(1) The stars came out for White House Astronomy Night.
Watch live as the @WhiteHouse hosts #AstronomyNight at 7pm ET. Here's what to expect: https://t.co/3B56ANr3oe pic.twitter.com/MCnBJRjbNi
— NASA (@NASA) October 19, 2015
Why are moon rocks tastier than earth rocks? Because they're meteor! #astronomynight pic.twitter.com/ZYKV96MZT3
— MythBusters (@MythBusters) October 19, 2015
This #AstronomyNight, @POTUS called the @Space_Station! See our Tumblr blog for a breakdown: https://t.co/MYIV9j822y pic.twitter.com/GSWGOvzqHK
— NASA (@NASA) October 20, 2015
https://twitter.com/NerdyWonka/status/656273938650021890
(2) New interview with Liu Cixin conducted by Yang Yang for China Daily.
When, in a telephone interview, China Daily reminds him of that comment, he replies: “It’s not a joke. Aliens may arrive at any time. When it happens, everything, social and economic reform, educational problems, international conflicts or poverty, will become much less important, compared with the alien crisis.”
Big countries such as China and international organizations such as the United Nations need to be ready for such an eventuality, he says.
“It does not necessarily involve a lot of money and human resources. But we should prepare, in the fields of politics, military, society and so on. The government should organize some people to do related research and preparations for the long term.”
Unfortunately, he says, “no country seems to have done this kind of thing”.
In the postscript for the English version of The Three-Body Problem, translated by Ken Liu, Liu Cixin says: “I’ve always felt that extraterrestrial intelligence will be the greatest source of uncertainty for humanity’s future. Other great shifts, such as and ecological disasters, have a certain progression and built-in adjustment periods, but contact between mankind and aliens can occur at any time. Perhaps in 10,000 years the starry sky that mankind gazes upon will remain empty and silent, but perhaps tomorrow we’ll wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the Moon parked in orbit. … The appearance of this Other, or mere knowledge of its existence, will impact our civilization in unpredictable ways.”
(3) Bob Byrne’s “The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Tying in the BBC Sherlock Special” at Black Gate has a lot of good information.
Back in July, what seems to be the most popular ‘The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes’ post appeared here at Black Gate. I looked at what I think went wrong with season three of the BBC’s Sherlock. I included the just-released ninety-second, ‘first look’ video for the upcoming Special, to be aired around Christmas. And I pointed out it seemed to be full of the “Look how clever we are” bits that I lamented in my post.
Now, just about everyone, including myself, loves that the Special is set in Victorian times; unlike the episodes in the first three seasons. Cumberbatch and Freeman would be given their first (and quite likely, only) opportunities to play Holmes and Watson in the Doyle mold. I view it as a chance for the show to get back on track and reclaim the multitude of fans it lost during season three.
(4) Brad Torgersen, in a comment on Kevin Trainor’s blog, now says:
I had multiple conduits for suggestions, and the comments section was just one conduit.
But he doesn’t identify what those sources for the majority of slated Sad Puppy 3 fiction were.
(5) Francis W. Porreto does not approve – “Really Quickies: From The Garbage Heap” at Bastion of Liberty.
If you’d like a gander at “how the other side emotes,” take a look at this post at this hard-to-describe site, particularly the comments that follow commenter “alauda’s” citation of this bit of dark foreboding. These past two days a fair amount of traffic has come here from there.
Note the complete lack of rational analysis. Note the immediate and unconditional willingness to condemn me, as if the scenario I wrote about were something I actually want to happen.
(6) Alyssa Rosenberg, while commenting on “The downside of cultural fragmentation” in the Washington Post, touches on a familiar topic —
Debates over what kinds of books, movies, television shows, comics and video games get awards are often a proxy way of debating what our cultural values ought to be. The alternative slates that attempted to wrest control of Hugo nominations were based on the idea that awards voters had over-prioritized identity politics over the quality of writing and plotting; GamerGate erroneously asserts that there’s a movement afoot to ban or stop the production of video games with certain themes or images. While I don’t agree with the premises of either of those two cultural movements, I do think left cultural criticism has sometimes asserted political litmus tests for art in recent years, and that elements of the right, spurred by the sometime success of this approach, have fallen into the same patterns (for a good example, see the suggestions that the action movie “Mad Max: Fury Road” was anti-male).
(7) After Steve Davidson of Amazing Stories picked apart the Trek-related fanhistory in Kevin Trainor’s post on Wombat Rampant, Dystopic followed with his own critique of what Davidson had to say about Trainor on Declination.
As my readers probably know already, I consider myself somewhere on the Puppy spectrum of the Science Fiction community. There’s quite a bit of difference between the Sad Puppies, who one might call the reformists, and the Rabid Puppies who are mostly of the opinion that Worldcon and the Hugos should be burnt to the ground and set on fire by their own Left-wing, Social Justice proponents.
Either way, though, both camps agree that the existing community is hopelessly corrupt, cliquish, and prone to a particular animus against Conservatives and Libertarians. This prejudice is such that their works are repeatedly voted down from awards, publishers like Tor Books are run by individuals openly hostile to alternate political affiliations, and backroom deals are made to secure nominations for authors based on political backgrounds and special interests.
Steve Davidson of Amazing Stories confirms this for us in a ridiculous post, so loaded up with Strawmen that he might as well be the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. Let’s allow him to hang himself with his own rope, shall we?
(8) Workaholics actor Blake Anderson appears in the Halloween episode of The Simpsons:
“Well, you know, we kind of feel a little disrespected by Homer and we show up at his doorstep basically looking for revenge,” Anderson explains. “So it turns into a full onPanic Room situation, where he’s kind of stuck in the attic and looking for him. We’re out for blood for sure.”
In the vein of the Treehouse episodes, Anderson says this one is not necessarily “piss your pants” scary, but, he assures, “me and Nick Kroll definitely brought our creepy to the table for sure.”
(9) Is this a clue to the future of Game of Thrones?
@livingston_tony Jon Snow from Game of Thrones passed me in Belfast City Airport tonight looks surprisingly healthy
— Tony Livingston (@livingston_tony) October 19, 2015
(10) Today’s Birthday Boys
- October 19, 1903 — Tor Johnson is born Karl Oscar Tore Johansson in Sweden. Especially known for his appearance in Plan 9 From Outer Space, although he had credits in all kinds of things, from the movie musical Carousel to Walter Cronkite’s You Are There nonfiction TV show.
- October 19, 1945 — John Lithgow is born. Acted in Twilight Zone, Third Rock from the Sun, Buckaroo Banzai…
(11) Today’s Birthday Book
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is 62 years old today. Phil Nichols explains:
FAHRENHEIT 451 was deposited for copyright at the Library of Congress on October 19, 1953. Both the first edition hardbound and mass market paperback carry this publication date, although the paperbacks actually reached the market a month earlier.
The McCarthy era’s climate of fear lingered beyond 1953, however; in spite of the book’s initial critical success, the first paperback printing took seven years to sell out.
(12) Diana Pavlac Glyer was very pleasantly surprised to find her forthcoming book Bandersnatch mentioned in a recent Publishers Weekly post, “Exploring C.S. Lewis’s Lasting Popularity – 52 Years After His Death”.
Coming in November, Bandersnatch: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings (Kent State University Press) by Diana Pavlac Glyer and James A. Owen shows readers how encouragement and criticism made all the difference in books written by the Inklings. A companion coloring book by Owen is expected next spring.
(13) Learn how to make your pumpkin look like a galaxy nebula.
(14) Io9 says “The Glorious Poster For Star Wars The Force Awakens Has A Giant Planet Killer On It”. Almost needless to say, you can also see the full, high resolution poster there.
(15) This collection of “13 Creepy Bits of Bookish Trivia” at BookRiot lives up to its headline. Here’s one of the tamer entries.
- J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, is rumored to have been quite the odd character. However, after his brother died in a skating accident, Barrie would routinely dress up in his dead brother’s clothing in order to ease his mother’s grief. The tragedy of his brother’s death would come to inspire the character of Peter Pan.
(16) Tonight was the Terry Gilliam talk at the Alex Theatre. Crusading photojournalist John King Tarpinian snapped a picture of the marquee.
(17) Chuck Wendig in “About That Dumb Star Wars Boycott” begins…
Let’s imagine that you are, as you are now, a straight white dude. Except, your world features one significant twist — the SFF pop culture you consume is almost never about you. The faces of the characters do not look like yours. The creators of this media look nothing like you, either. Your experiences are not represented. Your voice? Not there. There exist in these universes no straight white dudes. Okay, maybe one or two. Some thrown in to appease. Sidekicks and bad guys and walk-on parts. Token chips flipped to the center of the table just to make you feel like you get to play, too. Oh, all around you in the real world, you are well-represented. Your family, your friends, the city you live in, the job you work — it’s straight white dude faces up and down the block. But on screen? In books? Inside comic panels and as video game characters? Almost none. Too few. Never the main characters.
It feels isolating, and you say so.
And as a response you’re told, “Hey, take what you get.” They say, can’t you have empathy for someone who doesn’t look like you? Something something humanist, something something equalist. And of course you can have that empathy because you have to, because this is all you know, because the only faces and words and experiences on-screen are someone else’s so, really, what else are you going to do?
Then one day, things start to change. A little, not a lot, but shit, it’s a start — you start to see yourself up there on the screen. Sometimes as a main character. Sometimes behind the words on the page, sometimes behind the camera. A video game avatar here, a protagonist there. And it’s like, WOO HOO, hot hurtling hell, someone is actually thinking about you once in a while. And the moment that happens, wham. A backlash. People online start saying, ugh, this is social justice, ugh, this is diversity forced down our throats, yuck, this is just bullshit pandering quota garbage SJW — and you’re like, whoa, what? Sweet crap, everyone else has been represented on screen since the advent of film. They’ve been on the page since some jerk invented the printing press. But the moment you show up — the moment you get more than a postage stamp-sized bit of acreage in this world that has always been yours but never really been yours, people start throwing a shit-fit. They act like you’re unbalancing everything. Like you just moved into the neighborhood and took a dump in everybody’s marigolds just because you exist visibly.
(18) Amy Sterling Casil recommends The Looking Planet.
During the construction of the universe, a young member of the Cosmos Corps of Engineers decides to break some fundamental laws in the name of self expression.
[Thanks to Will R., JJ, John King Tarpinian and Amy Sterling Casil for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
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I’m not ancient, but I’ve been around awhle and I’ve never yet met a “manly man” who had to tell me he was a manly man. Doing so is almost like a signifier that the opposite is true. Maybe it’s different with writers.
Meredith said Puppies based their campaign on getting new people involved with the Hugo’s.
Puppies think ‘their’ fiction is the stuff that fans ‘really’ like.
Therefore if people vote against them, then they aren’t really new fans, because obviously new fans would be on their side.
I’ve been reading SFF since grade 4 and I’ve never been to a con or participated in any sort of organized fanac, including any Hugo voting. Theoretically, then, I’m one of the new people Sad Puppies wanted to enlist (well, except for being female, which may be a strike against me, and queer, which may be strike two, but whatever), especially since I don’t like overt messages in my reading matter and very much like space operas and sometimes military SF. I don’t even have a philosophical objection to slates (if they’re unwanted, then there should be rules in place preventing them and if there aren’t, eventually someone will game the system).
However, before I plunked my cash down for a supporting membership to Sasquan, I read a nominated story. It wasn’t just that I didn’t like it, it was that it was badly written and had an overt message as part of its very visible scaffolding that clunked every time there was a mild breeze. Then I tried reading something else (Best Related, I think) and it was even worse.
No. I really, really object to anyone thinking I’m stupid enough to read and vote for unadulterated crap because…what? Reasons? Because VD (I’m okay with that as he’s used those initials himself) says so? Or, wait, maybe it’s because my birthright includes knowing how to spell Larry Correia’s last name without having to think about it?
All the Puppies had to do to sway a chunk of those theoretical new voters was to nominate work they liked that had actual merit, but they mostly didn’t and instead of owning their role in a missed opportunity, they’ve knitted themselves a Victim Stadium Blanket (because a sweater just isn’t big enough to cover the pile they left on the rug) and cast blame far and wide. Which is even lamer than their Hugo nominees.
Yeah, if nothing else – by their very choice of items for their Slates, the Puppies have forever forfeit their right to set themselves up as arbiters of taste.
@Doctor Science–
I will be there all through the con. I hope you can make it; it’s a fascinating time.
The link is http://www.illuxcon.com
I’m going to launch an open source project that does what we’re currently doing
There’s one out there already. @Kate Secor, WSFS-OSD. Google group and a couple of other places. (Check the Making Light pages.)
I love this comment. It makes me want to study what audiences think about these characters when all they know about them is what they see in the trailers. It would be fascinating (and sometimes appalling) to see what’s mapped onto them in the lack of information.
Cool. I will look for it.
@Laura Resnick
Yes. 🙂
@Cheryl S.
Yes, when you’re told a group stands for message-free fun and bringing good works back to the Hugo’s and then you read all of, well, that, it does make it hard to take anything they say at face-value. The first one I read was Turncoat which needed a good line edit, and then I went to look at On A Spiritual Plain which at the time had been put online with no paragraph breaks. After those two I was starting to wonder whether they even realised that proof-reading was a thing let alone whether they were capable of recommending or writing anything genuinely good.
They’ve had three years to put good stuff on the ballot and an extremely poor success rate (and those three years have had some great works nominated by not-slate voters). I don’t really understand why. There are fantastic right-wing writers out there and there are fantastic minimal politics writers out there. Why weren’t they on the ballot? Don’t they read any of them? Can’t they tell whether something is well-written or not?
I used to be neutral…then someone milked my hotel
RedWombat on October 20, 2015 at 5:28 pm said:
Peter J on October 20, 2015 at 3:49 pm said:
I must say we get a far better class of wombat here on File770 than elsewhere on the internet.
#NotAllMarsupials
We can do a lot better for marsupials.
Here’s another favorite wombat:
http://lists.project-wombat.org/listinfo.cgi/project-wombat-project-wombat.org
It’s a resource site for baffled reference librarians.
@Aaron:
There will be another slate for me
And I’ll be iiiiiin it
There will be a new rocket, you’ll see,
And I will winnnnnnn it
I will have the fame that I desire, and–
Wait. Wrong Jim Webb. Nevermind.
@Aaron (different post):
I’m keenly reminded of the very end of Jane Yolen’s Heart’s Blood (the other series about arguably sci-fi dragons from my youth), where the protagonist is all like “I proved I’m a man now, that means I get the girl,” and said “girl” is like, “You are such a little boy sometimes.”
I used to be neutral but then I changed my pH.
I used to be neutral, and then someone fired a near light-speed proton through me.
@jimhenley Oooh, points for the music reference
Though I have to admit that out of that collective I’m more an Apples In Stereo fan, especially their most recent work which was something of an homage to ELO’s Time.
https://youtu.be/-nJYA5jP_9U
“The puppies aren’t going anywhere. If they did bugger off and form their own convention…”
Perhaps some goodhearted Pr*vd* 77*ers would anonymously gin up a SadPupCon site… perhaps even co-inciding with (but >1,500 miles from) WorldCon…
rcade:
It wasn’t lack of information that made me certain the woman and the black guy in SW:TFA weren’t the central hero, it was the *brand*: Star Wars’ brand, Disney’s brand, JJ Abrams’ brand. And the genre of “SFF movies costing $200M”, too.
I can see how these characters might be the equivalents of Leia and Han for the new generation, but I can’t (yet) believe that either is meant to be as central as Luke. I still expect them to turn out to be the “supporting heroes”, and that there will be a naive (though also scruffy) young white guy who we’re supposed to *really* care about: Luke Jr., basically. The conspicuous absence of Luke 1.0 in the trailer is telling, as well.
I still find it almost impossible to believe that JJ Abrams, George Lucas, and their friends would put so much money, effort, and prestige into a project that doesn’t have a white guy at the center. Maybe that guy is Luke, maybe the story is really about him even more than the younger generation. But my bet is on Luke, Jr., the better to have a fraught father/son relationship at the core. Because that’s what it’s all about, for them: white father and white son, so they (the director, most of the producers, and the other controlling players) can see *themselves* at the center of the story.
Posting from 1199, about 6 months after the death of Richard I Lionheart.
Very minor casting spoiler for Star Wars below.
@Doctor Science
A glance through the cast list shows four young people who seem to be the main lot. One white man, one black man, one – I think Latino? – man, one white woman. White man appears to be a villain, the others are good guys.
Meredith:
It’s possible Luke Jr. is still young, under 16, and is going to be growing up in subsequent movies. Or it’s quite possible it’s Pip Anderson http://www.imdb.com/name/nm4024206/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t34 or someone else buried down toward the bottom of the cast list, for !!surprise!! purposes.
@Petréa Mitchell
Charlotte never really came together to me, it really needed more episodes and a better ending.
I liked Sidonia no Kishi: Dai-kyuu Wakusei Sen-eki from the spring season and the first show Sidonia no Kishi from last year. It follows a generation ship that escaped from the solar system along with some 600 others after the Earth was destroyed by aliens. It has lost contact with all the others ships perhaps leaving them as the last humans. And it keeps running into the enemy aliens. Making you wonder if there is any place they can run or if all they can do is pick a place and have a last stand against what appears to be the rest of the universe. But even with all that sometimes it seems like their greatest danger comes from within.
It is a entertaining Sci-Fi show with genetic engineering, cybernetics, giant mechs, and much more.
@Doctor Science
I haven’t fact-checked it or anything but a comment over at WHTM just caught my eye:
I don’t know how the screen time will be divvied up. It will be interesting to read the reviews once it gets released – I’ll wait for the DVD unless most people love it. I don’t like to waste watching stuff spoons on things that might be awful, and the prequels haven’t left me much confidence. It would be nice if the trailer is accurate as to the importance of John Boyega and Daisy Ridley’s characters, at least.
(Ooh, I think I just spotted a female officer in the nu-Empire. I don’t think there were any in the originals? Only in the Rebellion?)
Doesn’t that mean the whole code should be GPL anyway? Unless Steve Stanton has relicensed it to him.
That doesn’t make any sense to me. What employers do not hire people who have written open source code?
I used to be neutral but then I charged my mind
“(Ooh, I think I just spotted a female officer in the nu-Empire. I don’t think there were any in the originals? Only in the Rebellion?)”
Gwendolyn Christie (Brienne from GoT) is part of Empire 2.0 as Captain Phasma, who seems to be either a Super Trooper mini-boss or a dragon. She’s the one in the shiny chrome armour.
I don’t think there were any female officers in the Empire or Rebellion in the original movies, except Leia, who I classify as a spy/ commando (ie, a Scout on progression to a Jedi Sentinel)
I had the same question back during the Business Meeting liveblog. If the Hugo voting code is “based on” GPL code, the normal expectation is that the entire code is GPL. That wouldn’t make the rest of the code GPL automatically, but it would mean Worldcon is in breach of Stanton’s open source license absent some other arrangement with him.
Have just realised that I missed off the obvious ending to my “I used to be neutral”, which is of course, “and now I’m anti…”
In 6217 we have built an accelerator around the sun, and have finally succeeded in splitting the dog into the puppy and the anti-puppy.
@snowcrash
Mon Mothma was a leader in the Rebellion, too.
MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA… my ticket for the opening night of Star Wars Episode VII has been booked for the theater with the mega-screen and fabulous sound system…
Star Wars is certainly known for stupidly misguided racially-based boycotts.
Who remembers the simpler times long past, when you boycotted a new Star Wars movie because you were too stupid to know the difference between a native Polynesian New Zealander and a Latino just because you thought Maori actor Temeura Morrison “looked Latino.” Brin summarized some of the crazier past grievances in his “Addendum” http://www.davidbrin.com/starwars2.html
I recall the campaign to rid the world of the Lego Jabba the Hutt Crime Palace playset, because the hookah-smoking gangster and his minions had too many guns which was a negative stereotype and the Asian-looking thug was deceitful and criminal looking, which I presume was actually a decent resume builder for employment with Huttese gangsters. Never mind that I can’t remotely identify which is the Asian-looking alien? Perhaps the green one with tentacles? Or the bulbous-headed one in blue with tentacles? Or the really furry one in shackles? http://cache.lego.com/e/dynamic/is/image/LEGO/9516?$main$
There’s really not much you can say about these Ep 7 trolls except laugh them off the stage and then not give them a second thought. Or just not give them the first thought to begin with.
Silly But True
@rcade: yeah, I wonder if anyone has notified the author of the GPL’d code. It is one of the strictest share-alike licenses around.
Also, if you’re serious about working on an open source version, I’m game. I’m xtifr at Github, and I was a Debian developer for over a decade, so I’m pretty up on open source/libre software development.
snowcrash:
The reason you don’t remember female officers in the Rebellion is because they were cut.
I thought Liu Cixin comments on alien contact was interesting. It does sound like something we should prepare for, given how momentous it would be. But without knowing anything about the aliens, how do we prepare?
Here in 7220, we are still wondering how to organize the alien contact task force.
Female officer of the rebellion? The Commander-in-Chief of the whole shebang was Mon Mothma.
(The licensed stuff had tons of female officers in Empire and Rebellion)
@rcade I’m not sure what you mean by the rest of the code not being GPL automatically. If an application contains GPL then either the whole application should be licensed under the GPL or it’s effectively breaking copyright law unless the GPL code has been relicensed under non-copyleft terms.
ETA: I think I’m probably being pedantic about semantics but it’s half four here and my insomnia-addled brain is making me argue with someone on the internet who is agreeing with me instead of letting me go to sleep!
My headcanon is that Mon Mothma was the leader of the political wing, with Ackbar being the supreme military commander.
@Doctor Science – Yeah. I was very unhappy when I heard that.
Here’s a more SFnal Apples In Stereo video, this time with added Elijah Wood:
http://youtu.be/C66yhRwpt7s
Due to my laggardly ways, my IMAX Star Wars premiere tickets are for Saturday, 48 hours after release. I’m still stoked.
When Phantom Menace came out, I was peripherally involved with journalism and somehow got into a press screening, 2 weeks ahead. When I got back home, I discovered my neighbors’ electrical contractor had disabled my internet, so I was stuck with all that movie in my head and no ability to blather with anybody else who had seen it, for over a week. It was so traumatic I ended up switching providers.
Re GPL. It doesn’t apply if you’re not releasing the code publicly. Hence, for example, the world will never see the Linux-based OS Google uses to host its cloud services.
Tenar Darell on October 20, 2015 at 3:56 pm said:
This week’s Movie of the Week on iTunes in the U.S. (which means it’s a 99 cent rental) is the zombie movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Abigail Breslin Maggie. Thoughts and opinions on it?
I liked it. It wasn’t the usual zombie fare. And you gotta give Arnold some props for this one.
@snowcrash,
Reasonable.
Mind you, I see such a political wing having a relatively slim chance of success when the negotiating partners across the table are Darths Sidious and Vader.
I guess she can go on road shows throughout the Outer Rim trying to counteract the misinformation that Rebel terrorists blew up Alderaan and have some success with sympathetic ears.
Silly But True
@Simon good point – as long as Worldcon isn’t distributing the code counting software to anyone else then the GPL likely doesn’t apply.
@SbT
Heh, yeah. I think her main tasks would be getting allies/ sympathisers, and encouraging/ negotiating with defectors from the Empire (Join us – we don’t Force choke you for your mistake!)
Book rec: Kenneth Oppel’s THE NEST is a children’s book. I guess you could compare it to CORALINE but I think that’s for lack of anything else to compare it to. I think it’s more like an episode of the Outer Limits. It is short and dark and disturbing.
There are some ostensibly kid books that adults love and kids ignore, and I wonder if this may be one of them. There’s a peculiarly adult horror to the idea of replacing imperfect children. I’d recommend it for adults but maybe not for kids–I don’t know that I’d have cared very much as a kid. (And definitely not at all if babies with disabilities dredges up badness for you.)
Doctor Science: The reason you don’t remember female officers in the Rebellion is because they were cut.
I did not know this (so count me as one of today’s 10,000), and delighted though I am by the possibilities, I also find myself unaccountably annoyed at the sheer waste of it. And the silliness, no matter how long ago it was. I mean, good grief, the US military academies started admitting women in 1976, the same year Star Wars came out! True, the Air Force kept women pilots out of combat (officially, at least) until the early 1990s, but still. A technological advanced multi-species society in a galaxy far, far away, and it doesn’t see how women can be fighter pilots? Or perhaps even pilots in general? Throw in the fact that there was a woman on the bridge of the Enterprise in the 1960s–and yes, she was mostly a telephone operator, but she was an officer–and that TOS had, I think, at least a couple of female red shirts die on screen, and I’m not sure what the logic of cutting these characters could have been . . .
I used to be neutral, but that is only because of the retcon.
I used to be neutral but then the alien horde* MADE us wear the neutrals, which are the only shades their tiny eyes can see, so the rebellious among us wear primary colors to remain invisible from their tiny, prying, neutral eyes.
*In 4060, the A’Li’En H’Horde descended, and by now, deep into 4063, we’ve gotten used to the short form alien horde or even just AH. Or even NAH, what with the neutral identification and all.
@’As You Know’ Bob, @Meredith
If you want to take back the Hugos from the small group of literati that you posit is conspiratorially (is that even a word?) gaming the awards in favor of…something or other, then your job is to nominate the something or other that demonstrates whatever point you’re trying to make. You’d think that would be the easy part, but nope.
So, maybe just go back to trying to get Larry Correia a Hugo? You can’t fail any worse at that than you did with the slate, and his work is at least readable if not to my taste.
Here in 5259, we’re having a Back to the Future nostalgia night.
“Heigho!” yawned one day Mike Glyer,
“How Puppies fluster the Filer.
When the Hive’s stirred, without warning,
You’ll see they’ve gone back to swarming:
LOL! See them pointing their fingers,
Hoping to land a few zingers.
Back into war they will then plunge,
‘Til every Puppy’s expunged.
That Xanatos Gambit’s working?
Better ask those who are lurking.”
By now, we’re feeling temptation
To choose en masse gafiation.
“Mike,” I replied, “Daily scrolling
Might prove too much for the fickle.”
Mike smiled and said, “It’s just trolling.
What, can’t they take a few pixels?”
Such is the quandary dire
For fen who scroll with Mike Glyer.
What I mean is this: If someone emails me a copy of the Hugo voting code, I can’t assume that it became GPL just because it was based on GPL code.
Worldcon is not comparable to Google, because it’s not a single organization.
The voting code is sent from one Worldcon committee to the next. These committees are independent organizations. If one organization sends GPL code to another, that’s a form of a distribution, thus requiring the license to be followed on that code.
Manly Men do not have to keep proclaiming that fact. Indeed, it’s usually the other way around. Nor do they whine and use childish nicknames for their perceived enemies.
This is still true in 7122, where we continue to enjoy “Back to the Future” movies.
(We used to be neutral, but someone also revived “Miami Vice” and it’s all pastel and neon here now.)
@ Simon Bisson on October 20, 2015 at 6:42 pm:
Thanks for The Apples in Stereo embed. Really liking them.
I used to be neutral, but the fall skies clashed too badly.
The Apples in Stereo remind me of MTV-debut-era The Buggles.