4, THE COMPLETE SPOILER REVIEW. Be honest, you weren’t going to watch it anyway, so why not read Jordan DesJardin’s “Movie Review: ‘Sharknado 4: The 4th Awakens’” at ScienceFiction.com?

I don’t want to spoil the ending, but the words ‘Shark-ception” definitely comes to mind. ‘Sharknado: The 4th Awakens’ culminates is probably the most ridiculous ending of any of these films to date, and there is nothing to not love about it. If you’re a fan of the first three, you’ll love this one. And really if you’ve never seen a ‘Sharknado’ movie before (in which case, what is wrong with you, get on that!), it is really difficult not to have a good time while watching this movie. We highly recommend pairing this movie (and the previous three) with a large couch, several good friends, some snacks and drinks, and you are all set for one hell of a ride!

(20) HOLODECK. You’ve just been drafted into the crew of the Enterprise. Would you rather wear a redshirt or a gray coverall?

[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, JJ, Gary Farber, Petréa Mitchell, Mark-kitteh, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

1,116 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/1/16 If You Like It, Put A Ringworld On It

  1. @Lurkertype
    Bill’s son can always work at Walmart if things don’t work out. I hear a lot of Millenials are doing that to get by during this underemployment job market.

  2. Speaking as an avid Welcome to Night Vale fan, I found the novel to be thoroughly disappointing.

    Good-I thought maybe I just wasn’t in tune. I keep seeing all these raves for Nightvale podcast and the book just. . . no. I couldn’t even get past the beginning. I was starting to think it was me–I kept hitting all these books people raved over (Seveneves; The Library at Mount Char; The Mandibles) and hitting a wall with them.
    Good thing there’s always something else to read and rave over. The latest for me was “The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August” which I wouldn’t have found if someone hadn’t mentioned it.

  3. Testing, testing.

    Just checking to see if all of my posts are still going to moderation.

  4. @Rob Thornton: That trailer looks seriously good. I feel bad for putting the Ted Chiang book to one side while I devour The Obelisk Gate now. But I should get through both before this comes out in cinemas anyway.

  5. @Lurkertype.
    Pretty sure that everyone moving to Canada won’t help Canada, or everyone who moves there. Short term, at least, we’ll stay here.
    “but if you’d lived in Canada, his ICU stuff would have been completely covered”
    We did write some pretty big checks, but it ended up costing us less out-of-pocket than a car we recently bought.
    If we had lived in Canada, he might have died because he wouldn’t have had access to the world-class surgeon who operated on him, he might have died because he wouldn’t have been attended by the PICU Dr. who recognized a very uncommon breathing issue, his wait times for procedures may have been longer, he may not have had the same access to facilities/equipment, etc. We entered the system from a place of privilege that many don’t enjoy, and that made a difference. Some of that was luck, some of it was the result of the hard work of his parents (not only in terms of earning the money to pay for good insurance, but also in terms of aggressively being his advocate at every step.)
    I’ve looked at two Canadian cities of comparable population to where I live (Barrie ON and St Johns NL); there aren’t as many neonatal/pediatric intensivists, neonatal/pediatric ICU beds, or neonatal/pediatric surgeons in either of them as there are here.

    Things ended up working out very well for him wrt to his health. If we had lived in Canada, it might have turned out just as well. We’ll never know. But there is nothing about the way our health care system treated him and us, vs what I read about the Canadian health care system, that makes me wish we had gone through yours instead of ours. I’m glad for you that you are satisfied with what you have access to. Both of us are in much better shape that way than the vast majority of the rest of the world.

    @Tasha
    I’ve read your comment several times, trying to see if somehow I’ve missed a nuance or something. From where I sit, it looks like you are taking shots at me by saying rude things about my kid in a public forum. Stay classy.

  6. @Bill
    Not taking potshots. Pointing out the current reality many millenials face. Underemployment is a real problem. Millenials taking jobs where their college degree isn’t needed because they can’t find one which utilizes it is a growing part of their discontent and a reason they may be the first white generation in a long time not to be better off than the previous generation.

    Used Walmart as an example simply because we’ve been discussing it as a place which hires those down on their luck and your insistence the government shouldn’t interfere with the way they do business.

  7. Bill; I’ve seen all your arguments for why Wal-Mart is just fine doing what they do and paying a starvation wage. They are the same arguments used to justify company towns (“but without the company, nobody would have work”), sweatshops in Bangladesh (“No, really, the people around here are glad of the opportunity. It’s one of the best jobs available”) and was used to resist almost every employment standard from child labour laws (“but if their children can’t bring in a few more coins, some of the poor families will starve”) to the work week.

    And sometimes you’re right. The company leaves, and the town collapses. The place hires fewer people and cuts its budget to the bone.

    A lot of times, you aren’t.

    I’m also really hesitant to tell someone whose job I’m not doing that their labour isn’t worth much. I know someone who stocks shelves, though for a better company than Wal mart; her job leaves her exhausted, especially at Christmas, but she takes some pride in doing it right. Meanwhile, I’m paid $14/hour for scanning, putting labels on folders, rearranging shelves and clicking save a lot on a computer. Aside from the computer part, I’m effectively doing the same thing she is, but with paper in a records room. Am I really working harder than she is and deserving of a better wage because my job is technically white collar*?

    Or is it just that the company I work for really *respects* its employees and contractors and finds benefit in treating them well and keeping them around?

    * I never wear white shirts, though, and few have collars. Go figure.

  8. @Bill: But I know that if he works hard and keeps himself out of trouble, the world is his oyster. “It ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you; it’s what you know that ain’t so.”

    Example: software engineering (my profession up to retirement) was once a good steady job for people with a slightly offbeat mindset; now it depends on almost-freakish ability to become fluent in new toys quickly — and even then one may be upstaged by Israel, or India, or …. And that’s just for development; as most of us have seen, support has long been spread among low-wage countries — and don’t think that hasn’t made the jobs of responsible developers (i.e., those who fix their own and their predecessors’ bugs) more difficult.

    This is just a more recent version of the steady outflow of jobs.

    wrt your defense of the Confederate flag: none of those are excuses — especially when it was revived specifically in response to the attempts to remedy the gross abrogation of the rights of citizens. The stories about valor etc. are lies, pure and simple; consider, for comparison, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth.

  9. If you happen to be a fan of Yoon Ha Lee’s fiction: He and his family live in Baton Rouge and have been flooded out of their house. Everyone (and the cat) is fine, but they’ve lost a lot of their possessions and are now dealing with finding a new place to live. In response Yoon Ha has added a new $5 level to his Patreon for a monthly flash fic. Source

    Please signal-boost if you can.

  10. Book covers have been a topic here before so I thought I should share this story: The designer who made the cover for the Norwegian edition of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant discovered, after the book had been sent to printing, that the stock photo she had used for the cover have been used on lots of other books too. The article says “around 25”, there’s a slideshow with 19 examples here:
    https://www.nrk.no/kultur/bok/fant-25-boker-med-samme-omslagsbilde-1.13081453?index=0#1.13085465.c556b0ff
    (If you exit the slideshow you reach a Norwegian news story which includes some general comments on the state of book cover design in Norwegian publishing.)

  11. @Bill:

    We entered the system from a place of privilege that many don’t enjoy, and that made a difference

    I’m glad you acknowledge that. Canadian healthcare has a lot of problems, especially as regards to wait times. But at least a medical emergency isn’t as likely to financially destroy a person.

    I’m currently on disability, and when I had a maybe-seizure a couple months ago, my biggest concern was paying for the ambulance to emergency. If I would have been on the hook for the ER visit, I would have been a lot more likely to explain it away, and certainly not follow up afterwards with my GP for a referral to a specialist and further testing. I wasn’t slurring my speech, or weak on one side, and my pupils were the same size, after all. I’m sure it’s fine.

    (And it might be fine, maybe I just stood up too fast, no worries buddy! But here I can see a neurologist and get an EEG just in case it isn’t fine.)

  12. I’m finding Obelisk Gate to be more upsetting than Fifth Season – partly because I’m even more, invested in the characters. Jemisin never makes excuses for why people have done terrible things but rather shows three-dimensional believable people who aren’t cartoon monsters and whose actions are plausible in context even when they are heartbreakingly appalling.

  13. I’m finding the idea that something that’s less than one’s current car but close enough to even make that comparison is a price one MUST pay for saving a 6 month old boggling.

    It’s a price any of us who can afford and many who can’t would be willing to pay, and we’d pay more if the choice was that or losing a child.

    But having to? After insurance? That’s where I get off the boat. Because to me I hear that as ‘poor children don’t matter’.

  14. I’m all for universal health care in the US so we stop being a country where poor children and people don’t matter. Unfortunately it is seen as evil communism to too many and unlikely to happen for many years. I do think eventually we’ll catch up with the rest of the 1st world countries. I hope we do so before the majority of 3rd world countries have implemented universal healthcare as that’s one of the first steps they take working towards becoming a 1st world country. O_o

  15. It seems ghoulish to observe it, but I wonder if the voting bloc that rigidly opposes all ‘socialist’ healthcare isn’t dying even faster than expected because of the unhealthy lifestyles they defiantly cling to. No nanny state’s gonna make them live longer! Let’s have some more tobacco-fed steak!

    (One of the things I like about this place is that, while I do expect to see rebuttals, I also expect that they will be factual, informed, and may even change my mind. Thanking my correctors in advance)

  16. In every European country and in fact every western country and many non-western ones, Bill and his wife wouldn’t have to pay a hospital bill that’s comparable to the price of a car. The baby’s neonatal care would have been covered fully by health insurance and the insurance premiums would likely have been much lower than in the US, too. And while I can’t speak for every country, the standards of neonatal care in Germany are very high and even very premature babies with multiple health issues routinely survive. For example, my cousin’s grandson was born extremely premature and weighed only a little over 600 grams at birth. At the time, the mother was a single 20-year-old with no job, i.e. not someone who would be able to pay high hospital bills. Now, six and a half years later, the kid is doing fine and has just started school. And later, if he wants to, he can go to university and get a BA degree without paying any tuition fees.

    Regarding long waiting times for treatment, this is not really an issue in Germany except in very rare cases. It is an issue e.g. in the UK, but the waiting times are for treatment for conditions that are not life-threatening such as hip joint replacements. If it’s an emergency and/or a life-threatening condition, you get bumped right to the top of the queue everywhere and you get excellent care.

    Since everybody here has health insurance, crowdfunding appeals to pay for medical treatment are pretty much unheard of. A few months ago, there was a case of a self-employed guy who exploited a loophole in the system (he cancelled his health insurance, but did not sign up with a different provider like he was supposed to) to save health insurance premiums and therefore found himself uninsured, when he was diagnosed with cancer. He started a crowdfunding appeal to pay for his treatment. This was so unusual for Germany, that the case made the evening news.

    The German health insurance system is not perfect, far from it (self-employed people are disadvantaged and always treated like they’re trying to cheat), but I’d much rather have that than the US system.

  17. Yes, that’s the one thing to remember about a socialized system – No entity should get between a person and the medical attention they need. No insurance companies, and in Canada – no government bureaucracy at all. Hospitals can work strictly on the basis of triage. If you need immediate medical help, you get it.

    Also for the Canadian system at least, it works out cheaper per capita(about 3/4 the cost compared to the US), since insurance companies typically expect a significant profit margin, where a socialized system can aim to break even.

  18. Medical expenses remain the leading cause of bankruptcy in the US. Benefits expenses remain one of the most significant drags on US business. From just a pragmatic view you would think an allegedly pro-business party would favor reform. A large segment of business owners would be overjoyed to lose that burden.

    Then again the Republicans supported health care reform right up until Obama adopted their ideas in a bid for unity. Which made it e-vile…

  19. And now for something completely different, namely today’s book haul:

    Today I was in Vechta, a town of 32000 people and two bookshops (used to be three, but one closed, because the owner retired). At one of the two remaining bookshops, I bought The High Ground, a promising looking space opera by Melinda Snodgrass, The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood (now out in paperback) and Brotherhood in Death by J.D. Robb. This is an excellent haul, considering that the shop only carries maybe forty or fifty English language books at a time and half of those are by Jeffrey Archer.

  20. Re: the Weird West bundle — I cannot recommend any more strongly than you MUST get “The New World” vol. 1. It’s a fairy tale, a Western, a coming of age, a frontier story. I’ve only read the first of the “Flash Gold” stories, but enjoyed it very much; plucky orphan girl who’s a steampunk champeen in Alaska.

    There is no excuse for the Confederate flag. It is the emblem of slave-owning, traitors, and LOSERS. Y’all LOST that war fair and square, remember? So why are you so proud of displaying the emblem of a) not the USA, while calling yourselves “real Americans” and b) admitting you lost the only war you ever fought? along with c) insulting your fellow citizens of higher melanin?

    @Kip W: indeed, many studies have shown that blue-collar white males, and Southerners are dying at much faster rates and younger than the rest of the country. Map that to the political party. The underemployment of said blue-collar men the past few years has led to much higher rates of suicide, alcohol/drug abuse, and death from things like high blood pressure and diabetes. But since they can’t afford to see a doctor, they don’t get medicine for the physical ills nor counseling for the mental ones. And Lord knows it’s tough to give up that yummy Southern food, because that cholesterol and salt is THE BEST. The ACA has been nothing less than a godsend for us since we’re lucky to live in a state that took the Federal money. I’d still prefer single-payer or German-style, but I’ll take this.

    Books! I’ve read “The Obelisk Gate” and OMG I may need to use Obamacare for a shrink appointment, but I love love LOVED it just as much as the first. It’s brutal, but in very human ways. Many questions are answered, the world is greatly expanded, and there’s another cliffhanger.

    I next read MRK’s “Ghost Talkers”. Which, even being in set in/near the trenches of WWI and featuring the spirits of dead soldiers, plus spy/counterspy, was Pollyanna-ish compared to the other. There are a lot of wonderful characters (not the villains, natch, they are villainous, but within reason), some delightfully snappy dialogue, vivid place-setting, and even a bit of romance. Also the obligatory Doctor Who in-jokes, and a cameo by someone you will all recognize. PoC in vital roles, lead character’s a woman. Highly recommended.

    Will need to read something fluffy bunny next, I think.

    Cora: Sounds like a good haul! Why so much Archer? I mean… meh.

  21. Chip –

    “..Example: software engineering (my profession up to retirement) was once a good steady job for people with a slightly offbeat mindset; now it depends on almost-freakish ability to become fluent in new toys quickly …”

    I’d also like to point out that, for most run-of-the-mill development and maint positions, what is really needed is experience and (as noted) that “slightly offbeat mindset,” not an advanced degree (or even a BA/BS)

    But these days, even 40 years experience won’t get you into the hiring manager unless you have a degree or know someone in the company.

    And for youngsters, that means having the amount of class privilege to both get into a “good” school itself and to be able to have someone convince the banks to lend you money

  22. (I’m catching up, traveling into the past in the comments here)

    For a few years for a couple of local conventions I played treasurer.

    That meant that in the days before the con I would have to get sizable cash to seed the cash boxes for Registration, banquet, incidentals and for tips to hotel workers.

    That wasn’t too bad. The fun was at the end-of-con, with all the the cash collected in from banquet and from Registration. This could be Sizable.

    What we *liked* to do was pay off a large chunk of the outstanding bill to the hotel using that cash. Sometimes a hotel would grumble (whether for security concerns or simple cussedness), but usually they were happy to do so, as obviously, the only “float” time is how long until they can make their deposit.

    Sometimes, through, this could still leave one with sizable amounts of cash. I don’t think we ever broke the 10K barrier with just cash, but did do so on several occasions of combined cash and checks.

    One time the bank cashier insisted that I really didn’t need to see an ossifer in order to take the deposit, only to have the teller-window-centric software choke on the volume of checks from registration – it wasn’t that they were such big amounts, just that there were so *many* of them. That was also the time that we discovered there was a bug in the ossifwer-centric software – they kept on coming up with an aggregate total that was consistently off for the total I had recorded.

    Took about 2 hours to verify it was an error in the bank software, and was resolved by breaking the deposit into 3 separate deposits.

  23. Just had the fun discovery that some (language x) to English translation software translates “Human” as “tellurian” and “tissue” as “hankie.” Cue the web sites featuring articles about tellurian hankie testing and such. (Also, “culture” is translated as enlightenment”, so there are articles about hankie enlightenment and, yes, “tellurian hankie enlightenment.”)

  24. Follow-up: Now I’m wondering if this could be some sort of thesaurus-based word replacing program intended to hide plagiarism of articles. One article I just read had enough clues (Ernest Moore, Wired, AR-15) that I was able to google up the original article, which appeared in English originally. So unless there is a rash of people dong a Jimmy James Karate Monkey Death Car double translation, they are going from English to bad English and then posting that on their websites.

    Original.

    Bad translation.

  25. @Darren Garrison:
    My favourite computer translation story (I think it was from one of Douglas Hofstadter’s articles) was of a system that was supposed to translate Russian technical documents, and one test involved running English technical documents through it in both directions to see what differences showed up. One of the results kept talking about ‘water goats’.

    They had to figure out which document was the original before realizing that ‘water goat’ == ‘hydraulic ram’.

  26. @lurkertype

    Cora: Sounds like a good haul! Why so much Archer? I mean… meh.

    Germans love crime fiction, so the English language sections of German bookstores always carry a lot of crime fiction and thrillers, usually of the airport variety.

    However, this particular bookstore (and I taught at Vechta university for a while, so I know the local bookstores quite well) has always had a surfeit of Jeffrey Archer books for some reason. Mayhe the owner really likes Archer or maybe Archer has a strong fanbase in Vechta for some reason.

  27. Wow, over a thousand comments? This is totally going to throw Mike’s stat collecting out of whack! 🙂

    What have I been reading? Well, I recently stumbled across an old Asimov non-fiction book, Exploring the Earth & the Cosmos, from the early eighties. Now, I know the suck fairy has visited his old SF, but I was curious how well his non-fiction stood up to the test of time, since I hadn’t read any in oiks. The answer is: surprisingly well. The science is a bit out-of-date in places, of course, but that’s only to be expected. But the man really was an excellent science popularizer.

    One thing that made me sad, though, was his quiet confidence that the US would be adopting the metric system any day now. He nicely provided conversions for those who weren’t yet up-to-date, but it was pretty clear that he thought the switchover was well underway. Alas, it was not to be.

  28. Xtifr on August 18, 2016 at 6:01 pm said:
    It’s happening, but under the radar: look at beverages, most of which are in metric packages. Or knitting needles and crochet hooks, where the old US sizes have been redefined in millimeters. (Crochet thread and yarn comes in metric packages a lot more often, also: 25g, 50g, and 100g usually. Embroidery thread has been in 8-meter skeins for a long time.)

  29. Still no Dragon Awards link. No email from them since original signup. Voting is through Survey Monkey, right? snicker Kinda wonder what’s up with them… not enough to do more than check the inbox now and again, though.

  30. ::squee:: Audible.com finally lists The Obelisk Gate – bought & downloaded! 😀 I can get to it if/when Seveneves ever ends (in fairness, it’s interesting again, though a little eye-rolling). 😉

    @Arifel: Yay, my reading will pay off with more reading time! Thanks for linking to that article.

  31. lurkertype on August 18, 2016 at 10:59 pm said:

    Still no Dragon Awards link. No email from them since original signup. Voting is through Survey Monkey, right? snicker Kinda wonder what’s up with them… not enough to do more than check the inbox now and again, though.

    I’ve had mine and voted. I think they must be manually working through a list.

  32. Can also confirm that I got my link and have also cast my votes. It took them a solid 4 days to get the link to me though. I wish them luck in ironing out all of the flaws in their process for next year. Assuming there will be a next year.

    Also, while I’m not overly bothered by the outcome of these, I do think it would be absolutely hilarious if The Fifth Season took two Dragons this year.

  33. Oneiros on August 19, 2016 at 2:11 am said:

    Also, while I’m not overly bothered by the outcome of these, I do think it would be absolutely hilarious if The Fifth Season took two Dragons this year.

    Likewise. I wonder what the chances of this are, as it’s FPTP voting and it’s competing against a broad spread of Puppy contenders.

  34. @Rob_matic: her only competition, in either category, would appear to be Butcher and maybe Larry. It depends on how pup-sympathetic the Dragon Award crowd turns out to be, I suspect.

    I’m expecting Butcher to take Fantasy, but Larry and the Pups *might* split enough of the vote to allow Jemisin a win.

    Jemisin should walk Apocalyptic though, as TFS has more 5* ratings than her competitors have *total ratings* combined.

    (I should add that any references to stats here are based on the ever-reliable “glancing at the books’ Goodreads pages” method)

  35. Oneiros: Also, while I’m not overly bothered by the outcome of these, I do think it would be absolutely hilarious if The Fifth Season took two Dragons this year.

    rob_matic: I wonder what the chances of this are, as it’s FPTP voting and it’s competing against a broad spread of Puppy contenders.

    Oneiros: It depends on how pup-sympathetic the Dragon Award crowd turns out to be, I suspect.

    Note that according to the rules, the organizers have the ability to throw out any votes they wish for any reason, and may therefore decide what the results will be.

    I don’t see a double win for The Fifth Season happening, exactly for that reason. It would make their award look bad, for not having a significant depth of nominees and voters.

  36. If anyone has read Correia’s and Brian Niemeier’s latest screeds regarding the Dragon Awards and the io9 article that called the ballot “mostly puppy-free”, they finally admit that Ann Leckie, John Scalzi and N.K. Jemisin have a legitimate fanbase, which is a start, I guess. There’s also a lot of gloating about Gawker shutting down and the typical lack of reading comprehension when a comment about euthanizing puppies (which IMO crosses the line in a big way) was attributed to the author of the article rather than a random commenter.

  37. @Cora If anyone has read Correia’s and Brian Niemeier’s latest screeds regarding the Dragon Awards

    Having now read them I’ve changed my mind on my D*C voting stance. I’ve now voted on the D*C Dragon awards because why should the puppies have all the fun? My ethics are more flexible than I thought. 😉

  38. @JJ: I’d actually completely forgotten about that 🙁 it does make it a lot more likely that TFS will only win the one Dragon this year. All we can do is just wait and see how it all pans out, though.

  39. If anyone has read Correia’s and Brian Niemeier’s latest screeds regarding the Dragon Awards

    Googling for those turned up a JCW piece, reminding me that he is such a charmer. In the comments, he even rubs the missus the wrong way.

  40. Darren Garrison on August 19, 2016 at 7:56 am said:
    If anyone has read Correia’s and Brian Niemeier’s latest screeds regarding the Dragon Awards

    Googling for those turned up a JCW piece, reminding me that he is such a charmer. In the comments, he even rubs the missus the wrong way.

    In some ways I feel sorry for him as he is clearly struggling professionally relative to so many of the people he despises… but then again there is probably a Christian lesson there for him.

  41. Book discount note:
    Sabaa Tahir’s Ember in the Ashes is £STG1.01 on Amazon UK at the moment – if you’re in the UK I think the price will vary slightly due to different VAT.
    Also €1.37 on Kobo but Adobe DRM is my most hated DRM, and $1.33 I think on Amazon US.

  42. I see from the comments on JCW’s Dragon Award thread that JCW has still not read Leckie’s work. I also note that the other comments who claim to have read it also seem not to have done so.

    It seems that JCW still doesn’t understand that the fact that he lost to No Award means that the popular vote was against him.

  43. Aaron: It seems that JCW still doesn’t understand that the fact that he lost to No Award means that the popular vote was against him.

    JCW: Last year was the last chance for the Hugo Awards to be granted on the basis of the merit of the work and the authentic will of the readership.

    Which is exactly what happened — and yet JCW is still clearly in denial about it.

    The sad desperation of that post, begging for people to vote for him, would inspire sympathy from me if JCW hadn’t been such a relentlessly horrible person over the last 3 years.

Comments are closed.