Mark Twain Pixel Scroll 4/30/16 Never Mind The Scrollocks, Here’s The Sex Pixels

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.]

124 thoughts on “Mark Twain Pixel Scroll 4/30/16 Never Mind The Scrollocks, Here’s The Sex Pixels

  1. @Vasha: Thanks for the reminder–I’ve been reading people’s comments on Lovecraft Country going hmmm, sounds great, and your post reminded me to order it!

  2. The article probably didn’t mention Die Wolke because it’s not about Chernobyl, but rather a fictional reactor located in the exact geographic center of Germany. Doesn’t the book explicitly say that the accident is even worse than Chernobyl? (It is, with bureauratic lack of irony, referred to as a Super-GAU [Super-Worst-Case-Scenario].) Regardless, I agree that such indirect responses to the accident should be included in the list, although it would become quite a bit longer.

  3. @Cora Buhlert 2) I understand copyright/plagiarism worries, but this is ridiculous, not to mention culturally insensitive.

    I’m wondering if it’s more about trademark issues (which have to be defended in certain ways to avoid loss), and if the purpose of the letter is to show such intent (I am NOT a lawyer, and only have the most rudimentary understanding of such things, but know that TM is very different from copyright).

    And: momentary fangirl moment–I have your blog in my RSS feed on Dreamwidth so I can read regularly!

  4. (10) I… wow. A museum focused entirely on writers and writing? Looking at their webpage, I think I squeed the most I have in my entire life. That place’ll be heaven, for me.

  5. The Ballad of Black Tom is well worth the read, and is another of those pleasant notes/deconstructions of the Mythos. Heck, it’s basically The Horror at Red Hook done from the point of view of one of the horrors, as Lovecraft called brown people, involved.

    It’s an excellent subtly written piece of short fiction that sketches out the lives and motivations of a character, and how they come into contact with the whole gallery of unnamable, unmentionable etc. It’s very Lovecraft reminiscent, but at the same time very different. It’s one of several works that have my ballot starting to fill for next year before this one’s been blown up.

  6. A friend of mine who is a professional artist and comic colourist released a comic book of her own artwork recently.

    I’m curious what the differences are between her methods and Sanderson’s – I suspect a major one is knowing how to have the artwork itself camera-ready in fewer steps (including likely mostly producing all but the initial design sketch in a computer program in the first place, and I only say “all but the initial design sketch” because she’s sometimes shown original sketches that were clearly pencil).

    (All her posts and discussion thereof are on facebook, alas, or I’d link it. She was doing a small run mainly for friends and the local con.)

  7. @Vasha

    I’ve preordered the paperback of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ first four issues of the new Black Panther–it’s supposed to come out in August, I believe.

    Also, don’t know if you saw this, but Kameron Hurley’s The Stars Are Legion has been bumped over to January of next year. (It sounds really good, though.)

  8. @Iphinome – That MLP theme song was great! Bonus points to the guitarist for adding a little Metallica to the middle, and rocking a Killers shirt! Thanks for posting!

    Currently reading:
    I’m almost done with the final book in Hobb’s Liveship Traders trilogy – Ship of Destiny. Really digging the ending. Heard from some people that it was too contrived, but I like that all the bits were set up from the beginning and then come together. Znlor n yvggyr cng, cybg erfbyhgvba-jvfr, ohg zna, nsgre nyy gung tevz va gur zvqqyr, vg’f avpr gb frr fbzr fhayvtug. Nyfb, Znygn unf bar bs gur orfg punenpgre nepf V’ir frra. Fur tbrf sebz hggreyl oenggl naq ubeevoyr – gb gur cbvag jurer V jnf ubcvat znlor fur’q snyy bss n cvre naq qebja be ng yrnfg or pneevrq njnl bhg bs gur fgbel – gb bar bs zl snibevgr punenpgref va gur obbx. Nygurn’f punenpgre jnf nyfb jryy qrirybcrq. Va snpg, nyy bs gur znva punenpgref, nfvqr sebz znlor Erla? ner jryy qbar. Gung’f bar bs zl snibevgr cnegf bs guvf frevrf. Uboof’ punenpgref frrz yvxr npghny crbcyr. Jura fur pna znxr zr srry flzcngul sbe Xraavg – gung’f fbzr tbbq jevgvat, rira vs V jnf irel tynq jura ur qvrq, naq jvfurq ur’q znantrq vg nobhg unys gur obbx ntb. I’m still a little over 40 pages from the end, though, so for all I know everything could fall apart and I could end up needing a new Kindle. I suspect it’ll be more like I need to force myself not to head straight to the next trilogy in the series.

    Also reading: A Mountain Walked, Lovecraftian stories anthology edited by ST Joshi, at a fellow Filer’s recommendation. They described it better than I could. I’m on the second or third story, currently, and enjoying it. Not a collection of stories about giant tentacled monsters.

    Not sure what to go for next. Maybe the new Marko Kloos, which just came in. If it’s anything like the others in the series, it’ll be a lot of fun and a much quicker read than Hobb.

    I am entirely remiss in my novel reading for 2016. I’m trying to keep up with shorter works this year, and grab a smaller number of new books, based on reviews.

  9. Just thought of something, a bit too late to edit…

    Kyra, if you read this – would you place the Liveship Traders trilogy anywhere within your romance lists? There’s a lot of it going on throughout the novels, and there’s a strong bond between Amber and Jek that doesn’t quite seem romantic.

  10. I’m in the middle of The Lie Tree and it’s making me very happy. I still need to finish Girls & Sex by Peggy Orenstein. It’s good, but reading about what teenage and college-age girls can go through now is depressing. After that, it’s either Hope Jahren’s Lab girl or Rise of the Rocket Girls by Holt. Then I’ll be ready for some fiction again. I really need to reread Martian Chronicles, simply because the writing is so lovely.

  11. I am, at this point, savoring having not yet read Borderline. It sounds so very wonderful a book, and I do so love having something like it to look forward to.

    In reading news, I just finished the audiobook of A Natural History of Dragons. It is entirely possible that I drove the long way back from my in-laws in order to hear more of it yesterday. It is also possible that I have accomplished all manner of annoying chores today in order to continue listening to it.

  12. Just one letter away from a second pun: “never mind the scroll locks”

  13. > “Kyra, if you read this – would you place the Liveship Traders trilogy anywhere within your romance lists?”

    I hadn’t, at least not at present … while I get pretty loose with the term sometimes (especially in the “minor romantic elements” category), I keep a reasonably firm rule that it has to involve a main character to get into any section on the list. (And in another note which may or may not be relevant here, while I’ve included some subtle or ambiguous pairings in “minor romantic elements”, I’ve nonetheless tried to keep even that to ones I’m pretty sure the author had in mind and wanted to come across, and not ones that needed to be “read in”.)

    I don’t recall any f/f romance for main characters in those books — although admittedly it’s been a while since I read them and I might have forgotten.

  14. @vasha

    The article probably didn’t mention Die Wolke because it’s not about Chernobyl, but rather a fictional reactor located in the exact geographic center of Germany. Doesn’t the book explicitly say that the accident is even worse than Chernobyl? (It is, with bureauratic lack of irony, referred to as a Super-GAU [Super-Worst-Case-Scenario].) Regardless, I agree that such indirect responses to the accident should be included in the list, although it would become quite a bit longer.

    That may be the reason why Die Wolke was not included, though Pausewang is on record that it was directly inspired by Chernobyl, even though it’s not about Chernobyl itself, but rather offers a “What if it happened here?” scenario. She also used a real nuclear power station, though the film adaptation changed the name to a fictional reactor.

    BTW, both Chernobyl and Fukushima are routinely referred to as Super-GAUs in Germany. I think Three Mile Island is referred to as a GAU, though that was before my time.

    The Christa Wolf book is quite interesting BTW, first of all that it was published at all, since the East German authorities were not at all keen on anything that smelled of environmentalism (pre-1989 East Germany was massively polluted to the point that I always got sick during our annual visits) and also tried to suppress news about Chernobyl (didn’t work, because pretty much everybody could and did watch West German TV). East Germany was also operating an increasingly unsafe nuclear reactor of their own in Greifswald, which was switched off in 1990. In fact, East Germans say that they remember clearly that in April/May of 1986, the stores were suddenly full of fresh vegetables, whereas the selection would be a lot more limited normally. But since it was impossible to export the irradiated vegetables, they fed them to their own population instead. Friends in Latvia (then still part of the Soviet Union) BTW told me that they heard nothing concrete at all, they were only told not to drink milk for a few weeks.

    BTW, this quote from the article annoyed me:

    Accident, for instance, seems to have been written under the belief that the explosion resulted from a random accident, something innate to nuclear power itself, rather than a calamitous series of human errors.

    This is not a failure of Christa Wolf’s due to incomplete information – no, she is stating what everybody in her social circle (and a majority of people in both East and West Germany) believe, namely that nuclear power is so inherently dangerous that safe reactors aren’t possible.

    @robinareid

    I’m wondering if it’s more about trademark issues (which have to be defended in certain ways to avoid loss), and if the purpose of the letter is to show such intent (I am NOT a lawyer, and only have the most rudimentary understanding of such things, but know that TM is very different from copyright).

    And: momentary fangirl moment–I have your blog in my RSS feed on Dreamwidth so I can read regularly!

    Yes, trademark issues might be the reason here. US trademark law is rather weird compared to the rest of the world.

    Glad you like my blog BTW.

  15. (2) Unless it’s some legal defense, it’s stupid. And even then, it’s rude. Free advertising, and something that doesn’t actually resemble the product? I say, let ’em burn all the paper Gucci they want. Grandma may be getting paper LV and Hermes if they keep this up.

    (3) There’s no 3D, VR, AR, MR, whatever that’s good enough to keep me from getting motion sickness. Too much lag, no matter how simple the shapes are. I can ride real rollercoasters all day, but one trip on a virtual one and I’m queasy. And if you’ve got to wear headsets and straps and stuff, it’s not going to work for a lot of people. I do like my Google Cardboard, in short doses.

  16. (2) Note that the letter contains no mention of legal action. Or any action. It just asks them to stop. This is almost certainly a result of their trademark lawyers telling them that they had to make an objection known, and the execs asking, in light of the circumstances, how little they could do while still doing the necessary to protect the trademark.

  17. I went to YALLwest, a YA and middle grade book festival, in Santa Monica. They had an amazing gathering of big-name YA authors. I went primarily because Aussies Amie Kauffman and Jay Kristoff were there. They wrote Illuminae, which was one of two favorite 2015 books. So much so that I nominated it for a Hugo. They were delightful and funny.

    What surprised me was that Mercedes Lackey was there and almost no one seemed to know who she is! I went to a panel and very few questions by the audience were directed at her and after the panel, no one went to her to squee. I was the only one who went up to her afterwards and told her I liked her books. She’s written 162 books!!

    This is the second year they’ve had it, and any of you in the LA area who like attending conventions and YA books, will really love it. It’s free and parking for the day is only $5. Afternoon traffic sucks, though.

  18. Kyra – Thanks. I’ve been curious about your romance category, while at the same time having limited time to check things out. There’s no f/f romance in Liveship Traders, but if you were willing to really stretch, you could maybe make a case for Amber/Jek (really, really stretch). I do think that love, romance, and the ramifications and responsibilities of long-term relationships are central to the series, but I would not classify the series as Romance. I know Romance has evolved a lot in the past 30 or so years, but that’s the extent of my knowledge.

  19. Cheryl S — I’ve turned off autocorrect on all my devices, though I let my desktop underline words it thinks are wrong. I can live my own errors, I don’t see why I should put up with a machine’s unhelpful corrections.

  20. The autocorrect on my iPad occasionally gets into a state where it can’t make a suggestion and won’t return the input cursor.

  21. The latest iteration of OS X started to autocorrect with a bit more fervor than previous versions. Not so bad except when it decides you’ve misspelled a word while you’re typing your password and corrects it without asking.

    I liked that it would automatically correct some words I always mistype, but in the end I had to turn it off. I will admit Apple can hide off switches with the best of them. Luckily, Apple still has community discussion boards which are usually more useful than their current support pages.

  22. @Red Wombat – I do exactly the same things you do with sharing nature through tech and sharing excitement with like-minded internet friends, and just the other day I was over the moon to discover an app that lets me take a picture of a plant and it will try to identify it for me, how cool is that?? All I need now is the bird song version of Shazaam and I’ll be set! (Though I am proud that I successfully figured that the peacock-like cry I heard the other day was in fact a pilated woodpecker, that was a magical moment to hear one in the woods near me, they are LOUD!)

    @alexvdl – I love how grackles look! And the long-tailed ones I encountered in Mexico made the most amazing creaky-metal-door sound and were clearly in charge of all trees at the resort, they are such a fantastic bird 😀

    (Ohhhh I am such a bird nerd, birds are my jam!)

  23. @Lenora Rose:

    I’m curious what the differences are between her methods and Sanderson’s – I suspect a major one is knowing how to have the artwork itself camera-ready in fewer steps

    Of course I don’t have any idea what your friend does, but I’ve scanned and printed a lot of comics, so for what it’s worth: 1. Some people do draw directly on the computer, but it’s still very common to scan ink drawings. 2. Sanderson’s particular way of using Photoshop is pretty idiosyncratic; that’s not a surprise since most people end up informally learning just a few features of PS and often don’t know the simplest way to do a thing, but I have no idea why she’s using the “Smart Object” feature at all. Cleaning up scanned line art is always somewhat tedious but if you just bump the contrast way up to start with, most of the dust and lint will drop out right away. I wouldn’t necessarily take Photoshop advice from myself but I would definitely not advise anyone to take it from Sanderson. 3. Sanderson’s pasting of images into Microsoft Word is also unusual, although without knowing more about what the page layout requirements are I couldn’t say why she’s doing it.

  24. A fun thing to do with autocorrect in the iOS messaging app, and maybe other messaging apps that I don’t have first-hand experience of, is to make auto-generated messages from scratch. The app always has suggestions available, even before you’ve started typing, even at the beginning of a sentence. So you can just pick one and go. Our family members do this sometimes on the family group-chat.

    “The best thing about being able to see what happens when you have a great way to go back and forth between two countries in Asia is not to mention me.”
    “Thanks to my mom just said I had a great way to go back and I don’t think I’m going to the gym today and it is not the same thing to say I have a great way to go back and I don’t think I’m going to the gym today.”
    “I’m so excited for my birthday in the first place.”

    Now, this gets old after awhile, so you want to ration it…

  25. I was at PenguiCon last weekend, and absolute highlight was hearing Catherynne M. Valente read from her super-secret project. It is truly awesome. *beams*

    It’s possible Gucci knows something more about the economies and sweatshops of the Underworld than the rest of us do…

    Re: Autocorrect. One of my friends has been engaging in a long running prank of changing an autocorrect into something bizzare each time she hands him her phone. “Facebook” into “face-eating sharks,” and so on. She finally ended the game by tripping the one that corrected to “Matt has been changing the autocorrects on my phone.”

  26. On VR/smartphones vs. The Real World –

    Generally I enjoy the webcomic Little Tales, It’s mainly a quasi-biological slice-of-life (except for the Wednesday edition, which is a retelling of The Man Who Was Thursday) that’s done in the anthro/furry style (including Thursday). It tends to make me giggle.

    Except one strip got right up my nose. Since I’m not prepared to dig it up out of the archives and link it, I’ll describe it. Basically, the setting is a New Year’s Eve fireworks display, and the inspiration is one person who’s got his nose in his smartphone instead of looking up at the pretty lights and going Ooooh! aaahhh! like everyone else. And the webcomic author takes that as inspiration to, as RedWombat put it, concern troll about how sad it is when people are so wrapped up in what’s online they can’t see what’s right in front of them in Real Life.

    It infuriated me. Who is she to tell people that they’re doing fireworks appreciation wrong? How does she know that the smartphone user isn’t actually taking snaps of the fireworks and sending them to a distant loved one, so as to share that moment with them?

    Guess I wasn’t done ranting about THE INTERNET IS TOO REAL LIFE the other day after all.

  27. I just now realized that I pissed a few people off with my comment on VR yesterday. Wasn’t trying to troll anyone, concern style or otherwise, though I see now how my comment could have touched a nerve if you’ve been on the receiving end of too many lectures on that theme. I like throwing my two cents around sometimes but am generally uninterested in getting in arguments or telling people they’re doing life wrong or whatever.

  28. Re: Smartphones vs. real world, is this where I mention a TV commercial broadcast during the Christmas shopping season which showed “typical teen” just staring at their smartphone during all the Obligatory Family Stuff… and the punchline is that on Christmas morning the family finds they’ve put together a Heartwarming Video capturing all the Obligatory Family Stuff to send to a distant relative…? Yes, obviously smarmy and product-placey, but it still had an element of truth to it. Judging is easy if you don’t have all the facts.

  29. @sunhawk – I’m headed to New Orleans this weekend for birding with friends! Swamps! Bayous! Rails! Crawfish over rice!

  30. @RedWombat on May 2, 2016 at 3:51 pm said:

    @sunhawk – I’m headed to New Orleans this weekend for birding with friends! Swamps! Bayous! Rails! Crawfish over rice!

    Have all the fun! Hopefully you’ll have better weather than what Dad just reported from the last weekend of Jazz Fest – apparently they got rained out like woah. Here’s to the best birding weather and lots of wonderful meals! My intense jealousy goes with you. 😀

  31. @NelC, I have disabled autocorrect on my phone before and it’s fine. My spelling is pretty good and it doesn’t help with grammar anyway. But I get bored with texting if I have to type out every single word, and then my kids nag me about being monosyllabic. Which, fair point, they’re already being understanding about my intense dislike of phone calls.

    This trick of correcting things as I hit send – plus doubling wordswords – is new and it may send me back to “yep,” “nope,” and emojis for awhile.

    I’ve just spent five days on the edge of the Sonoran Desert, where I saw a lot of hummingbird pairs, something I don’t recall seeing before. I saw other birds nesting, but maybe hummingbird mating season is later?

  32. Crawfish étouffée, yum yum. (Had some for lunch last week and it was delicious.)

  33. I’ve just spent five days on the edge of the Sonoran Desert, where I saw a lot of hummingbird pairs, something I don’t recall seeing before. I saw other birds nesting, but maybe hummingbird mating season is later?

    Well…hummingbirds are weird.

    By weird, I mean that once they mate, the male leaves and provides no paternal care at all. But they also engage in some very peculiar behaviors, including what is best described as “nectar-based prostitution” where males controlling a particularly good resource, like a flowering tree, will allow females access if they mate, but will drive off enemy males and females not interested. (There’s some interesting studies–apparently the females aren’t just going “sexy male with his own tree!” they’ll mate with whoever has control of the food sources.)

    I can’t speak to why Sonoran hummingbirds are currently pairing off, but y’know.

  34. @L: For what it’s worth, I was completely baffled by the response to your gripe about VR, and still have no idea how it could be read as “concern trolling” (unless “concern trolling” now means something totally different than it used to*). I think it’s totally legitimate to sometimes feel like the world is throwing a constant stream of distracting gadgets at you. I have no problem with other people sending each other cool videos or whatever— doesn’t mean I want to be staring at screens all day every day.

    (* As I’ve always understood it, a “concern troll” would be if Anon Q. Notapuppy said something like “File770 commenters shouldn’t say bad things about the Puppies, because that’ll make them look intolerant and then everyone will take the Puppies’ side, and heavens knows I wouldn’t want that to happen.” It makes no sense as a description of any sincerely held opinion about something the commenter is personally and openly unhappy with.)

  35. @RedWombat – Ohhhhhhh I am super jealous! Food AND nature, together, so beautiful it brings a tear to my eye ^____^ Eat many delicious shrimps for me! :9 Are you doing any picture taking? I do amateur nature photography when I can, brings me lots of joy (and even an award, one time – woo!) 😀

    Also, watching hummingbird males fight over a feeder, chasing each other away with angry squeaking is super funny XD

  36. @Eli – Hmm, we may have different understanding of “concern troll.” I always think of it with stuff like strangers going “Oooh, won’t you be healthier if you lose a few pounds? I’m just Worried About You.”

    If you’re showing up to pour unasked-for concern on people, when you don’t know their situation, because you are Just Worried About Them for things that you THINK must be wrong with them (unhealthy, ignoring the real world, etc etc) then that’s what I think of as concern trolling.

  37. My understanding of the term “trolling” is that it is a deliberate attempt to piss others off for one’s own entertainment. As opposed to just stating one’s thought, which others may find disagreeable.

    ETA: to be clear, I thought of my post as more “just stating one’s thought” as I had no intention of pissing off anyone. Alas.

  38. I think of concern trolling as something like “think of the children (or some other group of which you aren’t a member).” Worry about someone’s health because they’re eating while not thin is a few more degrees of toxicity past concern and well into complete obnoxiousness, at least for me.

    @RedWombat – (There’s some interesting studies–apparently the females aren’t just going “sexy male with his own tree!” they’ll mate with whoever has control of the food sources.)

    I was surrounded by flowering trees, shrubs, cacti and vines, so that might explain the late mating season. Now that I’m back home, hummingbirds are singular, which is what I’m used to.

  39. @L – “Concern trolling” is different from regular or other types of trolling. It might be helpful to think of when people evoke a sentiment such as “Won’t someone think of the children?” when attempting to express disapproval of something – taking it one step further by trying to suggest the disapproval is meant for the benefit of others, rather that just an expression of dislike.

    **ETA: omg Cheryl beat me to saying the same thing lol **

    If you say “I don’t personally use my smartphone as much, as I feel it distracts me from what’s happening in front of me” that would just one person sharing what they prefer or how they’ve experienced something. But you said ” 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.” – there’s a lot of assumptions to unpack there, about individuals and about society itself, that you are now making a broader statement about others. It creates a false dicotomy between enjoying technology and enjoying the world around us. I personally feel there is no divide, the technological world IS the world around us, it is increasingly part of our daily lives and how we get things done. And sometimes technology and non-tech life aspects come together in some really cool new ways, I think it does people and tech a disservice to reduce this fascinating relationship as just “people absorbed in their devices oblivious to the world around them”. I get why people felt it put their fur back a bit.

  40. I’m fine with people telling me why I am mistaken or why my comment bothered them or why my statement was reductive or making assumptions or whatever. I am really fine with people disagreeing with me, and I’m perfectly willing to concede I may be wrong. I am not all that fine with getting called a troll.

  41. @L – no one called you a troll, they said you were speaking in a way that had “concern trolling” overtones. If you kept showing up only to make similar remarks, THEN someone MIGHT call you a concern troll, but that hasn’t happened yet.

  42. Jim Henley on May 2, 2016 at 9:37 am said:
    A fun thing to do with autocorrect in the iOS messaging app, and maybe other messaging apps that I don’t have first-hand experience of, is to make auto-generated messages from scratch.

    You might have given my phone ideas. I just got a message from my mom saying she’d gotten her phone back, etc. When I opened the actual text (instead of looking at the preview), I found “Glad you got your Samsung” preloaded as a response.

    @L, this probably won’t help, but at some point being a troll and trolling got a divorce. In any case, I certainly don’t think you’re a troll, although I do disagree. I take my phone backcountry hiking and find technology and the wilderness go well together and I’m excited by the possibilities of VR (which my phone tried to correct to VD).

  43. @L – really, I was gonna let it drop, you apologized, it’s all good! But then it got into defining concern trolling and y’know.

  44. Eli:

    “(* As I’ve always understood it, a “concern troll” would be if Anon Q. Notapuppy said something like “File770 commenters shouldn’t say bad things about the Puppies, because that’ll make them look intolerant and then everyone will take the Puppies’ side, and heavens knows I wouldn’t want that to happen.” It makes no sense as a description of any sincerely held opinion about something the commenter is personally and openly unhappy with.)”

    Agree. A concern troll, as I have seen it used, is someone who poses as a friend, but in reality is a critic. The troll will pretend it only says things with your best interest in mind while in reality arguing for the position of tour opponents or trying to change focus.

    If the expression has started to mean something else now, I must have missed it.

  45. Common disease among filers. No resistance towards discussions about definitions.

    Savingthrow -20.

  46. I first encountered the phrase “concern trolling” as a way to describe an online argument style that claims to be on your side but is “concerned” that your points are undermining your cause by being too strident, too aggressive, too broad-spectrum, too whatever. Sort of a species of tone argument, but instead of “You’re too angry, so you’re point’s invalid,” it’s more “You have a good point, but unless you can tone down that anger no one will listen to you.”

    Or see: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Concern_troll

    I think the way RedWombat used the term in this discussion makes perfect sense, and is useful, but I do acknowledge it represents a certain amount of semantic drift.

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