Pixel Scroll 8/16 Waiting for Our Vote to Come In

When I came home last night my place had no power because a fuse had blown. I waited til this morning to be able to find the fusebox in daylight. Here’s as far as I got with yesterday’s Pixel Scroll, which in Wikipedia parlance is more of a Pixel Stub..

(1) Greg Machlin has finalized the File 770 meetup location at Sasquan.

The Worldcon File770 meetup, Thursday, Aug. 20, at 530 PM, will be at SARANAC PUBLIC HOUSE, 21 West Main Avenue, a very short (2 block) walk from the Convention Center.

They have food, drink, vegan and vegetarian food, and affordable prices:

SO MANY OPPORTUNITIES FOR FUN with that prior sentence, people. DO NOT DISAPPOINT.

They know to expect at least 25, and not to expect us all at once. There’s a bar, so milling is a definite possibility.

Morris Keesan made an interesting discovery:

… and on the Google map, it appears to be next door to the Justice League.

Saranac map CROP

(2) Courtesy of Geekcrafts, socks to wear on your next Trek.

Linda Jo Park, of BeadKnitter Patterns, has created some out-of-this-world socks in honor of Captain Picard from Star Trek. You can find her pattern here.

She also suggests that the pattern could be easily adapted to reference other characters:

There’s no reason why a person couldn’t do them in Captain Kirk gold, Spock blue (you get two choices there), or even Deanna Trois lavender. Or perhaps you’d rather have Gorn green.

(3) Footage of Mark Twain shot by Thomas Edison in 1909, from Mental Floss.

Edison and Twain were close friends. In 1909, Edison visited Twain’s estate in Redding, CT and filmed the famous author. The silent footage is the only known recording of Twain in existence. It first appeared in a 1909 production of Twain’s “The Prince and Pauper,” and it shows Twain wearing his trademark white suit, puffing a cigar. Twain would die one year later.

(4) Sarah A. Hoyt is warming up for Sad Puppies 4 in “It’s All About the Bling”.

When we set out on this, back in the dim days of our first discussions of Sad Puppies (I object, of course.  I have cats) the goal was to make the Hugo worth something again.  Granted, we can’t cater for everyone’s taste.  If you’re a heavy mil-sf guy and the prize goes to hard sci fi it won’t be to your taste.  BUT to cater to the “literary” crowd is to cater to the tiniest fandom in SF.  (I found this out in sincere arguments with agents while looking for one between my third and fourth.  They all wanted me to write literary sf — because I CAN do it — because it would win awards and increase THEIR prestige (and make me slit my wrists in a warm bath if I had to write much more of it.  It was no fun.) But they all candidly informed me that it sold almost nothing and so I should try to get a job teaching or write for literary journals or something.  Why do you think they kept telling us that Ancillary Justice as a “fun space opera” — because no one buys “literary”.  Or yeah, some people do, but not enough to keep you in writer kibble.

Our idea, goofy as it sounds was to get some good books/good names associated with the Hugo, so Hugo would mean a boost in print run again.

[Thanks to Will R., Michael J. Walsh and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of yesterday Will R.]

362 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/16 Waiting for Our Vote to Come In

  1. McJulie on August 18, 2015 at 6:55 am said:

    The thing I probably complain about the most is women’s clothing and makeup. It’ll violate character, period verisimilitude, and even basic continuity. Like I’ll point out to my husband, “see, she was wearing these ridiculous tottery spike heels, and now magically she’s wearing boots instead because she has to run.” 1960s period films are terrible for having women who are supposedly living in the Middle Ages or the 19th century having bouffant hair and cat eyeliner

    I have books about that. It’s fascinating how closely you can date historical movies to when they were made, no matter how authentic people claimed they were at the time.

    My favorite howler about that is “Pride and Prejudice.”

    The first big “Pride and Prejudice” movie in 1940 clothed the actors in big hoopskirt garments of the 1840s instead of the classical pseudo-Greek column dresses of the 1810 setting because at the time the bigger, later dresses were considered prettier and more romantic and fashionable.

    The young ladies of the family wore big hoopskirt dresses, but their silly mother wore fussy versions fashions of a few years earlier, huge corkscrew curls and a fussy lace cap and flower-covered dresses with big sleeves.

    Remember those. Those are fashions of about 1830.

    Jump ahead to the hugely successful 1995 miniseries of “Pride and Prejudice”.

    Here the Bennet girls are wearing proper 1810 fashions, austere and slim and elegant. How is their mother dressed? Huge corkscrew curls and a fussy lace cap and flower-covered dresses with big sleeves. In other words, the fashions of 1830.

    It is as though one were filming a Second World War drama set in 1945 and the hero’s silly old mum was wearing the Mondrian minidress and long straight hair and thick black eyelashes and go-go boots of her youth back in 1965.

  2. Birdman was totally accurate in one respect though–all stage actors have an invisible costumed superhero following them around and berating them. It’s in the Guild contracts.

  3. A friend went to Cape Town for work and everyday went past a building he found eerily familiar. About two weeks later the Homeland crew turned up and filmed some scenes set in Pakistan and he recognised it as a ministry in Islamabad.

  4. The biggest recent movie howler that I have noticed was in the last Bond film Skyfall. I almost swore aloud when Q plugged the villain’s laptop directly into their network.

  5. delurking: I quit reading John Grisham, forever, in the middle of one of his early books (The Pelican Brief, as I recall) when he had the main character walk into the Cafe du Monde and order a bagel and a club soda.

    Because NO.

    Because you can order four things at the Cafe du Monde, as everyone from New Orleans knows: coffee, milk, (plain) water, and beignets. That’s it. The end.

    And chocolate milk. And THAT’s the end.

    Your post had me snickering so hard, because I’m from there, and being taken to Morning Call (same thing, only in Metairie about a ten-minute bike ride from my parents’ house and a lot less crowded) was a constant treat for my and my friends growing up. And if they let me have a half-coffee half-milk with my beignets, ooh, they were really treating me like a grownup. Morning Call is still one of my pilgrimages when I’m home visiting, and the bike’s in good enough shape for me to ride. (These days if it isn’t I might just roller skate there.)

    Rev. Bob: Regardless, someone thought that what a sourcebook on New Orleans really needed was a comprehensive study of the city’s extensive sewer system and the labyrinth connected to it.

    *splorf!* OK! Anyone read Brian Hodge’s Nightlife? Fun supernatural thriller involving a drug sourced out of the rain forest that turns people into shapeshifters. I am not knowledgeable enough about said rain forest to know how accurately he portrayed the people living there or the person from there who travels to the big city to stop the export of the drug, but I assume it’s not very accurate at all, because he does the same damn thing you mention with New Orleans.

    Specifically, he has a main character flashback to a night of shady occurrences in a French Quarter sub-basement with access to an underground creek that can carry dead bodies swiftly away to the Mississippi River.

    Fun book! But what a howler. Given that the sequel is supposed to take place entirely in New Orleans, I’ve decided to give it a miss.

    Here’s another fun one–and forgive me if you’ve seen me rant about this on other fine blogs such as Making Light or Slacktivist, but it’s just so good–Anyone seen the movie RED? Bruce Willis plays an aging, retired spy who suddenly finds himself and his buddies on a hitlist? So he runs off getting the band back together, so to speak, to deal with the problem? They pick up Morgan Freeman’s character at a retirement home in New Orleans, which looks fairly accurate because they shot a lot of the movie there. Very cool. Much better than that Wolverine origin movie in which they go to the French Quarter to meet Gambit, and the ensuing fight takes them into a back alley that both physically and stylistically can’t exist in that neighborhood, despite that someone helpfully painted the words BOURBON STREET on a brick wall next to the fire escape stair.

    Except (back to RED) what with shooting so much of the movie in NOLA and surroundings, they then try to pass off the New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal as an airport in Florida. Which would have worked a lot better had they bothered to clip out of the frame Conrad A. Albrizio’s 120-foot mural depicting scenes from Louisiana history. It’s kind of instantly recognizable to anyone who’s been in the building.

    Peace Is My Middle Name: It’s an awful thing to think, but after Hurricane Katrina clobbered New Orleans and it was all over the news, I wondered if all the gothic stories and games set there might start getting it a little more accurate.

    Would be nice to think so.

    Didn’t stop Heroes Season 2 from having a Katrina-displaced girl say, “Half the people in this county are still living in FEMA trailers!”

    In this county. In this county.

    There’s mistakes that are just funny, and then there are mistakes that feel downright disrespectful. Using a real-world, huge-scale tragedy as an easy way to give your new character extra pathos and sympathy, but not bothering to even open a map of the real-life affected parishes, struck me as terribly disrespectful to the real-life victims.

    Again, apologies if I sound like a broken record; I’ve ranted about this one elseblog before too.

  6. Late to the party.

    Things that make me crazy, although not in sf so much as mainstream television: Bone marrow transplants. (Or, I assume, transplants in general.) There’s always this thing where there’s this huge push to find the real father, or real mother, or whatever, for that perfect match. Arghhhh. Siblings. What you want are siblings. A parent only gives you 50% of their DNA. A sibling is much more likely to be a good match. Incredibly more likely. And if you’ve got one parent, you’ve already probably got as good a match as you’re going to get, if what you’re stuck with is a parent. No particular reason to believe that the missing parent is somehow a better match. (I did see, when I worked for Bone Marrow Transplant, a couple that deliberately got pregnant more than once in an attempt to breed a good donor for their ailing child. I have many feels about this. Many, many feels.)

  7. Movie geography: I had the great good pleasure of living in Minneapolis when “Fargo” first came out. Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth hereabout. “They went down the same river bluff twice, in two different directions, but they were supposed to be headed north the whole time!” “That bridge isn’t there! It’s over there!” And my favorite, “No one here talks like that.” When I said, “Now you know how New Yorkers feel,” no one understood.

    Really, we do talk like that. Not quite as broadly as that, but yep, we talk like that. And, yes, that bridge is in the wrong place, and yes, the went north and south at the same time, and all that. And yes, I laughed like a drain. (Been here since 1986, but couldn’t rightly say I was from here.

  8. I recently read “A Clubbable Woman” by Reginald Hill, published around 1970, first of his popular Dalziel and Pascoe detective stories. The initial situation involves a rugby player who suffers a concussion and groggily makes his way home. I’m no expert but I’ve read about hockey players with concussions (a fairly well publicized subject in today’s pro sports world) and I thought the concussion was well and credibly handled. I enjoyed the book though it’s of its time and dated in some ways.

    I can’t even start to tell how devastated I was at Hill’s premature death. Even if I didn’t like his latests books as much as the period around Exit Lines and Deadheads.

  9. DNA from hair for cloning, hair is keratin – like fingernails, not cellular, you need a hair follical with blood at least, and you’d be far better off with a tissue sample. This even cropped up in modern comics Mark Waid – I’m looking at you.

  10. Oh and while modern songs shouldn’t be all about the accuracy “I wish I were a punk rocker with flowers in my hair” is *so* annoying. The two things hippies and punks are not the same. [My daughters play this]

Comments are closed.