Check your tickets. The winning numbers today are 4 and 770.
(1) Our Fantastic Four correspondent James H. Burns has discovered a website for an imaginary 1963-1964 FF television series with many clever faux production photos.
Cast of the faux Four series.
Elizabeth Montgomery and Russell Johnson were producer William Frye’s first choices to play Sue Storm and Reed Richards. Although neither Johnson or Montgomery were yet huge stars, Frye had worked with both on separate episodes of Thriller. He had also enjoyed Johnson’s work in This Island Earth, and Montgomery had initially attracted his attention with her Emmy-nominated performance as doomed nightclub performer Rusty Heller in The Untouchables.
Episode #5 was written by Harlan Ellison, and others were scripted by sf stalwarts Jerome Bixby, Theodore Sturgeon and Charles Beaumont.
Why is it impossible to watch this classic today?
The tapes of the actual episodes and most of the production notes were destroyed in a warehouse fire in southern California in 1974.
Because — “Flame on!”
(2) MiceAge has the scoop on plans to add “Star Wars Land” and “Marvel Land” to Disneyland and Disney California Adventure respectively:
The majority of Star Wars Land in the northernmost park acreage will be inside a massive series of show buildings, meaning the land won’t have to close for fireworks fallout. The rides and shows in the land itself are being developed in a top secret Imagineering lab in Glendale with Imagineers signing extra confidentiality agreements because the plotlines and characters are pulled from the next three episodes in the Star Wars saga and the Lucasfilm folks understandably guard that information with their lives. But what we can tell you is that Star Wars Land will include multiple attractions, anchored by a mega E Ticket using a trackless vehicle that will break the mold when it comes to how theme park visitors interact with a ride environment.
And:
The plans to expand DCA again with a Marvel Land behind Tower of Terror continue to move ahead, and the E Ticket thrill ride that is planned to anchor that expansion is going to be very unique. The ride will feature a newly Imagineered hybrid ride system that might be best described as a combination of Rock N’ Roller Coaster and Universal’s Transformers ride using every trick and gimmick WDI can throw at it, including on-board audio and effects and elaborate sets and animatronics.
(3) The Star Wars franchise is expanding in every direction. Even cosmetics. Nerdist has loads of pictures of the CoverGirl Star Wars: The Force Awakens makeup collection.
The line includes six new lipstick colors, three shades of nail polish, and ten tubes of mascara featuring quotes from the Star Wars films–including the first six films and The Force Awakens. CoverGirl Global Creative Design Director Pat McGrath has come up with six different and dramatic looks using products from the collection, and those are being unveiled at CoverGirl’s Star Wars Tumblr.
There isn’t much at the Tumblr today, maybe later on. Plenty to look at in the Nerdist post, though.
(4) Syfy channel has plans to develop Frederik Pohl’s Hugo-winning Gateway into a series. Battlestar Galactica’s David Eick is involved.
(5) The New York Times reports on a variety of computers with personality – “Siri, Tell Me a Joke. No, a Funny One”
Fred Brown, founder and chief executive of Next IT, which creates virtual chatbots, said his company learned firsthand the importance of creating a computer with a sense of humor when he asked his 13-year-old daughter, Molly, to test Sgt. Star, the Army’s official chatbot, which allows potential recruits to ask questions about the Army, just as you would in a recruiting station. Molly was chatting with Sgt. Star when she looked up and said, “Dad, Sergeant Star is dumb.” When he asked why, she said, “He has to have a favorite color, and it can’t be Army green.” Turns out, more than a quarter of the questions people ask Sgt. Star have nothing to do with the Army after Next IT programmed it with more human answers.
(6) The last few lines of Brad R. Torgersen’s long comment on Sarah A. Hoyt’s blog are sufficient to give you the flavor of the full 7-course meal. (Scroll down. The direct link doesn’t work for me.)
So, the field is essentially returning to its Marxist roots. But the starry-eyedness is mostly gone. Now we’re down to the raw hate of the thing: the vengeance-minded outliers and weirdos, determined to punish wrongdoing and wrongthinking and wrongfeeling. Which means, of course, smoking out all the wrongfans having all the wrongfun with their wrongstuff.
If they could clap us in shackles, put us into the boxcars, and send us to the icy wastes to die, they would do it in a heartbeat.
Because — by golly! — somebody has to make things be safe!
(7) Some writers can’t fathom how File 770 gets credit for being a radical hangout.
https://twitter.com/katsudonburi/status/631942337413935104
(8) Today’s birthday boy: Alfred Hitchcock, born in 1899.
[Thanks to James H. Burns, Petréa Mitchell, Mark, Gregory Benford, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cubist .]
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As a small data point, I was actually interested in possibly picking them up, until I noticed the publisher.
@Elisa:
I believe the third Kazam/Last Dragonslayer book was the final one [EDIT: okay, maybe I’m wrong], and I’m now hoping to see the next Shades of Grey book sometime this decade. Or another Thursday Next book; I’m not picky.
More fun(ny) stuff I haven’t seen mentioned in this thread:
– Jennifer Estep’s “Bigtime” superhero romances
– Dakota Cassidy’s “Accidental Friends” paranormal romances
Dakota’s series has a simple formula, but her execution is flawless and hilarious. In the first book (the template), a woman gets nipped by a dog… who happens to be a male werewolf. Complications along the lines of “you did this, find a way to undo it” occur, denied chemistry surfaces, and the couple winds up together. In later books, the three central women start a help line for the benefit of others in the same dire straits.
I am tempted to mention Simon R. Green’s recent megaseries, which encompasses everything in his Nightside, Secret Histories, and Ghost Finders lines (they cross over to varying degrees), but there is rather a lot of gore in them. However, he gets mad points from me for sheer attitude. I gulped a third of last year’s GF book down in one sitting last night, and the mood shifted deftly from overwhelming dread to cocky humor. Just don’t get between Happy and his pills, don’t look in JC’s eyes, and don’t ask if Melody’s new cart might be related to the Luggage. You’re better off not knowing.
For short stories, I recommend the Chicks in Chainmail books and the relatively new Unidentified Funny Objects series.
On the subject of working with hands: My namesake grandfather was a tailor. His wife, before raising seven kids (alone, after her husband died when my father was 12) was a professional cook. My other grandfather was a baker.
Typhoid Mary is still a baddie. And there’s also a great autobiography, Fighting for Life, by S. Josephine Baker–the almost certainly lesbian doctor who caught her, but was even more famous for championing children’s health in NYC. It’s also a great account of why the government needs to be involved in public health.
Aan, your CSS hack is awesome. Kudos for that.
Speaking of Typhoid Mary, someone linked to a contemporary scientific report about that outbreak that took the time to rate her hotness; she rated something like ‘not bad, if she’d only do something about her hair!’ (not actually her hair they found fault with). Because I guess when someone gives you typhus, it matters how cute they were.
Fun reads? the Kai Lung stories of Earnest Bramah.
or The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox by Barry Hughart.
Well, jeez, ugly typhus is the worst typhus. Always hold out for sexy typhus!
@Laura Resnick
To be fair, Simon Bisson recommended it a few minutes ahead of me, but seeing that quote really brought my inner fanboy to the surface. I forget now where I got the recommendation, but I blew through the 3 Chronicles of Sirkara books in about a week when I first heard about them a few years back (even if I did accidentally read the first chapter of The White Dragon before realizing that I really needed to read about how the huge spoiler from the first book happened before continuing) and was excited to find more of your work. I remember I started reading Disappearing Nightly one Saturday morning thinking I’d just read a few chapters before starting my day and all of a sudden the book was finished and 4 hours had passed.
Since someone else asked about recent reads, I’ve also finished Uprooted and Karen Memory in the past couple of weeks and both are amazing, and I’m about a third of the way through The Fifth Season, which might be my favorite N.K. Jemisin work yet. And with all the cries of God Stalk going on around here, I picked up the combination of the first 2 books to go next on the TBR pile.
@ RedWombat: “*cough* Clarification”
Oops! My mistake.
@ Chris V:
(beam)
I am happily reading RedWombat’s books this week.
I wonder, why would I want to grant concessions to someone who, if he had the power to, would strip me of the right to vote, ban me entirely from writing SF (except that icky were-seal romance subgenre) and who deliberately shat all over an award which means a great deal to my community?
See, all *I* was doing to Beale before he decided on his misguided vengeance was … reading the SF I liked, hanging around with people in fandom who made me feel welcome, and writing my own preferred fiction. Oh, I might have rolled my eyes at his extremist views, and I would probably be so rude in person as to try not to talk to him.
Explain then why *I* and others like me should offer *him* concessions?
And Adventure Magazine *from the 1940s, back when Nutty Nuggets were eschewed in favor of meat, fresh, bloody red meat (and probably bacon, too). The Puppies? Pikers, fools from a mythical future, not worth a candle when I can read Adventure Pulps.
Chiming in on Naomi Novik: I want to thank everyone who recommended Uprooted. I don’t know if I’d have bought it if I hadn’t heard of it here, and I would have definitely missed out. It’s just wonderful. It’s certainly going on my 2016 noms list.
Starting on Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife.
Also, I just read this jaw-droppingly good story co-authored by Ted Chiang, found here. I’m not sure if this eflux.com is a magazine or a community or what, but this story will leave you reeling.
Next up, Adam Hall spy novels and Anthony Price counter-spy novels, and Barry Hughart, again.
@Laura:
I was using the term with the same intonation he applies to “social justice warrior”: an armchair slactivist. After all, he’s the same thing but on the other end of the spectrum.
Reading lately: Just finished City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett, which I enjoyed. Before that, read The Girl With All the Gifts which I loved so much I immediately turned back to the first page and read it again in its entirety.
On working with one’s hands: Ya, sure, yu betcha! The last three generations of my family have all worked in Del Monte canning factories, though for me it was not a permanent job. In my current job I work with pliers and metal all day. Also dinosaur bone, meteorites, coprolites, and so forth. If you come find me in the dealers’ room at Sasquan, I can show you.
(I’m hoping to do well at Sasquan so I can get a few more books on the want list, which keeps getting longer every time I read here. Darn you guys. Darn you to heck, I say.)
The prominent people do not decide the Hugo winners.
In regard to the Campbell and how it is always being won by Literary types rather than storytellers.
I was amused by Larry Correia’s claim the other week never to have heard of Adam Roberts, It showed just how out of touch with the awards systems that he critcises he is.
Mamatas,
Damn its late.
Re Lind and Maneuver Warfare, look for the Commandant’s list rev 1/2/2013
It’s been on most or all these lists since the 90s. Including the branch schools like Benning.
Lists mutate.
@Buwaya:
In a small town, the sheriff has pull with the fire department because she can find areas of mutual benefit in every deal, because she has elements of her own long-term good to trade, or because she has a history of such damn good judgment that the fire chief will go along with her even when he’s not convinced in this instance.
There’s no mutual benefit in a deal that brings Beale back into SFWA; he was not a force for comity, good, or clear communication there. There’s no long-term good to a deal when the health of the Hugos become a tradable commodity and all we’re arguing about is the price. And anyone with any kind of good judgment would know it well enough not to stake their credibility by advocating that trade.
So even if there were a sheriff in this town who could convince the fire chief (and there isn’t), she wouldn’t, because it would destroy her ability to work with said fire chief into the future.
I must say I love this. The tyranny of the jerk. People who will scream COMMUNISTS! or FASCISTS and reach for their automatic weaponry because they can’t barbecue with charcoal will urge others to roll over and show their belly if the bullying is being done for the lulz. You can fight evil imaginary fascists and loathsome non-existent SJWs from here til the last trump, but someone who goes out of his way to fuck tings up just for the cool amusement it supposedly brings? Submit. Doesn’t matter how you show it, because they don’t actually want anything, just find a way to be defeated! They’ll be sure to leave you alone then!
I suppose it suits you guys to keep things as fuzzy as possible.
Unless other people do it.
Since this comment thread is still active, I’ll sum up my suggestion from the 8/14 comments:
This weekend, let’s ignore the trolls. Completely, utterly, to the point of not even posting about how much quieter the place is without them cluttering it up. Let’s just close the buffet table for a couple of days.
If it works, maybe we can keep doing it for a while longer. We’ve got plenty of other stuff to talk about.
I do like your keen sense of irony in comparing Beale to the IRS. Good one.
Oh my God, he’s come down from the Mount to mentor us with business advice. Quick! Tell us about The Art Of War as it relates to genre literary awards!
@Rev Bob I did NOT mean to undercut your fine suggestion a mere two minutes after you making it. I will abide.
Re: Books. Second (third? fourth?) the rec for Graydon Saunders’ A Succession of Bad Days; just read it and The March North. Also Novik’s Uprooted, which led me to McKinley’s Rose Daughter. Because Kyra’s Brackets reminded me, I re-read Ford’s The Dragon Waiting. Took a side trip through Kingfisher’s Nine Goblins (RedWombat, I *loved* that teddy bear…). The online book club I moderate will be starting Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane shortly, followed by Hodgell’s (all together, now) God Stalk. And maybe Baker’s The Garden of Iden. Which means I need to dig my copies out….
Who has time for trolls? There’s BOOKS to read!
My two cents: the trolls are getting funnier and funnier. They don’t even pretend to be real people any more.
But, where does this idea of getting Beale back into the SFWA comes from? I am confused. If he suggested it, then i admit I feel a bit sorry for him, living all alone with his pile of stolen money and gnawing his fingers at the thought that the SFWA kicked him out. It’s like Gollum.
@ Laura: You’re very welcome! 🙂
@ Amoxtli Thanks. 🙂
I’m always a great fan of people taking control of their browser and making it display websites as they want. The way a website displays by default is just a starting point to then remix to your own liking. That this nicely dovetails here with the desire to more easily ignore certain individuals is a great bonus.
@ Will R.
Actually changing visibility is sadly not that easy, since the necessary styling hook to identify someone’s posts is too deeply embedded in the DOM, and support for the few proposed mechanisms of effectively going up in the DOM or otherwise working around that, is sadly not yet there. But you can indeed still effectively visibly “fade out” the post, for example by changing the background-color to white, and the opacity to 0.5.
Doing that then makes the gravatar itself stand out more than I like, which can be fixed like this:
img[id^=”grav-a9bea8198715ed10882ecba7c7adaf37″] {
opacity: 0.5;
}
(And again replace curly quotes with regular double quotes.)
@ Brian Z
Wouldn’t change a thing. The generated ID would still be there.
@RedWombat
Thank you for this – one of the pithiest things I’ve read this month.
Thank you, gang, who’ve read the books! (And I’m glad somebody got a kick outta that, Hugh.)
Also, since it got buried in the shuffle, thank you to the reader who complimented the fic! Glad you enjoyed those!
@Morris
Thanks for the link to the evil kale mastermind. I doubt that one T-shirt vendor is a sufficient explanation. But if he can do the same thing for Bernie Sanders, I’ll be happy to be proven wrong.
@RedWombat
Agree with Hugh on the open relationship comment. Great line. I enjoyed Jackalope Wives too, very evocative writing. I don’t read graphic media so I’m glad you dip your toe into other forms.
If the alternative is holding fast to my unwavering conviction that Kate Paulk lies awake at night thinking up ways to steal all of my Hugos, like you people, I’m damn proud have flirted with a few new ideas.
RedWombat said
I laughed so hard at this my partner came to see what was going on.
Then I remembered one little detail: typhus and typhoid are two different illnesses. Still, from now on, I will always hold out for sexy typhus or typhoid, whichever happens.
@Brian Z
If the alternative is holding fast to my unwavering conviction that Kate Paulk lies awake at night thinking up ways to steal all of my Hugos, like you people, I’m damn proud have flirted with a few new ideas.
Spoken like a true lies-awake-at-night-trying-to-think-of-new-ways-to-argue-that-EPH-is-futile-because-Puppies-are-even-now-devising-new-ways-to-game-the-Hugoes-that-we-can’t-even-imagine Brian C.
Not that Sarah Hoyt or anyone else is counting, but I was the first in my lineage to go to college–state schools, B.A. and M.S. My father’s line is stonemasons and, before that, farmers. My mother’s I know less about–her father was a bus driver, his father a Colorado rancher.
I’m immensely proud of my eldest child, who recently earned a Ph.D. from Purdue, and my youngest, who is currently at Harvard. But even they wouldn’t merit a checkmark on Hoyt’s little list–they both busted a gut to earn scholarships to places we could not possibly have sent them.
(I honestly hope no one ever sees this message, which will go up in the mid-700s. If you are still following this comments thread this weekend, please reconsider. Surely a walk in the neighborhood, an episode of any SyFy sci-fi series, or poisoning seagulls at the dump would be better for you. :p )
My father trapped muskrat and dried the pelts himself. My mother made drying racks for muskrat pelts. That’s how they met. My mother taught us to read by scribbling stories in muskrat blood on dead leaves. The stories were about muskrats. When I was thirteen they both felt it was time I found a wife, so they took me to the shack on the other side of the hill to court their daughter. Her parents were beaver trappers so they looked down on our kind, but their daughter had a nervous tic and was therefore lonely. But all the stories she had learned to read by – scrawled in beaver blood on strips of bark; as I said, they were rich – were about beavers. It opened a whole new world for me.
My grandparents were piles of rock on the side of a hill. Until Agnes brought the floods that year.
Hey, Michael. Happy to see you commenting here; if you’ve done so other times lately, I missed them.
And some of us are sitting here fighting migraines or whatever, so alternatives are thin on the ground. 🙂
Upper middleclass here from one of the richer areas of the capital. From upper middle class to upper class generations back. No special education at all though, undiagnosed ADHD is not good for studying, but still high income.
Possibly the target for the puppies. Well, would have been if they travelled to other countries. Which I doubt. Americans with the kind of opinions they express have seldom seen another country (apart from bombing or having bouts of drunkenness in them).
Oh, I forgot to add something to the class-background thing.
I mentioned that my father’s family are academicians. I didn’t mention that Dad worked for NASA, starting in the ’50s, up through his retirement in 1993. Specifically, he designed ranging systems for the Deep Space Network (with some stints doing other things, like a couple years’ classified work for the Navy’s research station in Monterey). He’s one of the many people all enthusiasts of the exploration of space owe thanks to for their hard, productive work. But the Puppies also hate him as one of those liberal guys interested in social justice and eager to learn more about and deal more with the rest of the world.
Hard to be a hater, I guess. 🙂
I think I read about that…
Primal chaos reigned, Heaven sought order.
But the Phoenix can fly only when its feathers are grown.
The four worlds formed again and yet again,
As endless aeons wheeled and passed.
Time and the pure essences of Heaven,
The moistures of the Earth,
And the powers of the Sun and the Moon
All worked upon a certain rock – old as Creation,
And it magically became fertile.
That first egg was named Thought,
Tathagata Buddha, the Father Buddha,
Said, ‘With our thoughts we make the world.’
Elemantal forces caused the egg to hatch,
No, wait, that was Monkey…
@Camestros Felapton: That was good, but I think people could relate to it more if the hero was a muskrat.
So I was driving today, in my good solid ‘Murican truck made by Nissan, and a muskrat ran onto the road in front of me.
I stood on the brakes, cussing, and the muskrat froze and the truck went right over the top and in the rear view mirror I watched it make a U-turn and high tail it safely into the weeds.
I’m just gonna assume, Henley, that it was one of yours.
@RedWombat: Thanks for being so careful on the road! Dad needs the income.
I think that is a common criticism of both the TV show and of Journey to the West in general. I assume it was due to the great muskrat shortage of the Ming Dynasty.
…and so the age-old animosity between wombats and muskrats was once again re-ignited.
My family has been here since the early 1600’s. I can trace my ancestry back to the Mayflower in several different lines, including John Alden and Priscilla Mullins. I come from a very long line of farmers and fishermen. The farmers were dirt poor, the fishermen didn’t even have dirt.
My parents were anxiously middle-class by social status, but not by income. My father was a minister. He attended Boston Latin school, Gordon College, and Westminster Theological Seminary. Boston Latin is the only really prestigious one of those, and that, of course, is a public school. (And not in the British sense.) My mother married right out of high school, and was a secretary on and off, because ministers are largely paid in cheese sandwiches and social status, not actual money that allows you to put shoes on your kids. My grandparents were all working class of one sort or another. House painter, fisherman, dairy foreman. My maternal grandmother was a nurse, so some higher education there, but still a trade for all that.
Me, I also work in the medical field, I did a two year trade program to get my job. I used to be a secretary.
Yep, seriously privileged background.
msb on August 14, 2015 at 4:06 am:
What mode of transportation did the cheka/NKVD/KGB use to transport victims to Siberia? I did start on the gulag archipelago but I can not remember how Solzhenitsyn got there. But I am going to guess the majority got there primarily by rail and by box car.
Wow, just wow. I have seen sturdier accidental strawmen while tossing hay.
Floatin’ like the heavens above
It looks like muskrat love