Pixel Scroll 8/1/17 The Magic Fileaway Tree

(1) BESIDES CONFEDERATE. Deadline tells about another post-Civil War alternate history in development: “‘Black America’: Amazon Alt-History Drama From Will Packer & Aaron McGruder Envisions Post-Reparations America”.

Another alternate history drama series, which has been in the works at Amazon for over a year, also paints a reality where southern states have left the Union but takes a very different approach. Titled Black America, the drama hails from top feature producer Will Packer (Ride Along, Think Like A Man franchises, Straight Outta Compton) and Peabody-winning The Boondocks creator and Black Jesus co-creator Aaron McGruder. It envisions an alternate history where newly freed African Americans have secured the Southern states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama post-Reconstruction as reparations for slavery, and with that land, the freedom to shape their own destiny. The sovereign nation they formed, New Colonia, has had a tumultuous and sometimes violent relationship with its looming “Big Neighbor,” both ally and foe, the United States. The past 150 years have been witness to military incursions, assassinations, regime change, coups, etc. Today, after two decades of peace with the U.S. and unprecedented growth, an ascendant New Colonia joins the ranks of major industrialized nations on the world stage as America slides into rapid decline. Inexorably tied together, the fate of two nations, indivisible, hangs in the balance.

(2) SPARE CHANGE. Everybody’s getting on the bandwagon: Smithsonian curators present historic coins representative of the noble houses of Westeros: “It’s not heads or tails in the ‘Game of Thrones'”.

House Targaryen: Fire and Blood

Daenerys Targaryen has spent the Game of Thrones saga making a name for herself—several, actually: the Mother of Dragons, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Breaker of Chains, and more. She harnesses the power of fire and blood, renowned for her skills as dragonlord and evidenced in the sigil of her house, which depicts a red three-headed dragon on a black field. The silver-haired Targaryens are not alone in their veneration of dragons as ancestral symbols of power and prestige. This gold liang coin depicts a mighty and ferocious dragon flying through clouds toward the viewer, flames protruding from its mouth. The coin was minted under the Guangxu Emperor of the Qing dynasty, where the dragon would have been understood as a symbol for wisdom, power, nobility, and ambition. Such symbolism is literally used by Targaryens and their dragons to claim rule of the Seven Kingdoms.

(3) BOW WOW. The Washington Post’s Karen Bruillard, in “Dire wolves were real. Now someone is trying to resurrect them”, reports on Medford, Oregon dog breeder Lois Schwarz, whose Dire Wolf Project has been going on for thirty years but has gotten national attention with Game of Thrones.  Schwarz has been working on wolf-dog hybrids for decades (the term she likes is “American Alsatians”).

“‘Game of Thones’ has given demand a bump, but not in the way Schwarz likes,” Says Bruillard.  “The fiction-motivated customers are looking for dogs that resemble the characters Ghost or Nymeria,” while Schwartz wants to breed dogs that are smart and friendly.

Bruillard also interviewed palentologist Caitlin Brown, who did her dissertation on Canis dirus.  One quibble Brown has with Game of Thrones:  “The wolves of HBO usually lunge at their enemies’ heads, whereas wolves typically drag down their prey from their haunches.”

(4) NEW MCCCAFFREY. A little birdie told me WordFire released “The Jupiter Game (The Game of Stars Book 1)” by Todd McCaffrey (Kindle edition) on July 30. Not about dragons – but aliens.

Jupiter!

The Russians and the Europeans got there first in their fusion ship Harmonie. At least, that’s what they thought.

Aliens!

“They’ve matched orbit with us!”

What do they want? What will they do?

Ooops…

“Ooops?” Jenkins echoed. “Aliens go ‘Ooops’?”

The Jupiter Game: A close encounter with aliens who watch Howdy Doody.

(5) HEVELIN COLLECTION Andrew Porter reports that it looks like the digitization of Rusty Hevelin’s fanzines has slowed dramatically.

The person in charge has left, leaving someone else in charge. Post on the blog 2 months ago, showing a flyer from the 1981 Worldcon about the Hugo Losers Party, shows how little the people in charge know about SF. “The year of the con?” Really?

“Hi Folks, I want to let you know that Laura Hampton, the librarian doing the actual digitization of Hevelin fanzines and who has masterfully displayed some of the Hevelin treasures here over the last two years, has moved on to a great job in Florida. We all wish her the very best and I am so grateful for all she’s accomplished. We’ll miss her.

“So, it’s just us chickens. And to begin my return to doing Hevelin Tumblr, I introduce this piece of fan art, done on a piece of hotel stationery from the Denver Hilton. Can anybody identify the artist? The year of the con? I’m going to post more mysteries like this so stay tuned.”

It says something that the person does not recognize references to the 1981 Worldcon – where Rusty Hevelin was the Fan Guest of Honor!

(6) BLACKOUT. The Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham has discovered “The path of the solar eclipse is already altering real-world behavior”.

The upcoming solar eclipse is poised to become the “most photographed, most shared, most tweeted event in human history,” in the words of one astronomer. Millions of people will watch it, potentially overwhelming the cities and towns along the eclipse’s path of totality.

According to Google, interest in the eclipse has exploded nationwide in the past few months, mirroring national media attention. The county-level search data above, provided by Google, paints a striking picture: Interest in the eclipse is concentrated in the path of totality that cuts through the middle of the country, receding sharply the farther you go from that path.

 

(7) SKLAR OBIT. Marty Sklar worked for Disney for 54 years and led the designing and creating most of the Disney rides during this period. He died July 27.

Los Angeles Times writers Daniel Miller and Richard Vernier marked his passing in “Marty Sklar, Pioneering Imagineer Who Channeled Walt Disney, Dies at 83”.

Long after his mentor’s death, Sklar recognized the treasure-trove of wisdom he had started compiling at Walt Disney’s elbow in the late 1950s. He distilled it all into “Mickey’s Ten Commandments,” a widely circulated creed that remains a touchstone in the theme park industry.

The commandments were a cornerstone of Sklar’s own half-century career at Walt Disney Co., where he led the creative development of the Burbank company’s parks, attractions and resorts around the world, including its ventures in the cruise business, housing development and the redesign of Times Square in New York.

Sklar died Thursday in his Hollywood Hills home. No cause of death was given. He was 83.

His retirement in 2006 marked the end of an era: He was one of the last remaining executives to have worked alongside Walt Disney in shaping the company into a global powerhouse. Sklar, who last served as principal creative executive of Walt Disney Imagineering, the storied theme park design and development outfit, was so closely associated with the company’s namesake that he became known as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

(8) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • August 1, 2014 Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 1 opened.

(9) COMIC SECTION. John King Tarpinian says to check out today’s Moderately Confused.

(10) AUDIENCE BUILDING. Cat Rambo wrote a column about writers and self-promotion for Clarkesworld.

Whether opting for indie, traditional, or hybrid, publicity work on behalf of one’s output is less and less optional on the writer’s side of things for everyone except the top tier writers whose fan bases are so established that the publishers know their books are almost guaranteed to sell. Time and time again I have had writers come to me worried that they must create a social media presence because they’ve been told that they must by their agent or publisher. And it’s true that when acquiring books, some publishers look at a writer’s social media, believing that large followings will lead to greater sales.

You can see this pressure to publicize manifest in one form on Twitter, where writers work at projecting their brand as well as writing. It’s a weird balancing act, where they’re working at writing books people will want to read, but also working at attracting readers who might give them a try based on a quip or observation they’ve posted. Sometimes it feels sincere; other times less so. It is undeniable that a strong social media presence will affect sales, but its effect is generally overestimated, in my opinion. Creating consistently good work that brings readers back to look for more will always be the best strategy—although admittedly not one available immediately out of the authorial starting gate.

(11) A WORD FROM HER SPONSOR. Cat Rambo’s Patreon supporters got plenty of goodies from her in July. Here, let her draw you a picture –

(12) CLASS. And one of the items in her latest newsletter is her teaching schedule for August. See something you need? Sign up.

Plenty of Plunkett scholarships available. Please make use of them or pass the info to someone you know would benefit from the class but can’t afford it.

(13) YAKKITY-YAK. A corollary to the well-known joke about it being okay to talk to yourself as long as you don’t answer — “Chatbots develop own language: Facebook shuts down AI system…”.

Initially the AI agents used English to converse with each other but they later created a new language…

(14) AN UNCANNY EDITOR. Elsa Sjunneson-Henry tells Tor.com readers “I Built My Own Godd*mn Castle”.

I am seventeen when I meet Miles Vorkosigan. I’m not ready to meet him then. He startles me, I see myself in him and I don’t want to, because the common narrative told me being disabled was a weakness, not a strength. When I re-read him several years later, I find myself reveling in his glee, his reckless abandon. His energy.

I wish I’d been ready for him sooner. He is what tells me I deserve romance, that I deserve my own narrative. He is also still a boy. I have no women in fiction to guide me.

I am in my mid-twenties the first time the word “disabled” escapes my lips as a word to define myself. I’ve had a white cane for six years, yet I still don’t see myself as disabled, because no one else does.

When I discover it applies to me, it feels freeing.

I have mere days left in my twenties when I start writing a book about a disabled woman, a woman who shares my blindness, though not my conditions. It is rewarding, working through a story that feels right, the weight of the story, the sensory details all mine.

I’ve made a promise to myself, one that I haven’t shared yet. A promise to tell stories about disabled people as often as I can, as many varied stories as I can, because for me, I didn’t get enough of them when they were needed.

I am thirty-one when I take a job as an editor, creating a special issue for a Hugo award-winning magazine where I will, with other disabled people, destroy ableism like the kind that took me years to undo, and will take me more years to untangle and burn away.

That magazine is Uncanny. That issue is Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction. That job is Guest Editor-in-Chief of Non-Fiction. Those disabled people are my co-workers, my co-editors, and the writers I will work with.

(15) BEST COMMERCIALS. Adweek says “5 Years Later, the Guardian’s ‘Three Little Pigs’ Still Blows the House Down”. Click on the link to see the video.

It’s been a good year for ads from newspapers and magazines, from The New York Times to the Atlantic. But you have to go back five years for a truly transcendent piece of advertising from a journalistic publication—the Guardian’s “Three Little Pigs” spot by BBH London.

Adweek chose “Three Little Pigs” as the single best ad of 2012. And now, Hill Holliday creative director Kevin Daley has included it among his favorite work of all time in Adweek’s latest “Best Ads Ever” video (see above).

(16) PLONK YOUR MAGIC TWANGERS. Hampus Eckerman says, “I demand that these people get to make the soundtrack of a fantasy movie. All of them.” — Khusugtun Takes Listeners To Mongolia | Asia’s Got Talent 2015 Ep 2.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Rambo, Hampus Eckerman, Jonathan Edelstein, Paul Weimer, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, Jon Del Arroz, and Chip Hitchcock for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Nigel.]

52 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/1/17 The Magic Fileaway Tree

  1. 6) People are interested in what will happen in their own area? Who would have thunk it?

  2. I’d’ve expected some dark spots in major population centers like New York and Chicago. I wouldn’t expect such dark spots in the relatively-unpopulated Mountain West. Must be an average over local population. (I wonder what accounts for the random-seeming black blotches in Texas? A local astronomy club in a sparsely settled region?)

  3. @5: what it says is that the library found someone who could do organizing and digitizing, without also demanding that they know what happened in fandom 36 years ago. In theory, it would be nice if they were a Hevelin scholar; in practice, ISTM that that it’s more important to get the basic work done (in the course of which they may learn what they don’t know now, and be able to make more intelligent links later).

    @8 looks like a typo; isn’t it Guardians of the Galaxy?

    I saw Valerian… this evening. (This is a slow week.) I can summarize the attitude in five words: “Laureline’s space armor has tits.” (In a few more words, the reason it fails the Bechdel test is that the only other female human is a gofer; next to that, the other implausibilities are just icing on the stupid cake.)

    edit: @Bruce: yes. (And when I submit a comment, but not when I edit.) @OGH: can you fix? I never expected File:770 to have a soundtrack.

    Fifth!

  4. Bruce Diamond-It also auto played for me (and it is annoying to see and hear autoplayed videos on File 770).

  5. Chip Hitchcock: @OGH: can you fix? I never expected File:770 to have a soundtrack.

    I took a look — the connection is very simple and doesn’t include autoplay instructions which can be edited, that just “happens.” So by popular demand I have chopped the video from the Scroll and reminded people it’s available at the linked post.

  6. (3) If they are friendly, they are not dire wolves.

    OTOH, “American Alsatians”–if she’s using good breeding practices, go for it, an interesting look with a good, stable personality.

    (5) A member of the library staff has had a big project in an area they don’t have a background in dumped on them by a colleague’s departure. That person is looking for the information they know they don’t have, trying to do a good job. Answering some of their questions and pointing them to good sources would be more appropriate than mockery asnd contempt. Far more appropriate.

    Especially if one would prefer to see the project survive and prosper.

  7. (1) This. THIS! It’s a fresher, more imaginative concept. Something I haven’t seen before.

    (3) If she calls ’em American Alsatians, everyone’s going to think they’re just German Shepherds. C’mon, lady, they need a cooler name! Even if they’re just big fuzzy friendly mutts, not Dire Wolves.

    (9) I like that John brings us the funnies.

    (15) It’s no “Cat Herders”.

  8. @5–What Lis Carey and Chip Hitchcock said. The University of Iowa is involved in a massive digitization effort and I’m sure all the librarians and archivists there are doing their best. Cookbooks; Civil War letters; pioneer women’s diaries; lots of good stuff.
    That being said–their Tumblr for the Rusty Hevelin collection could use some work. Too bad most of it isn’t going to be available to the online public because of what I understand to be potential copyright issues. You wouldn’t think they’d have to worry about someone upset that their hand-crafted fanzines of Amazingly Weird Tales from 1953 that they wrote, mimeographed and stapled by hand would be out for the world to see.

  9. A dear and long departed friend of mine was fond of American Alsatians. Her first one was a large male with German Shepherd blood and an almost military bearing. Very obedient and neat and no trouble whatsoever.

    When he passed she got a female puppy with some kind of husky or coyote or chupacabra genetics. Despite lots of obedience trainers and patient handling, she couldn’t be trained or fenced and she destroyed thousands of dollars worth of stuff. She dug up pvc plumbing pipe and chewed through it. We locked her in the car once — on a COLD day — while we were getting coffees and when we came back she had bitten a chunk out of the steering wheel and shredded all the upholstery. Eventually she ended up being given to some farmer with lots of land. Very lovable goofy creature but definitely required advanced animal handling skills.

    An exotic dog breed, newly popular with impractical people who like violent TV! With a wildly variable temperament! And major gnawing skills! What could go wrong?

  10. (5) Agree with Lis, Chip, and Harold. Don’t mock the neos!

    (10) This is only a tangent, but such are in the best tradition of Dénis Lindbohm. I think a strong social media presence for an author isn’t that good for direct marketing. What it is good for is making some of the author’s readers feel more invested and engaged in the author, and thus more likey to spread word of mouth about their books. To me, it’s long-term audience building, not sales or promotions.

    (Social media also has some distinct drawbacks as a marketing tool. I think the development of Baen has shown the creative danger of a too effective rapport between in this case a publisher and its social media audience. Another is that a slighted customer with a high level of engagement is far more likely to react with anger than other slighted customers.)

    (14) Read this. Above all, learn to read, and to listen.

  11. 1) A much more interesting Alt history than Confederate. Execution is what ultimately counts. However, this is a fresher idea.

    13) I am suddenly reminded of the scene in Colossus when the two computers start learning to communicate, and soon outstriip their creators ability to keep track of what they are saying.

  12. 13: I’m wondering about the language. what was the purpose of its development? A need for secrecy? Tailored for the task? Greater specificity/less ambiguity? Strikes me that it might be something meatbags would want to learn.

  13. @Steve
    I am also reminded, now that I think of it and your comment, about the Clakkers’ speech in Ian Tregillis’ Mechanicals novels…

  14. @steve: They drifted away from “plain” English, and developed language that was more efficient and highly tailored to their task.

    Articles with more info are here and here.

    I’ve seen some really alarmist versions of the article (I especially love the implication in “the bots developed a new language, so Facebook shut them down,” which is more properly interpreted along the lines of “my phone started loading Facebook in Chinese, so I shut it off“). I’m curious about the negotiation mechanism here, but it remains a mechanism that’s tightly, tightly coupled to a very narrow problem domain.

  15. 13) This article has samples of the language spoken.

    It looks like English words repurposed to serve the purpose of this very specific negotiation.

    EDIT: Took too long before posting, everything there is in Standback’s post. I’d notice that the repetition they were using isn’t efficient to human eyes, but with a few slight differences in the cost of using different linguistic forms it might seem so.

  16. @Standback & James Moar: thanks…and interesting.

    I like the statement in one of the pieces that “researchers don’t know what AI’s are thinking”…because it takes place at a level they can’t drill in to.

    First – ahhhh, now we know why the Star Wars universe needs protocol droids to be conversant in so many languages

    Second: was just talking with my aunt the other day about how much we dislike modern tech’s black box nature: used to be your average person could do at least basic maintenance on their tools and technologies; then we went to plug-n-play, then we discarded that in favor of replacing the whole non-working device, and now those replacement devices come with more and more capability to “spy” on us and we’re largely totally unaware that this is even going on. (My Aunt was recently “forced” to accept exchange of her cable box for a new “better” one that the installation tech assured her was even better at spying….

    It’s not that I think “AI” is going to turn bad and go all Forbin Project on us (I did some AI research back in the 80s) – in fact, I believe we’ll never imbue “AI” with consciousness for all kinds of reasons, but the inability to be able to manipulate our tools while layering on ever more complexities – relying on replacement – makes me think of Campbell’s Twilight, or Forester’s The Machine Stops…

  17. @Karl-Johan Norén – This is only a tangent, but such are in the best tradition of Dénis Lindbohm. I think a strong social media presence for an author isn’t that good for direct marketing. What it is good for is making some of the author’s readers feel more invested and engaged in the author, and thus more likey to spread word of mouth about their books. To me, it’s long-term audience building, not sales or promotions.

    Yep. It’s not going to work for direct marketing.

    It will, however, work to build community – the people who write reviews and provide word of mouth. You can see that, I think, as the end goal for some of the outrage-practitioners: they create a platform, poke people until they react, and then scream about the reaction so they can sell to people who identify with them. Is it a good long-term strategy? I’ll be curious to find out; I suspect not, but I’ve been proven wrong many times before.

  18. Have we done The Magic Scroll Bus yet?

    (13) I think we have to worry if an American chatbot start talking with a Russian chatbot.

  19. @Cat Rambo:

    I suspect it is a very successful (I hesitate to call it “excellent”…) short- and medium-term strategy, using “short-term” to mean “up to 3-6 months” and “medium-term” to mean “up to 1-2 years”. Longer than that, you’re probably going to lose your devoted followers to a new, shinier, outrage merchant. Unless you manage to do some sort of “brand conversion”, I guess.

    Probably more successful for setting up a Patreon for the purpose of feeding the rage machine than for actually selling stuffs.

  20. (1) Well, it is different. And it at least succeeds in being even less likely then the Confederacy wining the war. There is no way that anyone would willingly give away Mississippi or more importantly the river and port. Or why would a country that had just fought the worst war in it’s history to keep all the states in the union give away a few to what even most of the North thought were savages.

  21. (5) If it were me that did not know that Rusty Hevelin was GoH at the 1981 Denvention, that verbal kick in the pants you gave to the University of Iowa curator would be appropriate. But he is not a fan historian, so I think some allowance should be given him for not having an encompassing knowledge on what happened more than 35 years earlier.

    He has a name, by the way: Peter Baliestrieri. Not very many university libraries are digitizing their fanzine collections, so maybe we should be sending some congratulations his way instead, regardless on how fast or slow it’s all happening.

  22. 5) As others have pointed out above, being assigned to a digitization project–or any library and archives project–is very rarely a question of being a subject matter expert. My gf is an archivist, and she has never worked for an archive or been part of a project where she has started out as an SME; she has sometimes become so, but not always. It can help, but it’s not essential. And the “chickens” the blog post refers to may be people like me… I used to work on the Internet Archive’s book scanning project as a book scanner. Almost none of us had any library or archives training beyond what was necessary to assess the copyright status of a book and then scan it and pack it up for return to the stacks without damaging it. (And to be clear, my title never involved things like “archivist” or “librarian”. I know a few archivists/librarians who get *extremely* upset about people who don’t have their Master’s in Library/Information Science using those titles… although my gf isn’t one of those archivists.)

    10) Social media promotion is difficult, because there are so many different ways to engage with it. There are a handful of writers I follow on Twitter or Facebook because I just want news and updates, but I follow most of them–and this is true for every kind of person I follow–because I want some sincerity from them. I want to see their personality and self-expression with less mediation than I would get in an interview setting and in a different kind of context than their work. I want authenticity, I guess? And for the most part I find the writers who present on social media as people first, with marketing agendas well down on the list of priorities, are the writers I most want to engage with, learn more about, and read.

    *Edit: Social media, and twitter in particular, was instrumental in launching my career as a critic/reviewer, and has been an essential tool in maintaining it. It is also a big part of how I get editing work.

  23. 2) The “coin” from the Game of Drones lookes exactly like a cheap pot metal coin you can buy for under about a dollar in Chinatown. The Chinese dragon motif is almos identical.

  24. (1) Another take on the independent Black nations/states in the Americas is Eric Flint’s 1812: The Rivers of War and 1824: The Arkansas War. Here a slightly changed outcome of the war of 1812 (described in the first book) leads to the formation of an independent nation in the Arkansas Territories, led by Black freedmen, freed slaves, and several of the dislocated southern tribes.

    I think the basic spiel given to Eric was an AH were the Trail of Tears didn’t happen, but Eric concluded that the demographics would lead to a similar event no matter what, but in this case the tribes acted much more in concert and led parts of the relocation themselves.

  25. Hampus: Thanks for the link to Asia’s Got Talent, which was very enjoyable.

  26. What rough Pixel, its hour tick-boxed at last, scrolls towards Bethlehem to be born?

  27. 1) I’m probably in the minority, but while “Black America” at least covers less well-trodden ground than “Confederate”, I have zero desire to see either show and find both scenarios equally unlikely. Coincidentally, I don’t watch “The Man in the High Castle” either.

    Perhaps we should declare a moratorium on alt history shows/movies altogether or at least on WWII and US Civil War alt histories. Cause I would actually like to see Sarah Gailey’s River of Teeth as a film or TV series.

    BTW, have any other Filers attending Worldcon 75 received an invitation to attend a reception at Helsinki City Hall on the day before the con or have I been singled out for some reason?

  28. Chip: We may be the last two people to ever look at this post, but Guardians will now be pluralized when we do it!

  29. I just started watching “The Man in the High Castle” and I’m finding it intensely discomforting (and not much like the novel). I don’t know if I can stand much alternate history in my television viewing, although I enjoy it in written fiction. Perhaps because the visuals don’t hit me quite as hard through words? I can gloss over the bits that make me uncomfortable? I don’t know.

  30. I just got a follow-up e-mail that they have sent the invites to people who volunteered or participated in the program, so that’s probably why Kevin, Kathryn and I got one, while others didn’t.

    BTW, I asked my Mom (since I can bring a guest) if she wants to go and she was really enthusiastic.

  31. @Cora. Well, I did volunteer to be on the program (I’m on the Podcasts panel, and Fan Funds stuff, come find me).

    Ah well.

  32. So are any of the invitees here planning to go to the Helsinki reception? I got an invite but haven’t decided yet (it’s my travel-recovery day and not sure I want to lock anything in).

  33. Sorry to hear they skipped sending you an invite, Paul. If anybody deserves one, it’s you.

    I havent fully decided whether I’m going to attend the reception yet either. Since my Mom wants to go, it’s looking more likely.

  34. @Cora just another log on the eternally burning fire of my imposter syndrome, is all. I hope you do go and have a great time and get to tell me about how great it was when we meet next week.

  35. @Paul Weimer

    I didn’t realize the reception invite included a guest so I don’t know if I had to list one when I RSVPed (but I’m guessing not), but if you truly want to attend, you could be my date.

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