(1) What could be more appropriate to continue a discussion launched in yesterday’s Scroll than Jurassic Park: High Heels Edition! Thanks to Cathy for dropping this into the comments.
(2) “Emperor Palpatine and Sauron in the Afterlife” by Steve Ogden. Here is the first frame of the comic —
This crazy comic sprung from a Twitter conversation I was having with Scott King. He said he was considering writing an essay, the events of Star Wars as seen from Emperor Palpatine’s point of view. I said it would be a terrible idea, but really funny, to have a conversation in the afterlife between two dead bad guys, sort of swapping horror stories about how badly everything went for them at the hands of the Good Guys. Scott admitted it was both terrible and funny, and why don’t I go write it then. So I did, and here you have it.
(3) That was a strange experience – reading Alexandra Erin’s “Millennial Pledge: Trouble Edition”, which translates “Trouble in River City” into a bullet-pointed blog post.
(4) Recommended: Ty Templeton’s comic ”What if Bob Kane has created Bat-Man without Bill Finger?”
(5) Most of “The 20 Biggest Bombshells J.K. Rowling’s Dropped Since ‘Harry Potter’ Ended” are less cheerful than —
Chocolate Frogs
Harry, Ron and Hermione all wound up with their own chocolate frog cards, which Ron reported as his “finest hour.”
Harry’s card says that he is “the first and only known wizard to survive the Killing Curse, most famous for the defeat of the most dangerous dark wizard of all time, Lord Voldemort.”
Ron’s card gives him credit for “destroying the Horcruxes and subsequent defeat of Voldemort and revolutionizing the Ministry of Magic.”
On hers, Hermione gets credit for being “the brightest witch of her age” and that she “eradicated pro-pureblood laws” and campaigned for “the rights of non human beings such as house-elves.”
(6) Remember the Star Wars blooper reported by Screen Rant that I posted here the other day? Io9 checked with Mark Hamill who says it never happened.
TOTAL BS! Actually said "There she…" as in "There she is." Dialogue in that scene was dubbed. In-jokes disallowed! https://t.co/nWLmsLsgpw
— Mark Hamill (@MarkHamill) October 13, 2015
Instead of calling Carrie Fisher’s name out, Hamill insists that he started to say “There she is!”—dialogue provided in ADR that was cut short by Leia and Luke’s embrace.
(7) “Make Sure to Check Your Camera Settings” — a funny Flash reference at Cheezburger.
(8) Today In History –
- 1926: A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh was published.
- 1947: Capt. Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager pilots the rocket-powered Bell X-1 to a speed of Mach 1.07, becoming the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound.
(9) John ONeill profiled The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak, Volumes 1-3 at Black Gate.
The lack of a complete collection of Clifford D. Simak’s short stories has been keenly felt among many old-school fans. So as you can imagine, I was delighted to discover that Open Road Media has undertaken the first comprehensive collection of all of Simak’s short stories — including his science fiction, fantasy, and western fiction. The first three books, I Am Crying All Inside, The Big Front Yard, and The Ghost of a Model T, go on sale later this month.
All three, like all six volumes announced so far, are edited by David W. Wixon, the Executor of Simak’s Literary Estate. Wixon, a close friend of Simak, contributes an introduction to each volume, and short intros to each story, providing a little background on its publishing history and other interesting tidbits.
As a special treat the first volume, I Am Crying All Inside, includes the never-before-published “I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Way Up in the Air,” originally written in 1973 for Harlan Ellison’s famously unpublished anthology Last Dangerous Visions, and finally pried out of Ellison’s unrelenting grip after 42 very long years.
(10) Margaret Hamilton’s pioneering work on NASA computers is covered by Wired in “Her code got humans on the moon – and invented software itself”.
Then, as now, “the guys” dominated tech and engineering. Like female coders in today’s diversity-challenged tech industry, Hamilton was an outlier. It might surprise today’s software makers that one of the founding fathers of their boys’ club was, in fact, a mother—and that should give them pause as they consider why the gender inequality of the Mad Men era persists to this day.
As Hamilton’s career got under way, the software world was on the verge of a giant leap, thanks to the Apollo program launched by John F. Kennedy in 1961. At the MIT Instrumentation Lab where Hamilton worked, she and her colleagues were inventing core ideas in computer programming as they wrote the code for the world’s first portable computer. She became an expert in systems programming and won important technical arguments. “When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West. There was no course in it. They didn’t teach it,” Hamilton says.
She’s an unsung heroine of Apollo 8, because she got them home after a fatal input error in the spacecraft somebody at NASA insisted would never happen.
(11) Scientists measured the erosion of terrestrial river rocks to deduce — “Pebbles on Mars Shaped by Ancient Long-Gone Rivers Dozens of Miles Long”.
Using publicly available images of the rounded pebbles on Mars from the Curiosity rover mission, the scientists calculated that those rocks had lost about 20 percent of their volume. When they factored in the reduced Martian gravity, which is only about 40 percent of Earth’s, they estimated that the pebbles had traveled about 30 miles (50 km) from their source, perhaps from the northern rim of Gale Crater.
(12) NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has been used to produced new maps of Jupiter – the first in a series of annual portraits of the solar system’s outer planets.
New imagery from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is revealing details never before seen on Jupiter. High-resolution maps and spinning globes (rendered in the 4k Ultra HD format) are the first products to come from a program to study the solar system’s outer planets each year using Hubble. The observations are designed to capture a broad range of features, including winds, clouds, storms and atmospheric chemistry. These annual studies will help current and future scientists see how such giant worlds change over time.
(13) Well, this is bizarre, but extremely well-edited (NSFW) humor video, a mashup of Hitchcock’s movies with Jimmy Stewart and Kubrick’s sf/horror movies.
(14) Free Nick Mamatas!
No, no, you don’t need to bail him out — just read his story free on the Glittership webpage (or listen to it on the podcast) — Episode #18 — “Eureka!” by Nick Mamatas.
Adam hadn’t worn the crushed velvet blouse in his hands for a long time. It was from his goth phase, twenty pounds and twenty years prior. He shuddered at the thought of it distending around his spare tire these days, but he couldn’t bring himself to put it in the box he’d set aside for Out of the Closet either. And not only because it would be embarrassing if anyone saw it.
There were memories in the wrinkles of the velvet—well, not memories exactly. Half-memories, images and glimpses and smells. Two decades of gimlets and bad decisions and a few teeth and a trio of cross-country moves. What was the place? It was Huggy Bear’s on Thursdays, when they played disco for a majority black clientele, but on most nights it was just The Bank. A real bank, in the sepia-toned days when great-grandma worked in an Orchard Street sweatshop, a goth/darkwave club now….
(15) Kameron Hurley interviewed at SFFWorld:
With The Mirror Empire, you’ve challenged many genre assumptions/expectations/tropes, most notably genre roles and expectations. What other genre expectations did you seek to challenge but instead readers accepted easily?
So far readers have pretty much balked at everything I thought they would, though I admit I’ve been surprised at the reactions to Anavha, which were far more perplexed and passionate than I anticipated. It seemed like a fairly straightforward plotline to me, but putting characters with unexpected genders into those roles surprised people. I think it really made them think hard about reading abusive relationships like that in other books.
(16) Steve Davidson, taking as his sample the recommendations made so far at Sad Puppies 4, theorizes quite reasonably that works available for free are more likely to be recommended for awards. By implication, he wonders what will happen to authors who like to get paid.
I do believe that there is a distinct trend represented: freely available, easily accessible works may very well swamp the nominations – if those works are given a little initial traction by readers, like including them on a recommendation list, because (I belabor), the fewer “objections” you place between a consumer and a potentially desirable product, the more likely they are to “buy”. In other words, “click here and invest a few minutes” is far more attractive than “click here, pull out your credit card, wait for delivery, invest a few minutes”.
(17) Brandon Kempner latest survey “Hugo/Nebula Contenders and Popularity, October 2015” for Chaos Horizons. I’m late picking this up, and as Kempner notes in the post, Leckie’s book was still on the way when he wrote it.
Last year, I tried to track Goodreads stats a measure of popularity. This year, I’m tracking both Amazon and Goodreads.
I’ve been disappointed in both of those measures; neither seems particularly accurate or consistent, and they don’t seem to predict the eventual Hugo/Nebula winner at all. What is useful about them, though, is getting at least an early picture of what is popular and what is not. I do believe there is a minimum popularity cut off, where if you fall below a certain level (1000-2000 Goodreads votes), you don’t have much of a shot at winning a Hugo or Nebula. This also allows good comparisons between books that are similar to each other. If you think Uprooted and Sorcerer to the Crown are both contenders as “experimental”-ish fantasy books, one of those (Uprooted) is 10 times more popular than the other. If you had to pick between one of them being nominated, go with Novik.
(18) Dawn Witzke, in “Taking Sides” , says George R.R. Martin has convinced her to pick a side.
[GRRM] I have no objection to someone starting a people’s choice award for SF. Hell, I might even win it, since I have the sort of mass following that tends to dominate such awards. But it would not be as meaningful to me as winning a Hugo.
[Nitzke] There is no need to start a people’s choice award for SFF, one already exists. You may have heard of it, it’s called the Hugo Awards. And, I believe you might have won one of those once. After reading Game of Thrones, I can say it was definitely worthy of Hugo. (Trust me, that’s not a good thing.)
I do want to thank you, Mr. Martin. Without your rich elitist bullshit, I might have continued to sit on the sidelines again this year. Instead, I will be forking over the cash for a membership, because those of us who can’t afford to blow money on cons are just as much true fans as those who can. So you can go stuff it in your asterisk.
(19) Not everyone is tired of the subject —
https://twitter.com/horriblychris/status/654462570842091520
(20) Talk about a really sad puppy – William Shatner:
William Shatner is exploring strange new worlds in trash-talking his former “Star Trek” co-star George Takei.
Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk on the iconic sci-fi series, lashed out at Takei in an interview with Australia’s news.com.au published Monday.
“He is a very disturbed individual, the truth of the matter is,” Shatner said of Takei, who played Hikaru Sulu on the series and subsequent movie franchise. “I don’t know him. I haven’t seen him in 25 years, I don’t know what he is up to. It is not a question that has any meaning to me. It is like asking about George Foreman or something.”
And when asked about director J.J. Abrams, who is currently filming Star Trek Beyond, he told the Australian press:
“No matter what plans I make it is J.J. Abrams who makes the plans and no I don’t think he is planning anything with me,” Shatner said. “I would love to. In one year it will be our 50th anniversary and that is incredible.”
(21) “California nixes warrantless search of digital data” —
In what’s being called a landmark victory for digital privacy, California police will no longer be able to get their hands on user data without first getting a warrant from a judge.
Governor Jerry Brown on Thursday signed the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA), SB 178, which requires state law enforcement to get a warrant before they can access electronic information about who we are, where we go, who we know, and what we do.
US privacy rights groups have long been concerned that law enforcement hasn’t considered it necessary to get a search warrant before they can search messages, email, photos and other digital data stored on mobile phones or company servers.
States such as California, tired of waiting around for Congress to update 29-year-old federal electronic privacy statutes, are taking reform into their own hands.
(22) H.G. Wells took a shot at foretelling the future — “A Peek Ahead” at Futility Closet tells you how well he scored.
Readers of the London Evening Standard saw a startling headline on Nov. 10, 1971: “The Prophecy H.G. Wells Made About Tonight’s Standard.” Wells had published a story in 1932 in which a man unaccountably receives a copy of the newspaper from 40 years in the future. “He found himself surveying a real evening newspaper,” Wells wrote, “which was dealing so far as he could see at the first onset, with the affairs of another world.”
Most of “The Queer Story of Brownlow’s Newspaper” is devoted to Wells’ prophecies regarding world events in 1971, and most of these, unfortunately, are misses. Newspapers today are printed in color and the Soviet Union has fallen, but geothermal energy has not replaced the age of combustion, body clothing has not (quite) been reduced to a minimum, finance and nationalism still thrive, gorillas are not extinct, the human birthrate has not dropped to “seven in the thousand,” and there are no plans to add a 13th month to the year.
(23) Here’s a massive cosplay photo gallery from New York Comic Con. (Activate by clicking on arrows in upper right corner of image displayed for Slideshow #1 and Slideshow #2.)
Look for an amazing Raiden, an outstanding Mr. Freeze, a spot-on Nosferatu, and a glorious Muto from Godzilla. Spider-Woman, Hawkgirl, Princess Amidala, Mystique, gender-swapped Booster Gold, Ratchet, Venom… the list goes on and on! Take a look at the slideshows below and share your favorites in the comments!
(24) The sf magazine market contraction predicted by Neil Clarke is not far off, but L. Jagi Lamplighter doesn’t want it to begin with Sci Phi Journal, so she is making an appeal for donations.
Jagi, here. I learned this morning that Sci Phi Journal needs help.
For those who don’t know it, Sci Phi Journal offers science fiction stories that have a philosophy to them. It is one of the few periodicals offering a place to the kind of stories that Sad Puppies stood for…in fact, it was on the Hugo ballot this year, as was one of the stories that appeared in it (“On A Spiritual Plain” by Lou Antonelli).
Sci Phi offers a venue for the very kinds of stories that we all want to read but seldom get to see. It features some of the best new authors, like Josh Young and Brian Niemeyer, and a number of others. Both John and I have had stories appear in its pages.
It would be a real shame if it folded!
What can you all do to help?
If you should feel moved to make a donation, you can do so here. (The donate button is on the right. You may need to page down.)
(25) Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam will appear at Live Talks Los Angeles on October 19, 2015 at the Alex Theatre. It’s the launch event for Gilliam’s memoir. He gave an interview to a local paper to promote the appearance.
What led you to write the book?
It really was supposed to be a book about just my art — whatever my art is — starting with childhood cartoons. My daughter Holly assembled a chronology of the work I’ve done. I would sit with a microphone and talk about it. Somewhere along the line, the publisher says “Oh, God, this is better as an autobiography.” It ended up being that, even though it’s a very incomplete one. I refer to it as my “Grand Theft Autobiography.” It’s a high-speed chase, crashing around the place, a lot of bodies left all over the place. It’s not the great summation of my life in the last hours of my life.
What was your reaction when you started digging into the art you had made?
I was surprised because I don’t linger in the past. Things I’d done over the years had been filed away. Holly had been archiving and dredging this stuff out. The other day I found something and I thought, “God, I can’t believe I could draw that well 20 years ago!” I can’t draw that well anymore.
(26) A Back To The Future prediction still has an opportunity to come true.
At one moment in the 1989 film a billboard reveals the Chicago Cubs have won the 2015 World Series, the joke being that the Cubs hadn’t won the baseball World Series since 1908 and likely never would do.
“A hundred-to-one shot,” the charity fundraiser jokes with Marty, “I wish I could go back to the beginning of the season and put some money on the Cubs!”
But now it’s looking like the Chicago team could actually win the 2015 World Series.
The Chicago Cubs beat the St. Louis Cardinals this week to proceed to the National League Championship Series (NLCS) and will face the New York Mets or LA Dodgers on Saturday for the chance to play in the coveted World Series. Think of it as a sort of regional semi-final for the biggest game of the baseball season.
The film’s writer Bob Gale said he chose the Cubs as the winning 2015 team as a joke, saying: “Being a baseball fan, I thought, ‘OK, let’s come up with one of the most unlikely scenarios we can think of’.”
The Dodgers, if they advance, will have to start the back end of their rotation which would really boost the Cubs’ chances. No time-traveling DeLorean will be swooping in from 1963 delivering Koufax and Drysdale to save LA.
(27) A high-tech prank — Real Mjolnir (Electromagnet, Fingerprint Scanner)
A replica of Mjolnir (Thor’s Hammer) from The Avengers that’s pretty much unliftable unless you’ve got my fingerprints!
[Thanks to Cathy, David K.M. Klaus, Will R.,and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]
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It’s straight out of the Gamergate playbook. It’s meant to persuade true moderates and reassure in-group members that they are the side of reasonableness. It’s usually pretty transparent though, as in this case where the writer was posting hate-fiction about Scalzi several months before her ‘decision’.
Puppies write awful graphic murderous revenge fantasies about real people.
Puppies complain endlessly about how everyone else has gone too far. (Which, in OGH’s case, seems to consist almost entirely of quoting them accurately – the horror! The insult!)
I don’t even.
Oh yes: Friendly reminder that Round 4 of the comics bracket is going on. Getcha votes and forehead cloths there. 🙂
OK, so Witzke, has published my comment saying that the Hugos was never a Good Reads/People’s Choice style mass participation award and agreeing it’s silly to pretend that things are something they’re not, pointing out that the Hugos don’t call for any involvement in Worldcon fandom apart from deep pockets.
I can’t be bothered to explain that “joining the convention as a supporting member” and “paying the membership fee” are different ways of describing the same thing. Black is already White.
The sexualised revenge fantasies against real people who’s crime is selling science fiction books already brands her as a ghastly person. Murderous revenge fantasies against Adolf Hitler or Bashir al-Assad I can cope with.
Puppies write awful graphic murderous revenge fantasies about real people.
Just remember, Witzke was “neutral”. Just a bystander writing murderous revenge fantasies about John Scalzi. Just sitting there neutrally taking the Puppy side.
For some comic relief, let’s all enjoy this particularly fine example of the hate-bombing of the reviews of Ancillary Mercy on Amazon:
Linky
@Aaron
Yes, and I just saw a rather attractive British Saddleback pig fly past my window.
For some comic relief, let’s all enjoy this particularly fine example of the hate-bombing of the reviews of Ancillary Mercy on Amazon:
It is that reviewers only review too. They couldn’t even be bothered to review the previous two books in the series, let alone any other books. This is probably a burner account created specifically to leave a hate-review, which is very sad that someone is pathetic enough to go to such an effort.
Lot of scrolling to do!
LOL.
Puppies stand for philosophy? Odd; I thought they stood for rockets and blasters and Manly Men Saving Beautiful Damsels, and covers matching the content….
“Bob Roehm on October 15, 2015 at 5:09 am said:
While the publication of Clifford D. Simak’s short fiction is certainly a cause for celebration, I’m very disappointed that apparently only the first volume will be released in print. Ebooks may as well be invisible to me…”
WHY? I mean, you’re on a computer or phone to be posting that message, which means you possess a device you already read on, so what makes ebooks invisible?I’m not advocating pitching your physical library for ebooks, but I am asking why you can’t buy something you’d like that’s readable on your device (phone/computer, whatever you are posting with) but not available in hardcopy?
There are two basic Puppy threads for Puppy-friendly stories according to Puppies:
1. Manly engineers, ray guns, busty women, fun, no visible politics (visible, in this case, meaning liberal/left-wing), and no literary with a capital L styling.
2. Explicitly right-wing and/or Christian philosophical literature with a capital L.
I don’t think they’re entirely different, though. The political stuff from 2 I don’t think Puppies would generally notice as political. The bigger problem is that most of the 2 seems to lack the fun aspects of 1, but Puppies seemed quite happy to defend most of that once they’d signed up – I’m sure there’s a reason for that but I’m not quite clear on what it is. Once you’ve signed up to something its hard to criticise the execution of it, maybe?
At any rate, based on their actual nominations and actual behaviour, it largely boils down to this:
1. No left-wing/liberal politics. Fun preferred, but optional.
That fits in just fine with Lamplighter’s statements, I think.
Regarding (22):
I wonder if Futility Closet really thinks it unfortunate that gorillas are not extinct. A bit of an awkward phrasing there.
In #16, Steve Davidson thinks that difficulty of access will make people less likely to nominate works from Analog, Asimov’s, and F&SF. That’s sad because they’ve definitely got the best stories. This was part of the reason why we set up Rocket Stack Rank after Sasquan–to make it easier for people to figure out how to get back issues of those magazines.
Has anyone tried it? This is a link to our current recommendations list. Each story has an “obtain issue” link next to it. It would be great if a few people would give it a try and give us some feedback on how well it worked for them. (Actually reading a good story is a bonus.) 😉
http://www.rocketstackrank.com/p/2015-year-to-date.html
Note: We don’t make any money from the site (not even referrals), nor do we take donations; it’s just something we’re doing for fun. We really do want it to work, though.
Flowers for Trinitron
There is still definitely a place for good, focused anthologies in short fiction. Something about the way the stories play off each other. But pay magazines seem to be on the way out, no question. Asimov’s is still consistently excellent, though; I’d hate to miss it. Uneasy times for aurhors who are trying to get paid for short fiction.
Re: Takei v. Shatner:
For the most part, I like Takei. I follow him on Facebook, like everyone else. But it was interesting to see the clip Shatner played during his one-man-show (“Shatner’s World”), taken from the Shatner roast, were Takei ends his remarks with “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on” in a very earnest manner. Shatner’s take, IIRC, was “That’s hate” or something like that, and it’s hard not to see it as such. Justification for that hate? No particular clue. This article kind of sums it up (without providing any answers).
I don’t think they’re going to work it out in the time they have left.
As for Sci Phi, I suspect they are going to fold like the Origami Olympics.
And then the four subscribers will wax wroth and declaim that the filthy SJWs have conspired against it because they cannot abide honest philosophy.
Somehow my post got duplicated below by the edit function.
The Erin post baffled me (I mean, I get the reference but… what was the point?) until I stumbled across this other bulleted list which provided the missing context.
Am baffled, not unusually, by Dawn person’s bizarre belief that anything which took place more than 30 minutes or 110 tweets ago is now forever lost from sight. The web, it does not work that way.
One of the many advantages of having concierges is that nobody ever rings my doorbell to ask me how I feel about Jesus.* I am, therefore, protected from the sort of people who believe that if a story doesn’t have Jesus in it then it’s a bad story, so I am even more baffled by the element of Puppidum which does. I see no way of resolving this in any way which Puppidum may hope for; England is a secular society, notwithstanding, or possibly because, we have an extraordinary array of religions and spiritual beliefs, including none at all.
*Nobody every rings my doorbell and asks me how I feel about Krishna either, in case anyone was wondering…
@bloodstone75: More on Shatner and Takei here. It’s not that mysterious.
For anyone who cares, I wrote a thing about CapClave, which was this past weekend.
@Eli: Yeah, I was wondering if it was something more specific than ego, but I guess not.
this Witzke fan-fic discussion reminds me of an email conversation I had with my significant other’s brother-in-law (SOther’s-in-law??) yesterday about the upcoming Michigan State-Michigan football game … he’s a diehard MSU fan… his opinion:
if I question his use of and appropriateness of metaphor … I’ll be met with a blank look and “what?? It’s how REAL fans talk!”
no it isn’t … or if it is, it shouldn’t be
@Meredith
In my opinion, On A Spiritual Plain was remarkable in doing neither of these two very well.
The dialogue and action was as bland as they could be (Arguably, it does take some talent to write a story which makes a journey accompanying a disembodied soul to its resting place about as exciting as a random day at the office).
Philosophically, sure, the protagonist identified as Christian, but it was about as mechanical a depiction of a Catholic priest I’ve ever read. One gets the impression he did his job primarily because that’s where his government check came from. The story also suffers, in my opinion, fatally from the author making sure right away that the soul he was talking about was NOT the immortal soul of Christian belief. To me, the author was lowering the stakes to avoid violating a personal taboo.
@Aaron,
Very nice write up, enjoyed reading it.
@Ed: Thanks. I love small local conventions like CapClave.
@Greg Hullender
I’ve certainly visited RSR and had a good look through the lists. It’s an excellent resource. I particularly like the “meta review” aspect of being able to see what other reviewers have concluded without reading spoilerific reviews.
I do think it’s true that the freemium models like Lightspeed get more views. For example, I’m probably more likely to recommend something that I can link people to, because while I don’t feel too bad using up people’s time, I’d be a lot more cautious about persuading people to spend money based on my personal taste.
As a data point, I’m currently subscribing to Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Asimovs, and F&SF, in an attempt to get a decent spread.
Takei is not by any means the only Trek cast member who has told tales of Shatner hogging lines and camera time. Some have achieved peace with him since, some haven’t, but there isn’t much disagreement about his behavior at the time.
@Vasha
I’m following up on your Maria Dahvana Headley recs. I’m very impressed. Her stories seem to smoothly flow from one mode to another, never letting you settle. Some of them lose me, to be honest, but others are great. I just read And The Winners Will Be Swept Out To Sea and really liked it, for example, whereas Seam and Solder lost me at the end (that probably isn’t very logical, because S&S is less complex than ATWWBSOTS). There’s no doubt she’s a talent though.
@Meredith
I think once your identity has become “member of X group,” the dynamics of group loyalty tend to take over, often overwhelming any reason you ever joined the group in the first place.
Cults are an extreme example. But the idea is, things that are approved by the group are Good and things that are opposed by the group are Bad. Any narrative about WHY — why do we hate THAT story, why do we hate THAT author — is just post-facto rationalization. Which, it should be noted, humans are exceptionally talented at.
Also, this is a long pixel scroll with many items of wonder, But it’s hard to imagine anything topping the Jurassic Park high heels edition.
@Mark subscribing is definitely the best way to go. So you decided to skip Analog?
Many of the RSR sources don’t cost anything. For example, anyone with a Kindle who has Amazon Prime can borrow a copy of F&SF for free. Most public library systems have online versions of Analog and F&SF for free. Asimov’s is the only one you always have to pay for.
@stevie
What breed is your concierge? Mine is mostly Rottweiler with a good mix of mutt. One day I may be able to afford a human, but canines work cheaper and are generally more lovable. And if asked about Jesus, he lives next door, but he and his family already belong to a church.
Meredith:
I saw this, sadly, too late, and I’d like to second, third and fifth that recommendation. The level of bile and rage, the disproportion, aargh.
I wonder if Cally also stocks brain-soap along with the forehead cloths.
@Paul Weimer: “There was an old issue of the board gaming zine The Space Gamer that had a story/scenario for the old Steve Jackson game O.G.R.E. In that story, apparently the last World Series before the US collapsed was between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Chicago Cubs. The Cubs were up 3-2 in the series when things went to pot, and the series never finished.”
That would be Michael Stackpole’s “The Lone GEV” story in SG52 – available electronically (as a scanned PDF) at Warehouse 23 for anyone interested. 🙂
BTW, it’s Ogre, not O.G.R.E. – it’s not an acronym. Thanks for the reminder that I needed to polish up those Space Gamer pages, though… 😉
@Rev Bob. Stackpole wrote it? Really. Hunh, that makes it by a long margin the first thing of his I read. I seem to remember some of the editions of OGRE having it as the acronymized form and that erroneously stuck with me as the “Right way” to write it.
@Paul:
I’m a relative newcomer to the game (as in, I didn’t play it in the 20th century), but I suspect the confusion may come from the frequent juxtaposition of Ogre with G.E.V. – where G.E.V. is an abbreviation that’s frequently written as GEV, so Ogre looks like a no-dots abbreviation when placed beside it in the same all-caps font.
Re: Takei and Shatner. That’s sad. I thought they had patched things up relatively recently
Re: Dawn Witzke. Explicit revenge-porn fantasies are unsettling. Someone who is willing to let that show for the world to see doesn’t strike me as someone I’m comfortable with trusting with anything, really. (A shame, too; those are really cool looking boots.)
Re: Takei v. Shatner:
I understand Shatner was very negative about Takei’s marriage.
The Puppies claim that the drop in Analog nominations is due to a conspiracy
I’d rather blame it on the stories that Analog is choosing to print. Which are, IMO, not exciting at all.
When the Nebulas were announced, I rounded up links to almost all of the work shorter than a novella. There was exactly one piece that I could only find a site that seemed to not be giving proper copyright acknowledgement to the author. Everything else was out there free. Now many of these many have been released free so that Nebula voters could get to them, but it did strike me that I could find every short story and Novelette except one freely accessible online. The puppy
slate“recommendation” is almost definitely bullshit in a can, but given the increase in voters, I wonder if there will be more people looking at only free stories.I have to admit doing that myself, at least for new stories. For authors that I like, I wait until their stories are collected and then buy the collection. I think I have bought exactly one magazine containing Science Fiction and Fantasy stories and that was for the China Mieville story inside. I don’t have time to read all the books I like, let alone all the short stories people recommend. I find that I really have no motivation to pick up Analogue or Asimov’s for additional reading material.
@McJulie
Why should anyone identify as anything but an individual? When you start identify as a group or stereotyping members that may associate with a group, then you may be putting yourself in a group.
It’s possible that some people don’t fit neatly in a group, they may have a cornucopia of beliefs and passion that are picked from a larger buffet than just a narrow menu. You may love print books, but ebooks work better for your circumstances. You might be socially liberal but fiscally conservative. You might support gay marriage, but have doubts about plural marriages. You might like an authors works, like them as a person, but be disappointed in their behavior in certain circumstances. People are complex. And awesome. And screwed up.
There’s a large number of folks that neither fully support the SP or the ASP or RP, but find bits of truths and insanity in the whole stupid mess from all sides. But when sides are polarized, nobody gives a shit about the neutrals or the mixed opinionated. “You’re for us 100%, or die blasphemer!”
Re: Takei v. Shatner:
George Takei only mentioned Shatner in passing in TO THE STARS, and I don’t recall him expressing any opinions about him (though he spoke with affection or admiration about most of the other actors). Some years ago, I saw an interview where he was asked about his friction with Shatner, and his comments were measured and temperate. And Shatner included Takei’s criticism of him in STAR TREK MEMORIES and didn’t deny or refute it there; he seemed to think it over.
From all of that, I had the impression that this was something they put behind them years ago.
Apparently not.
(Who knows, maybe behind the scenes fresh enmity arose? I did briefly wonder if the reason Sulu is on a separate ship throughout their final ST movie was that the actors didn’t want to work together again.)
@rob_matic:
At least the first guy read it. He actually knows what happened “halfway” (I think it’s more like 2/3?) into the book, if not quite why.
Meanwhile, I am pretty smug about having held the Most Relevant Positive Review spot for a full week now. Go, me!
@Greg
I had noticed that f&sf was covered by prime/kindle unlimited. I have a cunning plan to read the back issues via a free trial when I have some spare time…
On Analog, I didn’t feel I had the time to read everything, so at least one had to go, and after trying a couple of issues of each Analog was the least convincing. I’m probably going to grab a couple of back issues with recommended longer stories in though – my long list for novelette/novella isn’t that satisfying at the moment, whereas I think I could nominate 5 shorts quite happily at this point (don’t ask me which 5, mind you, there’s some tough decisions to come)
Stephen King once referred to a hypothetical World Series involving the Boston Red Sox vs. the Chicago Cubs as the “Apocalypse Series”, because if either of these perennial losers were to get the pennant, the world would surely end.
The Sox went on to actually win the Series (though not against the Cubs). The only degradation in the world that I have noticed since then is that it’s no longer fun to tease Red Sox fans for their optimism.
I’d rather blame it on the stories that Analog is choosing to print. Which are, IMO, not exciting at all.
The lack of nominations started in the last days of the Schmidt era, but I will say that Quachri’s editorial choices have not impressed me much, and probably contributed to the drought.
@ Greg Hullender
I was able to download a story from F&SF through NYPL easily enough, but downloading a story from Analog required getting past an impediment – the one between my ears.
There are two catalog entries for the digital version of Analog. I clicked on “Analog Science Fiction & Fact Online Periodical or Article – 1991- [then after a blank line] Available onsite at NYPL,” and managed to download a story after some frustration and dead ends. If I had scrolled down and clicked on “Analog Science Fiction & Fact Online Periodical or Article – 1991- Available from home with a valid library card,” I would have had a much easier time, since I was not actually in the library.
Hm. Of that Chaos Horizon list, I’ve read three, and have plans to read only two more. And only one of the three I’ve read is even in my top ten so far this year.
There’s a lot of SFF out there.