141 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 9/5/17 For Sale: Baby Pixels. Never Scrolled”

1. There are times I don’t feel intelligent enough to run with this crowd, so I lurk. Now I have confirmation that I’m right:

   I’ve seen 51 movies from that list. (And enjoyed a handful of ’em.)

   Like some have mentioned, MST3K has been my major source of bad movie watching. I’ve seen every episode. More than once.

   Further evidence: I absolutely adored Becky Chambers’ THE LONG WAY TO A SMALL, ANGRY PLANET. (Haven’t read the sequel yet.)

   I’ll just see myself out …

2. @Bruce Diamond Many here adored The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet.

   One of us! One of us!

3. @ Jamoche: Whereas I can’t (precisely, at least on the first read) tell you how far in I am through a book, but can tell you with confidence what page I last stopped reading at, for at least a few days. Once I’ve read it, I know what the final page number is, which I tend to recall if I re-read it (up to a “while” after), and at that point I can extrapolate where “page N of M” is by division and converting down to a small denominator.

   @ multiple: Once upon a time, I sneered at people reading romance. Now, my considered position is “well, they’re reading books, that ain’t half bad.” And without romance, urban fantasy probably wouldn’t’ve been a thing, even if I seem to prefer mine with somewhat less steamy sex scenes than the general audience.

4. I remember seeing 10 of those movies, I’m not really a bad movie aficianado.

   I would defend Zardoz, an interesting movie (not good, but not one of the worst) and The Smurfs, a harmless kids movie with Hank Azaria having a good time as Gargamel,.

5. Yeah, well, not everything is Smurfy with that movie.

6. @Cheryl —

   The books she writes as Nora Roberts are perfect for those nights when I want something new but I do not want surprises.

   I will stipulate that I’ve never read any of the books she’s written under the Nora Roberts label. But I didn’t find anything that would make me want to read a second JD Robb.

   Huh. In fact, I just checked, and it looks like I never even recorded my read of Naked in Death on Goodreads — so I guess it didn’t even hold my attention long enough to type in the entry!

7. Ok, ok, I went and checked out the bad movies list. I will confess to having seen (or to remembering having seen) 10 out of 100. The largest common factor in which of them I’ve seen is that my quality bar for movies that center female characters is set pretty low, simply to increase the available pool. The second largest factor can be summed up as “least worst movies available on cross-country flights.”

   But neither of the movies that receive my personal rating as “worst movie ever” are on that list. Those would be The Seeker: The Dark is Rising (2007), for which my review began, “My movie-buddy and I disagreed about this movie. I thought it was the moral equivalent of raping kittens. She felt it wasn’t quite the moral equivalent of raping kittens.”

   The second movie competing for my worst ever slot is Lost and Delirious (2001), for which my review begins, “Yeah, ok, lots of spoilers in this review because I WANT TO WARN EVERYONE NOT TO SEE THIS FUCKING MOVIE!!!!! This is the platonic ideal of the Tragic Lesbian Boarding School Story.” (I am astounded at the number of people who seem to have watched this movie and not noticed the suicide at the climax of the plot.)

8. @Heather Rose Jones:
   Oh, good lord, The Seeker. I had loved the books, heard bad things about the movie, but decided to watch it when it was on the in-flight entertainment system on the airplane I was on once. And discovered exactly what happens when you give a story based heavily on pre-Christian Celtic myths to a production company that makes ‘Family’ (read: explicitly US Christian Protestant) entertainment.

   It also says something that the climax of the movie was not only something nowhere in the book, but something I had predicted less than half-way in when they were first talking about the ‘signs’.

   The only thing worth watching in that movie was counting the toothmarks that Christopher Eccleston left in the scenery.

9. @Bruce Diamond: everybody has ?guilty? pleasures — and if you saw those movies through MST3K (whose purpose AFAIK is to enjoy snickering at dreadful movies) the fact that you’ve seen so many is unlikely to lead anyone here to doubt you.

   @Ingvar: And without romance, urban fantasy probably wouldn’t’ve been a thing, Do you think Charles de Lint or Emma Bull wouldn’t have existed without romance? You could argue the prior lack of fantasy with female leads before then (until McKillip catches up with you), but I don’t think that’s enough on its own — unless you think romance was pushing overall SFF, which took a while to move beyond the occasional remarkable female lead. (Yes, I’m speaking very generally here. If the thread is prolonged we can trade examples, even if I don’t have Hewitt’s extensive list from ~1982 to cite from.) Perhaps there would be less UF without romance — but I’m not sure that the part of UF driven by romance is the best part of the subgenre.

10. There’s been such an outpouring of response to the bad movies poll that I asked Hampus Eckerman to revive the File 770 brackets — post your “anti-favorites” in the Worst Movie Golden Bracket.

11. What’s going on? Is there a massive Cheese Extinction Event in our near future?

    Cheese is a fantasy food. They serve it, along with stew and ale, at taverns in the snow.

    SF has synthcheese instead.

12. Ok, against my better judgment, I went back to the click-bait-y list site to actually count how many of the movies I’ve actually seen, and the answer is 14. But that’s not particularly revealing, because it’s obvious the site is one of those which is deliberately poorly done, because that drives more traffic to the site as people argue and quibble on social media about its errors. I absolutely hate that sort of thing, but since the discussion here has been interesting….

    So, anyway, yeah. 14. Of which at least three don’t, IMO, belong on any such list.

    As for Twilight, haven’t seen it, but I skimmed a bit of my niece’s copy of the book, and while I certainly wouldn’t describe it as well-written, it did seem fairly adequate for its intended market: pre-teen girls. Yes, there are some unfortunate implications of the story, but that’s true of a lot of stories which don’t receive anywhere near as much negative criticism.

    I think one of the things that most clearly reveals the misogynistic nature of much of the criticism of Twilight is the unfortunately-widespread meme “still not as gay as Twilight“. The fact that people could look at something with hot boys in it, and decide it must be gay, just shows that they’re not even considering the possibility that women might be an audience.

13. And without romance, urban fantasy probably wouldn’t’ve been a thing,

    Urban fantasy was a thing, before paranormal romance sidled in and virtually took over the genre, to the point that the pre-romance UFists renamed what they were doing “Mythic Fiction.”

    Not sure if the Asskickers of the Fantastic wing of UF would have thrived or not without the Fangbangers wing, but the Ordinary Modern Folk Encounter the Fantastic roots got kinda buried by both.

14. Yeah, the “hnur hnur real vampires don’t sparkle” criticism Twilight-ward bugs me too. Vampires are fictional; stop being macho idiots. (It reminds me of the “anime guys look like girls” jokes a bunch of guys in college–usually guys whose eyes would cross if they ever got near a gym or a decent outfit–made. Like, if you’re the standard for “real men,” hon, I will gladly be either Sapphic or celibate.)

    My problem with Twilight is not that the vampires don’t match classic myths, which vampires in fiction have almost never done; it’s that none of the main characters match actual people who aren’t completely vile, useless, or both, and the messages don’t match anything that I can read without wanting to punch people. (Particularly the pro-life-even-if-it-kills-you bullshit in Book 4.)

15. @Isabel —

    Yeah, the “hnur hnur real vampires don’t sparkle” criticism Twilight-ward bugs me too. Vampires are fictional; stop being macho idiots.

    Hey — I’m a woman, and I say VAMPIRES DON’T SPARKLE. That is just a bridge too far.

    So there.

    😉

    I pretty much agree with you on the rest, though. That stalkery stuff really creeps me out. I never got as far as book 4, so I can’t comment much there, though it isn’t surprising coming from a Mormon author!

16. Re: Cheese Extinction Event

    Y’know, thinking about this and looking at a couple of modern trends, I could actually explain a lack of future cheese without trying extremely hard. Keep population growth up – such as by delaying any sort of planetary exodus while avoiding a mass die-off – and meat could become a premium food. (Also, is it me or does lactose intolerance seem to be on the rise?) Less beef cultivation, for whatever reason, means a smaller dairy market and therefore less milk and cheese. Continue that trend long enough, and cheese simply stops being commonplace.

    Alternately, if humanity has to leave the planet in a hurry, meat animals probably won’t be on the menu. If you’ve got room for cows, you’re better off using it for hydroponics. Sure, if you’re going somewhere, taking some embryos makes sense, but if your main concern is simply Getting Off The Planet, not so much.

    Or, if I wanted to take a big shortcut, I’d stipulate medical nanites and posit that dairy products interfere with them. I like cheese, but I’d give it up if that was the price for a shot that’d make me fit and healthy and keep me that way for another hundred years.

17. Or there’s a cultural shift. I’ve read (long enough ago that it could easily be wrong) that Chinese cuisine considers cheese to be spoiled milk and so will have no truck with it. Or (riffing on the above) the advantages of using milk to raise more animals leaves none for cheese. (I wish Mike Ford were still around; he’d obviously thought about food animals (e.g., angora “lamb”) in Growing Up Weightless). Or it’s a separate course from tea (which seems a poor match). Or the culture has lost chocolate, next to which the loss of cheese is considered trivial. Or….

18. I’d seen about a dozen of the bad movies listed. No particularly strong feelings about any of them, except that PLAN 9 kept pulling me back in the first couple of times. Except maybe ZARDOZ (which I think I haven’t seen), I wouldn’t quibble with anything being on the list. It was just there.

    I’ll nominate for the worst animated feature: WIZARDS. A cavalcade of crap, poorly written, using every convenient cliche and finding every possible way to extend (i.e., cheapen) the animation. (At one point, an object is pulled across the viewer’s field of vision in real time, possibly with a string, and they call it animation.) They present Public Domain footage from vintage war movies with horns sort-of rotoscoped in so we’ll think they’re the Hordes of Eldritch Evil. In the best moments, it’s about on a par with Saturday morning animation of the day. There were good people working on this movie, but they weren’t allowed to do anything decent. Maybe two times, they hit upon a joke that was funny for a second, and they pushed it for a solid minute, until I sincerely regretted the initial chuckle. I stop now.

19. I find it noteable that I commented on the sexual harassment survey with a question about methodology and the comment seems never to have come out of moderation. Nor have any others. If Nevins wants to start a discussion re the SF community that’s a weak start?

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21. Didn’t we once have a group Filer brainstorm about cheese-based genre fiction?

    I confess that I have a possibly deeply unfair suspicion of USA cheese. It doesn’t help that the main imports are “American cheese” (plastic burger cheese) and Monterey Jack (bland, although I understand less so in the USA), or that perfectly reasonable unpasteurised cheese is banned, but once I found out about the spray can cheese… *shudder* Perhaps, like Wisconsin’s Provel, the USA keeps all the decent USA cheese to itself.

    Speaking of Cheese Extinction Event, the UK is currently having a minor milk crisis (largely because of stupidity) that has lead to knock-on impact on all the various by-products, including cheese, and also I understand that animal-based rennet is becoming more difficult to get hold of because of the shrinking of the veal industry. So, you know, UK-based cheese fans: Panic stations.

    If we had to leave in a hurry I think sheep might still make it onto the manifest. They’re very multi-purpose and easier to raise after all. Sheep’s milk cheese is perfectly nice.

    The first two Twilight films are fine. They’re not great genius, and the relationships aren’t exactly role-model material (but how often do we see ones that are?), but the acting is decent and some of the visuals are genuinely good. Spice World is brilliant in the same way that Legends of Tomorrow is brilliant: They know perfectly well that they’re ridiculous bits of frothy entertainment and lean all the way in, and it works.

    I liked Lost and Delirious, but it certainly isn’t cheerful. One of the few films my sister introduced me to (she usually curates the LGBT films for me so I mostly end up watching the ones she really likes and also thinks I might like, since unlike for me, watching stuff isn’t hazardous to her health) that isn’t on the lighter end of the scale. Not sure how people managed to miss the ending. It wasn’t exactly subtle.

    Star Trek Into Darkness currently has an 86% Fresh rating which I think says it all about whether the majority opinion should be accepted as truth.

22. @Meredity —

    If we had to leave in a hurry I think sheep might still make it onto the manifest. They’re very multi-purpose and easier to raise after all. Sheep’s milk cheese is perfectly nice.

    Nonono. Dairy goats all the way. Small, tough to kill, adaptable to a wide range of forage, and can produce tons of milk relative to body size. Nigerian dwarfs ftw!

23. @Contrarius

    I thought about goats (because delicious, hardy, and adorable) but I’m not sure they’re quite as versatile – I figured sheep’s wool would be a pretty major incentive. I could be wrong!

24. (Although, my sister and I were teenagers when we first watched Lost and Delirious. There’s a certain point of teenagerishness, at least for some teenagers, where I think teenage angst themed media is extremely attractive. Not sure what I’d think of it watching for the first time as an adult.)

25. @Meredith —

    I thought about goats (because delicious, hardy, and adorable) but I’m not sure they’re quite as versatile – I figured sheep’s wool would be a pretty major incentive. I could be wrong!

    I am, of course, not at all biased just because I keep Nigerian dwarfs myself. 😉

    If you want fiber, you can keep hair goats. But in general, notice that the poorest human populations in the world tend to keep goats more often than sheep. There’s a reason for that. 🙂

26. @Contrarius

    A lot of those places are also significantly warmer (and often more mountainous) than the UK, where sheep have outnumbered goats for quite some time, I expect because people in cold, damp, hilly places are highly motivated by wool. So… we should take both! 😀

27. I have one word for you: cashmere.

    🙂

    But to be more serious: yes, it would be great to have both. I think the bigger message is that either sheep or goats would make more sense on a long space trip than cattle. And they are much less messy, to boot — AND their poop makes better fertilizer. Winners all around!

28. @Meredith – There is good cheese made in the US, but I don’t know how readily available it is across the Atlantic. There is a great… cheesery(?) called Cowgirl Creamery. They make brie-like cheeses, stinky cheeses… I think they’re mostly soft. There’s also a cheese called Humbolt Fog (another soft one, with an ash rind, iirc). My favorite cheeses are aged goudas and sharp cheddars. Most (all) of the aged goudas I know are European, though. Tillamook makes some decent cheddars, though they’re not particularly noteworthy. Monterey Jack, es the good stuff, is good for quesadillas and other melt-oriented dishes.

29. kathodus on September 10, 2017 at 4:01 pm said:
    Point Reyes Blue. Amana Blue. Sonoma Jack, which is a drier cheese than Monterey Jack.
    I met one from Wisconsin called Mobay, which is similar to Morbier, from France – a layer of sheep’s-milk cheese and a layer of goat’s-milk cheese, separated by a very thin layer of ash.

30. Oh! I forgot about Point Reyes blue, and Sonoma Jack! Don’t know the others but will trust your judgment.

31. Part of the fun is the deli cheese section at the supermarket. I’ve met several interesting cheeses when they hit the sell-by date and are lower priced. (Like the Mobay.) They get imports, but not as much variety as they used to have.
    If you get a chance at white Stilton with blueberries or cranberries, take it. It’s fine dessert cheese.

32. @Meredith – …that perfectly reasonable unpasteurised cheese is banned…

    Only imports. We have quite good raw milk cheeses made in the US, none of which have an even passing resemblance to spray cheese (I know it’s a thing, because I’ve seen it, but I don’t know anyone who has eaten it). They’re available at some grocers and pretty much all specialty cheese stores and my town is probably not the only one with a local cheesemaker that includes raw milk cheeses in their offerings.

    (Also, I had a dream last night that included Ann Leckie being very kind, but no cheese or pizza.)

33. There’s a USA cheesemaker called Sartori that does an absolutely fabulous cheese they’ve named Bellavitano. It’s a bit cheddar-like, but more earthy. (They wash the rind in things like balsamic or espresso, but those are just fillips, ignorable.)

34. I thought that aged raw-milk cheeses could be imported.

35. +1 on Bellavitano cheese. It’s a cheese with character; I’d describe it as kind of similar to cheddar but with an aged-swiss tang to it rather than a sharp cheddar bite. I like the balsamic-vinegar one; the bits of rind have a nice faint sourness that goes well with the cheese.

    I despise boring flavorless cheese like colby or monterry jack. I want cheese with attitude. Sharp cheddar, smoked gouda, aged swiss, roquefort…. there was a sheeps-milk cheese I’ve had once and never found again; I don’t know the make but the logo was a sheep riding a motorcycle. It was delicious. Sound familiar to anyone? Probably out of Wisconsin, since that’s the major cheese producing area near me….

36. I’m relieved that the USA has cheese worth eating! Perhaps most of them are just too similar to the much-easier-to-stock British and European types to be worth importing?

    The British cheese industry was crippled during World War II (rationing limited the types of cheese that could be made, and then cultures died out or were lost, plus problems with native breeds dying out) and has only really recovered in the last couple of decades. (Even now probably our most famous cheese, cheddar, has no protections at all and depressingly few people even in Britain know what it’s actually supposed to taste like. Supermarket cheddar isn’t very accurate. Or good. *cheese snob*)

37. Wisconsin does make some excellent cheese (in my opinion). There are a few other dairy centers in the US that I’m told are also very good; New Hampshire/Vermont and parts of northern California, I believe.

    The “American Cheese” you may or may not get on your side of the Pond (individually wrapped tasteless slices of processed blandness, the only virtue of which is that it melts well) is NOT representative of actual American cheeses.

    I had a Wisconsin Stilton cheese a month or two ago that was excellent; smelled like old gym socks but tasted marvelous.

38. never found again; I don’t know the make but the logo was a sheep riding a motorcycle. It was delicious. Sound familiar to anyone? Probably out of Wisconsin, since that’s the major cheese producing area near me….

    Cassie, the cheese you are looking for is Lamb Chopper by Cypress Grove. It’s a good cheese though not my favorite, and if they sold tee shirts with that logo I’d buy one in a heartbeat.

39. @Nancy —

    Cassie, the cheese you are looking for is Lamb Chopper by Cypress Grove. It’s a good cheese though not my favorite, and if they sold tee shirts with that logo I’d buy one in a heartbeat.

    OMG, that company has a cheese that costs $75 for a THIRD of a pound! YIKES!

40. Cassie, the cheese you are looking for is Lamb Chopper by Cypress Grove.

    And, peculiarly, given that this branched off a discussion of American-made cheeses, it’s produced in Holland and imported by Cypress Grove.

41. Nancy Sauer, thanks! Knowing the name makes it MUCH more likely I’ll be able to find it again! Kurt Busiek, it’s Dutch? Cool! (And my apologies for the incorrect assumption; I have a bad tendency to assume cheeses are Wisconsin-made if I don’t absolutely know otherwise, because we get So Many Wisconsin Cheeses here…)

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