(1) David Brin urges everyone to make a fashion statement for Back To the Future Day:
Okay so October 21 is “Back to the Future” Day,” when movie houses all over will be holding special showings of BTTF-II, to commemorate our crossing that particular frontier — when Marty McFly and Doc Brown arrived at the ‘future’ of 2015 from the year 1985. Here is a rundown of ways the film was eerily on target… and another… if you set aside hover boards and flying cars and hydrated pizzas. And Mr. Fusion, alas. Hey, everyone wear a DOUBLE TIE that day! I haven’t heard anyone else pushing that meme, so pass it on starting here!
(2) Jim C. Hines’ Icon report includes a photo of a group posed around the “Future Birthplace of James T. Kirk” monument in Riverside, Iowa. Hines is there with Ann Leckie, David Gerrold, Joe and Gay Haldeman, and some others I should probably recognize.
(3) Amanda S. Green considers possible outcomes of Amazon’s new move against fake reviews in “To Pay or Not to Pay”.
I can’t speak for Amazon but I have a feeling what we will see happening is that a number of reviews will simply drop off the site. These reviews will either be directly tied to the sites Amazon has suspicions about or will have key phrases that are oft repeated across other reviews. It is easy enough to code a data crawler to find such similarities. It is basically the same sort of tool that schools use to determine if a paper contains any plagiarized parts.
Amazon might go one step further. Right now, if you look at Amazon customer reviews, you will see some from verified purchasers and then those that aren’t. A verified purchaser is someone who actually purchased the item from Amazon. The only problem with this is it doesn’t reflect those who borrowed a book or short story under the Kindle Unlimited program. This may be the point where Amazon needs to add that as one of the descriptors. I know a number of authors, and readers alike, who have been asking Amazon to do just that. At least that way, people who look at reviews before buying something would have an idea if the reviewer actually put down money on the book in question.
There is always the possibility that Amazon will require you to have purchased an item from them before you are allowed to review it. I’ll admit to being torn about this option. That would keep reviewers like Shiny Book Review from posting reviews on all sales sites. It would kick out reviewers who receive free copies of books unless Amazon has them register as reviewers. This is a path I’m not sure I want to see them go down.
Right now, Amazon gives more weight to reviews written by verified purchasers. As they should.
(4) The Tiptree Award is looking for recommendations. Got one? Click and fill out their form.
Most of the books and stories that Tiptree Award jurors read to pick a winner are nominated by authors and readers. We need your suggestions. If you’ve read a work of science fiction or fantasy that explores or expands our notions of gender, please tell us about it by filling out the recommendation form below. If you have more than one, just fill out the form again with a new recommendation and submit it until you’ve told us about them all.
Recommendations close on the 1st of December, 2015.
(5) Fans and everyone seeking eyeballs for their blog are busy mining the newly-released Star Wars trailer for provocative material like – Who dies in the movie?
The first full-length trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens gave fans plenty to speculate wildly about, but one moment in particular is causing widespread panic across the galaxy — or at least, the Internet. Towards the end of the trailer (watch it here!), there is a one-second shot of heroine Rey (Daisy Ridley) sobbing over what looks like a dead body. So who dies?
(6) Geeks Are Sexy has photographic proof that Canada’s Newest Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, is a member of the Rebel Alliance. Eh?
(7) Catherynne M. Valente delivers The Big Idea today at Whatever. You were warned!
Radiance doesn’t have a big idea at its heart.
It has about six. It’s a decopunk alt-history Hollywood space opera mystery thriller. With space whales.
Over-egging the pudding, you say? Too many cooks going at the soup? Gilding that lily like it’s going to the prom? I say: grab your eggs and hold onto your lilies because I am cannonballing into that soup FULL SPEED AHEAD.
(8) Brandon Kempner assesses the chances of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora getting a Hugo nomination.
The Hugo is a murkier award in 2016, given the turbulence surrounding it. 2312 took third place in 2013, and was also third in the nominations. Given the campaigns that are sure to take place in 2016, 3rd place is probably vulnerable to being pushed out. Add in that 2016 is a strong Hugo year (former Best Novel winners Robinson, Stephenson, Leckie, Walton, Bacigalupi, Scalzi, and Liu are all fighting for 5 spots, and that’s not even factoring in Puppy campaigns or buzzy authors like Novik). As a result, I think Robinson will miss the ballot, but a strong year-end push could definitely grab Robinson a spot.
As for metrics, as of mid-October 2015, Aurora has 2,535 Goodreads ratings with a 3.79 score and 264 Amazon ratings with a score of 3.7. Those aren’t great but they aren’t terrible. It’s a rare thing to see the Goodreads score higher than Amazon, but I couldn’t tell you what that means. I think around 1500 Goodreads / 100 Amazon is the cut off to be competitive, so KSR is well above that. Score doesn’t seem to matter for either the Hugos or Nebulas; VanderMeer won a Nebula last year with a 3.62 Goodreads score.
(9) Tobias Buckell is losing readers right and left. Mostly right. “Today’s passive aggressive fan mail: reader will not read more of my books because I don’t speak English English as my first language”
(10) Peter David “Just when boycotts couldn’t get any more stupid: Star War VII”
When the first “Star Wars” film came out in 1977, it was criticized for the overall whiteness of it. The one major black actor, James Earl Jones, wasn’t even given voice credit (his choice). This was answered with the introduction of Lando in the very next film, but still, mostly white.
So now the new film prominently features a black hero and there are actually idiots who are declaring it should be boycotted because of that? I mean, I knew there are people for whom Obama can do no right because of his skin color, but this is quite simply insane.
(11) But Gary Farber says it’s a fake boycott trolled by 4chan.Here’s one of those claiming credit.
https://twitter.com/The_Extrange/status/656225411773300736
(12) Meanwhile, in the interests of being fair and balanced, we bring you the A.V. Club’s post “Conservative pundit bravely comes out in support of the Galactic Empire”.
Star Wars’ Galactic Empire tends to get a bad rap. Oh sure, Emperor Palpatine started the whole thing by manufacturing a phony war to scare people into supporting a leader who would slowly take away their freedom in exchange for “safety,” the entire organization is suspiciously stocked with almost exclusively white human men, and there was that one time it destroyed an entire planet full of innocent people just to prove that it could, but is any of that stuff objectively evil? Conservative pundit Bill Kristol doesn’t think so, according to a tweet he posted this morning in response to a joke about how the Star Wars prequels encouraged conservatives to root for the Empire….
(13) Today In History:
- October 20, 1932 — James Whale’s The Old Dark House makes its theatrical debut.
(14) Today’s Birthday Boy:
- Born October 20, 1892 – Bela Lugosi. As they say at IMDB:
It’s ironic that Martin Landau won an Oscar for impersonating Bela Lugosi (in Ed Wood (1994)) when Lugosi himself never came within a mile of one, but that’s just the latest of many sad ironies surrounding Lugosi’s career.
(15) Today’s Birthday Book:
- October 20, 1955 – The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien published. The Wertzone pays tribute:
The Return of the King, being the third part of the novel, was released on 20 October 1955, completing the publication of the tome that had begun on 29 July 1954 with the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring. The Return of the King had originally been planned for release much earlier in the year, but Tolkien delayed it due to working on the book’s appendices, to the annoyance of readers (yet another epic fantasy trend begun by the Tolkmeister).
(16) Belfast-born writer C.S. Lewis is to be honored in his native city with a series of new sculptures depicting characters from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe reports the BBC.
Belfast City Council has commissioned six new pieces of public art, including Aslan the Lion and the White Witch.
They will be erected in a new civic square, currently under construction, at the Holywood Arches in east Belfast.
…As well as the lion and the witch, the six pieces of art also include sculptures of Mr Tumnus, Jewel the unicorn, Mr and Mrs Beaver and the Stone Table
(17) Belfast is also where the third C.S. Lewis Festival takes place from Thursday 19 – Sunday 22 November 2015, marking the 52nd anniversary of the death of the author, theologian, academic and creator of the incredible Chronicles of Narnia series.
Across 4 days of Lewis-related events will be reflections and assessments of the cultural significance of Lewis’ rich legacy, the impact he had on Belfast, as well as the strong influence his native city had on his vast body of work. There will be something for everyone with many magical and free events offered; it’s definitely worth checking out.
Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898. The C.S. Lewis Festival will recognise and celebrate both his life and his legacy to the world. Across 4 days of Lewis-related events will be reflections and assessments of the cultural significance of Lewis’ rich legacy, the impact he had on Belfast, as well as the strong influence his native city had on his vast body of work.
(18) Free lifetime memberships for trying it! One of the best book cataloging sites. LibraryThing launches in iPhone app.
We’re thrilled to announce the official LibraryThing iPhone App!
What it does. This is our first version, so we’ve limited it to doing the most basic functions you’ll need for cataloging on the go:
- Browse and search your library.
- Add books by scanning barcodes. Scanning to add is VERY FAST!
- Add books by searching.
- Browse and upload covers, using the iPhone camera.
- Do minor editing, such as changing collections and ratings. Major editing sends you to LibraryThing.
(19) Wait, you mean it isn’t fake? “This Software Lets Someone Else Control Your Face”
Researchers created expression transferring software that projects mouth, eye, and other facial movements onto another face in real time.
(20) “Life on Earth likely started 4.1 billion years ago – much earlier than scientists thought” reports Phys.org.
“Life on Earth may have started almost instantaneously,” added Harrison, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. “With the right ingredients, life seems to form very quickly.”
The new research suggests that life existed prior to the massive bombardment of the inner solar system that formed the moon’s large craters 3.9 billion years ago.
“If all life on Earth died during this bombardment, which some scientists have argued, then life must have restarted quickly,” said Patrick Boehnke, a co-author of the research and a graduate student in Harrison’s laboratory.
Scientists had long believed the Earth was dry and desolate during that time period. Harrison’s research—including a 2008 study in Nature he co-authored with Craig Manning, a professor of geology and geochemistry at UCLA, and former UCLA graduate student Michelle Hopkins—is proving otherwise.
“The early Earth certainly wasn’t a hellish, dry, boiling planet; we see absolutely no evidence for that,” Harrison said. “The planet was probably much more like it is today than previously thought.”
The researchers, led by Elizabeth Bell—a postdoctoral scholar in Harrison’s laboratory—studied more than 10,000 zircons originally formed from molten rocks, or magmas, from Western Australia. Zircons are heavy, durable minerals related to the synthetic cubic zirconium used for imitation diamonds. They capture and preserve their immediate environment, meaning they can serve as time capsules.
(21) A New York Comic Con panel on the economics of Star Trek gathered Trek writer Chris Black; Manu Saadia, author of the book “Trekonomics”; Annalee Newitz, founding editor of the culture site io9; moderator Felix Salmon, of Fusion; Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist; and Brad DeLong, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
“Gene Roddenberry tried to paint our future,” said DeLong, noting that we’ve gone far down that road. “We’re now, in fact, approaching post-scarcity in food and products.”
But, as Newitz pointed out, because “Trek” is a future where money no longer exists, people work because they want to but are therefore supported by other economies. To prove her point, she cited as an example “Measure of a Man,” an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” that centered on the character of Lt. Cmdr. Data, an android.
Even though Data is a crew member of the starship “Enterprise,” unlike his fellow crewmates, he’s a robot. But does that make him a person or Starfleet property?
“We’re constantly being reminded that slavery and low wages support the comfortable, ‘Enterprise’ living,” Newitz said….
Salmon, the panel’s moderator, pointed out that in 2016, “Star Trek” will turn 50 and Thomas More’s book, “Utopia,” will turn 500. He then asked the panel if there is anything utopian about “Trek.”
“We are problem-solving, puzzle-solving, status-seeking creatures,” DeLong said.
Krugman responded by saying: “People have an amazing ability to be unhappy. The problem with utopia is not the lack of scarcity — it’s people.”
[Thanks to Will R., Steven H Silver, 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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Tom Galloway: Results were 1) A lot of Pups questioning my math abilities and saying that lockstep nominating couldn’t possibly have happened and I was lying and 2) the following from Paulk
As you so rightly pointed out, in the end it doesn’t matter whether Puppies believe that their members have nominated in lockstep according to a slate, rather than genuinely nominating based on their own personal preferences — what will matter is whether all the non-Puppy Hugo voters perceive that the Puppies have nominated in lockstep according to a slate.
The Puppies seem to think that if they post a slate but then say “We didn’t post a slate!” loudly and frequently enough, Hugo voters are stupid and gullible enough to take that on faith based on the Puppies’ word for it. It didn’t work this year, and it’s not going to work next year.
Hopefully, EPH will pass next year and then everyone can go back to ignoring what the Puppies do in their little echo chambers.
@DMS
Book Catalogue (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eleybourn.bookcatalogue&hl=en) has a barcode scanner and integrates with LibraryThing.
I’m not on LT so not sure how well that works but it is a decent app as standalone. It also integrates with goodreads reasonably well but not as well as the dedicated goodreads app.
Tom Galloway: I can’t get over how many people offer coaching and advice to the Sad Puppy leadership. Toward what end? Because you’re actually cool with a slate provided it’s brought about in some antiseptic way you approve? Are you nuts?
One Ink Cartel is very proud of her decade, and thinks they could outshoot any other decade on the ship.
Five Ink Cartel is an aficionada of fine porcelain.
Nine Ink Cartel writes poetry but won’t show it to you unless she’s very, very drunk.
Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little –
Slow clap.
Brava!
> “Hopefully, EPH will pass next year and then everyone can go back to ignoring what the Puppies do in their little echo chambers.”
I do want to point out that EPH will *only* work if quite a lot of people nominate. It is not a magic bullet that ends slates with no effort.
@Peace
re: goodreads
What an awful experience. Sorry you had to put up with that. Sometimes I just don’t understand people. The pursuit of petty revenge is so damaging to everyone. And GoodReads really comes off sounding useless!
I played around at goodreads for the first time recently. After this and all the talk about LibraryThing, maybe I will go over there instead.
The failure to recognise Sturgeon’s Law also accounts for the perenial discussion of Is anime dying? which always sounds like cranky old men yelling “Get off my lawn!” to me. Which is funny since a lot of the time the “cranky old men” are mostly uni students who have been watching anime for 5-6 years max.
At some point I just assumed Orbit was an off-shoot of Tor, or something like that. I assumed I’d missed something. I’m terrible at paying attention to publishers, anyway. The Pups are masters of fluid goalpost moving, though. Tor may not actually publish Ancillary Justice, but they may as well, given the whole thing is a misandrist screed blatantly calling for the murder of all men, disguised as a science fiction novel, disguised as a fantasy novel, heavily infused with a possibly unhealthy obsession with tea (that last bit is actually true).
A few random comments on current topics…
Just because an online short fiction market is free to the reader doesn’t meant that authors aren’t paid. A good number of the hot online SFF markets these days are donation-funded yet manage to pay SFWA-qualifying rates.
I suspect that the “you must only write postive reviews” thing in LesFic derives originally from connections with fanfic communities.
As someone who both reviews and is reviewed on Amazon and Goodreads, I’ve noticed some interesting overall trends of comparison that may apply more among small-distribution books than blockbusters. Goodreads reviewers seem generally more comfortable giving lower ratings. This isn’t solely because you can rate without reviewing (because people seem more willing to leave text reviews with low ratings too), nor does it seem solely attributable to the mismatch between the descriptive guidelines for # of stars between the Amazon and GR systems. For books with fewer than 10 reviews/ratings, Amazon seems more likely have have only 4-5 star inarticulately glowing reviews than GR does. And among very low-star reviews, GR reviewers seem more comfortable going into detail as to what they felt were flaws in a book (while low-star Amazon reviews typically are more terse).
Why yes, over-thinking this is a hobby of mine. Why do you ask?
“GoodReads really comes off sounding useless!”
You don’t know the half of it. They actually caved to the STGRB trolls and deleted a few accounts by reviewers on the troll’s hit list, and deleted a bunch of reviews and reading lists for having such innocuous tags as ‘nope’ ‘hell no’ etc
The fact that the owner of STGRB, Melissa Douthit, several of her attack mutts, and a good number of the poor poor oppressed authors she ‘championed’, had already been banned (in some cases, several times thanks to sock puppeting) didn’t seem to register with GR as a reason not to take these numbskulls seriously. GR decided readers weren’t making them money, and certainly not readers who didn’t LOVE EVERYTHING THEY READ, so they changed tack and pitched the site as a marketing tool for authors.
Which has meant GR is now not friendly in the slightest for readers, and no use to authors like me who (a) self publish (yeah, I know, ptui) but (b) loathe the kind of marketing too many other authors, SP or not, bombard potential customers with.
Yo9u’ll find me listed on the STGRB site as a loony to avoid (no reason given of course) – because I wrote too many pieces poking at Douthit’s foulness. Badly behaving authors, canine or otherwise, tend to return to the same kind of vomit every time.
McJulie: I’d forgotten that Biff was clearly Trump even at the time (well, it’s 6511, so it’s been a while since I saw the movie). I’d much rather have hoverboards and Jaws 19, thanks.
Meredith: Oh, I feel your pain. I wish I could send you some spoons. And painkillers. Fingers crossed for best possible outcome. Absolute American sincerity.
Dearest Wombat: lots of cream sauce, and plenty of spices, I’d say. Also booze to wash it down with, and maybe plug your nose so you can’t taste the shudder fish balls.
All the county and state fairs are over. I’m sure there’s deep fried pumpkin with pumpkin spice out there, but I’ve got pumpkin macarons and pumpkin pie mochi ice cream, and some Vosges chocolate with bacon in, so I’m good. None of it’s on sticks, though. I like Blooming Onions, but they don’t like me.
Friends and I once did a day where everything was deep fried. ONCE. Breakfast was various blobs of dough and fruit; dinner was tempura everything. Even the pepperoni. Don’t think we had any rutabagas, but we damn well would have done them too, and eaten them. My acne the next week was a flashback to puberty.
I’m not sure whether or not I like the Trader Joe’s “Fireworks” chocolate, which is an average milk choc with bits of chipotle-flavored things what explode in your mouth exactly like Pop Rocks. It’s not too spicy. Damn interesting, though — I may need a second one to know if I like it or it’s just the novelty.
The Sad Puppies were a cabal of useful idiots for Teddy last year, and they are again this year. They refuse to admit it, since nobody likes to acknowledge that something they started and worked hard on was taken over completely and used for someone else’s benefit. But it’s going to happen again.
Puppies just need to start their own award, curated and voted on by only Approved Puppies. Then none of those icky SJWs will get in and ruin it. Actually, a Puppy award might turn up some good stuff if Teddy isn’t allowed to pack it with his crap! Even better if nobody’s allowed to nominate their friends/objects of suck-up, but Puppies are too tribal and authoritarian for that. They could probably run it out of Baen’s Bar, as long as Teddy and his Elk aren’t allowed in.
I am really liking F&SF this year and am considering subscribing. I’ve found some very good stuff there. Analog is… well… sigh. Not worth money, which is a shame considering its long and storied history. If someone’s daft enough to get that editor on the nominations, yours truly is putting HIM after No Award, slates or no.
FYI, if anyone wanted to hear the William’ score from the latest Star Wars trailer (@Meredith?):
ETA: This isn’t the full score, just someone isolating the bits from the trailer BtW.
Mike, I wasn’t offering the Pups advice on how to slate. I was trying to point out that if they do slate, or appear to slate, they’ll just get the same result (I managed to refrain from pointing out that doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result is a common definition of insanity). So to accomplish anything different from last year, they need to not slate, and said not slating will have to be crystal clear to non-Pups. And at least for me, getting them not to slate would be a good thing.
@ JJ:
Indeed.
When the Puppies emerge from their enraged huddles to disrupt and damage chosen targets, rational people need to pay attention to see whether they’re actually disruptive or damaging, and then make responsible decisions.
For example, they only disrupted Tor Books in a minor way, and only briefly, and they’ve been unable to damage Tor at all. So their continued Tor hysteria, though noisy, is irrelevant, and it can (and really should, IMO) be ignored.
But they have substantially disrupted and slightly damaged the Hugos, and they intend to continue doing so. That shouldn’t be ignored, obviously since there are consequences to their activities in this case. It’s not just a matter of “Puppies fabricating more offensive/ludicrous rubbish.” But if the measures passed this year to solve that problem are ratified next year (which so far seems likely), then I have high hopes it will make the Puppies’ Hugo hysteria as irrelevant as their Tor hysteria. And then it, too, will be something that rationale people can (and really should) ignore.
If someone’s daft enough to get that editor on the nominations, yours truly is putting HIM after No Award, slates or no.
Trevor Quachri was an interesting omission from the Puppy slate last year in the short form editor category. They nominated several stories from Analog onto the ballot – more than from almost any other source if one does not count Beale’s self-serving Castalia House nominations, and yet the Pups completely ignored the Analog editor.
Which has meant GR is now not friendly in the slightest for readers, and no use to authors like me who (a) self publish (yeah, I know, ptui) but (b) loathe the kind of marketing too many other authors, SP or not, bombard potential customers with.
It sounds like LibraryThing would suit you. The range of what is considered to be an acceptable review on LibraryThing is quite broad, including a review that simply says “No”. The only thing prohibited is basically spam.
I’m pretty sure the reason for any Puppy mistaking the Ancillary books as being published by Tor goes like this:
1. Tor manipulates the results of awards to make sure that most or all awards of any significance go to books they publish.
2. Ancillary Justice won nearly everything, so it must have been published by Tor, because only Tor books win awards, even more so if multiple awards are involved.
I really wish I was making these episodes of Puppy-Logic up, but everything is based on things prominent Puppies have said. 🙁
Re: Sad Puppies 4
I don’t plan on participating in the creation of a slate. I do understand why other people have chosen to do so, but its not for me. I prefer the nice, broad rec lists of File770 and elsewhere to ‘here’s the top 10 and you’d be wise to pick from the top’.
@andyl
That’s pretty much as far as I’d got so far in my planning! Any other organisational ideas are, of course, welcome (and that counts for everyone).
Once I’ve got some proof-of-concept lists up and a system worked out I was thinking of throwing open the username/password (its not a me-account) to people who ask for it (and whose nyms I’m familiar with, obviously, because even petty sabotage sometimes happens). That way it isn’t relying on just me to keep it ticking over – and people don’t always have to alert me to additions if they want to add a book to a list that was made previously. I’m not decided on that yet, though.
Thank you for the offer of help! I’m still playing around with the details at the moment, but it might be quite helpful to be able to point someone (or more than one someone) at a particular list in order to get through the backlog without it being just me doing the whole lot once there’s a standard in place.
@Cassy B, Doire, Anna Feruglio Dal Dan, Cat, Stevie, junego, McJulie, Lis Carey, Soon Lee, Greg, GSLamb, and lurkertype
Thank you for the well-wishes. I found out once I’d got there that my appointment had been cancelled and I’d gone all that way for nothing – the reason was good, as my intended assessor’s mother had had a heart attack, so I don’t blame them, and the receptionist was very apologetic, but it was still quite frustrating and I’m not looking forward to having to do it all again once they book me a new appointment. Recovery time times two is not my idea of fun, and neither is assessment stress times two. 🙁 Even more annoying is my blue badge (disabled parking thingy) is waiting on the result of this, so I haven’t had the parking proximity I need since the end of September and no real idea of when I’ll have it back.
I did manage on the spur of the moment to do some catching up with a friend who lives there and I don’t get to see much, so at least there was some lemonade from those lemons.
I’m sorry for not replying to you all sooner, but I left quite shortly after making that comment.
@Cat
I really like this idea. I’m all for lots of book recs, and surely spreading all that love around could only benefit more people who the Puppies think are doing good work?
Photosynthesis by itself doesn’t get you noticeable oxygen in the atmosphere, because the oxygen is used up in breaking the sugars down for energy. (The purpose of photosynthesis isn’t to create oxygen, it’s to store solar energy for later use by whatever organism is photosynthesizing.) An oxygen atmosphere is the result of burying some of those sugars/carbohydrates before they can be oxidized back to water and carbon dioxide.
Daniel Canfield’s book Oxygen: A Four Billion Year History is good, though I had to skim some of the more technical bits.
Jason said: “On the other hand, I have breaded and deep fried bacon to prove a point ”
Growing up, on occasions when my Dad cooked meals, one of his standards was thick-sliced bacon dredged in flour and cooked under the broiler. The flour made it less likely for the stove to catch on fire, which only happened a few times.
Supporting the Galactic Empire makes alot of sense… The Jedi are a bunch of hippees who never had a real job in their lives. Look at how Yoda talks and his skin? He looks and talks just like a meth addict from Breaking Bad.
Plus look at all the wars under the ‘republic’. It wasn’t a republic it was a confederacy. It even had slavery on Tattooine. I don’t recall any slaves on Tatooine during the empire do you?
You got the whole Alderaan thing… , but Prince Leia is a known liar (see the this is a diplomatic mission at the start of the first movie). How do we know they didn’t have weapons?
Given how the Star Wars universe works alot less people probably died during the Empire, then during the republic period. This does make some sense. OK sure you got the whole wrinkly cackling lightning shooting wizard in charge, but how many people have any contact with him?
Plus Leia was a ‘princess’. The republic had royal families. The empire promoted based on merit. Not on birth.
There is something to this. I would have been a loyalist to the empire.
@Mike: Could you make separate ‘puppy’ posts just for puppygate stuff. You have alot of points here,but if you just include 1 puppy post all the responses are about puppy gate stuff. There is more going on in SF than that Hugo nonsense and its a long way away. So how about removing them from the scrolls and just keeping it separate?
Of course, those of us who require at least three cups of tea before our morning zombie state begins to lift realise that there can be no such thing.
I am profoundly grateful to the buffet cooks and waiters on board my favourite ship who, recognising this fact, smile indulgently at my inability to make speedy decisions about what I want for breakfast, and steer me to a table, where they produce a large pot of strong tea and wait for the magic to work.
Saying that I am not a morning person is roughly as accurate as saying that Mount Everest is a hill; without those guys I would never have made it to any of the extraordinary array of World Heritage sites on the cruises this year, last year, or the year before. Indeed, they are so attuned to me that one morning the waiter took one look at me and said
He was right; It was before sunrise, and yet they managed to get me into the land of the living so I could see Olympia before the hordes arrived, and there are a lot of other sites where the aim is to get there as early as possible, since that way you get to see them without vast numbers of people standing in the way.
And once you factor in my cabin steward’s amazing ability to create order from chaos, of which there’s a lot in my vicinity, It’s an unbeatable combination, and I put my thanks in writing to the officers, as well as the guys.
So, I’m pretty happy with my tea; it’s definitely my drug of choice when I’m trying to regain consciousness, though obviously people are entirely free not to drink tea. Of course, that’s weird but there’s a lot of weird things out there, particularly here in the year 0591…
@Jason
Re: Magazines
I’m still not quite up on things enough to be much help at describing magazines, but most of them have an option to subscribe to them on Kindle – with a 30 day free trial, too, so you can get a feel for each magazine without throwing money at all of them at once. 🙂
@Rose Embolism
I think you nailed it. 🙂
@Hypnotosov
I’m finding it hard to contain my vindictive glee at the idea of the Mad Genius Club having to grit their teeth and recommend File770 – but I still wouldn’t wish slating on File770, however amusing it would be to see them have to do it or admit that they were only following the most popular principle when it suited them.
@Lis Carey
I’m glad your mission was successful with no major injury to you or to Rosie. 🙂 Gratz on getting an adopter, too!
@Peace
That all sounds awful, and those authors behaved abominably. I’m sorry you had to deal with that.
@Rob Sharp
Thanks for the Le Guin link. Great letter.
@Lauowolf
It does bear an uncanny resemblance.
Sadly for Butcher, his neutrality is hard to believe considering he was on a Puppy slate. His intentions may have been to be neutral, but when he started his involvement getting bribed it can’t help but be an influencing factor.
@Tom Galloway
It’s a shame Paulk decided posturing was the best response. Your point about how Puppies look to everyone else being the important thing was particularly good.
I think this bit:
Looks a bit like suggesting that if they had a slate with broadly popular works it wouldn’t be called out as a slate, though, which I think wasn’t quite your intent?
@Aaron
I think Torgersen said something about some people turning down being put on the slate before he ever published it. Perhaps that includes Quachri?
@Guess
Did you miss the Princess Leia in a gold bikini scenes? 🙂 Or the slave dancing girl who gets eaten?
@Vicki, about oxygen, I haven’t read that book but if you’re describing it accurately, that’s very different from what I was taught in college biology which was that the oxygen used for metabolizing sugar is simply much less than the oxygen produced by photosynthesis– basically what’s said here: http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=2860
@Meredith
Bummer about the cancellation, Hope her mother will be all right. Hope your reaction isn’t too bad and doesn’t get worse 24 hours after the stressor like mine sometimes does.
The effect of the increasing amount of oxygen was, I gather, constant. It’s just that there was a massive amount of iron in solution in the oceans and land which sucked up darn near every oxygen molecule as it was produced (producing some beautiful banded iron formations and redstone). It took aeons before enough iron was rusted to allow a trickle of oxygen to slowly start to accumulate in the atmosphere.
Interestingly, there is good evidence that just as the Earth’s atmosphere became seriously oxygenated the entire planet froze over almost to the equator for hundreds of millions of years. This may have had something to do with oxygen displacing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. It also happens to be just the moment when multicellular life evolved.
@ Tintinaus
The failure to recognise Sturgeon’s Law also accounts for the perenial discussion of Is anime dying? which always sounds like cranky old men yelling “Get off my lawn!” to me. Which is funny since a lot of the time the “cranky old men” are mostly uni students who have been watching anime for 5-6 years max.
I would say that the discussion on Anime dying has more to do with people looking at the sales of Anime in Japan and the bad financial situation of a lot of Japanese animation studio. All the bad light novel adaptions does not help either. Manglobe’s bankruptcy is the most resent example but to be honest I think it is more of a miracle that they lasted as long as they did.
Meredith
I’lm so sorry that it was cancelled, particular forms of stress really don’t help any underlying conditions, so I hope that you get a new appointment in the near future…
@junego
I already had an injured leg and an injured shoulder before I even left the house (more so than usual, I mean) so I don’t think tomorrow is going to be any fun. 🙁 I’m going to ensure a decentish nights sleep with oramorph tonight so hopefully that will help a bit.
The reason for the cancellation was very reasonable and also sort of put things in a better light than a less understandable reason would have. I might have a bad few days, but my mother is fine, and I’m grateful for that. I would have left early for the day too in that situation.
ETA
@Stevie
The last appointment (the one that was supposed to be today) took them a couple of months to make (I gave up on chasing them after the first two weeks of phoning them every other day) so I’m hoping this one will be a bit quicker. The whole assessment process is deeply unpleasant, since mental health is generally not improved by dwelling on and mentally rehearsing all of ones deficiencies in order to be able to accurately report them when they ask questions, so I’m very much looking forward to it being done with – and hopefully not having to spend a year on an appeal this time.
@snowcrash
Oops, forgot – thanks for the music!
Oh, so GoodReads cravened to the Stop-The-GoodReads-Bullies trollls, eh? I’m gladder than ever I left.
When I first joined it was being hyped as a site for readers to talk to each other and maybe cross paths with some authors. I sure don’t appreciate being treated as meat on a platter to sell to a shark tank of desperate self-published authors who demand my praises and eyeballs.
Another possibility is that he was privately asked to be on the slate and declined, which happened in some instances.
Meredith
Obviously I misunderstood earlier because I hadn’t grasped that the assessment had been postponed till tomorrow. I really hope round two works better…
Back in the aughties it was pretty easy to make a case that the guys who went around blowing things up because they wanted to return everything to the good old days when people were more religious, led by a black-robed desert hermit named Bin, were actually the villains. Plus there were all those independent contractors on the Death Star.
At that time I was addicted to a Star Wars MMO with an international fan base, and we used to have great political discussions couched in SW terminology that probably would’ve escalated beyond tolerable stress levels if we had been discussing the real world. In fact, I had always kind of thought that was the main reason science fiction existed — to give people a less acrimonious way to argue about politics. Goodbye innocence, hello disillusionment.
Inspired by Brad Torgersen’s recent remarks, I have designed a “Manly Man Card” suitable for printing out and carrying around in one’s wallet like a desiccated condom. It’s posted on my blog here.
Another possibility is that he was privately asked to be on the slate and declined, which happened in some instances.
That is certainly possible. I wasn’t particularly perturbed by Quachri’ s absence from the ballot, as I think that the editorial direction Analog has taken under his watch has been very questionable at best, but it did seem notable. Maybe he did decline and no one said anything. If I were Brad, I wouldn’t want that rebuff being widely known. Quachri might be worried that if he made it public, the Pups might retaliate by stopping sending stories to him. On the other hand, that might improve the quality of stories in the magazine, so maybe he should try that out.
@Bruce Arthurs
LOL
This also needs one of those tiny talking chips attached, which will play Aerosmith’s “Big Ten Inch (Record)” when the card is displayed.
@Stevie
Oh! Sorry, I should have been more clear, you were right the first time and I didn’t mean to confuse you – ‘today’ was referring to the day just ending (well, ended). No, I don’t know when it will be yet, it isn’t tomorrow – and frankly if they’d tried to get me to drive to Nottingham and back twice in two days I would have pitched a fit. That’s pretty far beyond my being-in-a-car tolerance – everything gets all slippy.
@Bruce Arthurs
The inches bit is a very nice touch. 😉
@Aaron
Always a possibility that Torgersen just forgot, too. He forgot lots of things.
I conceive of the Scroll as a daily post to energize several braided discussions within the community here.
If I isolated the Puppy stuff, what I expect would happen is the community discussion would promptly migrate there, leaving the Scroll a link collection that gets 1 to 5 comments like the majority of other posts.
Science fiction news can attract readers, but rarely sparks discussion. Locus Online and Ansible Links don’t even provide for comments. SF Site News does, but very few comments are left. SF Signal boosts marketing information and includes news in its daily link roundup — I don’t know what a typical day is like for them but I see the site has received 12 comments in the last 12 hours.
Politics and cultural controversy are what drives sf blogs with an active community of commenters. Those blogs might deal with gun ownership, immigration, feminism (or anti-feminism), or the antics of our two-party system. While I may have more fun writing about fanac and pop culture, I also care about the survival of the Hugos as a democratically-chosen award, which has led to a great deal of political and politico-cultural discussion in the comments here for the past six months. That sustains the community’s continuing interest, bringing in the people who engage in the delightful literary and culinary discussions.
That’s my theory. If anyone likes another theory better, I’m all ears.
@Mike Glyer:
Hear hear!
Always a possibility that Torgersen just forgot, too. He forgot lots of things.
That had been my first thought.
Oh, hey, and back to commenting on news items. Justin Trudeau seems a breath of fresh air, and good going, Canada!
I think the Puppy discussion is usually in a fairly good balance with everything else. It doesn’t usually take over anymore. I like having it all mixed up together because it allows the conversation to flow freely, and lets people switch from topic to topic more easily. The bits that don’t interest you – just scroll past them. 🙂
@Meredith
Oh dear, very gentle hugs.
Since it was their issue, one can hope they fit you in soon.
Sigh.
The only thing worse than going in for medical stuff is going in and not getting it done.
But a question about the disabled parking.
My husband and I had a few Very Bad Years, and as a result had assorted blue and red parking thingys coming and going for a while.
The good news is that we are both largely recovered.
The bad news is that therefore the tags went away, as did the super cheap electrical rate for having home medical machinery.
Because of this, we discovered that, at least in California, getting disabled parking is not linked to having a formal legal disabled status.
It’s just a form from the DMV that any doctor can fill out for you.
So my husband got the first one from his surgeon, but after that it was simply renewed twice by his regular doctor when we sent him the DMV form with a note.
MG : “If anyone likes another theory better, I’m all ears.”
I have a theory Mike is a Panotti.
@Peace
re:oxygen
My understanding is that current scientific consensus believes photosynthesis evolved about 3.5 billion years ago (don’t hold me to that, I didn’t google, just from my memory 🙂 and slowly filled the ocean with oxygen, then the atmosphere, as you said. Nuts, I gotta go look this up…OK (from Wikipedia) the build-up to saturation of the oceans is thought to have been from 2.45 to 1.85 bya, the atmosphere from 1.85 to .85 bya.
The Late Heavy Bombardment is hypothesized to have been from 4.1 to 3.8 bya and to have sterilized any life that may have been extant.
If the evidence shown in the PNAS paper showing that there were photosynthetic bugs *well before* 4.1 bya is correct, then either
1) some bugs survived the LHB and started photosythesizing 500 million years earlier than now thought or
2) all the bugs did die, but life (and photosynthesis) re-evolved as now hypothesized or
3) some bugs came from Mars on meteorites to jumpstart 1) &/or 2)
If either of the 1) scenarios is correct, the time to build up oxygen took longer than now thought or the beginning of saturation began earlier than now thought.
At least that’s my brain doodles 😀
Just had another doodle…the LHB was earlier or later than thought. I don’t know what the dating evidence is for the LHB.
@Peace Is My Middle Name — it’s completely wrong of me, but I really want a Chretien-Trudeau photo that works with “now, my apprentice” sorts of captioning.
I am not sure (art major, not a scientist), but I gather the evidence for the LHB *might* be based on the dating of some overlapping craters on the moon which *might* have been contaminated by some ejecta from a different and much younger crater, forcing a false idea of when the majority of craters formed.
In other words, it might just be a mirage based on an erroneous date and the late bombardment may have never happened.
ETA: According to item #20, there is now evidence of photosynthesis, or at least biological activity. 4.1 gya.
Mike
Beautiful demonstration of your views of slating! I’ll just plod after you, in the hope of distracting anyone who thinks that Constable the greatest landscape gardener of all time…