Pixel Scroll 10/22 No Certain Elk

(1) Nick Skywalker’s touch of genius —

(2) Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow is teasing plans for a sequel. Cinema Blend says here’s what to expect:

It all has to do with what B.D. Wong’s Dr. Wu said in this summer’s blockbuster: “We’re not always going to be the only ones who can make a dinosaur.” In an interview with Wired U.K., Trevorrow said he found that to be an interesting idea:

What if this went open source? It’s almost like InGen is Mac, but what if PC gets their hands on it? What if there are 15 different entities around the world who can make a dinosaur?

Though Trevorrow admits this isn’t really covered in the original movie, it’s something in which he sees potential for growth. Looking back to the first Jurassic Park film, we saw Wayne Knight’s Dennis Nedrey attempt to steel the genetic material from dinosaurs and smuggle them off the island for a third party. While he didn’t succeed, this seems to be along the same lines that Trevorrow is talking about.

(3) Tom Galloway: “Seems Mark Zuckerberg’s project for this year was to read a lot of books (for values of “lot” that amounts to one every two weeks. Well, he is busy). There’s a Facebook page to serve as an online book club for them, and the latest choice is the Hugo-winning Three Body Problem.”

(4) David Gerrold has made his novelette “Entanglements,” published in the May/June issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, a free read via Dropbox. [PDF file]

(5) Aya de Leon’s article “Space Babe Fantasies: On Geoff Marcy and Sexism in Science and Sci-Fi” for The Toast begins with a headline example of harassment, and moves on to comment about the genre, including three paragraphs about Sad Puppies.

Last Thursday, my colleagues and I received an email from the Chancellor of UC Berkeley informing us that Marcy had resigned. A panel had found that he had sexually harassed female students for nearly a decade. According to Azeen Ghorayshi, the reporter who broke the story for BuzzFeed, Marcy’s great success was part of the reason why his pattern of harassment went unchallenged. As Ghorayshi explained, “Marcy’s is the rare ilk of scientific research that is capable of both reaching the peak of his field and capturing the public imagination.”

Ghorayshi lays out in painful detail how Marcy’s behavior was both widespread and well known; her article documents incidents of alleged misconduct with female colleagues dating back to the 1980s. BuzzFeed also noted that “UC Berkeley is currently under federal investigation for its handling of dozens of sexual violence complaints on campus.”

(6) Adam-Troy Castro offers an analogy in “Enough With the Fershlugginer Chocolate Cake, Already”.

Look, I’m going to explain this in terms you might be able to understand.

I like chocolate cake just fine.

I think chocolate cake is one of the things that makes life worth living.

As a fat guy, I not only return to chocolate cake more often than is healthy for me, but can actually wax rhapsodic about great slices of chocolate cake from my past.

I’m perfectly capable of sitting down with you and geeking out over chocolate cake.

But I can’t eat just chocolate cake.

(7) And apparently you can’t drink Pepsi Perfect either.

“Back to the Future” fans had hoped to be sipping a Pepsi Perfect by now, but most of them are making sad eyes at their computers after facing a fast sellout of a special release of the bottles.

Fans have been waiting for this day ever since the 1989 sequel, when Marty McFly and Doc Brown arrived in the future on October 21, 2015. In honor of the film, Pepsi decided to make 6,500 limited-edition bottles of Pepsi Perfect available.

Pepsi Perfect makes a cameo appearance at an ’80s-theme cafe in the future. Fans got extra-excited about the prospect of owning it because it feels both iconic and attainable (selling for $20.15, about £13, AU$28). The release date? October 21, 2015, naturally.

Now imagine the stress when Back to the Futurites discovered that some of the Pepsi Perfect bottles went on sale early and that other people had snapped them up. Actually, you don’t have to imagine it. Here’s a selection of what they said:

Amazon reviewer Pissed AF wrote: “I am SO upset!! This didn’t even pop up in the search! And you released it a whole hours early? Are you kidding me?????????” This is currently the top most-helpful review on the Pepsi Perfect Amazon page.

(8) Notes Adweek: “During his stay in the future, McFly often references a copy of USA Today, which was created specifically for the movie. To celebrate the occasion, USA Today wrapped its paper in a replica of the movie edition.”

(9) Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd rolled onto the set of Jimmy Kimmel Live in a classic DeLorean and got a standing ovation just for showing up.

(10) Today’s Birthday Boys

  • October 22, 1938 — Christopher Lloyd
  • October 22, 1952 — Jeff Goldblum

(11) Now for something completely different. Entertainment.ie names its “Top 10 Time Travel Movies That Aren’t Back To The Future”

(12) How It Should Have Ended – why Big Hero 6 should have been a lot shorter.

(13) James H. Burns praises the Mets’ broadcast crew:

Another reason for those who admire near Hall of Fame first baseman Keith Hernandez (famous for his stints with the St. Louis Cardinals and New York Mets), now a long time Mets broadcaster, to like him:  In the local post game after the Mes clinched the National League title, when talking about first baseman Luca Duda, “We’ve seen him go from the depths of Mordor, to the heights of the Swiss Alps…”

Frequently, during unusual moments in Mets seasons past, Hernandez and lead broadcaster Gary Cohen, and former Mets pitcher Ron Darling (also a broadcaster with TBS), will discuss ancient Saturday mornings, and cartoons; CHILLER THEATRE; Kurt Vonnegut, and puppet shows….

(14) An artist used Google Street View to visit all the places in Around the World in 80 Days and created postcards of those places.

(15) Mark Kelly in Part 4 of his “Rereading Isaac Asimov”  series comments —

“Nightfall” is still, I would guess, Asimov’s most popular story, though it was one of his earliest stories, and one which Asimov came to resent — he felt that he must have improved as a writer over the subsequent decades (the story was published in 1941, just two years after his first-published story) — and was perplexed by how fans kept gravitating to this early story.

(16) Gregory N. Hullender touts a new article, “The Locus Reading List and Hugo Awards” at Rocket Stack Rank.

This new article looks for selection bias in Locus Recommended Reading List short fiction over the past fifteen years. We found that although stories from the reading list regularly make up about 70% of Hugo-nominated stories, there doesn’t seem to be any actual bias, either in terms of which sources they come from or in terms of the authors.

So while we can’t speak for how good a job Locus does with novels, we don’t find any obvious problems with their recommendations for short fiction.

(17) Really funny compilation of comics bloopers from Mental Floss.

Here are some classic screw-ups, printing errors, and unfortunate coincidences that have graced the pages of comic books and newspaper strips over the years.

(18) We end with a serious fan edit of what Han Solo sees before his eyes when he tells Rey and Finn about the past in the new trailer for The Force Awakens.

[Thanks to Tom Galloway, Steven H Silver, James H. Burns, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]

243 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 10/22 No Certain Elk

  1. Greg, I would watch the heck out of Alien Visas. And good on you for making it paralegals, not lawyers. 😉

  2. I get confused between The Avengers and The New Avengers. I mean the one with Steed and Peel. I never had a chance to watch much of the one with Steed and Purdey, and I don’t remember any with anybody named Gambit.

  3. @LunarG, @Meredith: (Blush) Aw, you guys… thanks… I am grinning here. I’m co-writing “Alien Visas” with my friend Robby, and it may or may not have similarities to the actual immigration law firm we worked at. As paralegals.

    This is an excellent nudge for me to get back to work on what I should be doing…

    revising Alien Visas. 🙂

  4. Firefly
    Buffy the Vampire Slayer
    Shadow Chasers
    Sapphire and Steel
    Man From U.N.C.L.E. (is, too, SF)
    Dr Who (new)

    Awesome job, Meredith, and thank you Jim.

  5. I don’t watch much TV these days, so I wasn’t going to nominate — but what the hell, I’ll signal-boost those I love.

    UFO
    ST: TOS
    ST: TNG
    Firefly
    Quantum Leap

    I didn’t really watch Quantum Leap until much later when it went into daily sydication, at which time I binge-watched almost all the episodes. Bakula is unbelievably talented and versatile — he can dance, sing, play guitar and piano, compose songs, and he’s pretty athletic. Campy though it might have been, the writers and producers of QL did a fantastic job of allowing him to showcase those skills — and many others, to which challenges he managed to rise admirably. And the way that the show examined a lot of unpleasantness — racism, sexism and misogyny, homophobia, dealing with a terminal illness or AIDS, domestic violence, greed (both individual and corporate) — and did it in a way that was palatable to a wide audience without soft-soaping the subject matter, which was pretty amazing for its time.

    I always wanted to find out whether the aliens we saw on UFO were 1) humanoid aliens, 2) humans captured by aliens (and their descendents), sent back to do the aliens’ dirty work, 3) humans seeded elsewhere in the galaxy eons ago by a powerful ancient race — or something else. Gerry Anderson cancelled the series because he and Sylvia had divorced and he didn’t want to have to keep working with her. I’ll always wonder where that series would have gone if it had continued for many more episodes.

  6. I have a question – if there are a largeish number of one-vote items and those stetch both above and below the 64 item threshold, how will the ones that get on the ballot be chosen? Mini pre-ballot ballot? Death match? Pick them out of a suitably nice hat? Throwing darts at a wall blindfolded?

  7. Oh, randomised code thingy maybe. Or let a goat take a bite out of a scrambled and scrunched up list and see what’s left. Dice-throws! Concentrating on Filers really hard and sensing their inner preferences. Pray to [deity of choice] and see what happens. Wait for the File770 comment box time machine to come back and peek at the results.

  8. Television Bracket:

    1. Firefly
    2. Out of the Unknown (60s/70s BBC anthology series)
    3. Science Fiction Theatre (50s anthology series)
    4. Tales of Tomorrow (50s anthology series)
    5. UFO

  9. Land of the Lost
    The Prisoner
    Babylon 5
    Battlestar Galactica (reboot)
    Doctor Who (classic)

  10. SELECTION SUNDAY STATISTICS

    Nominators – 58

    Nominees – 83
    Nominees with more than one vote – 53

    Number One Seeds
    Babylon 5
    Buffy the Vampire Slayer
    The Prisoner
    Star Trek: The Original Series

    * B5 and Buffy exactly tied with 15 nominations each. The Prisoner beat out ST:TOS, 13 to 11.

    Number Two Seeds
    Farscape
    Firefly
    Doctor Who (New)
    Twilight Zone (Original)

    Rest of the Top Half
    Blake’s 7
    Doctor Who (Old)
    Battlestar Galactica (New)
    Red Dwarf
    Star Trek: The Next Generation
    Quantum Leap
    Sapphire and Steel
    Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
    Eureka
    The Outer Limits
    Twin Peaks
    UFO
    X-files
    Xena: Warrior Princess
    Addams Family
    Beauty and the Beast
    The Avengers
    Wild Wild West
    Angel
    Fringe
    Land of the Lost
    Lost
    Night Gallery
    Slings and Arrows

    Definitely In (Got at least two votes)
    Doomwatch
    Due South
    Friday the 13th: The Series
    Greatest American Hero
    Life on Mars
    Misfits (UK)
    Mystery Science Theater 3000
    Out of the Unknown
    Pushing Daisies
    Robin of Sherwood
    Star Trek: Enterprise
    Stargate: Atlantis
    Stargate: SG1
    Survivors
    Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
    The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.
    The Middleman
    The Mighty Boosh
    The Tomorrow People (late ’70s version)
    Torchwood
    Wonderfalls

    On the Bubble (About a third of these will make it)
    Ark II
    Being Human (UK)
    Blood Ties
    Carnivale
    Chuck
    Dresden Files
    Futurama
    Lexx
    Lois and Clark
    Lost Girl
    Men Into Space
    Monkey
    Pan Tau
    Raumpatrouille: Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffs Orion
    Round the Twist
    Science Fiction Theater
    Shadow Chasers
    Space: Above and Beyond
    Star Cops
    Star Trek: Voyager
    Starlost
    Tales of Tomorrow
    The Six-Million-Dollar Man
    Third Rock from the Sun
    Tom Corbett Space Cadet
    True Blood
    Twilight Zone (Revived)
    Voyagers!
    Warehouse 13

    Fear the dice, bubble teams!

  11. ?Okay, here are the full seedings by region.

    COREWARD REGION
    1 Babylon 5
    2 Twilight Zone (Original)
    3 Battlestar Galactica (New)
    4 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
    5 UFO
    6 The Outer Limits
    7 Slings and Arrows
    8 Land of the Lost
    9 Misfits (UK)
    10 Torchwood
    11 Friday the 13th: The Series
    12 Robin of Sherwood
    13 Out of the Unknown
    14 The Mighty Boosh
    15 Lexx
    16 Space: Above and Beyond

    RIMWARD REGION
    1 Buffy the Vampire Slayer
    2 Doctor Who (New)
    3 Red Dwarf
    4 Sapphire and Steel
    5 Twin Peaks
    6 Addams Family
    7 Lost
    8 Angel
    9 Greatest American Hero
    10 Stargate: Atlantis
    11 The Tomorrow People (late ’70s version)
    12 Due South
    13 Survivors
    14 Being Human (UK)
    15 Carnivale
    16 Warehouse 13

    SPINWARD REGION
    1 The Prisoner
    2 Firefly
    3 Doctor Who (Old)
    4 Star Trek: The Next Generation
    5 X-files
    6 Eureka
    7 Beauty and the Beast
    8 Night Gallery
    9 Mystery Science Theater 3000
    10 Stargate: SG1
    11 Pushing Daisies
    12 The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.
    13 Wonderfalls
    14 Futurama
    15 Third Rock from the Sun
    16 Chuck

    TRAILING REGION
    1 Star Trek: The Original Series
    2 Farscape
    3 Blake’s 7
    4 Quantum Leap
    5 Xena: Warrior Princess
    6 The Avengers
    7 Wild Wild West
    8 Fringe
    9 Life on Mars
    10 Star Trek: Enterprise
    11 Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
    12 Doomwatch
    13 The Middleman
    14 Lois and Clark
    15 Star Trek: Voyager
    16 True Blood

    I’ll upload the full tournament layout to Google Docs this afternoon, but if you know how March Madness works, you can already see what the first-round matches will be. For those looking ahead, Coreward and Spinward will be on one side, Rimward and Trailing on the other.

  12. Is it ok to go ahead and vote if you are a brackets wiz? I mean, I know everything adds up to 17 in this round and 9 in the next if seeds hold. Meanwhile, I don’t care a whit for college basketball and I know that isn’t the original March Madness, anyway, so… Yeah, I think I am competent to vote, unless you are only doing one “region” at a time.

  13. Drat, Round the Twist didn’t make it. Sigh. If only I hadn’t used two of my noms on things that ended up being dead certs… Oh well. The list in general looks pretty great.

    For any fellow information nerds, the things which got four and up nods in the suggestion round but didn’t make it:

    The Dresden Files
    Kolchak: The Night Stalker
    Max Headroom

    And of those, only Max Headroom was in the five and up list.

    A lot of people suggesting a show seems like a reasonable predictor, since most of the ones that were on the four-and-up and five-and-up lists made it through, but definitely not 100% reliable.

  14. @Meredith: Right. When I looked over the suggested list and compared it to the one thing I knew – my own opinions – it seemed like some of them were mentions more than recommendations. Like, my name was by a few things that I was using as examples more than anything, and one of them was Dresden Files IIRC. So like you say, a decent predictor, but not reliable.

    It’s also interesting how poorly superheroes fared, with Incredible Hulk, Batman ’66 and the Nicholas Hammond Spider-Man all failing to garner any nominations at all.

    @BigelowT: I wouldn’t recommend voting yet because I’m not counting yet, and I wouldn’t want your votes to get lost. 🙂

  15. Can we do one bracket at a time? Stretches out the suspense some (and makes it more likely I can vote in at least some of them, given the way my schedule’s been iffy…)

  16. @Jim Henley

    Yeah, the ones that were shakiest were yours, actually, since you were the one who was mostly likely to use things as examples rather than as Thing You Like. I just didn’t want to miss out ones where you were the only person who had mentioned them (in case your mention lead to someone not suggesting it – some Filers prefer mentioning only unmentioned things), and once I included those it didn’t seem right not to use your mention for the ones where you weren’t the only one. Similarly, Small Wonder was only mentioned in purely negative terms, but the person who mentioned it still has their name next to it.

    I think Dresden and Kolchak both had your name on them pushing them into the four and up list, but IIRC your mention of Kolchak was positive? Max Headroom – I guess it just didn’t manage to get onto top fives. Bit of a shame but there you go.

    For Batman, I had that on my longlist before I narrowed it down to five but to be honest I would have been voting on the basis of the film – which I love – and not the tv series – which I’ve never seen. I thought my limited nomination slots were better used on things I’d actually watched!

  17. @Meredith: Yeah, even accounting for Filer completism, I’m surprised that Dresden went from 4+ mentions to only one vote, and Max Headroom to zero votes.

  18. Possibly stupid question — why is Futurama not disqualified under the “no animation” rule?

  19. Oooh. *crosses fingers for Round the Twist*

    @Jim Henley

    Max Headroom is definitely the big surprise. I haven’t cross-checked to see if any of the people who suggested it missed the nomination stage – perhaps that was part of it?

    ETA – nope. I checked, everyone voted.

  20. Okay, that was stupid of me. Futurama has been replaced with Dresden Files. Apologies if this means anyone has to update their brackets.

  21. Drat!

    I’m having a family emergency and this is the soonest opportunity I’ve had to post my votes. I know it’s too late, but I feel the need to make my list known (difficult though it was to compile). Thanks!

    Earth 2
    Alien Nation
    Eureka
    Invasion
    Journeyman

  22. So far sentiment is in favor of one bracket at a time rather than two. IIRC, we did the pre-21st-Century fantasy bracket that way, so there’s preedent.

    @Catrinket: Sorry about the timing. I’d love to hear what you loved about your picks, though.

  23. Max Headroom isn’t streaming anywhere, which makes it very difficult for newer generations to experience. It strikes me as potentially my kind of show.

    Looking forward to the bracket, Jim! (with strong assist from Meredith)

  24. Um, stupid question…
    When it says share it with anyone who has the link, is that how I send in the filled in form?
    Or is it something else.
    (IZ VERY COMPLICATED, MISTER HENLEY!)
    (Oh, and the form had two, so I did two.)

  25. Lauowolf: When it says share it with anyone who has the link, is that how I send in the filled in form?

    It took me a sec to figure that out, too. Share with imhenleyjay atay mailgay otday omcay.

  26. Oh, no, I’m just here for occasional list-forming and link-spamming. Its all Jim’s work really.

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