Pixel Scroll 1/24/18 You Can Get Anything You Want At Filer’s Pixel Rant

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(1) WORLDCON 76 MEMBERSHIPS SPONSORED FOR MEXICANX FANS, CREATORS. Artist John Picacio, a Worldcon 76 guest of honor, and John Scalzi, are funding four memberships —

John Scalzi, who will fund a pair of the memberships, also publicized the announcement on Whatever: “John Picacio Offering Worldcon Memberships to Mexicanx Fans and Creators”.

(2) COMMEMORATION. Naomi Novik was asked by the New York Times to write an appreciation of Ursula K. LeGuin. She responded with a poem — “For Ursula” – which begins:

I want to tell you something true
Because that’s what she did.
I want to take you down a road she built, only I don’t want to follow it to the end.
I want to step off the edge and go into the underbrush
Clearing another way, because that’s also what she taught
Not how to repave her road but how to lay another
Even if it meant the grass came through the cracks of the pavement, and the thicket ate it up.

(3) DID YOU REMEMBER? Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin were at Berkeley High School at the same time in 1947. However, it spoils the story to add that they didn’t know each other…. See “When Ursula K. Le Guin & Philip K. Dick Went to High School Together” at Open Culture from 2016.

(4) OF ACE BOOPS. Doctor Strangemind’s Kim Huett draws this great anecdote from the pages of a classic Australian fanzine — “Ursula Le Guin & Her Elusive Hugo!”.

And now for my favourite Ursula Le Guin letter, one which highlights the two things I like best in an author, a lack of pretentiousness and a sense of humour. The following letter appeared in Philosophical Gas #2, published by John Bangsund in October 1970. The Hugo in question was awarded to Ursula for The Left Hand of Darkness at Heicon ’70, the worldcon held in Heidelberg, Germany in August of 1970. I assume the rocket was accepted on Ursula’s behalf by Terry Carr of Ace Books (which would explain a lot).

(5) SFWA AFFIRMED. Jennifer Brozek on “SFWA and its Community”:

Last night, I went to the SFWA Reading to see my friends Josh Vogt, Greg Bear, and Tod McCoy read. I realized something: I’d missed my SFWA community. These are people I only see at conventions and SFWA events. I’d been so busy with my own stuff lately, and needed some distance from the organization after I stepped down as a Director-At-Large, that I’d pulled away too much. That was the wrong approach, but I suppose it was one I needed at the time.

It’s hard to express just how good it feels to be in a room full of like-minded people who all understand why losing one of the greats like Ursula K. Le Guin is such a tragedy or why naming Peter S. Beagle as SFWA’s newest Grand Master is such a joy. So many of the people I met up with last night are at various points in their writing careers. It was like looking at my past, present, and future writing self. They all understood the language of the writing professional and the publishing industry. It felt like coming home. It felt like family.

Recently, SFWA has had to deal with some tough issues. All of them center around protecting its membership at large. I know, intimately, what they’ve been going through—all the time spent, the discussions had, the decisions made—and I’m proud of the Board. I think, with the evidence they had on hand, they did the only thing they could do to protect the SFWA organization and the community they’ve built.

(6) MORE ON COMMUNITY. SFWA President Cat Rambo tweeted —

(7) RETURN OF THE SHADOW CLARKE JURY. CSFF Anglia has empaneled a new Shadow Clarke Jury for 2018 — Gary K. Wolfe, Alasdair Stuart, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Nick Hubble, Samira Nadkarni, and Foz Meadows. (Speller and Hubble are the only returning Sharkes.)

Dr. Helen Marshall, General Director of the Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy says in “And Now for a Word from our Hosts” —

The Arthur C. Clarke Award has long been an excellent point of reference for taking stock of the changes in the field. It has a deliberately loose mandate to identify the “best” science fiction book of the year, acknowledging that the definition of “best” must be decided by a changing pool of jurors on an annual basis. The Clarke shortlist and the eventual winner showcase the work that has been done in the field, providing an intriguing snapshot of a field in flux. Since its inception the award has been at the heart of a robust critical discussion which interrogates the centre of the genre, its heartland, as well as the margins, where the genre pushes outward. This is why we’ve chosen the Clarke Award submissions list as a starting point for our discussions, and why we return to their shortlist in our discussions.

…What a shadow jury might do, then, is bring these debates into sharper focus. We believe the criticism is valuable, and that detailed, provocative, and respectful criticism enhances our understanding of the text and the cultures which produced it. This form of criticism is not intended to serve the needs of marketers or publicists but those of readers and writers. It aims not only to make visible but also to illuminate and contextualise.

Shadow Clarke juror Maureen Kincaid Speller’s manifesto for the return engagement, “You’re Never Alone with a Critic – Shadowing the Clarke Award, 2018”, says in part —

Here’s the thing – a critic’s job is not to provide plot synopses, nor is it to tell you whether or not you’ll like a novel. It is definitely not a critic’s job to act as an unpaid publicity agent. A critic’s job is to look at the fiction itself, and to have a view about it. Critics write about all sorts of things. They think about where a text sits in relation to other works of sf, they explore themes, tease out aesthetic similarities and differences; they consider what a novel says about the world at large, and, yes, they make judgement based on their experience as informed readers. Which is, if you think about it, exactly the same kind of work as that carried out by an award jury.

Which makes it all the more puzzling that criticism per se has become so frowned upon in the last few years. Is it just that people don’t want to admit this is what is going on behind the scenes? Is it because the word ‘criticism’ carries two meanings, one analytical, the other disapproving? We couldn’t tell but we were fascinated by this pushback against the Shadow Clarke project and decided we needed to explore it further. So, we have decided to run the project for a second year, and this time, rather than simply focusing on the Clarke Award, we’re taking the opportunity to use the shortlisting process as a springboard to exploring the business of criticism more broadly, because we continue to believe that critical analysis has a vital role to play when it comes to talking about science fiction.

(8) STRONG ATTACHMENT. Live Science reports the discovery of a “1.7-Billion-Year-Old Chunk of North America Found Sticking to Australia”.

Geologists matching rocks from opposite sides of the globe have found that part of Australia was once attached to North America 1.7 billion years ago.

Researchers from Curtin University in Australia examined rocks from the Georgetown region of northern Queensland. The rocks — sandstone sedimentary rocks that formed in a shallow sea — had signatures that were unknown in Australia but strongly resembled rocks that can be seen in present-day Canada.

Will this open the way for an Aussie Worldcon with adjacent NASFiC?

(9) WHO IS COMING. LA’s premiere Doctor Who convention takes place in three weeks, and the program has been posted: “Gallifrey One 2018 Schedule of Events Now Online”.

With great pleasure, Gallifrey One today is proud to announce the release of our Schedule of Events for our upcoming convention, The 29 Voyages of Gallifrey One in February. As in prior years, we are using the Sched online scheduling system for a seamless and easy-to-navigate program that can be used on your desktop or mobile device….

Full Screen (General Purpose) version
Fully viewable version, with custom views of events, searchable, plus panelist and guest listings
http://gallifreyone2018.sched.com

(10) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • January 24, 1984 — Apple Computer, Inc. introduced the Macintosh personal computer.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) RON ELLIK AND THE RONVENTION (1962). Although I never met LASFS member Ron Ellik, who died before I ever joined the club, he was a well-known newzine editor (Starspinkle) and influence on Bruce Pelz, who kept his friend’s name alive in the title of his annual wine and cheese party that I attended for years. Now Rob Hansen gives us new reasons to remember him —

Ron Ellik in 1962.

This year’s Eastercon is being held in Harrogate for the first time in more than half a century. Known as the RONVENTION, that earlier one was organised by Ron Bennett and attended by TAFF-winner Ron Ellik, hence the name. At the January first-Thursday pub meeting here in London, Eastercon committee and staff persons Mark Plummer and Caroline Mullan asked me if I could add a section on the RONVENTION to my website that they could link to. Since this was one of those I’d always intended to get around to I was happy to oblige. I drew mainly from conreports by James White and the two Rons when putting it together: “Ronvention, the 1962 Eastercon”.

I’m uploading this earlier than originally intended because of something I realised after I started work on it, namely that tomorrow, 25th January, is the fiftieth anniversary of Ron Ellik’s death at the tragically young age of 30. So I’m publishing it today in memory of him.

Weird to think that when Ron died, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were still alive, the Beatles were still together, and astronauts had yet to leave Earth orbit and strike out for the moon.

(13) OSCAR ISSUE. The Washington Post’s Cindy Boren, in “Kobe Bryant’s Oscar nod rings awkward in a year Hollywood is hyper-focused on sexual assault”, says Dear Basketball, an Oscar nominee for Best Animated Short Film, may be in trouble because, despite its John Williams score and Glen Keane animation, it features Kobe Bryant, who settled a sexual assault case in 2003 for a substantial sum in an out-of-court settlement.

(14) WOEBEGONE. The MPR News (Minnesota Public Radio) post “Investigation: For some who lived in it, Keillor’s world wasn’t funny” has more information on the firing of Garrison Keillor. Several incidents are described at the link.

For weeks, Minnesota Public Radio refused MPR News’ repeated requests to comment on the company’s separation from Keillor. But as negotiations with Keillor’s company stalled and pressure from news organizations mounted, Jon McTaggart, president and CEO of MPR and American Public Media Group, broke his silence.

In an interview with MPR News Tuesday afternoon, he said the company’s separation of business interests from Keillor came after it received allegations of “dozens” of sexually inappropriate incidents involving Keillor and a woman who worked for him on A Prairie Home Companion. He said the allegations included requests for sexual contact and descriptions of unwanted sexual touching.

McTaggart, who after the interview with MPR News sent an email to MPR listeners and members further explaining the separation from Keillor, says cutting Keillor off was the most painful decision he’s made as CEO. But in-house and external investigations into the matter bore details he could not ignore.

“When we reached a point that from all sources we had sufficient confidence in facts that really required us to act, we took the action we did,” he said. “It was the right thing to do. It was the necessary thing to do, and we stand by it.”

Since the firing, Prairie Home Companion has been renamed Live From Here.

(15) WHAT FATE. Charles McNulty ponders “As artists fall into disgrace, must their art be consigned to oblivion?” at the Los Angeles Times.

The cavalier way men have systemically abused their power over women in and around the workplace warrants little leniency. But a more slippery question has emerged in this me-too moment of cultural reckoning: What to do with the works of artists whose conduct has been abhorrent?

In the growing gallery of alleged predators, there aren’t any artists I hold dear. James Toback’s films aren’t in my Netflix queue. I never mistook Kevin Spacey for one of the greats. And my admiration for James Levine’s conducting has been mostly of the dilettantish variety.

But inevitably a contemporary artist with whom I feel a special kinship will shatter my illusions about his or her character. I doubt that I will throw away the books or delete the recordings or swear off the films. I’m sure I’ll be disillusioned and quite possibly disgusted, but I know that an artist is not identical with his or her masterpieces and that few human beings can live up to their greatest achievements.

This is a theme that Marcel Proust returns to in his epic novel, “In Search of Lost Time” (more romantically known in English as “Remembrance of Things Past”). The narrator recalls a dinner party in which, as a young man, he meets his hero, the writer Bergotte. The young Marcel, intimidated to be seated among the important guests of the swanky Swanns, is struck immediately by the way Bergotte bears no physical resemblance to the man he had “slowly and painstakingly constructed … a drop at a time, like a stalactite, out of the limpid beauty of his books.”

More distressing to Marcel than Bergotte’s coarse appearance is “the busy and self-satisfied mentality … which had nothing in common with the type of mind that informed the books.” The narrator, a natural philosopher, begins to understand through this encounter that art is not contingent on the specific circumstances of an artist’s life.

(16) SF HISTORY. Michael Dirda, in “An expert’s guide to science fiction’s greatest — and neglected — works”, reviews the companion volume to A Conversation larger than the Universe, an exhibit on view at The Grolier Club in New York City from January 25 through March 10 (see the January 19 Pixel Scroll, item 7).

Being well-read both inside and outside the genre, Wessells contends that the first major work of alternate history was a 1931 collection of essays, edited by J.C. Squire, titled “If It Had Happened Otherwise.” Its fanciful “lapses into imaginary history” include “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” by none other than Winston Churchill. Wessells also lingers over one of the most chilling dystopian novels of the 20th century, “Swastika Night,” written by Katharine Burdekin under the pen name Murray Constantine. Drafted in 1936 and published in 1937, it projects a Nazified far-future Europe where Hitler is worshiped as an Aryan god and women are kept in pens as breeding animals. (For more about this remarkable book, I recommend Daphne Patai’s excellent Feminist Press edition or the Gollancz SF Masterworks paperback, for which I wrote a short introduction.)

(17) A COMFORTING DOOM. Jill Lepore’s “A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction” in the June 5-12 New Yorker last summer, is an essay-review of several dystopian novels, including Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway and Ben H. Winters’s Underground Airlines. Martin Morse Wooster flagged up its quotable last paragraph:

Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of fake news and infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness. It cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one.  It nurses grievances and indulges resentments; it doesn’t call for courage; it finds that cowardice suffices.  Its only admonition is:  Despair more.  It appeals to both the left and the right, because, in the end, it requires so little by way of literary, political, or moral imagination, asking only that you enjoy the company of people whose fear of the future aligns comfortably with your own.  Left or right, the radical pessimism of an unremitting dystopianism has itself contributed to the unravelling ot the liberal state and the weakening of a commitment to political pluralism. ‘This isn’t a story about war,’ (Omar) El Akkad writes in American War.  ‘It’s about ruin.’  A story about ruin can be beautiful.  Wreckage is romantic.  But a politics of ruin is doomed.

(18) UP IN THE AIR. Maybe we’ll get them after all? “Degree in ‘flying car’ engineering offered online”.

The online course is being offered by Silicon Valley e-learning school Udacity and will begin in February.

It is the brainchild of former Stanford University professor Sebastian Thrun, who previously headed up Google’s self-driving car project, Waymo.

Prof Thrun is hoping to attract at least 10,000 applicants to what he is describing as a “nanodegree”.

A nanodegree, according to Udacity’s website, is an online certification that can be earned in six to 12 months, and aims to teach basic programming skills in various disciplines.

…Previously Udacity has offered a self-driving car course, which has attracted 50,000 applicants since 2016.

(19) KIDS PUT IT TOGETHER. “K’Nex builds toys rollercoaster you can ride in VR”. (Video) A little like those model railroad trains with the tiny camera on the front – only a lot faster.

Toy-maker K’Nex has designed a toy rollercoaster kit that children can assemble and then “ride” by wearing a virtual reality headset.

The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones tried it out at the Toy Fair 2018 exhibition in London.

(20) VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA. BBC reports “A submersible mission in Antarctic waters has revealed unique ecosystems so rare they deserve special protection, say scientists.” — “Antarctica’s Weddell Sea ‘deserves protected status'”.

The seabed investigation, co-ordinated by the campaign group Greenpeace, will help build the case for the creation of the world’s largest wildlife sanctuary.

Covering 1.8 million sq km, the marine reserve will be considered by Antarctic nations at a conference in October.

It would ban all fishing in a large part of the Weddell Sea.

… Along with the smaller creatures that live on the seafloor, the reserve would bring additional protection to larger animals such as leopard seals, orcas, humpback whales and penguins.

(21) WETTER RESISTANCE. The BBC’s Nicholas Barber argues “Why ‘The Shape of Water’ is the most relevant film of the year”.

All things considered, the savvy choice for best picture might be Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water, which has been nominated in a whopping 13 different categories. Admittedly, it’s yet another film with a male director, but it does have a female co-writer, Vanessa Taylor, and a female lead, Sally Hawkins, and it passes the Bechdel Test within minutes. If that weren’t enough, it has major black and gay characters, as well as a South American immigrant; true, he’s a half-human, half-newt South American immigrant, but that’s not the point. More diverse and inclusive than any of the other best picture nominees, the film doesn’t just rail against sexism, racism and homophobia, it argues that they are all symptoms of the same patriarchal disease – a disease which all voiceless and oppressed people should defeat together. In short, The Shape of Water is a lot more militant than the average magic-realist fable about a woman who fancies a fish-monster. What’s more, it’s even more topical now than when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival last August.

(22) WORKSHOP WISDOM. Cynthia Felice shared “Five things I learned at Clarion”. The first is:

  1. Writers who write naked or wearing only a fedora do not write any better than a writer who is fully dressed.

(23) TRAILER PARK TRASH. Cnet doesn’t want you to miss it — “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Trek gets a trashy parody trailer”.

Ever since news emerged that Quentin Tarantino, famous for films like “Pulp Fiction” and “Kill Bill,” had pitched a great idea for a Star Trek movie to film studio Paramount, we’ve been wondering what Tarantino Trek might look like.

We now have one possible answer in the form of “Star Trek: Voyage to Vengeance,” a fake trailer made up of moments from the original series.

The video comes from Nerdist and features a laundry list of some of the original series’ most cringe-worthy moments, including the space hippies and almost everyone Captain Kirk ever kissed.

 

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, JJ, Mark Hepworth, ULTRAGOTHA, Martin Morse Wooster, Michael J. Walsh, Carl Slaughter, Daniel Dern, David K.M. Klaus, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]

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121 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 1/24/18 You Can Get Anything You Want At Filer’s Pixel Rant”

  3. @Chip Hitchcock: ISTR Amis (and Conquest?), in the preface to one of the Spectrum anthologies, noting SF’s optimism, saying that if Brave New World were in-genre it would have had some indication of a brighter future.
    That was Amis & Conquest in Spectrum 5.

  4. Meredith-submitted-without-comment-Moment — Apparently, a bunch of Terry Goodkind eBooks are currently really cheap?

  5. I read through a lot of those Twitter messages, and now I need to know: If I claim to Camestros Felapaton, do I also get him as a husband? Because I could really use someone to chase the bats out of the bedroom while I cower under the sheets.

  9. Camestros Felapton
    Blogger of timothrics
    Camestros Camestros
    Fela-a-apton
    Come, we’ll expose him
    Claim his name is Meadows

    O come let us expose him
    O come let us expose him
    O come let us expose him
    Christ, the Stupid

  11. JJ on January 25, 2018 at 6:39 pm said:
    Over on Twitter, it now appears that everyone is Camestros Felapton.

    Ooh attention.

    @Kurt
    OK I don’t have a response to that 🙂

  13. @bookworm1398: “7) saying ‘I disagree with what you say here’ is not the same as saying ‘I frown on criticism””

    One is not allowed to critique the critics. 😛

    “15) I’ve personally taken the hypocritical position that if I haven’t yet read anything by that artist, I won’t in the future. But if I have read and enjoyed it I won’t throw it away.”

    I don’t feel that’s hypocritical, but I feel similarly, so maybe I’m not the best judge here.

    @Hampus Eckerman: “The Pixel Scroll Shadow Jury”

    LOL!

  14. JJ on January 25, 2018 at 6:39 pm said:

    Over on Twitter, it now appears that everyone is Camestros Felapton.

    In one smooth manoeuvre, the Puppies have made themselves look stupid and Camestros more popular.

  15. Too Many Jens,

    My cats were not interested in the catgrass from the grocery store. The one cat that was interested in eating plants preferred the Sweet Alyssum.

  16. rob_matic: In one smooth manoeuvre, the Puppies have made themselves look stupid and Camestros more popular.

    He’s got 236 Followers now. The Google cache from a few days ago had him at 145. 😀

  18. I thought I wasn’t Camestros, but then I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror and discovered my corporeal form had been replaced with a pleasing geometric pattern.

    I still don’t seem to be married to any Hugo finalists, though.

  20. Arifel: I thought I wasn’t Camestros, but then I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror and discovered my corporeal form had been replaced with a pleasing geometric pattern. I still don’t seem to be married to any Hugo finalists, though.

    I woke up this morning and discovered that last night in a drunken stupor I had married a Hugo-winning photocopier and moved to Edinburgh, Adelaide, South Australia. 😛

  21. Camestros Felapton
    His name is Camestros Felapton
    But that might just be a pseudonym
    But you just wait, you just wait…

  22. @JJ:

    But it’s not others’ place to tell someone they’re not who they say they are ethnically, so if he says that he’s Hispanic I’ll be accepting that at face value.

    Does the ethnicity of the other have no bearing on this? As a constituent of Elizabeth Warren’s, I’ve been watching the argument over whether she can/should/… claim a Native American connection; I was struck by a NA from her part of the US saying that the claim requires acceptance by the tribe, not just genetics.

    Making this comment separately so @OGH can block it if he feels it’s out of line.

  23. @PhilRM: That was Amis & Conquest in Spectrum 5.
    That’s what I thought, but you’ll note I quoted from that preface; I’ve just re-read it for the 2nd time and don’t find the reference. (It mostly discusses Sharke-esque snobbery about “style” and the fact that SF legitimately substitutes person-to-thing relations for the person-to-person relations of mundane work.) I also don’t find this remark in vols III and IV, although I haven’t reread them just now to be sure; I don’t have the first two. Can you point to roughly where in the 4-page preface the reference in Brave New World appears?

  25. @Hampus: I was going to claim that is a strange cat — I’d expect most to snoot broccoli’s sulfuric bitterness — but my partner has seen other broccoli fanciers. OTOH, our late liked the leaves off home-grown radishes (although not as avidly — a lot of begging, then a few bites and some play), so I’ll just quote somebody-or-other (Haldane??) to the effect that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine.

  26. Our cat Asimov loves cucumber. He gets excited by it way more than any other food. He can smell it when I bring some home from the market, and if he knows there is some in the fridge he will demand a snack.

  28. @Chip Hitchcock: This morning my brain tossed up the recollection that what you were referring to was indeed a quote from Kingsley Amis’s New Maps of Hell, and I thought (mistakenly) that it was from the preface to Spectrum 5 (a book I no longer seem to have a copy of, unfortunately, just volumes 3 and 4). However, I just remembered (and verified) that I encountered that quote in the preface to one of the stories in Lloyd Biggle Jr’s collection The Metallic Muse. So mystery solved, sort of.

  29. @Chip Hitchcock: As to why I was so sure it was the preface to Spectrum 5… the mind works in mysterious ways. Perhaps because approvingly quoting himself seemed like such a Kingsley Amis thing to do.

  30. Chip Hitchcock: Does the ethnicity of the other have no bearing on this?

    If I said on File 770 that I had a specific ethnicity in my heritage, I would expect to be believed, without having to provide a family tree as proof (especially since such proof would provide internet trolls with a means of identifying, and harassing, me and people who are related to me).

    If revealing my ethnicity was a means for receiving some financial or other special benefit, then I would have no issue with providing my family tree privately to the person(s) or institution providing me with that benefit (I note that Warren has never received funds nor special privileges for her ancestry).

  31. @JJ

    (I hope I don’t regret this….)

    She may have received a marginal benefit in terms of her professorships at various universities. While it certainly was not the only factor in play, it may have been one of many.

    On another subject, I appreciate your and our esteemed host’s efforts to oppose those questioning JdA’s claimed heritage. Kudos.

    Regards,
    Dann

  32. I don’t question JDA’s claimed heritage; he says he is Hispanic, he’s Hispanic. Period. Without some extremely compelling reason to change my mind, (Vox Day, for instance, has given us good reason to be skeptical of his claims to be anything other than a white person in practice, benefit, or disadvantage – JDA has not given us reason to doubt him) I accept him at his word on this.

  33. Dann: She may have received a marginal benefit in terms of her professorships at various universities. While it certainly was not the only factor in play, it may have been one of many.

    Again, here you are, casting aspersions based on claims by people not known for a close association with the truth, and supported by no evidence whatsoever — while there is some evidence to the contrary.

    Really Dann, I do think that somewhere in you there is a core of integrity — and it baffles me why you would want to diminish that by continually trotting out sleazy assertions which have no evidentiary basis.

  34. There’s no point to discussing his heritage, even if OGH was interested in it. When JdA claims to be the leading Hispanic voice in sf, people aren’t laughing about the Hispanic part.

  35. @Maximillian —

    When JdA claims to be the leading Hispanic voice in sf, people aren’t laughing about the Hispanic part.

    Dingdingding!

    I’m perfectly happy to accept that JDA’s heritage is heavily Hispanic. No skin off my nose. What cracks me up is that he believes there are no Hispanics in the field more prominent than him.

    Just a couple of quick examples that I used in another discussion the other day:

    Malka Older —
    — Infomocracy named one of Kirkus’ “Best Fiction of 2016”
    — Infomocracy One of The Washington Post’s “Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2016”
    — Finalist for the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

    Daniel José Older —
    — Shadowshaper Locus Award Nominee for Best Young Adult Book (2016)
    — Shadowshaper Mythopoeic Fantasy Award Nominee for Adult Literature (2016)
    — Shadowshaper Lincoln Award Nominee (2018)
    — Shadowshaper Kirkus Prize Nominee for Young Readers’ Literature (Finalist) (2015)

    Silvia Moreno-Garcia —
    — Signal to Noise Locus Award Nominee for Best First Novel (2016)
    — Signal to Noise Sunburst Award Nominee for Novel (2016)
    — Signal to Noise British Fantasy Award Nominee for Novel (2016)
    — Signal to Noise Prix Aurora Award Nominee for Novel (2016)
    — Signal to Noise Copper Cylinder Award (2016)
    — Certain Dark Things Locus Award Nominee for Best Horror Novel (2017)
    — Certain Dark Things Sunburst Award Nominee for Novel (2017)

  36. @JJ

    I’ll still be laughing hilariously at his “leading voice in Hispanic SF” claim, though. That’s about as true as me calling myself “the leading voice in Pixel Scrolls”. ?

    No offense to the Leading Dishonest Alt-right Stalker of SF Writers, but while your statement would be an exaggeration, it is at least on the same street as the truth. JDA’s claims are in an alt-universe from the truth.

  37. My cat Skyler used to have a thing for olives. (We found this out when he fished the olive out of my husband’s martini.) We soon learned that every time my husband made himself a martini, he had to put an olive or two on the floor for Skyler in order to furry little paws out of his drink.

    Also, whenever my husband made himself a gin-and-tonic, he still had to put down an olive on the floor. “Skyler, there are no olives in a gin-and-tonic!” Didn’t matter. Skyler knew that when he smelled gin, there MUST be an olive on the floor for him….

  38. OMFG I just realized this puppy crap is my equivalent of The Real Housewives of $region. I was telling my girlfriend about the latest JDA stuff and she told me I’m no longer allowed to make fun of her for watching that franchise.

  40. Nancy Sauer, some years back we took a cruise. Cruise ships, it turns out, have lots and lots of little bars. There was a bar on this one called The Martini Bar, which had a live jazz pianist playing. So we walked in and when the waitress came over to us she offered us a martini menu. “No thanks, I’ll just have a martini,” my husband replied. (I don’t drink, but I was enjoying the music.) “What kind of martini?” “Just a martini, please.” “Which brand of vodka?” “Martinis don’t have vodka.” “Onion or olive?” “If I wanted a Gibson I’d’ve asked for one. I want a martini.”

    This went on for rather a while. I don’t think that waitress actually knew that there was such a thing as a just plain old ordinary gin martini…. and I know that my husband was enjoying himself. (When he did eventually get his martini, he was perfectly satisfied with it. And he left her a good tip to compensate for his being a smart-ass.)

  41. Cassy B on January 26, 2018 at 7:04 pm said:
    One time at work we were looking at the menu from a restaurant we were planning lunch at. They had a “martini” menu where everything was a mixed drink/cocktail, but I don’t remember any of them actually being martinis. (At least one involved chocolate liqueur.)

  42. kathodus: while your statement would be an exaggeration, it is at least on the same street as the truth.

    I am very appreciative of you saying this.

    The four Pixel Scrolls I have done in the last month have each taken me from 3-5 hours to put together, including finding a bunch of items to include (even with Filers sending me things, which actually makes selection more difficult), deciding which ones to use, determining a good placement order for them (those of you who have put together newsletters know how much of an art this is), pulling quotes, and writing up framing text — and I have lots of newsletter, researching, and writing experience, I’m a pro at MS Word, and I type 100 wpm.

    There is no way that I could ever do this on a daily basis, unless I was independently wealthy, could retire from the day job, and had a fully-stocked wine cellar. I hope that everyone here appreciates just how incredibly hard Mike works at putting a Scroll together and making this a great community for us to hang out. Every. Single. Damned. Day. (He feels as though he’s letting everyone down on the days in which he can’t put a Scroll out, and I keep telling him that he’s so very, very wrong.)

    I haven’t had a chance yet to send a message to all of you who sent me scroll items this week, but it was so very much appreciated. 🙂

  44. Also:

    I wholeheartedly endorse what JJ said. On occasion I’ve tried to maintain a regular schedule of putting something out on a blog or similar. After a while I petered out. The energy & enthusiasm required to keep producing on a regular basis was beyond me. And that was for something simple, not the sort of wide-ranging Pixel Scroll Mike does.

    So I’ll say it again: Thank you Mike for all your efforts. I really appreciate what you do. Please don’t feel like you’re letting anyone down if there isn’t a Pixel Scroll. File770 has become enough of a community that it runs just fine without. On the rare occasion there isn’t a Pixel Scroll, all it took was a post saying as much, and the comment thread rapidly fills up turning it into a roll-your-own Pixel Scroll.

  45. @JJ: Thanks, I didn’t have time to ask @Dann WTF with that B.S. Sheesh. Also, LOL at the “leading voice in Pixel Scrolls.” 😉

    @Cassy B: Hehehe, Skyler has your husband well-trained! I loved the Martini Bar on my cruise. I have zero interest in real martinis (or vodka martinis or whatever else), but I love the chocolatey, fruity, and other ones. My sweet tooth definitely extends to mixed drinks. Yum! Even if they’re not real martinis and just use the glass.

    @JJ, part 2: I can’t even imagine. It’s easy to get so used to Pixel Scrolls and not realize how much freaking work it is. Consider my hat off every time I read a new one, from @Mike Glyer or you, JJ! Sorry if I take this for granted.

    @Mike Glyer: You’re not letting us down if you can’t put out a Pixel Scroll. Rather, when you do put them out (nearly every day, wow!!!), you are lifting us up. We try to return the favor by filling up the comment threads, heh. (Just a joke; I don’t really believe it’s the same thing.)

  46. Adding my voice to @JJ’s, @Soon Lee’s and @Kendall’s.

    Mike, we very much appreciate what you do here. Don’t ever feel guilty about having to miss a Scroll, especially with tending to your mother. Just drop an open thread and we’ll happily talk amongst ourselves.

  48. File770 is my primary non-meatspace source for SFF news and discussion. I sometimes worry about what will happen if Mike decides to take a much-deserved break. Its true, though, that an open thread is enough to keep things going. Maybe a forum would be good at some point? I’d happily host and maintain it.

  49. I had a broccoli-eating cat. Since I was buying or raising it for my own consumption, I wasn’t inclined to give her a lot of the heads. I did pull the leaves off the stalks and give those to her.
    Mike and JJ, thanks to both of you.

  50. He feels as though he’s letting everyone down on the days in which he can’t put a Scroll out, and I keep telling him that he’s so very, very wrong.

    Oooh boy. OGH, I deeply appreciate the scrolls and can’t imagine how you put them together day after day. It’s an amazing amount of work and it’s astonishing that you do it day after day. It also shouldn’t be a kind of jail sentence, especially since we’ve proven we’ll just keep talking even when you’re in hospital and can’t provide fresh content. Maybe a vacation when there isn’t an emergency or crisis?

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