Pixel Scroll 11/23/17 Secondfox Scrollbit In My Pixelmoth

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(1) JURASSIC PEEK. Colin Trevorrow, co-writer of Jurassic World: Hidden Kingdom, sent out a tweet with the first six seconds of this 2018 film.

(2) AT THE CORE. James Davis Nicoll says there are “Twenty Core Urban Fantasies Every True SF Fan Should Have On Their Shelves”. They include —

(3) SANTA’S VENGEANCE. Naomi Kritzer has a very handy list: “Gifts For People You Hate, 2017”. You’ll love the wine-holder. It would be unfair of me to gank the picture, so hurry there to gaze upon it.

…Sometimes you’re shopping for a gift because it’s worth that $15 to keep the peace and even though you know that, you resent every moment trying to figure out what would please this person. And that’s where my shopping guide comes in! Free yourself from the burden of trying to make an asshole happy, and embrace the idea of giving them something that won’t.

There are certain basic principles that apply every year. It should be cheap, but untraceably cheap. (Buying them a hand-crocheted who-knows-what for $2 at a thrift shop and pretending it came from a craft show is a terrific idea but you will need to make sure it looks new and doesn’t have that distinctive, identifiable Smell Of Savers wafting from it.) It should be easy to get, and it should look like a gift you might honestly have picked out because you thought they’d like it….

… There are a whole lot of terrible movies in this ad. Based on the Rotten Tomato ratings, it looks like Fifty Shades Darker is probably the absolute worst of any of the movies in here, but I do not recommend giving it to your mother-in-law, especially if there is any chance that she’ll pop it in while you’re still visiting. Warcraft is also supposed to be pretty terrible and the best anyone can say about the Angry Birds movie is that it’s better than you’d expect of a movie based on this video game. If you’re willing to splurge $8, The Emoji Movie (shown in a different section of the ad) was heavily regarded as the worst movie of 2017. For $10, you can get it on Blue-Ray!

(4) REUSED ARTWORK. Walter Jon Williams discovered a piece of cover art that is awfully popular.

John Scalzi sent me the cover of the Italian edition of his novel The Collapsing Empire, which may look just a little bit familiar to you.  It uses the same piece of stock art (by Innovari) that I used for my own editions, ebook and paperback, of Angel Station.

Furthermore, I know of at least one other ebook that’s using that piece of art….

(5) CRAFT TIME. She did it herself: “A Real Wonder Woman Spends 50 Hours And $30 On Crafting This Costume From A Cheap Yoga Mat And Duct Tape”.

Some superheroes inspire people to get super crafty. Australian makeup artist and children’s party entertainer Rhylee Passfield took inspiration from everyone’s now-favorite female superhero, Wonder Woman, and using a yoga mat, duct tape, and a little magic from a heat gun, she created a wonderful costume.

“Basically, I started by duct-taping myself”, the artist explained the process to the Daily Mail Australia. “Then I cut out a pattern from the duct tape form, copied it onto a Kmart yoga mat and glued it together using contact adhesive.”

(6) BEYOND PRONOUNS. The BBC observes from across the Channel how “‘Sexist’ inclusive writing row riles France”.

The French, as is well known, are obsessed by one thing – language.

The latest topic to consume a nation of lexicologists is “inclusive writing”.

This is the attempt to erase all trace of sexism in a language where gender is a central feature – French nouns are either masculine or feminine, dictating all adjectives and some verbal forms (a point that is sometimes made painfully clear to foreigners who happen to get those wrong).

In such a charged linguistic context, the fight for sex equality is not exactly new. In recent decades the names of traditionally male professions have been feminised.

French people now often talk about “la juge” or “la ministre”. Many writers add an etymologically daring “e” to “professeure” or “auteure”.

But supporters of “inclusive writing” go further. They want to expunge any vestige of male chauvinism from the language of Molière.

…The Académie française – which, contrary to legend, not every French person regards as the final arbiter in those things – pronounced that inclusive writing constituted a “mortal danger” for the language.

(7) LEST WE RUN OUT OF ENGLISH. “Twenty-six words we don’t want to lose”:

Now, Paul Anthony Jones has compiled 366 ‘forgotten words’ in his new book The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities. It has a different phrase for every day of the year (including 29 February) – with entries ranging from ‘ambilaevous’, or ‘equally clumsy in both hands’, to ‘stirrup-cup’, ‘one last drink before a departure’. While it offers titillation for the curious mind, it also serves a more noble purpose – retrieving words from languishing unread and unspoken.

Lingo lovers

In September, academics in Britain uncovered 30 words ‘lost’ from the English language: researchers spent three months looking through old dictionaries to find them, in the hope they could bring the words back into modern conversations.

Purist Chip Hitchcock, who provided the link, adds: “I’ve sent a complaint about their referring to Smoot’s ‘attempt’ to measure the Harvard Bridge.”

(8) PLUMBING THE DEPTHS. Superversive SF, seeking new lows to descend to, harassed K. Tempest Bradford with remarks like this —

https://twitter.com/superversivesf/status/933873152102318080

Bradford responded with a long tweet soliloquy worth a look. While there doesn’t seem to be an individual tweet that links to the whole exchange, they aren’t difficult to find on her page.

(9) JUSTUS OBIT. Meg Justus (1959-2017), who published supernatural historicals as MM Justus died November 22 of cancer. Prior to her death she prepared this obituary for her blog:

But Meg’s true passions were writing and travel. She published a number of books under the moniker M.M. Justus. She liked to say what she wrote was 90% history and 10% fantasy, set in the Old West. Due to her background she was a stickler about getting the history right, and her books were set in places she’d traveled to herself. Her travels included two long trips of multiple months each; the first was documented in the travel memoir Cross-Country.

She liked to call herself a professional dilettante. Her other passions included quilting and other needlework, gardening, meteorology, and wild plant identification, especially wildflowers.

Meg is survived by her three older sisters, Susan Moore, Nancy Nowell, and Ann Mattas, her best friend of 52 years Jan Hanken, who was the sister she should have had, and more wonderful friends than she ever expected to make.

(10) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • November 23, 1963 – The first Doctor Who aired in the UK.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

  • November 23, 1887 – Boris Karloff

(12) FLAT EARTH. Will he wind up flatter than the Earth? “‘I Don’t Believe In Science,’ Says Flat-Earther Set To Launch Himself In Own Rocket”.

On Saturday, a limousine driver plans to launch himself on a mile-long flight over the Mojave Desert in a rocket of his own making.

His name is “Mad” Mike Hughes, his steam-powered rocket is built of salvaged metals, his launch pad is repurposed from a used mobile home — and he is confident this will mark the first step toward proving the Earth is flat, after all.

“It’s the most interesting story in the world,” Hughes told The Associated Press of his jury-rigged quest to overturn more than two millennia of scientific knowledge. And the whole thing is costing him just $20,000, according to the AP. (It goes without saying, but we’ll say this anyway: Do not try this at home — or anywhere.)

“I don’t believe in science,” Hughes added. “I know about aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and how things move through the air, about the certain size of rocket nozzles, and thrust. But that’s not science, that’s just a formula. There’s no difference between science and science fiction.”

(13) THE NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES. Or so it looks from space: “Earth Is Lit, And That’s A Problem”

The ever-widening use of artificial lights is making the nighttime Earth glow increasingly brighter, with the amount of global light growing about 2 percent each year.

That worries advocates for the protection of dark skies, who say that artificial night glow can affect wildlife like migrating birds and keeps people from connecting to the stars. What’s more, they say, all that wasted light sent out into space is effectively wasted money.

The findings are in a new study in the journal Science Advances that used five years of data from a satellite launched in 2011. This satellite has an instrument that gives scientists a more reliable way to measure nighttime light than they’ve had in the past.

(14) GLOBAL WARMING WITH THAT? “Deep fat fryers may help form cooling clouds”

Fatty acids released into the air from cooking may contribute to the formation of clouds that cool the climate, say scientists.

Fatty acid molecules comprise about 10% of fine particulates over London, and such particles help seed clouds.

But researchers dismiss the idea that cooking fats could be used as a geo-engineering tool to reduce warming.

Instead, the research is designed to help reduce uncertainties about the role of cooking fats on climate.

Researchers believe the fatty molecules arrange themselves into complex 3-D structures in atmospheric droplets.

These aerosols persist for longer than normal and can seed the formation of clouds which experts say can have a cooling effect on the climate.

(15) MR. MEMORY. Little Brother is watching, too: “More than 480 web firms record ‘every keystroke'”.

Hundreds of web firms are tracking every single keystroke made by visitors, a study from Princeton University has suggested.

The technique – known as session replay – is used by companies to gain an understanding of how customers use websites.

More than 480 websites used the technique, according to the study.

Experts questioned the legality of using such software without user consent.

“These scripts record your keystrokes, mouse movements, and scrolling behaviour, along with the entire contents of the pages you visit, and send them to third-party servers,” the researchers said in a blog.

(16) ARTS AND SCIENCES. From BBC we learn, “World’s only particle accelerator for art is back at the Louvre”.

The world’s only particle accelerator used regularly in the analysis of art has gone back into use at the Louvre museum in Paris.

The accelerator has been rebuilt to allow it to investigate paintings without risking damage to the artworks.

The upgrade cost €2.1m (£1.8m; $2.5m). The machine is 37m (88ft) long.

Paintings were rarely analysed with earlier versions of the accelerator because of fears that the particle beam might change the colours.

(17) TODAY’S LYRIC. Dave Hutchinson, author of the Fractured Europe trilogy and the Tor.com novella Acadie, broke out in song – with emphasis on the broke,

https://twitter.com/ColumPaget/status/933704941146968066

(18) FILE MAINTENANCE. If you’re not getting comment notifications from File770.com, it may be possible that you have hit the individual thread comment subscription limit. Not that I really know about how comment notifications work — I have no control over it, and just use what Jetpack provides.

However, there are Filers who have gone into their WP dashboard and deleted a bunch of subscriptions, or have abandoned individual thread subscriptions and just turned on “All Comments for File 770,” and reported afterwards that they’re getting notifications again. So if you are having this problem, give it a whirl.

[Thanks to James Davis Nicoll, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Chip Hitchcock, mlex, Martin Morse Wooster, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Camestros Felapton.]

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79 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 11/23/17 Secondfox Scrollbit In My Pixelmoth”

  1. First! (Yes, I’m up late. Serves me right for eating too much….)

    @2: 8/20, I think. (Yes, I should be keeping better logs.) I’ve heard of another few; Mt. Tsundoku upheaves a little further. Although Conjure Wife isn’t exactly urban….

  5. Well, L. Jagi Lamplighter runs the Superversive website, so as far as I’m concerned, she owns those vile tweets whether or not she typed them herself. And frankly, the tweets are consistent with all of Superversive’s past faux Christian messaging, so they’re not the slightest bit surprising. 🙄

  6. Just catching up now that I am in bed after very long Thanksgiving day. Hope everyone’s day went well. I always start with the current scroll and work my way back. Really enjoyed this scroll. Thanks for not publishing the photo from Naomi Kritzer’s blog. If you had, I might not have read the entire post and would have missed some WTF moments.

    I’m not familiar with Twitter as I already have too many ways to waste time on the Internet but I did my best to follow the Bradford thread and, man, I just don’t understand my fellow humans. It makes me sad and now my head hurts. I’m not sorry that I read it, though.

  7. Anyone who donated to the Strange Horizons indigogo campaign, check your email. They just sent me an ebook link.

  8. JJ on November 23, 2017 at 10:52 pm said:

    Well, L. Jagi Lamplighter runs the Superversive website, so as far as I’m concerned, she owns those vile tweets whether or not she typed them herself.

    Looking at some of the comments I assume it was Jason Rennie (i.e. former SciPhi Journal guy)

  10. (2) AT THE CORE. I applaud the inclusion of Tanya Huff’s Blood Price. I suggest Mercedes Lackey’s Burning Water in place of, say, one of the super-recent books that’s way too recent to be “core.” 😉

    (5) CRAFT TIME. Wow, awesome job, and the colors came out great!

    (7) LEST WE RUN OUT OF ENGLISH. “slug-a-bed” isn’t “lost” IMHO (and I see people in the comments here agree with me). Obscure, rare, etc. – sure.

    Some of these “lost” words were coined by authors; I wonder if they were “lost” or just never caught on (e.g., Tolkien’s).

    (18) FILE MAINTENANCE. Thanks, @Mike Glyer. It’s a pain to unsubscribe from a bunch of threads, since it only lists a limited number per page, but I’ve removed some old subscriptions to be proactive on this. I’m probably not near the limit, but why tempt fate? 🙂

    5th x 2.

  13. Out of idle curtiousity, how do these notifications work? Do you get an email every time anyone says anything? My mailbox would explod.

  16. Nickpheas:

    Out of idle curtiousity, how do these notifications work? Do you get an email every time anyone says anything? My mailbox would explod.

    The one or two times I’ve done it, that’s exactly what’s happened, which I absolutely hate. I follow File 770 using an RSS reader site, though, so I just save the link to each day’s thread and visit it a few times a day, and then I unsave it when the next one comes out (I know comment threads can last awhile, so I sure hope no one’s ever tried to continue a conversation with me that way.)

  18. 2) Urban Fantasy is probably the SFF subgenre I am “weakest” at, and still I’ve read a bunch of these. Go figure.
    3) Naomi has done this a couple of times now. The things people make…

    8) There is a vile human being in that exchange, but its sure not Tempest. Gah.

    18) I kept hitting this limit because I forget to remove subscriptions.

  21. 12) I was just thinking nothing would convince some people unless they could go into space and see for themselves. I kinda admire this guy for putting all this effort into his endeavor.

  22. 6) I hang out on a bilingual English-French Mastodon instance that has a lot of non-binary and agender users, so I see the dotted inclusive endings a lot. I hadn’t known they were popular enough to attract the attention of the Académie Française – that’s a good sign. (Though agender French speakers are very envious of the English singular “they”. Multi-gender endings don’t help much when you don’t identify as either.)

    EDIT: 3) Oh gods, I just saw the picture of that wine holder. The most terrifying thing is that someone is undoubtedly thinking of buying one.

  23. 4) As Williams points out, that image is stock art. Anyone with an account on Dreamstime.com can download it for a few bucks, put on a title and byline with Photoshop, and slap it on their own e-book. A Google search reveals it’s also been used on:

    Day of the Dragonstar by David Bischoff and Thomas F. Monteleone
    The Chameleon Society by William Sharp
    On the Rim of the Mandala by Paul Cook
    The Battle for Terra Two by Stephen Ames Berry
    Star Guild Episode Zero by Brandon Ellis

    That’s from the first 10 pages. Dreamstime says it’s been downloaded 32 times.

  24. 8) OGH hits the nail on the head:

    seeking new lows to descend to

    Really, what is this fascination with proving that they are what they have appeared to be?

    @ Kendall (7)
    Quite right. Xanthippe is obscure, but far from lost. And I like eucatastrophe, as a word, as well as a thing.

    6) from the ridiculous to the sublime – Swedish state church removed male-gendered language referring to God.

  25. @NickPheas

    Out of idle curtiousity, how do these notifications work? Do you get an email every time anyone says anything? My mailbox would explod.

    Yep, that’s exactly what happens. Plus you have to remember to tick the box when you first submit a comment; you can’t tick it during the edit window. (This is why so many people post “ticky” or “godstalk” posts–the only way to click it is to post something new.)

    I usually won’t click it until there’s a new pixel scroll and if there’s a conversation I want to be part of on the old one. Unfortunately it means I’ll often forget that I posted something that might have started a conversation.

    I want a feature like “send me e-mail notification of any posts that my name appears in.” 🙂

  27. (3) I thought the unicorn bottle holder was actually kind of sweet. I’m more sceptical to some of the other animals.

    ***
    bookworm1398:

    12) I was just thinking nothing would convince some people unless they could go into space and see for themselves. I kinda admire this guy for putting all this effort into his endeavor.

    The NPR piece hints that he’s a rocket-crazed con artist, more than an actual flat earther. It says “Hughes converted to the flat-Earth belief recently” – after a failed fundraising campaign. And “His second campaign, this time posted after his conversion and with the support of the flat-Earth community, succeeded in hitting its $7,875 goal.”

    So that’s basically exploiting flat-earthers for money.

    I’ll note that it’s reasonably affordable to launch a camera into space with a weather balloon. There are lots of videos on Youtube where people have added things like a Lego Space Shuttle or other toys to their weather balloon. There’s even an instructable for it.

  30. @John A Arkansawyer: Agree on “Our Lady of Darkness” which introduced me to the concept of a “Scholar’s mistress” (the pile of books and papers that accumulate on a bed).

  31. James Davis Nicoll says there are “Twenty Core Urban Fantasies Every True SF Fan Should Have On Their Shelves”.

    At least twenty. That’s what the ” NO IMPLICATION IS INTENDED THAT THESE ARE THE ONLY TWENTY WORKS YOU SHOULD CONSIDER” disclaimer is about.

  32. 7) This guy has odd ideas about “frowst”, a perfectly ordinary word for stale or stuffy air… it may also have the meaning he gives it, but it’s odd that he doesn’t mention the more common one. (OK, so the only immediate references I can think of come from 1930s detective novels, but they’re hardly Middle English, now, are they?)

  33. I’m more confused than ever. I used to have individual choice over which threads I was following here, and now I have the choice of following everything or… I dunno what, because I didn’t get any notifications for so long that I’m afraid to turn off “follow all” for fear of another six months in the lonely place.

    [3] Someone who’d rush to buy one of those would be a unicorn chaser chaser, so if that’s upsetting to you, you just need a unicorn chaser chaser chaser.

    Not ticking the box now. Things could result.

  34. I feel like the person in 12 is a perfect metaphor for some of the trolls from 8, with the willingness to self destruct to prove a point based on willful ignorance in a desperate attempt of validating themselves regardless of whoever might get hurt from the shrapnel when their ego or rocket detonates.

    And it’s going to be a long, long time until reality brings them around again to find that they’re not the brave heroes they think they are in their heads, oh no no no they’re rocket trolls, rocket trolls burning up their fuses out there alone on twitter.

  37. I thought Naomi Kritzer’s piece was very funny, although the spark for campers actually seems useful!

  38. It’s a world of films and a world of books
    It’s a world of shiny reflective looks
    It’s a world full of smiles
    It’s a world full of files
    It’s a scroll world, after all!

    It’s a scroll world after all!
    It’s a scroll world after all!
    It’s a scroll world after all!
    It’s a scroll, scroll world!

    (Repeat for three hours, in a high-pitched cartoony children’s choir.)

  39. @World Weary: Thanks for not publishing the photo from Naomi Kritzer’s blog. If you had, I might not have read the entire post and would have missed some WTF moments. Even if they make you want to bleach your brain? The “say hello” gnome, for instance…. I would love to see statistics on how many of these actually make back their costs, but I doubt anyone will talk.

  41. (8) Cripes, what a jackass. The replies to Azalea Dunn are even worse.

    (Sorry, Mike, I didn’t realize that word was on your moderation list.)

  42. 3) And I’ve just realised what that unicorn wine-holder reminds me of – the famous statue from Herculaneum of Pan having missionary-position sex with a goat.

  43. @Greg Hullender:

    I want a feature like “send me e-mail notification of any posts that my name appears in.”

    So you want to be Kibo?

    (James Parry, a.k.a. Kibo, used to run searches over the Usenet feed to find any mentions of his name so he could join in the conversation, and became somewhat famous for that fact at the time. I know I can’t be the only person here who remembers that…)

    @Andres:

    the concept of a “Scholar’s mistress” (the pile of books and papers that accumulate on a bed).

    *looks over at bed and associated pile, which admittedly includes craft stuff as well as books* I hadn’t realized there was actually a term for that.

  44. @Jenora Feuer

    *looks over at bed and associated pile, which admittedly includes craft stuff as well as books* I hadn’t realized there was actually a term for that.

    That’s why I was so happy to learn the term – it applied so well to real-life (particularly when I was in college, and books were moved to the bed when I needed to use the desk, and back to the desk (most of them), when I needed to use the bed.

  45. @Andrew:
    Single person, double mattress on the bed. Some of that pile has been on the bed for longer than I like to think about.

  47. (8) The Superversive crew will never change.

    @Iphinome– We here in 9728 are grateful for that advance in civilization which you in 5484 have blessed us with.

  48. @JJ: Thanks, I was using the bulk actions, but 20 at a time is tedious. I believe I started at 700-800 or so, gak! And I want to unsubscribe from older ones, but not newer ones – but it reverts to page 1 after each bulk unfollow action. It’d be great if they showed 100 at a time, or didn’t revert to page 1 each time, or both.

    Still, I cut it down last night to 480, and just did some more so now I’m down to 360. Woo-hoo! Baby steps. 😉

    @Nickphease & @David H.: I usually don’t subscribe to comments till after a day or three (depending on comment activity). Basically, the point at which comments aren’t coming fast and furious. I’ll probably check the box on this comment, in fact.

    @msb: From the article: “The Church of Sweden is urging its clergy to use gender-neutral language when referring to the supreme deity, refraining from using terms such as ‘Lord’ and ‘he’ in favour of the less specific ‘God.'” Hmm, is this a “lost in translation” issue? “He” is not exactly gender-neutral; I’m guessing Swedish has a gender-neutral pronoun?

  49. Kendall, I think you’re just misreading the article? It doesn’t claim that “he” is gender-neutral, it says the new handbook avoids gendered words like “he” and “Lord”.

  50. @Johan P: It would be great if I knew how to read. ::blushing:: Sigh. Thanks.

    I’ll just refrain from commenting any more till I’ve finished my cup of tea. . . .

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