(1) 2015 Canadian Unity Fan Fund winner Paul Carreau is a council member of the Federation of Beer. Their latest officially-licensed Star Trek brew is Vulcan Ale.
Federation of Beer announces that Shmaltz Brewing Company of Clifton Park, NY is brewing a new Star Trek-themed beer called Vulcan Ale – The Genesis Effect, that will be made available on Planet Earth in early October. Under license by CBS Consumer Products, Vulcan Ale – The Genesis Effect will pay homage to the Star Trek franchise and its legacy, tying into the storyline of The Wrath of Khan as well as Shmaltz’s own brand of He’brew craft beers.
(2) Camestros Felapton uses photographic evidence to set the record straight in “Tentacled Victorians”.
Rumors that Queen Victoria herself was a squid monster where unfounded. Photographic evidence shows she was an octopus-monster not a squid monster.
(3) Amazon has filed suit against 1,114 fake reviewers who “sell fabricated comments to companies seeking to improve the appeal of their products,” according to the BBC. The lawsuit was filed Friday in Seattle.
The defendants, termed “John Does,” have offered their false review service for as little as $5 on the website Fiverr.com, according to Amazon. The sellers were avoiding getting caught by using different accounts from unique IP addresses.
However, Amazon was able to identify the fake reviewers by conducting an investigation and purchasing some of the fake reviews. Amazon is also working with Fiverr to resolve the issue.
“While small in number, these reviews can significantly undermine the trust that consumers and the vast majority of sellers and manufactures place in Amazon, which in turn tarnishes Amazon’s brand,” Amazon said in its complaint.
Vox Day suggests “More than a few SJWs should be shaking in their shoes” because – why wouldn’t he?
(4) Bri Lopez Donovan reports on the latest conrunners’ convention in “JOFCon 2015 Helps Build the Convention Community” on Twin Cities Geek.
I was fortunate to be a part of the “Disability Access” panel, which was actually more about accessibility in general rather than disability access in particular. I and my fellow panelists, Amanda Tempel and Rachel Kronick, started with brief self-introductions before jumping into the discussion by talking about some pitfalls and how they’ve been addressed in various conventions. One of the problems we talked about was the lack of gender-neutral bathrooms at CONvergence. Amanda mentioned how it had been a problem and a point of discussion for years, and how member engagement really pushed the initiative to create bathrooms that were accessible to those outside of the gender binary. The solution she spoke of was convention runners working with their venues to relabel or re-allocate resources, in this case to relabel the gendered bathrooms of a hotel to make them gender neutral for the duration of the convention.
Another issue tackled was the vetting of panelists. Audience members of this panel brought up the lack of diversity on panels that were covering topics of diversity—for example, no people of color on a panel about race in sci fi, or no folks with autism on a panel about spectrum disorders within geek media. Audience members and panels brainstormed various ways to address this, including vetting panelists by asking why they are interested in being on a particular panel and assessing their answers for issues that could arise.
(5) Kevin Trainor asks “SF Won The Culture Wars A Long Time Ago. Isn’t It Time Fandom Started Acting Like It? on Wombat Rampant.
Are you starting to see a pattern here? Is a trend becoming apparent to you? Here, let’s add another ingredient to this mulligan stew. In 1997, while I and my wife at the time were mostly busy trying to raise our kids, the regional SF convention in Minneapolis, Minicon, was in crisis. Attendance had ballooned to over three thousand people, staff turnover and burnout were epidemic, and the fan club nominally responsible for running Minicon, MNSTF, had no real idea whether the con was making money, losing money, or investing it in beaver hat futures on the Medicine Hat Commodities Exchange. The MNSTF Board of Directors, wakened from their dogmatic slumber by all the hooting, hollering, carrying-on, shrieks of horror, and assorted gibbering, actually paid serious attention to various proposals regarding the upcoming Minicon. One proposal, advanced by Minicon veteran Victor Raymond, was to split the baby: have one Minicon dedicated to traditional SF fandom, and another at a different time which would be more of a Gathering of the Clans, a three-ring circus and big ol’ party for media fans, anime fans, BDSM folk, and the other subcultures drawn to SF fandom, where being different wasn’t automatically considered bad. Another proposal, which was the one MNSTF wound up going with, was called the High Resolution Minicon Proposal, and whatever its authors’ original intentions, it was seen by most of Upper Midwest fandom as “Thanks for all the time and money you’ve sunk into Minicon over the years, you fringefans, but we’re tired of you now, and you need to fuck right off.” What became immediately apparent was that the vast majority of Minicon’s attendance and staff had in fact been made up of those “fringefans” for quite some time, and in the years following the implementation of the HRMP, Minicon’s attendance imploded to a low of about 400 people. Meanwhile, those fans who felt snubbed by the HRMP organized three other conventions: Marscon, more focused on media and gaming but still mainly an SF convention; Convergence, essentially Minicon 2.0; and Diversicon, which was ironically even more focused on traditional SF & fantasy but had split from Minicon over the issues of a “dry” consuite and open staff meetings, which Minicon had rejected. So in the end, what Victor had campaigned for happened anyway, but instead of successfully managing the change and remaining the preeminent SF club in the upper Midwest, MNSTF dropped the ball and dwindled into obscurity, which their graying membership seems quite happy with. The same thing, with minor variations, also happened at Boskone and Disclave and other regional conventions, so i think it’s reasonable to draw a few conclusions about SF fandom in general from these examples.
Let’s fast forward a few years. By now, everyone is familiar with the Sad Puppies story: Larry Correia noticed a drop in Worldcon attendance correlating with an increase in Hugo Awards to works of SF that weren’t terribly successful in the marketplace, but were written by the Right People and tended to have the Right Characters expressing the Right Views. Over the next two years, he tested the hypothesis, encouraging his readers and friends to join Worldcon and vote. Membership numbers at Worldcon increased, votes for the Hugo increased, and in the third year of Sad Puppies, when massive numbers of people bought supporting memberships and nominated works by John Wright, Tom Kratman, Michael Williamson, and other authors considered “badthinkers” by defenders of the existing order – the same people, mind you, who had encouraged Larry to go out and get more people to join Worldcon if he felt it wasn’t sufficiently reflective of the SF market- the backlash from people such as Patrick and Teresa Nielsen-Hayden, John Scalzi, David Gerrold, and various unhousebroken employees of Tor Books was vitriolic. The Sad Puppies (and their co-belligerents, the Rabid Puppies led by Vox Day) were libeled as racists, homophobes, neo-Nazis, misogynists and pretty much every politically correct insult in the book. In the end, despite the Puppy Kickers’ hypocritical preaching against the evils of “slate voting”, a bloc of 2500 voters chose “No Award” over any work nominated from the Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies list – a list, mind you, that SP3 leader Brad Torgersen had not delivered from on high, but instead crowdsourced from anyone who wanted to suggest works worth nominating. Vox Day’s Rabid Puppies list was almost identical to the SP list, but as far as anyone knows, it was a list he chose and distributed to the Dread Ilk. This massive “No Award” result, which doubled the number of such from the last ten years, was loudly cheered and celebrated by those in attendance at the Hugo Award banquet; this cheering was encouraged by MC David Gerrold, while thousands of fans around the world were subjected to this display of vile behavior thanks to the Internet.
(6) Meantime, Kevin J. Maroney has his say, “Once More Around the Sun”, at New York Review of Science Fiction.
As I’m sure you know by now if you have even the faintest scintilla in the Hugo Awards, the “No Awards for Slates” option won out in this year’s Hugo final voting. This is the approach I advocated in my previous editorials, excluding the Puppy finalists not on grounds of quality or lack thereof, nor on the politics or personal foibles of the people running either of the Puppy slates. This was entirely a vote against the underhanded tactics that resulted in those finalists reaching the ballot. (The kindest thing that can be said about slate voting in this type of open-ended popular vote is that it is “technically not cheating.” That’s not a kind thing to say at all.) The people who were dragged onto the Puppy ballots without being consulted can be assured that this vote absolutely was not a personal rejection of you but of an unacceptable process.
There are larger issues involved in the Puppy movement that I don’t feel the need to rehash right now, issues of culture war, of reader communities and their protocols, of the powers and perils of our deeply interconnected communications. But at its core, the Puppy fight was about a group of people deciding to “not technically” cheat their way into an award and they were rebuffed, and that much, at least, is good. The Puppies will be back next year. It’s not particularly clear what they hope to accomplish in a fourth bite at the apple they claim is poisoned, but it will certainly be something.
(7) Today in History:
October 18, 1851 — Moby-Dick by Herman Melville was published. Much later, Ray Bradbury turned it into a script for John Huston.
October 18, 1976 — Burnt Offerings, from Dark Shadows‘ Dan Curtis, opens in theaters.
(8) The Superheroes in Gotham exhibit at the New-York Historical Society Museum & Library will be open through February 21, 2016.
Superheroes in Gotham will tell the story of the birth of comic book superheroes in New York City; the leap of comic book superheroes from the page into radio, television, and film; the role of fandom, including the yearly mega event known as New York Comic Con; and the ways in which comic book superheroes, created in the late 1930s through the 1960s, have inspired and influenced the work of contemporary comic book artists, cartoonists, and painters in New York City.
Michael Powell reviews the exhibit for the New York Times.
The curators found in a private collection the Pow! Bam! Wham! Pop Art-era Batmobile and put it in the lobby. They mounted the Penguin’s umbrella and Catwoman’s hot unitard upstairs, along with Action Comics No. 1 (the first appearance of Superman) and art originals of the singular Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man.
The exhibition focuses on comic book founding fathers. They were predominantly Jewish kids — with a few Italians and the occasional wayward Protestant mixed in — from the Bronx, the Lower East Side and Brooklyn. And in the 1930s and ’40s, they created a world.
Bob Kane (born Robert Kahn), a creator of Batman, and Will Eisner, a son of Jewish immigrants and the creator of the Spirit, attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, as did the wisenheimer bard Stan Lee (born Stanley Lieber), who created the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Hulk and many more.
(9) Christopher Lloyd told The Hollywood Reporter he’d be glad to do Back to the Future: Part IV if somebody reunited the whole gang. “Doc” also says he’d like to toss out the first pitch if the Chicago Cubs get to the 2015 World Series, as predicted in Back to the Future: Part II.
(10) Book trailers by SFWA Members are collected here on YouTube.
(11) Brian Z. lays that pistol down in a comment on File 770.
Meet me in the thread, pixel, pixel
Puppies all around, pooping, pooping
Tear those puppies down, scrolling, scrolling
Droppings in the ground where flowers grow
Old familiar whine
Shiny happy pixel-scrolling fans
Shiny happy pixel-scrolling fans
Shiny happy people laughing
Filers all around, love them, love them
Never make amends, dish it, dish it
There’s still time to cry, crappy, crappy
Save an unkind word for tomorrow’s whine
Old familiar whine
Shiny happy pixel-scrolling fans…
(12) J-Grizz scores one for the home team.
Pixel pixel little scrolls
God Stalk! Brackets, maybe trolls
Reading comprehension’s bad
Perhaps that’s why they are so sad
Pixel pixel little scroll
Filking’s just the way we roll
(13) Yipes.
I bought a $10 hat. Fear me. pic.twitter.com/BuKDNHiFQF
— Simon Bisson (@sbisson) October 18, 2015
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Camestros Felapton.]
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What the hell is a socho?
Mike, does this mean you have 385 scullions?
Hypnotosov on October 19, 2015 at 12:45 pm said:
Next year might be a bumper year for Declan Finn, he’s clearly leading the
SP4 poll for ‘Best Related Work’ (Sad Puppies Bite Back), tied with Jeffro Johnson in ‘Best Fan Writer’ and a surprisingly close second in ‘Best Novel’ (Honor at Stake).
I was actually tabulating the standings because I thought it would be fun to see how they change over time and boy did the people making this not know what they were doing. There’s really no nice way to get numbers because there is no format, which also means quite a few recommendations are ambiguous (do you count “I liked that too”? What about “I might nominate that”?).
Come nominating time this will balloon into 999+ comments recommending almost as many books, all of which will have to be tabulated by hand. And that’s not even counting the affiliated blogs that will supposedly also be taking recommendations (will File770 be part of the Puppy-affiliate program?), also presumably in the shape of free-form comments.
Anyone else anticipating a repeat appearance of Torgersen’s Magic Nomination-Generating Box?
You take in reader recommendations at one end, and, presto! your unrelated personal preferences come out as nominations at the other end.
It certainly simplifies the accumulating and tabulating processes.
@Petrea
Certainly. N ybg bs zr gubhtug gung lrf, gurer unf gb or fbzr bssrerq punapr bs fnyingvba sbe gur aba-fcnpref. V’q rkcrpg gb frr n fuvg gba bs qvttvat. V guvax gur Fcnpr Nex vf fhccbfrq gb or gur fghcvq cebwrpg, sbe gur crbcyr abg tbvat gb Frn Yno. Ohg bar jbhyq guvax gung fbzr qvttvat cebwrpg, jurer lbh ng yrnfg trg n fbyvq t bs tenivgl naq n zntargvp svryq, jbhyq or zber frafvoyr guna fcnpr jvgu n arne shgher yriry bs grpuabybtl.
My biggest disappointment with Part 3 of Seveneves was its complete failure of imagination and extrapolation.
*Minor thematic spoilers follow*
Five thousand years later and you want me to believe that multiple isolated populations have had such small language drift that they can still understand each other? That family names and (effectively) oral history are still recognizable? That a wooden shovel handle is still intact and useable?
Five thousand years is longer than our entire (meaningfully) recorded history. It’s longer than our language groups, let alone any recognizable dialects. The idea that a few hundred people could dig themselves underground and then emerge thousands of years later and be even the slightest bit recognizable is the most obvious of a long list of total failures of imagination.
I really liked Dark Forest. I also liked Three Body Problem(It was my #1 for the Hugo) and think this is better than that.
The first section I found a bit difficult but(showing my SJW chops here) I think it was because I am not used to the naming conventions in Chinese. When the story jumped from place to place, it took me a moment to click which character I was back following.
The first part has a bonus bit for the authors who read it since there is a bit on how characters can take in a life of their own.
I really liked Sorceror to the Crown. I thought it was definitely in conversation with Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (which I loved!), and I couldn’t help comparing Zacharias to Stephen.
Sad Puppies Bite Back winning a Hugo would be like The Room winning an Oscar.
Finished it last week. I thought it was weaker than The Three Body Problem: in that book, I thought that Ye Wenjie’s life logically led up to what she did; I didn’t think that the main characters, actions in Dark Forest were as plausible. There are some very vivid scenes, and the last third was more coherent IMHO (it took me a while to get into the first part of the book, but once the future started the pace picked up). I thought the translation was more stilted than in the previous volume. I’m still looking forward to the conclusion, although I probably won’t be putting Dark Forest on my nomination list.
Ryan H:
There are reconstructed proto-languages believed to go back further than that. The current estimate for Proto-Indo-European is around 7000 years ago, IIRC.
I could buy that with excellent recording and playback technology, a language could be kept comprehensible to people 5000 years later, but it would probably still fall out of everyday use and survive only as a sort of liturgical language, like Latin or Sanskrit.
I’m with you there. As for the people in space, vg enat snyfr sbe zr gung gurl jbhyq fcraq 5000 lrnef znexvat gvzr va beovg jura Znef jnf ninvynoyr sbe vzzrqvngr greensbezvat naq pbybavmngvba. Naq gung n pvivyvmngvba gung’f fcrag 5000 lrnef qryvorengryl abg pbybavmvat nal cynargf jbhyqa’g unir tebja gb pbafvqre yvivat va fcnpr gbgnyyl abezny naq whfg tbggra ba jvgu yvsr va vgf arj raivebazrag engure guna fcraqvat trarengvba hcba trarengvba va n ubyqvat cnggrea.
Speaking of hats, if you ever want to join a strange fellowship and make friends with random strangers all over London, may I recommend wearing a bowler hat? People without bowler hats will stop you in the street. People with bowler hats will pantomime “Look! We share a hat!” at you, or will stop to have a chat if they’re close enough. People will ask to take your photograph. Bowler hats unite the people.
Also, that scene in an episode of The Avengers where Steed has an eye test which consists of identifying various types of hats – pure gold.
Hats are awesome. 🙂
@Petréa Mitchell That may not be so unreasonable. In at least two cases I know about (Atlanta and Moscow just before each was destroyed by an army) most people just kept going about their daily lives as if nothing were happening. Maybe it’s a form of denial or maybe it’s just not knowing anything else to do. Anyway, that part didn’t bother me so much.
To bloodstone75 and Meredith – thanks for your comments re my intervention at Trainor’s blog. I quickly worked out that the horse is dead so there is little point in flogging it.
Note also copious comments from “mauser” (Richard Alan Chandler), a new name to me.
@Hypnotosov, Lauowolf
Having just googled Declan Finn, I’m almost hoping for some Puppy Democracy to put into play. The price for enough bourbon to get through last year’s packet was quite something; Finn’s work could make it prohibitive.
@Ryan H. Yeah, the idea that you’d have seven races that maintained genetic isolation (despite being able to interbreed) but somehow experienced no language drift wasn’t very credible.
@Petréa Mitchell
Gur raretl erdhverq gb ernpu Znef vf jnl, jnl orlbaq nalguvat gurl unq ninvynoyr. Ybbx ng ubj zhpu gebhoyr gurl unq trggvat sebz ybj-Rnegu beovg hc gb gur yhane pber.
Having just googled Declan Finn, I’m almost hoping for some Puppy Democracy to put into play.
I almost hope his work is nominated. I can’t think of anything that will discredit the Pups’ efforts more than having a guy like him front and center of their “movement”.
Meredith on October 19, 2015 at 1:26 pm said:
Speaking of hats, if you ever want to join a strange fellowship and make friends with random strangers all over London, may I recommend wearing a bowler hat? People without bowler hats will stop you in the street. People with bowler hats will pantomime “Look! We share a hat!” at you, or will stop to have a chat if they’re close enough. People will ask to take your photograph. Bowler hats unite the people.
Also, that scene in an episode of The Avengers where Steed has an eye test which consists of identifying various types of hats – pure gold.
Hats are awesome. 🙂
Okay, definitely time for an Avengers marathon.
He used to post comments here as Dr. Mauser. That was back when there was more Puppy activityin Izvestia 770. I think he’s also a regular on the Mad Genius Club and those circles.
The Trouble with Trilbys
If Finn were nominated that would be the Puppies not just shooting themselves in the foot but blowing their entire leg off. I almost want it to happen just because the knots they’d have to tie themselves in to defend it would be fascinating – but more importantly, I would rather the Hugo’s weren’t tainted by that gross collection of revenge porn.
If I did, think how clean my home would be.
They
NickPheas: Hoo-bloody-rah. I have finally finished Seveneves.
That pretty much sums up my feelings about the book. I’ve loved all the Stephenson books I’ve read, but I had to keep forcing myself to pick Seveneves up again, and a paraphrase of James Davis Nicholls’ quote about Peter Watts kept running through my head: “Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Seveneves“.
I felt as though Stephenson became overly enamored of the concepts he’d come up with, and because he is now TBTE*, he just rambled all over the place with them, weaving in lots of illogic and just plain bad science.
Yes, some aspects of the book are great — but I would much prefer to reward with a Hugo nomination a less-ambitious book which is well-written and sticks the landing, rather than a hugely-ambitious, rambling mess which fails in an epic fashion. Seveneves will definitely not be on my Hugo nom list.
Bite your tongue.
junego: I haven’t noticed anyone talking about the Dark Forest. Has anyone read it yet? I’m not planning to even try with that one. I bounced really hard off Three Body – 3 times! – because of the cardboard characters. I simply could not care what happened to any of them.
I understand why some people thought The Three-Body Problem was Hugo-worthy, but I just didn’t. It had huge characterization, plot, pacing and science fails — and I’m not going to cut a book extra slack just because it’s a translation. I had to force myself to keep picking it up and reading it (and I will usually tear through a SFF novel in 3-5 hours).
I already know that it will be a struggle to force myself to read The Dark Forest — in fact, I’m quite sure that the list of 2015 books I actually want to read is so long that I won’t get to it before nominations.
Tom Galloway: Torgersen’s latest massive projection of his own behavior onto us, er, opinion about us from a comment on an Antonelli post; “Pravda 770! Where half the commenters are spewing snide hatred at something, or somebody, any time of the day, all week, all year.”
He’s just pissed off that Puppies keep saying really stupid things, and commenters on File770 keep pointing out how and why the things the Puppies are saying are so stupid.
I’d be tempted to pray to some god for intercession re Declan Finn on this year’s Hugo nominee list, if only I could figure out which one.
Simon Bisson, that is an epic hat. I may not be fearing you but I’m certainly witnessing you. I don’t know where you laid hands on that for only $10 but you got a bargain!
And going to conventions means never having to say “yes, but where would I wear that?”
Hats are indeed awesome; I have gotten something of the bowler fellowship effect with my Tilley hat.
I am… becoming less eager to try Seveneves–I think I will check back later and see if my library has it. OTOH I just finished The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and woe is me I will have to toss something off my nomination list to make room for it. I loved it. There was a scene toward the end where I was afraid it was just going to turn horrible, and I had to put it aside and pick up some comfort reading because it was bedtime and if it was horrible I wouldn’t be able to sleep and then the next day I started it again, and it turned away from horrible and I was so relieved because that delicate crystal chandelier of a book wasn’t smashed. Naq V ubcr Zbev znxrf nabgure Xngfh. Many thanks to the File770 recommenders!
He’s just pissed off that Puppies keep saying really stupid things, and commenters on File770 keep pointing out how and why the things the Puppies are saying are so stupid.
One thing that makes Torgersen’s tag of “Pravda 770” so hilariously wrong is that as far as I know, Glyer has never edited comments here, and moderates with a fairly light hand. As far as I can tell, there are only a handful of people who have been banned from posting (usually for pretty egregious offenses) and most substantive posts, even those that trigger the spam filter, get approved.
On the other hand, Torgersen edited people’s posts to say things that those people didn’t say.
Which one sounds more like Soviet era censorship?
Yep, Torgersen would have to be a hypocrite to complain about how someone else handles comments.
Aaron: I don’t consider it an accident that Torgersen chose “Pravda 770.” This is the place that won’t let him forget the truth about what he did.
Heh, and I was worried I was being too critical of Seveneves.
Regarding Seveneves, I just wrote a blog post summarizing the problems I had with it – some of which I wrote in various posts here on File770 at different times, some which I haven’t…basically all my old gripes and many new ones. It’s here, if anyone’s interested:
https://jaynsand.wordpress.com/2015/10/19/seveneves-more-than-six-impossible-things-before-breakfast-with-spoilers/
Umm, should I know who Declan Finn is? The name is vaguely familiar, but I can’t place it.
To anyone interested in reading Anathem, two suggestions:
* Do the audio book instead of the print version, but if you insist on reading,
* Don’t use the dictionary in the back, it is a trap. You’ll pick up the terminology soon enough, and checking it will just further slow the already crawling pace of the first act.
To anyone interested in Reamde: don’t. Unless you are super into lengthy descriptions of air traffic control and find the typical thriller too fast-paced.
@Matt Y,
Neal Stephenson will just have to console himself with the bags of money his books are bringing in.
I enjoyed “Three Body Problem” well enough but without the love or hate it’s garnered. “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” was meh, and I have bounced off “Little, Big” twice already despite people whose tastes I trust raving about it.
Truly, de gustibus non est disputandum.
@Cally
He’s the writer of all that horrible revenge snuff porn. He also hosted Witzke’s gross contribution to his horrible revenge snuff porn, which I have linked somewhere in this thread if you feel like ruining your day. ETA: Here.
Is there any chance that the #BoycottStarWarsVII thing that’s running around Twitter is a super-clever parody?
Because it actually seems too dumb to be true.
@Mark
It doesn’t appear to be. Although I suppose I’m thankful that it’s pointing out to me a number of people whom I am willing to take steps never to associate with or read again.
Isn’t a scullion now a unit of skepticism?
Measured as the amount of improbability required to have Dana Scully say “But Mulder…”. It’s a metric unit, so the milliscullion is the amount of improbability required to raise one eyebrow, while the megascullion is more commonly used when listening to a political press event.
@Mark
Would this be the Puppy reaction to a black protagonist with a light saber?
@Jon
Oh dear, then apparently I need to recalibrate my stupid-o-meter, and I only just finished changing it to a log scale too.
@The Young Pretender
It appears to be an entirely independent source of dumb, but yes, it does seem to boil down to that. Being twitter it’s a bit difficult to see who started it and whether they were being serious.
Jayn
Thank you for your review of Seveneves; I enjoyed the careful way you set about demolishing the profoundly bizarre pseudoscience cobbled together in pursuit of an audience which likes to believe that it understands science but doesn’t…
@other Nigel I thought that was measured in kiloscullions?
@Mark
One black guy protagonist = white genocide?! What even…
# 5
(Correct me if I’ve gotten it wrong)
Definitely didn’t bother to research indeed. Boskone was in Springfield for 5-10 (I don’t remember exactly) years because it lost its Boston hotel space in February in the 1990’s (IIRC) and in the meantime a group of people had spun off Arisia in January to increase the options for media and Art as well as literature. So, nothing to do with wrong fans, except the common division between literature vs. media, older vs. younger fans that seems to have hit a lot of regional conventions by the late 1980’s to the 1990’s.
@Other Nigel It can also be a measure of speed while wearing high heels.
(and at size 7 and 3/4, finding a hat that fits is also pretty awesome. Why yes, I do have a big head 🙂 )
Mark –
Some folks are claiming it’s a chan joke, where they get something stupid to trend knowing it’ll piss folks off, and when people react they go ‘lol, gotcha’. Though some I’m sure are honestly supporting it because there’s no bar set too low when it comes to internet idiocy.
“Speaking of hats, if you ever want to join a strange fellowship and make friends with random strangers all over London, may I recommend wearing a bowler hat? ”
The Global Grand Lodge of Tilly Hat wearers is also to be recommended 🙂 You meet the nicest people that way.
Fox News is unhappy with Captain America, too: http://io9.com/people-are-very-mad-that-the-new-captain-america-is-act-1737313033#_ga=1.162172991.247789306.1444157926