Pixel Scroll 11/3 Ten Things I Slate About You

(1) Disney has optioned the movie rights to Ursula Vernon’s childrens book Castle Hangnail for an adaptation to be produced by Ellen DeGeneres.

DeGeneres will produce with Jeff Kleeman, her partner at A Very Good Production banner.

The book tells of a 12-year old witch who shows up at a dark castle that needs a master or be decommissioned by the bureaucratic Board of Magic and its many minions, such as a hypochondriac fish and a letter ‘Q’ averse minotaur, dispersed into the world. She projects confidence as she tackles the series of tasks laid forth by the board but underneath lie several simmering secrets, including one of her being an imposter….

DeGeneres and Kleeman are busy in the television world but Hangnail is their second notable move on the movie side and keeps their feet firmly in the fantasy field. Earlier this year the duo set up Uprooted, the novel from Temeraire author Naomi Novik, for Warner Bros.

(2) A magisterial essay by Ursula K. Le Guin at Tin House, “’Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?’”.

American critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury one of the great works of twentieth-century fiction, The Lord of the Rings. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it, because they’re afraid of it. They’re afraid of dragons. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they’ll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they’ll have to redefine what literature is.

What American critics and teachers call “literature” is still almost wholly restricted to realism. All other forms of fiction—westerns, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, romance, historical, regional, you name it—are dismissed as “genre.” Sent to the ghetto. That the ghetto is about twelve times larger than the city, and currently a great deal livelier, doesn’t bother those who live in ivory towers. Magic realism, though—that does bother them; they hear Gabriel García Márquez gnawing quietly at the foundations of the ivory tower, they hear all these crazy Indians dancing up in the attic, and they think maybe they should do something about it. Perhaps they should give that fellow who teaches the science fiction course tenure? Oh, surely not.

To say that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to imply that imitation is superior to invention. I have wondered if this unstated but widely accepted (and, incidentally, very puritanical) proposition is related to the recent popularity of the memoir and the personal essay. This has been a genuine popularity, not a matter of academic canonizing. People really do want to read memoir and personal essay, and writers want to write it. I’ve felt rather out of step. I like history and biography fine, but when family and personal memoir seems to be the most popular—the dominant narrative form—well, I have searched my soul for prejudice and found it. I prefer invention to imitation. I love novels. I love made-up stuff.

(3) “The Call of the Sad Whelkfins: The Continued Relevance of How To Suppress Women’s Writing“ by Annalee Flower Horne and Natalie Luhrs in Uncanny Magazine #7 uses Joanna Russ’ text to diagnose some critics’ responses to Ancillary Justice.

I snorted. For the past week, Natalie Luhrs and I had been discussing the book in the context of the ongoing fight for the soul of the science fiction community, most recently played out in the failed attempt to take over the Hugo Awards. In HTSWW, Russ uses an alien species called the whelk–finned Glotolog to illustrate the methods by which human cultures control women’s writing without direct censorship (4). These days, the tactics the so–called “sad puppies” use to paint themselves as the true heirs of science fiction, bravely holding the line against the invading masses, are the very same tactics Joanna Russ ascribed to the whelk–finned Glotolog in 1983…

False Categorizing of the Work She wrote it, but she isn’t really an artist, and it isn’t really art. (HTSWW)

False Categorization is, essentially, bad faith. It allows the critic to shift the focus to something else—usually something trivial in the larger context, so as to dismiss the whole. So once again, we’ll look at the pronouns in Ancillary Justice. By focusing on the pronouns, the sad whelkfins are able to dismiss the entire work as nothing more than a political screed against men, as turgid message fiction that doesn’t even tell a good story.

That’s a massive tell to anyone who has actually read the book—because while the pronouns do take some adjustment, they’re a small part of the novel’s world–building and not a major source of plot or conflict. They just are, the way there is air to breathe and skel to eat.

(4) “Updates on the Chinese Nebula Awards and the Coordinates Awards” at Amazing Stories has the full list of award winners (only two were reported here on the night of the ceremony). Since Steve Davidson is able to reproduce the titles in the original language, all the more reason to refer you there.

(5) Liu Cixin participated in “The Future of China through Chinese Science Fiction” at the University of Sydney on November 3.

(6) Crossed Genres Magazine will close after the December 2015 issue reports Locus Online.

Co-publisher Bart Lieb posted a statement:

Two primary factors led to this decision. First, one of Crossed Genres’ co-publishers, Kay Holt, has been dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) for more than two years. It’s made it extremely difficult for her to help with the running of CG, leaving the lion’s share of responsibilities on the other co-publisher, Bart Leib, who’s also working a day job. Magazine co-editor Kelly Jennings, ebook coordinator Casey Seda, and our team of first readers have all been heroic in their volunteer efforts, but we’ve still been unable to keep from falling behind.

The second factor is simply that the magazine has run out of funds to continue. In April 2014 we ran a successful Kickstarter to keep CG Magazine going, but once another year had passed, roughly 90 percent of those who’d pledged to the Kickstarter chose not to renew their memberships….

(7) Today In History

  • November 3, 1956 — On this night in 1956, CBS presented the first broadcast of The Wizard of Oz.  It was a major event for which the network paid MGM a quarter of a million dollars for the rights (over $2,000,000 in today’s dollars.)
  • November 3, 1976 — Brian De Palma’s Carrie is seen for the very first time

(8) Today’s Birthday Monster

  • November 3, 1954 — Godzilla was released in Japanese theaters.

(9) Today’s Belated Birthday

  • Lovecraft’s 125th birthday (in August) was celebrated in many ways in Providence. A new plaque was installed near his birthplace at 454 Angell Street, designed, created, and installed by Gage Prentiss.

(10) Today’s Yodeling Marmot

(11) “Transparent Aluminum: IT’S REAL!” at Treehugger.

Remember Star Trek: The Voyage Home, where Scotty talks into a computer mouse and then instantly figures out keyboards and gives away the formula for transparent Aluminum? And remember Galaxy Quest, where Commander Taggart tells the Justin Long character about the ship: “IT’S REAL!”

Mash those two scenes together and you have Spinel, described by US Naval Research Laboratory scientist Dr. Jas Sanghera as “actually a mineral, it’s magnesium aluminate. The advantage is it’s so much tougher, stronger, harder than glass. It provides better protection in more hostile environments—so it can withstand sand and rain erosion.” He likes it for the same reason Scotty did, according to an NRL press release

(12) Arlan Andrews told Facebook friends that Ken Burnside has answered the Alfies.

The Wreck of the Hugo

So, today I received this 3D-printed crashed rocket ship, titled “The Wreck of the Hugo” as created by artist Charles Oines and commissioned by Ken Burnside. Others went to Kary English, Mike Resnick, and Toni Weisskopf. According to Ken Burnside, the official 2015 Hugo voting tallies showed each of us recipients as runners-up to the 2500-vote NO AWARD bloc that wrecked the Hugos this year in many categories. I gratefully accept the gifted award in the spirit in which it was given, and sincerely hope that no future Hugo nominees are ever again voted off the island in such a fashion.

(That last part resonates strangely, at least in my memory, because “I accept this award in the spirit in which it is given” was Norman Spinrad’s answer when handed the Brown Hole Award for Outstanding Professionalism in 1973. And he was right to be suspicious.)

(13) Meanwhile, the curator of the Alfies, George R.R. Martin, is already making recommendations for the Dramatic Presentation categories in “Hugo Thoughts”.

In the past, I have usually made my own Hugo recommendations only after nominations have opened. But in light of what happened last year, it seems useful to begin much sooner. To get talking about the things we like, the things we don’t like. This is especially useful in the case of the lesser known and obscure work. Drawing attention to such earlier in the process is the best way to get more fans looking at them… and unless you are aware of a work, you’re not likely to nominate it, are you? (Well, unless you’re voting a slate, and just ticking off boxes).

Let me start with the Dramatic Presentation category. Long form….

(14) Damien G. Walter does best when the target is as easy to hit as the broad side of a barn. “Gus. A Case Study In Sad Puppy Ignorance”.

Firstly, is Gus actually asking us to believe that Frankenstein : A Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the famed early feminist icon, daughter of philosopher and political activist Mary Wollstonecraft, wife of romantic poet and political radical Percy Byshe Shelley, close friend of paramilitary revolutionary Lord Byron, and author of  seven novels (many science fictional) and innumerable other stories, essays and letters, all of them revealing a life of deep engagement with political and social issues of gender, class, sexuality and more, that this same Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote Frankenstein : A Modern Prometheus (a subtitle explicitly invoking the mythical act of stealing fire from the gods as an opening rhetorical reference to the risks of scientific endeavour) as, and I quote, “the sole purpose of…macabre entertainment”? Because I would suggest, on the basis of all available evidence, including every single thing ever written about Frankenstein, that Gus is in a minority on this one. In fact, I will go so far as to say that he is utterly, absurdly and idiotically wrong.

(15) John Thiel’s responses to Steve Davidson’s queries about “trufandom” appear in “The Voices of Fandom” at Amazing Stories.

Steve’s introduction notes –

I posed a series of interview questions to members of the Fan History group on Facebook.  I thought it would be a good place to start because that group is made up entirely of Trufans.

Today, I present the first in a series of responses to those questions and I should point out that, in typical Fannish fashion, the answers are anything but monolithic.  Apparently Fans have as many different ideas about what it means to be a Fan as there are Fans, which just serves to point out how difficult it is to get a handle on this question.

(16) A video interview with Dame Diana Rigg.

Five decades since she first appeared as Emma Peel in The Avengers (1961-1969), fans of the show still approach Dame Diana Rigg to express their gratitude. Rigg joins BFI curator Dick Fiddy to reflect on the influence of Peel on real-life women and acting with Patrick Macnee and Ian Hendry.

(17) Jon Michaud reviews Michael Witwer’s Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons in The New Yorker and accuses the biographer of shielding Gygax rather than exploring more deeply the controversial topic of his religious views.

Dr. Thomas Radecki, a founding member of the National Coalition on TV Violence, said, “There is no doubt in my mind that the game Dungeons & Dragons is causing young men to kill themselves and others.” In her book “Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society,” Tipper Gore connected the game to satanism and the occult. All of this prompted a “60 Minutes” segment in which Gygax rejected these myriad accusations, calling them “nothing but a witch hunt.”

What was largely unknown or omitted from this brouhaha is that Gygax was an intermittently observant Jehovah’s Witness. This startling fact crops up about halfway through Witwer’s biography, when he notes that Gygax’s “controversial” game, along with his smoking and drinking, had led to a parting of the ways with the local congregation. Up until that point, the matter of Gygax’s faith had gone unmentioned in the biography, and it is barely discussed thereafter. (The book’s index does not have an entry for “Jehovah’s Witness” or “Gygax, Gary—religious beliefs.”) Given the furor that D. & D. caused, the absence of a deeper analysis of Gygax’s faith is a glaring omission. In a recent interview with Tobias Carroll, Witwer acknowledged that Gygax “was a practicing Jehovah’s Witness. He would go door-to-door and he would give out pamphlets. He was pretty outspoken about it, as a matter of fact.” The reason for almost completely excluding it from the biography, Witwer says, is that “I couldn’t find it [as] a huge driving force in his life.…I didn’t want to be too heavy-handed with that, because I’m not clear that, especially with his gaming work and even his home life, how big a factor that was on a day-to-day basis. But I do know he was practicing.”

(18) Galactic Journey visits the year 1960 where young Mike Glyer’s favorite TV series, Men Into Space, is still on the air, and there’s even a tie-in novel by Murray Leinster.

men into space cover COMP.jpg

“Men Into Space” consists of short stories following the career of Space Force officer Ed McCauley:

As a lieutenant, McCauley makes the first manned rocket flight.

As a captain, McCauley deals with an injured crewman while piloting the first space-plane.

As a major, McCauley deals with a potentially-fatal construction accident while in charge the building of the first space station.

As a colonel, McCauley deals with a murderous personnel problem while overseeing the establishment of a series of radio relays to the moon’s far side, then deals with a technical problem aboard a rocket to Venus, and another personnel problem on a Mars mission.

Lots of nuts and bolts details about ballistics, rocket fuels, radiation, the van Allen belts, and so forth.  And with each story, McCauley deals with progressively more complex human problems as he moves up in rank.

Although 7-year-old me would have loved the tie-in novel, 35 cents would have been a king’s ransom in my personal economy….

(19) Here’s a photo of the Cosmos Award presentation to Neil deGrasse Tyson at the Planetary Society 35th anniversary celebration on October 24.

Neil deGrasse Tyson (left) accepted The Planetary Society's Cosmos Award for Outstanding Public Presentation of Science. Bill Nye (middle) was on stage as Tyson accepted the award from Nichelle Nichols (right), who is best known for playing Lt. Uhura on "Star Trek" (the original series) and who is an advocate for real-world space exploration.

Neil deGrasse Tyson (left) accepted The Planetary Society’s Cosmos Award for Outstanding Public Presentation of Science. Bill Nye (middle) was on stage as Tyson accepted the award from Nichelle Nichols (right), who is best known for playing Lt. Uhura on “Star Trek” (the original series) and who is an advocate for real-world space exploration.

Before the award was given to Tyson, Nye reminisced about meeting Tyson through the organization. Nye then showed a photo of what Tyson looked like in 1980, when he was a wrestler (Tyson wrestled in high school and college), and Tyson joked that he kicked some serious butt.

Tyson had come prepared, and showed a photo of Nye in 1980, in a “Coneheads” costume, with a silver ring around his head.

(20) The Red Bull Music Academy website has published David Keenan’s “Reality Is For People Who Can’t Handle Science Fiction”, about the influence of SF on French progressive rock from 1969 through 1985.

In 2014 I interviewed Richard Pinhas of Heldon, still one of the central punk/prog mutants to come out of the French underground. I asked him about the influence of the visionary science fiction writer Philip K. Dick on his sound and on his worldview. “Philip K. Dick was a prophet to us,” Pinhas explained. “He saw the future.”

It makes sense that a musical and cultural moment that was obsessed with the sound of tomorrow would name a sci-fi writer as its central avatar. Indeed, while the Sex Pistols spat on the British vision of the future dream as a shopping scheme, the French underground projected it off the planet altogether.

When Pinhas formed Heldon in 1974 he named the group in tribute to sci-fi writer Norman Spinrad’s 1972 novel The Iron Dream, conflating his own vision of a mutant amalgam of Hendrix-inspired psychedelic rock and cyborg-styled electronics with Spinrad’s re-writing of history.

(21) At CNN, “Art transforms travel photos with paper cutouts”:

That’s what happened when Londoner Rich McCor began adorning pictures of British landmarks with whimsical paper cutouts and posting the results online.

Originally, the 28-year-old creative agency worker intended the photos for the amusement of himself and friends.

Then he got a lesson on the impact of “viral” when Britain’s “Daily Mail” publicized some of his photos.

 

arc-de-triomphe-paris-jpg-rich-mccor-exlarge-169

 [Thanks to Rob Thornton, Mark-kitteh, Will R., Michael J. Walsh, JJ, Janice Gelb, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]

220 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 11/3 Ten Things I Slate About You

  1. Hurray Ursula Vernon ! My kids loved Castle Hangnail (though my son still prefers Danny to pretty much anything.)

    My daughter just used Hamster Princess to do her first paragraph form book report.

  2. Mark on November 4, 2015 at 2:26 pm said:
    Here’s a thing. Puppy nominee Eric S. Raymond has made the rather…dramatic…claim that Women in Tech groups (specifically, but not limited to, The Ada Initiative) have been attempting honey traps against open-source community figures, in which members attempt to engineer times they are alone in order to claim sexual assaults took place. He specifically claims that several attempts have targeted Linus Torvalds.

    Errrrr, what?

    Um. Not to cast doubt or anything. But isn’t the simpler explanation that certain people are actually disrespectful of boundaries and gropey?

    Occam’s razor suggests that some sort of secret conspiracy among tech women to take valuable research time away and set themselves up as sexual bait in order to frame men in the open source community is … kind of a stretch.

  3. Cassy B on November 4, 2015 at 12:43 pm said:
    @Jamoche, your why-evangelicals-hate-D&D link is broken.

    (And I’m curious to read it, because many-many years ago I briefly played D&D with a small group of mostly-evangelicals. Granted, they were outliers who read SF and fantasy…)

    I have been playing D&D (and lots of other RPGs) with a group of friends for over 30 years. One of us is an Evangelical Christian, very serious about his religion.

  4. Peace Is My Middle Name on November 4, 2015 at 3:13 pm said:
    Mark on November 4, 2015 at 2:26 pm said:
    Here’s a thing. Puppy nominee Eric S. Raymond has made the rather…dramatic…claim that Women in Tech groups (specifically, but not limited to, The Ada Initiative) have been attempting honey traps against open-source community figures, in which members attempt to engineer times they are alone in order to claim sexual assaults took place. He specifically claims that several attempts have targeted Linus Torvalds.

    Errrrr, what?

    Um. Not to cast doubt or anything. But isn’t the simpler explanation that certain people are actually disrespectful of boundaries and gropey?

    Occam’s razor suggests that some sort of secret conspiracy among tech women to take valuable research time away and set themselves up as sexual bait in order to frame men in the open source community is … kind of a stretch.

    I’m wondering, fantasy?
    THE WOMINZ IZ AFTER ME!!!

  5. I highly recommend against reading the comments on that link to ESR’s blog. Sheesh, I know the founding fathers of Open Source are a cantankerous, difficult to handle bunch, and there are a lot of computer-oriented MRAs, but it really is a bummer to see references to VD’s SJW book on that site. The ick is very strong.

  6. A bit more about Tom Shippey: He also edited the Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories (with a substantial introduction) and collaborated with Harry Harrison on the alternate-history/fantasy trilogy that opened with The Hammer and the Cross. I also recall reviewing a retrospective James Blish collection with a good intro by him. So while his career outside philology and medieval studies is certainly strongly Tolkienian, it’s hardly exclusively so.

  7. Has anyone mentioned Ramez Naam’s 2012 novel Nexus is on sale for 99 cents today?

    Just checked – 99p in the UK, too.

  8. Just saw The Martian.

    Weirdly, it … wasn’t nerdy enough for me. :/

    I had the same problem with Gravity.

    Oh, well.

  9. Thanks for the tip. Purchased.

    Just finished The Martian, with a mid-book break for The Witches of Lychford (dug it – would read more. There’s at least a bit of Granny Weatherwax in Judith, I think). Dug The Martian. It was fluffy, character-wise, and the ending was telegraphed… I dunno, pretty much on page 1, it felt like. But it was fun and clever and more humorous than I’d expected.

    And now, for some reason, I’m reading Transhuman and Subhuman. I’d read an essay or two from it, but now I’m just diving in. I think it was triggered by Silly’s discussion with Hampus(right?) about whether there’s any homophobic content in the book. I’m already seeing the book can be a valuable tool in translating JCW’s writing to standard English. Maybe I’ll go back into Pratchett next. Someone with soul and some empathy would be a good palate cleanser after JCW.

  10. Eric S. Raymond is a bit of a one-hit wonder who never really had anything anywhere near as big after the ‘Cathedral and the Bazaar’ essays and the Hallowe’en documents which poked into how Microsoft was dealing with the open source threat. He also, like many other American conservatives and gun lovers, seems to have veered completely off into conspiracy land since 9/11 and the later election of Obama.

    I wonder what Linus thinks of Eric’s claims above. Heck, I wonder what Tove thinks. (Tove is Linus’ wife. She was also Finnish karate champion for several years.) Honestly, from what I’ve heard about him, his wife and three daughters, I can think of few people in the open source movement LESS suited to any sort of hypothetical ‘honey trap’ than Linus Torvalds.

  11. @Steve Davidson:
    But none of those other things is an irrelevant award presented by a self-selected elitist geriatric clique who are completely out of touch with modern sci-fi fans.
    It’s only the Hugos that are unimportant enough to be worth getting worked up over not winning.
    (That is how Puppy Logic works, isn’t it? Or do I have to go back and study harder?)

    ETA: And congratulations to Red Wombat!

  12. Shippey has a great essay on Jack Vance that I used when teaching Dying Earth back in 2013: “People are Plastic: Jack Vance and the Dilemma of Cultural Relativism.” You can find it in Jack Vance: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography (1999) … which I now see that Russell has reviewed.

  13. kathodus on November 4, 2015 at 4:03 pm said:

    …And now, for some reason, I’m reading Transhuman and Subhuman. I’d read an essay or two from it, but now I’m just diving in.

    If you get as far as page 218, then I suspect you and I and Nate will be part of a very exclusive club.

    (I don’t know who Nate is. He’s just mentioned in an aside on p. 218, where JCW says something like “to anyone who’s read this far (hi, Nate!)”. It is of course mean-spirited and wrong of me to have a mental image of Nate as someone chained to a radiator in JCW’s basement.)

  14. Oh yes, congratulations to Red Wombat.
    I can’t even express how happy this makes me.
    I hope option becomes done deal and I can go see this!

  15. @Steve Wright

    It is of course mean-spirited and wrong of me to have a mental image of Nate as someone chained to a radiator in JCW’s basement.

    *snort*spit*

    Keyboard, please!

  16. @Jenora Feuer

    Eric S. Raymond is a bit of a one-hit wonder who never really had anything anywhere near as big after the ‘Cathedral and the Bazaar’ essays and the Hallowe’en documents

    Oh right. I always confuse him with Eric Allman, who I recall being much less cantankerous, and who is married-ish to Kirk McKusick (which I mention because McKusick is pretty awesome).

    @Steve Wright – Oh dear, now I’ve got a motive to continue.

  17. Steve Wright:

    “If you get as far as page 218, then I suspect you and I and Nate will be part of a very exclusive club.”

    I wonder if the membership is worth the loss of 2d20 sanity points.

  18. kathodus on November 4, 2015 at 4:03 pm said:

    And now, for some reason, I’m reading Transhuman and Subhuman.

    I found the anti-feminist one (Saving Science Fiction from Strong Female Characters) to be a perversely compelling hate-read and wrote a nine-part dissection of it. (Link, in case you’re interested: http://www.gothhouse.org/tag/strong-female-characters-series/)

    I didn’t read the other essays, so I’m not quite sure if I belong in your club.

    Steve Wright on November 4, 2015 at 4:21 pm said:

    If you get as far as page 218, then I suspect you and I and Nate will be part of a very exclusive club.

    (I don’t know who Nate is. He’s just mentioned in an aside on p. 218, where JCW says something like “to anyone who’s read this far (hi, Nate!)”. It is of course mean-spirited and wrong of me to have a mental image of Nate as someone chained to a radiator in JCW’s basement.)

    Bra-VO. That never occurred to me, but it fits oh, so very well.

  19. Mike Glyer on November 4, 2015 at 3:38 pm said:

    Has anyone mentioned Ramez Naam’s 2012 novel Nexus is on sale for 99 cents today?

    Well, not until now. I thank you, but my bank won’t …

  20. As for deeply-discounted books available today, Gary Braunbeck’s IN SILENT GRAVES is also available for 99 cents today.

    (Full disclosure: Have not read this one. But Braunbeck’s work is always worthwhile. He’s pretty well-known among horror aficiandos, but deserves a wider readership.)

  21. @Kathodus, Steve Wright

    My name is not Nate; I did finish Transhuman and Subhuman, and it was why I joined Hampus and several others in coming down on Silly.

    My advice is this – close the pdf file. T and S is prohibitive on one’s view of human nature, and on one’s bourbon budget and one’s liver. Up there with Wisdom from My Internet for crystalizing my views on the Puppies from dislike to hate.

  22. Raymond is a poorly socialized nerdboy libertarian gunhumping MRA. I wouldn’t believe anything he says regarding sex without video from three angles, notarized affidavits from all parties, and a personal appearance by the Virgin Mary. I’d skip the affidavits, but the rest are non-negotiable. I hope Linus tells him to STFU.

    @Lori Coulson: YES! That 1973 adaptation is my favorite too. Dreamy men, and in some ways, it’s the closest to the book. No bolt-necked green guy there.

    At least Puppies know they’re in no danger of winning a Tiptree. Plenty of limp dicks in poo, though… and that’s supposed to make them feel BETTER? Own goal. JCW should actually be happy he didn’t get one (or five) of these. Although it does point out even more of what a total losing loser he is, even among Puppies.

    JJ: Can also confirm that Laura’s mother is not a hamster, and her father does not smell of elderberries. At least in my presence; for all we know, Mom’s a were-hamster who changes and Dad covers himself in elderberry juice when they’re alone. And it’s not like they’d have told Laura about it.

  23. @PIMMN

    Occam’s razor suggests that some sort of secret conspiracy among tech women to take valuable research time away and set themselves up as sexual bait in order to frame men in the open source community is … kind of a stretch.

    Please. Next you’ll be telling us the reason the Puppies didn’t win any awards was because they wasn’t a clear conspiracy against them for the last 5/10/20 years. Wake up sheeple!

    Is it any surprise that some of these guys wander in a world filled with traps and conspiracies? The alternative – that they’re not good enough or that they’re arseholes – is not something they can ever accept.

  24. Lurkertype

    That is so true! The absence of the hamster is a vital clue; admittedly hamsters may not be as violent as ferrets, but I see this as a definite improvement, particularly since you are a vegetarian. Hamsters are a lot safer if you tip them into your trousers.

    Hey, we’re so much better than that Holmes chap; we picked the vital clue long before Holmes did. Of course, he may not be familiar with the propensities of hamsters, but he should have learned!

  25. Snowcrash

    I don’t think he was asserting what you think he asserted. I think you should go and read him again, and consider the fact you seem to have assumed someone was saying something which was not, as a question of fact, what he did say.

    This is, of course, Occam’s razor at work…

  26. kathodus: Just finished The Martian, with a mid-book break for The Witches of Lychford (dug it – would read more. There’s at least a bit of Granny Weatherwax in Judith, I think). Dug The Martian. It was fluffy, character-wise, and the ending was telegraphed… I dunno, pretty much on page 1, it felt like.

    The Martian, both book and movie, are like Apollo 13. You already know they get out alive, the enjoyment is in finding out what happens and how they deal with it.

  27. Found a very interesting short story today: “Rat Catcher’s Yellows” by Charlie Jane Anders. The publisher’s description says: “A crippling disease has made the body of Grace’s wife a prison for her erratic, reclusive brain. The only hope for their marriage? A video game where she rules over kingdom of cats.” This is a story where a disease transforms brains in a rather specific way; it’s not really unbelievable, since it’s compared to toxoplasmosis, which does indeed cause some specific behavioral effects, in a sort of parasitic mutual relationship:

    “I have this theory that it’s all one compound organism,” says Judy. “The leptospirosis X, the people, the digital cats. Or at least, it’s one system. Sort of like real-life cats that infect their owners with toxoplasmosis gondii, which turns the owners into bigger cat-lovers.”

    So here we have perhaps a co-evolution going on between the parasite (via the brains it molds) and the video game that changes as the RCY patients play it.

    Anyway, that’s not the main focus of the story. The main character is Grace who sees her wife Shary spending more and more time immersed in the game, and the less Shary recognizes the world around her, the more perfectly she seems to suit the game world. Grace naturally feels like she is losing Shary. But Shary’s game is personalized so it contains all her memories of Grace. There’s a quite moving storyline here about how Shary is being transformed in ways that Grace is not able to go along with, but in a sense she hasn’t lost Grace; and Grace is coming to accept and love whatever it is that Shary is changing into.

  28. ETA: That’s the sunny interpretation of the ending; it’s also kind of disquieting, because Grace says that this is what she wants to believe about what’s going on with Shary, and we know that parasites aren’t exactly benign things.

  29. Since I see a few people talking about PCA, I must ask: anybody up for a file770 meet-up in Seattle during the 2016 Pop Culture Conference in Marcy (22-25)?

    Seattle residents as well as anybody in town for the conference?

  30. In fairness, ESR’s other hit was reviving the then moribund Jargon File as the Hacker’s Dictionary in the ’90s and getting two editions published by a mainstream publisher (admittedly, Guy Steele did this about seven years before). His administration of it was controversial, but on the whole I consider it a good thing.

    He also showed good taste by using my really horrible computer pun as a chapter intro quote in The Art of Unix Programming, having gotten it from a post I’d made to rec.arts.comics. : -)

    (“It’s a well known fact that computer devices such as the abacus were invented thousands of years ago. But it’s not well known that the first use of a common computer protocol occurred in the Old Testament. This, of course, was when Moses aborted the Egyptians’ process with a control-sea.”)

  31. @Stevie

    I think there may be some miscommunication. What did you think I was saying, and who am I misunderstanding – Peace or Raymond?

    Just to be clear, I’m finding Raymond’s attitude fairly… amusing?, in that I think he’s grasping at conspiracies while dismissing the obvious, which pretty much agrees with what I think Peace was saying.

  32. I could have sworn Raymond had said something moderately sensible at some point during the Puppy stuff. Shame to see such an ugly post from him.

  33. @Mike Glyer: If I didn’t already have Nexus from (I believe) a Hugo packet, I’d buy it. 🙂 Now, finding time to read it (my eternal refrain). . . .

  34. Stevie: I’m the furthest thing from a vegetarian, and would be much more likely to eat a hamster than shove it down my trousers. But if you’ve got to choose toothy critters to go down your pants, hamsters are indeed much safer than ferrets.

    This is definitely the sort of deduction you don’t get from that Holmes chap. Did he even know what hamsters are? I doubt it. Whereas I have actually seen them with my own eyes. And they have seen me with their beady little ones.

  35. @kathodus on November 4, 2015 at 4:03 pm said:

    a mid-book break for The Witches of Lychford (dug it – would read more. There’s at least a bit of Granny Weatherwax in Judith, I think).

    Lychford is rather good, I agree. Of Sorrow and Such has a Weatherwax-esque witch as well, but isn’t as light as either Pratchett or Lychford.

  36. The thing about Raymond is that, while he wrote a lot of interesting stuff about free/open source software development, he didn’t actually do a lot of it, and at some point, people got tired of him telling them how they ought to run their projects when he wasn’t actually contributing to the projects. Or to much of anything else that anyone could see. So his speaking fees started to dry up, and that’s about the time he started to get really curmudgeonly and weird, which was pretty much the last straw as far as a lot of people, including former fans, were concerned. Nowadays he seems to be in full-on Brain Eater mode.

  37. This is definitely the sort of deduction you don’t get from that Holmes chap. Did he even know what hamsters are? I doubt it.

    Given that the hamster from which all pets are descended was captured in 1930, I think that’s a pretty safe bet.

  38. NickPheas on November 5, 2015 at 1:43 am said:

    Given that the hamster from which all pets are descended was captured in 1930, I think that’s a pretty safe bet.

    all pets are descended” – what? even my goldfish? 🙂 *

    *[brought to you by the bureau for creative pedantry]

  39. On ESR I just want to say that quite a large proportion of the people working on producing open-source s/w think he is a bit nutty too.

    I saw that someone retweeted the following – “ESR has written a new blog post that’s extra horrible, even for him.”

  40. Kyra on November 4, 2015 at 3:58 pm said:
    Just saw The Martian.

    Weirdly, it … wasn’t nerdy enough for me. :/

    There’s only so much nerdiness you can stuff inside a blockbuster movie, even if you are Ridley Scott. Or a movie, period.

    (ETA: did you read the book? That was a tiny bit too nerdy for me.)

  41. “I have this theory that it’s all one compound organism,” says Judy. “The leptospirosis X, the people, the digital cats. Or at least, it’s one system. Sort of like real-life cats that infect their owners with toxoplasmosis gondii, which turns the owners into bigger cat-lovers.”

    May I point out that last I checked, toxoplasma gondii does NOT turn people into cat lovers. What it does, or at least what we have solid evidence of it doing is that it removes mice and rat’s instinctive fear of the smell of cat pee. Hence the mice and rats go on wandering in the cats’ field of view, get eaten, and t.gondii can happily reach its final hosts.

    The effects of the parasite on humans are stranger and not as easily or certainly established. What I remember, and there may well have been development since, is that it makes humans slightly more prone to motorcycle accidents. I kid you not – I doubt it introduces a specific love for reckless motorcycle driving, but the correlation that has been found so far is that.

  42. and we know that parasites aren’t exactly benign things.

    Vertebrate prejudice! 😉

  43. Didn’t Eric Raymond participate in a panel with China Mieville and Charlie Stross at some WorldCon that has gone down in fannish history? Charlie just shivered in horror when I tried to make him talk about it, and said he didn’t want to talk about it, which is unprecedented for Charlie.

  44. There’s only so much nerdiness you can stuff inside a blockbuster movie, even if you are Ridley Scott. Or a movie, period.

    (ETA: did you read the book? That was a tiny bit too nerdy for me.)

    I have not read the book. Does it explain why the perchlorate in Martian soil didn’t make his potatoes toxic and destroy his thyroid? Or how a windstorm on a planet with hardly any atmosphere can throw around heavy equipment or knock over a spaceship? Or why, if this could be a problem, they didn’t take the incredibly simple steps it would require to secure the spaceship against such an eventuality? Or what a botanist was doing on the Mars mission in the first place, which the movie never bothered to explain? Or …

    You know, honestly I don’t know why I’m totally able to go, “You have faster than light travel and a machine that lets you see dreams? Fine with me!” But when you get a “we are using real-world science” story, things like this really bug me.

  45. @rrede:
    Thank you for your chewy post and all the linkage.

    I’m more inclined to forgive Le Guin too, in part because I think her grievance isn’t with how she’s treated (I’m pretty sure I’ve heard/read her gripe about her exceptional status), but with how the rest of the genre is treated, including her beloved Tolkien (I belove her beloving there). And she really did come up in the ghetto years, so her heightened sensitivity has context.

    I skimmed her essay yesterday, and thought, boy, she does repeat herself quite a bit, but then I realized I’d read it before, in Wave in the Mind, which I recommend to people who like Le Guin, or just smarts.

    Rereading the essay now, I’m struck by how it’s her own “On Fairy Stories”, an impassioned defense of taking magic, not just seriously, but as magic.

    Russell Letson:

    Le Guin’s comments on the privileged position of realistic fiction in our culture-at-large is a topic for another post, along, perhaps, with meditations on the multiplicity of audiences.

    If you ever feel like writing that other post, I would love to read it.

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