193 thoughts on “Off On A Comment 8/25”

  2. Lurkertype
    If the idea of Sad Puppies going forward is to highlight neat things and ignore the Hugos, why keep the “Sad” moniker? Unless, of course, it’s a marketing term for MGC and they don’t care if it makes any sense or not, plus too much work to change it. They ought to be “Happy Puppies”

    Or they could go with a name that basically means the something similar – the better to link back to their heritage – but doesn’t use the dreaded “p” word so hated by so many outside their group. Maybe something that doesn’t imply they’re so domesticated as puppies since they seem to value a certain free-spiritedness, even while being part of a pack.

    I shall call them Sorrowful Juvenile Wolves.

  6. Re: The Peshawar Lancers

    Thanks for the replies. I wonder if it might just be that most of my friends are close to my age so if they like adventure fiction like The Peshawar Lancers they have already read a fair amount of it and if they did not they were not likely to like The Peshawar Lancers.

    Of course a number of my friends who did not like The Peshawar Lancers like space opera, so who knows.

  7. Re: Peshawar Lancers

    I’m a moderate fan of Stirling. I really liked Conquistador. Yes, it has racist characters, but they have other dimensions as well, and their racism isn’t portrayed with approval or sympathy.

    Liked the Nantucket books.

    Liked the first few of the Emberverse books, but as the series went on, my interest waned. It was best when it was most connected to the “real” (non-alternate) history, and as time marched on, that connection weakened.

    Peshawar, however, left me a little cold. I read the first 100 or so pages, put it down, and realized a couple of months later that I had never picked it back up. Started over, and soon realized that I wasn’t too interested in finishing it. I don’t have a good explanation why, I just didn’t care for it the way I did some of his other books.

  8. I have had many encounters with live possums throughout my life.

    It sounds like you really appreciate them. That is awesome; it means the world is once again larger than I knew.

    I find it hard to be too upset with an animal who’s entire defense strategy is becoming so terrified that they loose consciousness. Possums for the most part very laid back animals. I’m more concerned when a raccoon wanders up on my porch–and would not be apathetic about having one of those end up in my house. Raccoons are vicious bastards. And also, of course potential rabies carriers. Opossums almost never have rabies thanks to their low body temperature. (Of course, I’m thrilled by the fact that armadillos are expanding their territory to my part of the country even though they can carry leprosy–and I’d love to have a giant fruit bad even though it is speculated that they can be carriers for ebola.)

    BTW, all this possum talk has jinxed me. It had been over a year since the last time I had a possum encounter, but last night I was working on my computer, heard loud crunching of cat food, looked around to see who it was, and it was a medium sized possum.

  9. Petréa Mitchell (re nearby alien life): But there are still hopes for the oceans of Europa, the recently-discovered ocean on Enceladus Gah! I \just/ read about those (I’m still a couple of months behind in both Discover and Smithsonian) and completely blanked. TFTR.

    Darren Garrison: how close would two bodies have to be to provide tidal heating enough to liquefy water, when the solar input is so insignificant? Petréa’s examples have huge primaries; I suppose Pluto/Charon is possible, since they’re so close the center-of-orbit is above Pluto’s surface — but that’s a unique case.

    Hampus Eckerman: was there anything fantastical in Prince Valiant? ISTM that a pure historical (even if the history is fiction)is a poor choice for a Hugo, regardless of its quality. (I suppose this could be argued endlessly — cf whether Apollo 13 was eligible for BDP — but the voters’ decision is final.)

    Rob Chilson: TFTverification — I thought it was the Hagopian (local artist) cover, but misremembered the hue.

    PhilRM: “Yvonne, I’ve told you that in private a simple ‘sir’ suffices.”

  10. @Chip was there anything fantastical in Prince Valiant?

    Yes. It had elements of magic (Merlin from King Arthur’s Round Table, an enchanted sword), and dragons.

  11. Also a fight with Death, a fairy in Merlins garden, magic to look into the future, demon summoning and teleportation.

  12. Come to think of it, I think there was a dinosaur also… Seems like most people only remember the later Prince Valiiant. The fantastic elements didn’t disappear until after 1942.

  13. Darren Garrison on August 26, 2016 at 7:48 am said:

    BTW, all this possum talk has jinxed me. It had been over a year since the last time I had a possum encounter, but last night I was working on my computer, heard loud crunching of cat food, looked around to see who it was, and it was a medium sized possum.

    We have met the enemy and he is us.

  14. how close would two bodies have to be to provide tidal heating enough to liquefy water, when the solar input is so insignificant?

    That’s a bit of a math question (see formula in wiki link.) Something I didn’t think about in my earlier comment is that the two bodies will need to be not mutually tidally locked like Pluto and Charon, because the tidal stresses need to move around and squeeze and compress the rock/ice. So there would need to be a significant size difference between the two objects for one to continue to tidally heat the other.

    There’s probably nothing past Pluto in our solar system that meets the tidal heating criteria, but in theory there could be.something out there with liquid water, even in interstellar space. See this paper and the less technical media summaries

    Pretty soon, possums came to visit and (not at all coincidentally) eat cat food. They were very well mannered and got along with my cats.

    Yes, cats seem to treat possums with a general sense of apathy when they are not near their infant kittens. Hanging out with older kittens doesn’t seem to concern them. (See this photo.)

  15. Darren, your picture link shows me lots of ads but no picture, at least on my tablet. I’d really like to see it….

  16. Hampus Eckerman said:

    The fantastic elements didn’t disappear until after 1942.

    It’s not like they’re completely gone, either. I’ve been reading it on and off since the ’90s, and Prince Valiant still has a magic sword and occasionally has to deal with fantastical enemies. The current story arc has him trying to stop a wizard who has just gotten hold of a powerful magical artifact.

  20. Darren, that photo is too adorable for words.

    There were two of them that wandered up to eat with the kittens, but that was the best photo I got. (It was very unusual that they showed up in the middle of the day–possums are usual crepuscular/nocturnal.)

    Did you see the other possum photos (some much less cute) that are sprinkled about in the photobucket folder link I posted yesterday? You’ll get a much closer look in an adult possum’s mouth than you ever realized you wanted.

  21. Cheryl S.: I used to live in a second story apartment with three cats who insisted they were not indoor animals except at night, so I put a board from my balcony to a neighboring fence. Pretty soon, possums came to visit and (not at all coincidentally) eat cat food. They were very well mannered and got along with my cats. The cats and possums also made common cause against the neighborhood raccoons, chasing them off nightly until the raccoons moved on. Also, baby possums are impossibly cute.

    This story is so adorable, it made me go “awwwww”. 🙂

  26. lauowolf on August 25, 2016 at 2:38 pm said:

    “Next year Worldcon is in Helsinki so I highly suspect attendance to dwindle,

    Don’t forget the Sekrit Trans-Atlantic SJW Fund!

    And we’re organizing a pre-con tour by Giant Lighter-Than-Air-But-Not-Using-Hydrogen Stuffed Possum Dirigible. (We’d ride in the pouch.) Currently expecting to start in Chicago, with pickups in DC, NYC, Bangor, and Halifax! Baggage limits strictly enforced, but there will be fabulous satband Internet, great for the bloggers (and Netflixers).

  27. Daniel Dern on August 26, 2016 at 3:07 pm said:
    lauowolf on August 25, 2016 at 2:38 pm said:
    “Next year Worldcon is in Helsinki so I highly suspect attendance to dwindle,

    That was the guy I was quoting that said that.
    Me, I think there are lots of fans in Europe.

  28. @Darren: your delightful story summoned forth a possum! You are a magical storyteller.

    @MrDalliard: I like the way that term sounds in your avatar’s voice.

    @Daniel Dern, can the Giant Possum Dirigible start a bit farther west? Or do we fear that helium-filled possums can’t make it over the Sierras and Rockies? Will there be a stop in Iceland?

    And can someone draw a Giant Possum Dirigible? Sounds much more interesting than the dreaded Spicy Oriental Zeppelin.

  30. I forgot to mention the time that I was in bed nearly asleep when I felt a small hand tug my hair–which was of course the possum climbing between the head of my bed and the wall. (Which still wasn’t as disconcerting as the time I slid my hand under my pillow and on top of a coiled snake.)

  32. Gah! Where did that happen?

    Not sure what you mean, but it was at home, in my own bed, in South Carolina. (Obviously not Australia, given that I’m not currently dead.)

  33. (whispering to other Filers) If @Darren Garrison invites you to stay at his home, run! He’s just trying to feed the menagerie! 😉

  35. Yeah, my window screens tend to have been on the losing side of a battle with a cat that suddenly decided that it wanted to be outside.

  39. Darren’s story about the snake in his bed reminded me of the time when I was a Girl Scout leader on a troop camp-out and one of the girls announced that she had found a snake in her sleeping bag. My mental reaction to this claim could be summed up at “1. There isn’t a snake in her sleeping bag; and 2. If there is, it’s a tiny little garter snake and [name redacted] is going to throw a fit and wake the whole park;”–

    So you can imagine my surprise when the bag was dumped upside down and a big bull snake as long as my arm and almost the same diameter as my wrist slid out. I stayed calm (‘stays calm in front of the children’ was one of my strengths as GS leader), and the girls had various reactions between waking the whole park with their alarm and “oh, cool!”

    Eventually the other leader and I got them to go back to bed, and by breakfast the next morning the girls had named the long-escaped snake ‘George’ and declared him to be the troop mascot. Camping with that group of girls was so much fun. 😀

  40. This thread is proof that we need more wildlife stories from Darren.

    Okay, another wildlife story. This is probably my funniest one.

    I’m unapologetically atheist now, but I was raised in a conservative Southern Baptist Church in a Southern Baptist family, and went through the motions of staying in church rather than make waves—plus I had friends in the church that I enjoyed spending time with anyway. So one time in my late teens our church was having an overnight “lock in” for the youth group, supervised by the husband and wife youth leaders. A female friend and I (along with maybe 2 or 3 others) were sitting and talking on the long covered porch that ran across the front of the “fellowship hall” when I noticed a large leopard slug crawling up the side of the porch beside me. I picked it up and held it in my hand for a minute or two, then on impulse placed it on the arm of the female friend (she was bookish, analytical, and sort of stoic like myself—I took it for granted that she wouldn’t be flapped by a creepy-crawly.) She didn’t say a word about it, just occasionally glancing down at the slug while we continued talking. The slug soon relaxed and began to slowly crawl across her arm. This was the moment that the wife half of the youth leader team happened to walk up to us. She gets right up on us before she notices the slug on my friend’s arm—at which point she screams “oh shit!”, turns, and runs in the opposite direction.

    (After all the laughter died down and we could breathe again, my friend finally asked me to take back the slug.)

  41. I think if I lived where Darren does, I’d invest in air conditioning so I could keep the doors and windows closed to prevent fewer critter and varmint invasions. Although the youth pastor cussing in front of the young’uns is a great story.

    Camestros: Thanks! Can they be more festive? I mean, we are taking them to Worldcon.

  42. [ Using Usenettish right-arrows because I’m hoping this is less unclear than F770’s “quote” within a nested context – DPD ]

    lauowolf on August 26, 2016 at 9:21 pm said:

    > Daniel Dern on August 26, 2016 at 3:07 pm said:
    >> lauowolf on August 25, 2016 at 2:38 pm said:
    >>“Next year Worldcon is in Helsinki so I highly suspect attendance to dwindle,
    > That was the guy I was quoting that said that.
    > Me, I think there are lots of fans in Europe.

    My apologies for the mis-attribution, and thanks for the correction.

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