One hundred percent pure Scroll.
(1) NOT QUITE FAILURE TO LAUNCH. “Nail-biting start for Russia’s new Vostochny space centre” – BBC has the story.
“Oh please, darling, fly!”
A technician standing behind me was really nervous during the launch countdown at Vostochny, a new space centre in Russia’s Far East.
It was the second launch attempt – a day after the previous one had been aborted at the last minute.
I noticed that some of the technician’s colleagues also had pale faces and had crossed their fingers.
It emerged later that a cable malfunction had led to the postponement of Wednesday’s launch.
This time there was relief for Russia’s federal space agency, Roscosmos, as the Soyuz rocket, carrying three satellites, blasted off and the booster stage separated.
President Vladimir Putin had travelled 5,500km (3,500 miles) to watch the launch and was in a black mood after Wednesday’s cancellation, berating Vostochny’s managers for the financial scandals that have blighted this prestige project.
(2) DEAD TO RIGHTS. For a collision between the real world and fantasy, see “Gucci warns Hong Kong shops on paper fakes for funerals”. Gucci is trying to prevent people from selling paper mockups (of their products) to be burned in placate-ones-ancestors ceremonies.
Italian luxury goods maker Gucci has sent warning letters to Hong Kong shops selling paper versions of its products as offerings to the dead.
Paper replicas of items like mansions, cars, iPads and luxury bags are burnt in the belief that deceased relatives can use them in the afterlife.
Demand for these products is highest during the Qingming “tomb-sweeping” festival, which happened last month.
The shops were sent letters but there was no suggestion of legal action.
(3) NEAL STEPHENSON CONNECTION. Kevin Kelly writes “The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup” in the May issue of Wired, about mega-mysterious virtual reality company Magic Leap.
Among the first people (CEO Rony) Abovitz hired at Magic Leap was Neal Stephenson, author of the other seminal VR anticipation, Snow Crash. He wanted Stephenson to be Magic Leap’s chief futurist because ‘he has an engineer’s mind fused with that of a great writer.’ Abovitz wanted him to lead a small team developing new forms of narrative. Again, the myth maker would be making the myths real.
The hero in Snow Crash wielded a sword in the virtual world. To woo Stephenson, four emissaries from Magic Leap showed up at Stephenson’s home with Orcrist–the ‘Goblin-cleaver’ sword from The Hobbit trilogy. It was a reproduction of the prop handcrafted by a master wordsmith. That is, it was a false version of the real thing used in the unreal film world–a clever bit of recursiveness custom-made for mixed reality. Stephenson was intrigued. ‘It’s not every day that someone turns up at your house bearing a mythic sword, and so I did what anyone who has read a lot of fantasy novels would: I let them in and gave them beer,’ he wrote on Magic Leap’s blog. ‘True to form, hey invited me on a quest and invited me to sign a contract (well, an NDA actually).’ Stephenson accepted the job. ‘We’ve maxed out what we can do on 2-D screens, he says. ‘Now it’s time to unleash what is possible in 3-D, and that means redefining the medium from the ground up. We can’t do that in small steps.’ He compared the challenge of VR to crossing a treacherous valley to reach new heights. He admires Abovitz because he is willing to ‘slog through that valley.'”
Magic Leap has also hired Ernest Cline as a consultant.
(4) REYNOLDS RAP. The Traveler at Galactic Journey has kind words for a prozine in “[April 30, 1961] Travel Stories (June 1961 Galaxy)”.
My nephew, David, has been on an Israeli Kibbutz for a month now. We get letters from him every few days, mostly about the hard work, the monotony of the diet, and the isolation from the world. The other day, he sent a letter to my brother, Lou, who read it to me over the phone. Apparently, David went into the big port-town of Haifa and bought copies of Life, Time, and Newsweek. He was not impressed with the literary quality of any of them, but he did find Time particularly useful.
You see, Israeli bathrooms generally don’t stock toilet paper…
Which segues nicely into the first fiction review of the month. I’m happy to report I have absolutely nothing against the June 1961 Galaxy – including my backside. In fact, this magazine is quite good, at least so far. As usual, since this is a double-sized magazine, I’ll review it in two parts.
First up is Mack Reynolds’ unique novelette, Farmer. Set thirty years from now in the replanted forests of the Western Sahara, it’s an interesting tale of intrigue and politics the likes of which I’ve not seen before. Reynolds has got a good grasp of the international scene, as evidenced by his spate of recent stories of the future Cold War. If this story has a failing, it is its somewhat smug and one-sided tone. Geopolitics should be a bit more ambiguous. It’s also too good a setting for such a short story. Three stars.
(5) POHL PIONEERED. In a piece on The Atlantic by Michael Lapointe, ”Chernobyl’s Literary Legacy, Thirty Years Later”, the author credits Fred Pohl with writing the first novel about Chernobyl and says that Pohl’s 1987 Chernobyl “is done on an epic scale.”
(6) INDIE NOVELTY. Cedar Sanderson tells how she self-published a coloring book in “Non-Traditional Books” at Mad Genius Club.
So why am I telling you about this? Well, it’s different. Someone reading this may be a terrific artist (I’m not, by the way. I doodle really well) and this might be a great way for them to get a product on the market. I figure you can learn along with me, or from my mistakes, so you don’t have to make the ones I did.
Ingredients for a Coloring Book:
- Pens, pencils, and paper
- A thematic idea (mine was adorable dragons and flowers)
- Line-Art (this from the pen and paper, or you could create it digitally, which would be even better)
- A good scanner
- Graphics software: Gimp will work, Photoshop is actually better for this
- Wordprocessing software: I laid the book out in Microsoft Word. You could use InDesign if you have it and are comfortable with it.
- Patience
Cost? Well, not counting the cost of pens, ink, paper (I had all of those at the beginning, although I did invest some in upgrades) I spent about $12 on Inktail’s final production stages. That was $10 for a Createspace ISBN and $2 for stock art elements to put on the cover. Time? Well, now, that’s a horse of a different color.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
Born April 30, 1938 — Larry Niven.
(8) TO THE LITTLE SCREEN. ScreenRant reports “Wheel of Time Book Series to Become TV Show”.
Fans of the best-selling American fantasy novel series Wheel of Time, created by Vietnam War veteran and prolific genre fiction writer Robert Jordan, are no doubt well familiar with the epic, fourteen-novel long series for its many well-detailed narrative elements and Hugo award-winning reputation. Drawing from European and Asian mythology, Jordan (who was born James Oliver Rigney Jr.) saw fit to create a fantasy realm and spiritual mythos that borrows elements from Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity. The resulting overarching narrative accordingly featured an overarching thematic concern with the forces of light and dark, mirroring the metaphysical concepts of balance and duality in kind.
As an answer to British novelist and former Oxford University professor J.R.R. Tolkien’s likeminded The Lord of the Rings, Jordan made a name for himself until the time of his death in 2007 as the chief successor to the throne of bestselling imaginative fantasy. The legacy that Wheel of Time has since left in the wake of its author’s death still holds a certain reverence for his grandly orchestrated fiction – and now that special place the series holds in the hearts of many fans looks to be fit for future production as a major network TV series.
Posting to the official Google+ account for the Wheel of Time franchise and intellectual property, Jordan’s widow, Harriet McDougal, was pleased to let fans of the series know that a late legal dispute with Red Eagle Entertainment has been resolved, meaning that the production of an official TV series based on her late husband’s masterwork will soon be announced. Speaking on behalf of Jordan’s estate, McDougal posted the following:
“Wanted to share with you exciting news about The Wheel of Time. Legal issues have been resolved. The Wheel of Time will become a cutting edge TV series! I couldn’t be more pleased. Look for the official announcement coming soon from a major studio.”
(9) MONSTERPALOOZA. Lisa Napoli explains that “Halloween is a $7.5 billion year-round industry”.
Here among the crowds of freakily dressed people at Monsterpalooza at the Pasadena Convention Center, Yvonne Solomon stands out. Not because of the red dress she’s wearing, with a plunging neckline. It’s the large old-fashioned baby carriage she’s pushing. In it are four distinctive creatures: “These are my were-pups,” she said. “They’re silicone, handmade little pieces of art.”
Were-pups. Baby were-wolves. Solomon paid an artist $650 a piece for these creepy-looking critters. At this gathering of fellow monster fans, she’s assured a sympathetic reception for her investment. Horror fests like Wizard World and Shuddercon take place every weekend, all around the country. People happily fork over pricey admission fees for the chance to mingle with like-minded mutants and monsters.
“You’re in a big hall with a bunch of people you don’t have to explain yourself to,” Keith Rainville said, who is here selling vintage Mexican and Japanese horror tchotchkes. “We’re all from the same mothership that dropped us off in this weird world.”
Rainville is one of 200 vendors here, selling one-of-a-kind pieces, like what Paul Lazo brought from his little shop of collectibles in New York: “He is a severed head with a bloody pan and he’s damn handsome.”
(10) INKSTAINED WRETCHES ON DISPLAY. Shelf Awareness catches a vision of the American Writers Museum.
The American Writers Museum, the first in the United States to focus exclusively on American writers, “past and present,” will open in March 2017 in downtown Chicago, Ill. Located at 180 North Michigan Avenue, the museum expects to draw up to 120,000 visitors each year and is working with more than 50 authors’ homes and museums around the country to build its exhibitions. Among the planned attractions are re-creations of writers’ homes and fictional locales (including Tara, Cannery Row and the House of Seven Gables), interactive exhibits about writers’ lives and methodologies (including “travels” with Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck, for example), and ample space for film screenings, talks, readings and presentations. The museum aims to hold exhibitions on a range of subjects. Roberta Rubin, the former longtime owner of the Book Stall at Chestnut Court in Winnetka, Ill., is co-chairman of the museum’s board of directors.
(11) VIRTUOSO. Hear the Star Trek: Voyager (Theme) “Metal cover” done by YouTube guitarist Captain Meatshield.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Will R., and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip W.]
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::ticky::
(11) VIRTUOSO.
That metal version of the Voyager theme is EPIC. 🙂
(11) Not quite as epic as the metal version of the My Little Pony theme
When did comments become “thoughts”?
Ah, but neither can compare to this rendition of the Reading Rainbow theme song done by my favorite Star Trek themed band Five Year Mission:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkgCHLIBA2g
As a little background: They learned the song a few years ago when they were the house band at Star Trek Las Vegas to play as an intro for LeVar Burton’s entrance onto the main stage. They will be the house band at this year’s Star Trek Las Vegas as well.
1. Coincidentally I just started reading All the birds in the Sky, where in the second chapter someone goes to see a rocket launch that is canceled.
2. Why stop it? Isn’t this advertising, the one purse you will need for your afterlife.
Since we gained the ability to project our mental effusions directly onto the scroll ow my foot itches did I make this coffee a bit weak when is that boy going to walk the dog I wonder if clouds look down and try to make shapes out of the ground G L O R I A GLOOOORIA though the edit function needs work.
4) Reynolds has got a good grasp of the international scene, as evidenced by his spate of recent stories of the future Cold War.
I am willing to bet money that his story “Farmer”, set in the 1990s, features at least peripherally the Soviet Union. Like most serious predictions of the future that didn’t involve nuclear apocalypse.
Over in Black Gate we had a short discussion and we thought: We need to invoke more laughter and humour in this mess. And well, we came up with this:
https://twitter.com/Koenigvonsiam/status/726369589660143616
Please help make this a thing 🙂
Hashtag is #LittlePonysHugo
Anything goes, as long as its funny (instead of Hatespeech). You could write military SF with Flattershy transforming into a tank or write about the impeding apocalypse that will doom as, if a children show will win a Hugo. Up to you. Just make it funny 🙂
I think that would be a much more healthy approach then get all work up about an award… Fandom will survive – but without humour it might loose its sanity…
(9) MONSTERPALOOZA.
Will have to visit one of these some time.
Second Fifth!
Happy May Day everyone! I’m hiding indoors from the traditional Turkish tear gas and police brutality.
Partway through Monstrous Little Voices: New Tales From Shakespeare’s Fantasy World and it seems pretty solid so far.
Nigel: Since we gained the ability to project our mental effusions directly onto the scroll ow my foot itches did I make this coffee a bit weak when is that boy going to walk the dog I wonder if clouds look down and try to make shapes out of the ground G L O R I A GLOOOORIA though the edit function needs work.
Dude, I don’t know what mind-altering substances you are ingesting, but I insist that you share. With me. Screw those other Filers. Wait! Did that get inclu
‘We’ve maxed out what we can do on 2-D screens, he says.
That’s an interesting position to take. personally I’m not a huge fan of 3D. As for virtual reality, I’ll probably start being interested when they get around to augmented reality. Give me eyeball overlays that remember people’s names, and give me stats on random things I look at. That’s the future I want!
JJ – it’s just damn fine coffee.
Clicky.
I’m not awake enough to say anything more, and I see I have a whole other scroll to read.
Third fifth! Completely by accident!
Thanks for (5) which I might have missed. I am currently reading the Pohl novel, which is a good book of a fairly conventional non-sf type. The “grand scale” comment is a little misleading I think. My Tor trade paperback is about 360 pages long. There are multiple points of view illustrating different aspects of events, but much of the focus is on a few competent men who understand the situation. It’s not “War and Peace”. Though Pohl does include material on the state of ’80s Soviet politics and a couple of pages on Babi Yar. His 2014 Afterword is mainly anecdotal, about how he came to write the book and his research trips to the Soviet Union. I also have a copy of “Voices From Chernobyl” to be read and will try to find a good journalistic account to read as well.
Great scroll title, Kip.
RE: Coloring books. As I was wandering through Dreamhaven for Independent Bookstores Day yesterday, I came across a Neil Gaiman one. While in all modesty I think I’m an okay photographer, I’ve always been pants at coloring books, so I didn’t grab it.
(2) Perhaps Gucci is planning their own line. You wouldn’t want to burn a cheap knockoff when you could buy the real thing.
Can we burn images of books for our ancestors to read in the afterlife?
One of Tom Holt’s J.W. Wells & Co. books starts with someone burning the night’s deposits to a bank in hell.
I really like adult colouring books and find spending 20 min or so on that before bed rather than reading on a screen helps me go to sleep better (I listen to audiobook or podcast while doing it then put the book down and close my eyes and just listen…the combo works perfectly most nights, tho I still have the 3 AM insomnia on the regular.
As for Monsterpalooza, I have a friend in the PD where I work who started a sideline haunted trail business on a rural property of his family’s as a teenager (mostly him and his friends running out of the woods with chainsaws and hockey masks to scare the patrons) which has grown over the decades into a true haunted house (Google 13 Stories) that provides a huge chunk of his family’s income (I suspect at this point he mainly does his day job because of the insurance and pension, and because he likes it, but he doesn’t need the pay check so much at this point). In the last year they have become a year round business running zombie vs human Apocalypse Zombie Kill events (it helps that they are in the same area where Walking Dead is filmed so there is marketing synergy with the people/tours that come to see the shooting locations and such.
Oh yeah, meant to compliment the title also. One of my all time favourites so far!
Has the inevitable Tingle reference happened yet? Slammed in the Pixels by My Own Scroll?
Also, ticky.
Space Pixel Nom Invasion
ETA Bah, Ninja’d
Cmm that’s better than the space pixel scroll invasion one I was thinking of.
3) I doubt the sword was hand-crafted by a master wordsmith. Though it would be nicely yet-more-recursive, a swordsmith is more likely.
Well Space Pixel Scroll Invasion is more of an inside joke since with the word substitutions there isn’t really innuendo. More family- friendly as it were!
Rabid Puppy Hugo Invasion.
@Nigel
“Since we gained the ability to project our mental effusions directly onto the scroll…”
*APPLAUSE*
I presume you are prepared for the inevitable banning of your posts in Boston?
Mine have already been banned from Argo 🙁
@ Stoic – I’m only surprised I haven’t been banned everywhere.
(4) You see, Israeli bathrooms generally don’t stock toilet paper…
Good heavens. That is rather….icky. Especially if you get travellers’ diarrhea.
Today’s read — A Spool of Blue Thread, by Anne Tyler (not SFF)
Between 1974 and 1988, Anne Tyler wrote a spate of some of the best novels of their era, brilliant work succeeding brilliant work in a slow-motion literary firework that lasted over a decade. Her work before then and since then is … good, but it doesn’t compare with her work at her height.
Her latest book doesn’t break this rule. It’s still good, though, and there’s a lot to it. Telling the saga of several generations of the Whitshank family of Baltimore, it is mostly a meditation on the mythologizing that takes place in families — the stories we tell, both to ourselves and to others, and how that can differ from, and even inform, the reality. It’s also hard not to read several parts of it as being a reflection by the nearly 75 year old Tyler on aging and death.
I’d recommend it to Anne Tyler completists (like me), and to fans of understated literary fiction about families. But to those who have been holding out hope that Tyler would rebottle the lightning one of these days, this isn’t the one.
I believe that in many parts of the world, washing with water and the left hand is the standard practice (the left hand is then not used for other purposes), and toilet paper is seen as kind of icky. A friend once said to me, “If you got shit on your arm, would you wash it with water? or just wipe it with a tissue and call it good?” and I had to concede he had a point.
3) Something about VR makes me sad. People already spend so much time ignoring the world around them, insulated by headphones, absorbed in their devices. The real world is actually pretty interesting, I want to tell them, you should try it sometime.
@Kyra: Thanks. Yes, that run that includes Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and The Accidental Tourist was wondrous.
Every one?
@ Rose Embolism:
It does, and it also mentions colons in northern Algeria and Morocco (Algeria was apparently partitioned, as some were proposing at the time) and rampant overpopulation. I have no doubt that our own conceptions of 2046, based as they are on extrapolation of current trends, will prove similarly wrong.
The story is a good, quick read, although by today’s standards it has a… rather embarrassingly colonial gaze.
@Jonathan Edelstein:
That’s true, though. Modulo colostomy patients.
…I’ll show myself out.
Anne Tyler – I’ve read a few other of her novels but nothing has ever touched The Accidental Tourist for me. I remember specific details of that book where I can’t even remember overall plot summaries of other books of hers.
Excellent pixel scroll title! Made me laugh out loud.
Oh, spare me.
Sorry, L, not your fault but I get really tired of that whole schtick. It smacks strongly of concern trolling.
I am practically grafted to my phone, I live and die by tablet. I used my phone yesterday to take a series of photos of a tiny brown snake I discovered in the mulch, which I tweeted to my followers, and then googled to discover what had caused the lumps on said snake (parasites, likely worms).
If it gets much more ‘real world’ than parasitic worms on wild snakes, I’m unaware of it.
People frequently tweet me pictures of birds (taken with their phone) and ask me to identify them. I take photos of moths and send to experts and ask THEM to identify them. We are thoroughly anchored in the real world, believe me.
There’s also a whole creative element to VR. I occasionally play a truly gorgeous game called Subnautica which is about exploring an underwater alien planet. I’d love to play it on an Oculus Rift and get the full wraparound immersion, partly because it’s beautiful, partly because I fantasize about a day when I make a world so vast and immersive that someone can stand inside my game and turn in a circle and see a 360 panoramic sweep of this is a world I built inside my head look at it look at all of it.
Automatically judging that VR is sad or that people on their devices must necessarily be isolated from the real world is really kind of obnoxious and makes a lot of assumptions about the lives of strangers.
I was going to point out that VR at the expense of the real world argument sounds a lot like the people who used to tell us to get our noses out of books and get outside, but then I found myself having unkind thoughts about someone who almost walked into me because they were too busy looking at their phone. So yeah. I’m conflicted here.
I knew I shared a birthday with Larry Niven, but somehow I never knew that I was actually born on his 30th birthday.
@RedWombat,
I was going to do that with a really cool looking tiny raven looking bird that seem to be covered in an oil slick, but I figured out it was a Grackle.
I didn’t know Grackles looked that awesome
3) I don’t like replica swords, but that would totally change for a line crafted by master wordsmiths.
Iphinome on May 1, 2016 at 12:15 am said:
(11) Not quite as epic as the metal version of the My Little Pony theme
That really was epic. I may have been influenced by today’s title, because I played it twice.
@Kyra, thank you for the reminder of being amazed by some of Anne Tyler’s fiction.
ETA – Happy birthday, @David Goldman.
Thanks, autocorrect. Goldfarb. (Does this happen to other people, where you correct autocorrect and it changes back?)
2) I understand copyright/plagiarism worries, but this is ridiculous, not to mention culturally insensitive.
5) Not to take away from Frederick Pohl’s legacy, but he was not the first or only author writing about/inspired by Chernobyl at the time.
Gudrun Pausewang’s apocalyptic (and depressing as hell) YA classic “Die Wolke” (The Cloud) also came out in 1987 in (West) Germany, as did Christa Wolf’s novel “Störfall” (Accident: A Day’s News) in (East) Germany in 1987. “Störfall” is not SF, but “Die Wolke” certainly is.
To be fair, the article explicitly states that Fred Pohl wrote the first Chernobyl novel in English and mentions Störfall, though not Die Wolke, probably because it’s YA.
I guess you could find more Chernobyl inspired works in the countries directly affected by the fall-out. The article lists a few Russian and Ukrainian works and Hampus may be able to suggest some Swedish works.
I am going to post a TBR/upcoming list just as a reminder to myself to stop piddling around reading depressing Hugo-related posts and instead read something interesting. So, new and upcoming stuff I plan to get to:
Novels: Lovecraft Country (Matt Ruff), Roadsouls (Betsy James), The Lie Tree (Frances Hardinge), The Devourers (Indra Das), Will Do Magic for Small Change (Andrea Hairston), Roses and Rot (Kat Howard), The Stars Are Legion (Kameron Hurley), Ghost Talkers (Mary Robinette Kowal)
UK novels with no announced US publication: The Thing Itself (Adam Roberts), Down Station (Simon Morden)
Graphic novels: Blue Hand Mojo: Hard Times Road (John Jennings)
Story collections: What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours (Helen Oyeyemi), The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria (Carlos Hernandez)
Novellas: Downfall of the Gods (K. J. Parker), The Ballad of Black Tom (Victor LaValle)
Anthologies: Clockwork Phoenix 5, Dead Letters, The Starlit Wood, An Alphabet of Embers, Aphrodite Terra
Does anyone have suggestions for new graphic novels that are standalones, not part of series?
@Jim Henley:
@Jonathan Edelstein:
It does, and it also mentions colons in northern Algeria and Morocco
That’s true, though. Modulo colostomy patients.
…I’ll show myself out.
Most of those are semi-colons.
…right behind you.
@RedWombat: Automatically judging that VR is sad or that people on their devices must necessarily be isolated from the real world is really kind of obnoxious and makes a lot of assumptions about the lives of strangers.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for the lovely post–not only for the point you were making but it was so beautifully written and so concrete/grounding (perfect marriage of purpose and form!)! I get so tired of the whole complex of discourse around that “oh tech bad coming between you and reality” as if there was one reality, as if humans haven’t been creating technologies of communication since who knows when (as I keep pointing out to my students, Socrates was totally against writing stuff down–the only TRUE communication was face/face in the marketplace and then of course only with young men SNARK, but if Plato hadn’t written it down!). My first memory of wanting to smack people came with the poets (I was one then) who were all “ooooo i must write my poetry by hand it would be so soulless typing it.” After I challenged them to distinguish between the handwritten poem I wrote and then TRANSCRIBED and the poem I wrote on my 1973 Olympia manual portable (meaning it plus case weighted 40 pounds) typewriter, they shut up around me at least.
And it is all over the issue of online teaching as well (“ooooo, I cannot tell if my students have learned anything if I cannot see their faces”). Now I’m all for people teaching the way they see best, but me? I have to see what they write to figure out if they’ve learned anything, and I like teaching online (well, everything except the crappy learning management system we have sigh). I am so tired of the fetishizing of f2f communication as some inerent magical moment of TWUE understanding that can never be achieved by any other means.
And I hate being told my friendships online are somehow not real and I’m losing something by not having local friends here (maybe–but I’m in the middle of rural Texas, and I am sure there are some lovely people amidst the homophobic fundamentalist social conservatives that dominant the rural culture, but I don’t have time to find them).
Today’s book report:
“Borderline” by Mishell Baker. Mr Dr Science read it first and recced it. I just finished, and agree with him that it’s very refreshing to read about characters who act messed up because they are all actually, clinically psychotic. Mr Dr Science in particular dislikes stories where he can’t *like* anyone, so he doesn’t usually care for books where the POV character is as frequently nasty as this one. But the fact that she’s aware of her own mental problems, and that they *are* problems, makes all the difference. Apparently “psychotic” as a metaphor doesn’t work for us, but literal psychosis really does.
What struck me is how much the behavior of the mentally ill people is similar to the reported behavior of “normal” people in Hollywood. I’ve heard some speculation that people with certain personality disorders do especially well in the entertainment industry — but it’s also possible that borderline behaviors (splitting, emotional whiplash, confabulation,etc) are rewarded in Hollywood, so neurotypical people get in the habit of using them.
I’m not sure I think she sticks the landing, but I have to talk to Mr Dr and see what he thinks.