271 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 1/18/16 The 770 Horsemen of the Apocalypse”

1. Let me take a stab at this without all of the Hugo/Tor/Baen wrappings.

   Your points seem to amount to (1) science fiction has been looked down upon by the literary establishment, (2) people like different things, and (3) a bunch of made-up stuff you’ve swallowed about some group telling people what not to read and telling authors what to write. Let’s just say that I’m not finding your arguments particularly noteworthy, or persuasive. They certainly aren’t relevant to anything I wrote.

2. Dann –

   Like a lot of SFF readers back in the day, I was on the receiving end of similar sentiments about SFF. Modern SFF simply wasn’t “literature” the same way that other modern authors wrote “literature”. It was all about gate-keepers deciding what is and what is not worthy of attention.

   Those gate-keepers aren’t doing a good job. For one thing having lots of arguments about what is and isn’t worthy of attention just draws more attention to the subject. I must’ve missed the guards at the gate because I just walked right in. They should think of upgrading their security.

   ** Heinlein’s Starship Troopers has been so fully distorted in movies as to be unrecognizable from the book.

   Weird thing to open with since it doesn’t really seem at all relevant to gate-keeping. You think Starship Troopers is unrecognizable from the book you should check out Pirates of the Caribbean On Stranger Tides. Whatever gives Tim Powers more money is a-ok by me though. Hell you could probably do a whole bracket of most unrecognizable adaptation from book to movie.

   ** Readers are actively discouraged from reading the works of certain types of current authors based on gender and race.

   I’ve seen some people state that they were going to read more books by specific gender or race, due to the fact that they felt those writers were having a harder time getting attention and promotion (sounds like gate-keeping!) so where going to focus on that for a while. If gate-keepers try to keep attention away, what do you call those that are trying to help promote? I nominate key-masters. From your first paragraph key-masters sound like the best way to minimize the impact of gate-keepers. How else would you suggest people promote works they feel are ignored?

   For those that are more hyperbolic about it, are those actual gate-keeping or anecdotal social media shit posts?

   Authors are given “friendly advice” to avoid submitting to certain publications.

   Malicious advice or a professional telling another professional where they’d likely get paid the most for their work? Because ‘friendly advice’ or not, most authors are happy to go with the publisher that will pay them the most and treat them with the most respect, which is business, not gate-keeping. Seems like you’re implying a further accusation but stopping short of saying something people make actually want a citation for.

   One individual even thought it might be cute to come up with a t-shirt saying “Fuck your golden age Sci-Fi” (or something similar).

   Holy shit. One random individual, who in context was tired hearing about how all the best Sci-Fi was older sci-fi made a sarcastic joke about making a T-shirt? Well there’s all the evidence of gate-keeping we’ll ever need.

   Legitimate actions to get rid of the HP Lovecraft statue are accompanied by a smaller group seeking to discourage any interest in his work.

   They’ll pry my Cthulhu plushie from my cold dead hands.

   With all this gate-keeping it’s amazing manages to break through the walls and enjoy SFF at all. However with the danger of those seeking to destroy SFF at all times I guess it’s important to keep it walled up like that.

3. Read some of the MGC stuff last night and wow, they still occupy a very strange corner of reality. Hoyt thinks we need protection from Beale? The pups certainly put more than a few noses out of joint last year but its herself and her own clique she should be worrying about. Their continued association with and use of Teddy as some sort of sff boogeyman is more damaging to them than anyone else.

4. @Dann
   I don’t know why I’m responding but some day… I really wish stylish worked on iPads

   ** Heinlein’s Starship Troopers has been so fully distorted in movies as to be unrecognizable from the book.

   I’m not sure what your point is. Many movies distort books. Starship Troopers isn’t the first and it won’t be the last

   ** Readers are actively discouraged from reading the works of certain types of current authors based on gender and race.

   Umm readers always have been discouraged from reading works by some authors. If you were/are a woman you shouldn’t read x. If you were a black slave trained to read to do a specific job you shouldn’t read anything but x, y, z. After blacks were given their Freedom they were and still are discouraged from reading certain things (sometimes that’s science and math which I find WAYYYY more serious). Throughout time depending on class/race/other factors reading certain authors for strange reasons has been discouraged by parents/teachers/religion/society.

   Which people are discouraging what authors based on what gender and race? Try specifics for a change. It helps in claririty of conversation.

   Most of what I’m aware of is SWM still being dismissive of authors not like them. Which makes some people mock.

   And some of us non-SWM saying hey there is some cool stuff written by people who look like us you might want to check it out. Yes I know sometimes that long thing is made shorter by “challenge you to read non-SWM for 1 year“. This makes some people comment poorly.

   ** Authors are given “friendly advice” to avoid submitting to certain publications.

   Different publishers have different requirements. Some are more friendly towards certain types of stories and types of authors. It’s perfectly appropriate to share useful information with peers. Again could you be more specific about the actual problem?

   ** One individual even thought it might be cute to come up with a t-shirt saying “Fuck your golden age Sci-Fi” (or something similar).

   What’s your point? One person expresses an opinion and the world of SFF is over? Golden Age Sci-Fi is not the begin all, end all of SFF. SFF came 100-200 years before it and hopefully will continue for thousands of years after it.

   ** Legitimate actions to get rid of the HP Lovecraft statue are accompanied by a smaller group seeking to discourage any interest in his work.

   Seriously? Most of the people who wanted the statue removed talked about how important his work was. No Daniel Jose Older didn’t but he is one person..

   BTW can you cite a source for discourage any interest in his work. It’s hard to have a conversation when someone doesn’t provide links to statements they make which don’t match my reality.

   ** The list goes on, “whisper campaigns”, etc., and most people already know enough.

   I’ve always loved your everybody knows there are secret groups trying to destroy everything comments on Scalzi’s blog

5. And Dann can be summed up as: Once again someone is arguing that the rare extreme viewpoint is the centre mainstream position.

   Not convinced.

6. @Dann, if you couch your opinions as opinions rather than authoritative facts, you wouldn’t get nearly so much pushback. Or maybe you wouldn’t get any. But, hey, you do you. Just don’t complain that folks here jump on dissent, because that’s not what’s happening.

   Because I have my own allergy to incorrect assertions, your friend the educated person is not representative of, oh, anyone. Stephen King is pretty much our era’s Dickens. In the normal course of events, some of his stuff will be consumed and forgotten and some will outlive him.

   People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction just went over $15k.

7. Perhaps like Tasha, I should started with I wonder why I still try……

   Start with the acknowledging that there are folks behaving poorly on all sides* and then we might have a starting point.

   Regards
   Dann
   *Excepting VD. Cause damn!

8. @TooManyJens Seniors Destroy SFF?
   I like this

   @Mike Glyer

   There are times I have jokingly called myself a geezer, but I see that term was already analyzed and found lacking.

   I did laugh at the ventures in other directions — like “Men Destroy Romance”.

   Part of my problem may be my age. But I have always had a diverse group of friends, age, sexual orientation, gender, race, class. As a kid (8-12) I was jhappy to hang out with my grandparents neighbors in their 80s. Our town was small so it wasn’t unusual to socialize with parents & teachers & frequently meet up at UU Church. I was as likely to sit with adults 😀 as hang with my age group (eh) or watch younger kids 🙂 .

   Do you know many women your age who call themselves geezers? My only problem with the word is gender connotations. None of the women I know over 65 call themselves geezers. The recently suggested seniors is the only word I think they’d agree on. Most of the guys in the right age group I know would be ok with geezers or curmudgeon or seniors. Unfortunately most of my senior family/friends/acquaintances are white. I think my oldest POC friend is 60ish.

   Glad people are enjoying Men Destroy Romance Does it work as well if it’s Men Destroy Paranormal Romance? Lightspeed could do that.

9. @rob_matic: “b) they must be making out like bandits from their backlists, where they are basically reissuing for free”

   Not so fast. There’s a lot of surprisingly-recent backlist that wasn’t in an easily-used electronic format and has gotten horrible e-publication treatment. Uncorrected scan errors are the least of it. As a concrete example, the ebook for Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew is just awful. Italics are added and dropped apparently at random, some of the spelling errors are obviously scanning artifacts, and there’s some terrible block-level formatting. One of his other books has the wrong copyright page; I remember it as It having The Stand‘s data, but I could have that backwards.

   And that’s Stephen King. I’d think that if anyone’s backlist would get excellent treatment, it’d be his.

   Then there are the huge swaths of backlist ebooks that don’t have cover art, because the contract didn’t cover that usage…

10. Start with the acknowledging that there are folks behaving poorly on all sides* and then we might have a starting point.

    Perhaps you should actually provide citations rather than vague statements. You might get more discussion if you aren’t so coy about your assertions. Positing vague conspiracy theories is a good way to get yourself not taken seriously, and that’s where you are right now.

    For example, I’m trying to figure out how the fact that the Starship Troopers movie was different from the book has anything to do with anything that is being discussed here. No one involved with SFWA or Worldcon had any input into that decision.

    Who is involved in this alleged “whispering campaign”? What evidence do you have to support such a campaign even existing? And so on. You’ve thrown out a bunch of talking points that have no substance. Provide cites. Tell everyone exactly what you are talking about.

11. @Dann

    Not to restart an old debate, but as far as Starship Troopers goes, I found it very recognizable to the book, save for the lack of powered armor. Critical difference though, I don’t assume that a military hierarchy can do no wrong if only the pesky civilians got out of the way. Without that assumption, the movie might seem a great deal like the book. With that assumption, the movie likely seems very different.

    As far as the rest goes, well, I’m yet to be convinced that a lot of this exists outside of Puppy heads.

    Yes, sff now speaks in enough voices that a more traditional style of pulp or golden age pastiche or even new wave pastiche will not necessarily speak to people. It’s just a different kind of works coming up with different kinds of authors.

    Similarly, I don’t see how asking people to consider reading works by authors outside of their cultural sphere is automatically saying one shouldn’t read those writers within ones’s sphere.

    And finally, I don’t see how acknowledges the virulent racism that pervades Lovecraft’s work is the same thing as saying they should not be read at all. Unless horror just isn’t your thing, of course.

    I suppose I can’t say that it’s entirely in the Puppies’ heads – RH was still a thing. But I think the Puppies ignore how a huge number of the evil SJWs came down on RH hard.* Really, how we’re all actively discouraging people from reading white dudes when we’re all secretly Scalzi’s pawns just doesn’t really add up.

    I think the assumption that encouraging people to read other kinds of authors must mean they hate pulp, or hate golden age stuff, etc.; or that by appreciating new takes on the genre automatically means automatically hating its more established parts, is treating sci-fi like a zero sum game. It’s the redditors deployment of “logic” to show that anyone who opposes them simply has to conform to that [redditors] chosen straw man.

    Really, we’re going to talk about gate-keeping – while demand that people refrain from criticizing some parts of the genre? Seriously?

    *Show me the Puppies being actually opposed to Beale, and not just riding his coat-tails while insisting VD is just a persona and that he’s just performing, and I’ll say they’re capable of the same thing.

12. Citing Sources, Quoting, and Linking
    Mike Glyer sets the standard with his incredible daily round ups as well as all the other daily posts. Filers are just trying to keep up with The standards set by the Hugo winning File 770 Fanzine: quote, cite your sources, link so others can read the original.

    @Dann
    Specifics really help in discussions around here. Otherwise you just sound like a conspiracy theorist. I don’t know if you’ve noticed how frequently comments here include one or more links as well as quotes. It’s one of the reasons conversations are so interesting. Filers backup their assertions with facts. It’s rare for someone to post about a topic – someone said x or did x or had x happen to them without linking to at least one source. If they don’t someone else will find and post a link because the first person included enough information that Googlefu does the trick or someone saw it/remembers it/etc.

13. Tasha Turner:

    Do you know many women your age who call themselves geezers?

    Not a one.

    Male fans I know are more likely to call themselves oldpharts, and I also don’t recall any women doing that.

    I won’t be telling you anything new to point out there is a strong disincentive in our culture for anyone to be identified as old, or that the underlying reasons are more biased against women.

14. Old guy checking in here: I can’t think of a term for folk we used to call elderly or old that isn’t either deliberately jokey/ironic (geezer, crone) or euphmenistic and/or faintly condscending (senior [with or without “citizen”], elder [outside traditional cultures]). The exceptions seem to be descriptive of situation (retiree, pensioner). Except, of course, “elderly” and “old.”

    It’s terminologically slippery. I’m 71, ambulatory, possessed of all my teeth and a relatively sound mind, and still learning stuff. I have a perverse affection for “geezer,” though I cannot think of my wife (six months younger) as a “nice old lady” (as one of her students once characterized her), let alone “crone” (way too active and attractive). When I was growing up, 71 was clearly old–many of my older relatives died before reaching that age. Now I have more than a few friends older than I am, who I cannot think of as old and who do not act their ages. (Though we are all perhaps a bit less fleet of foot.)

    I’d expand on this, but it’s time for the early-bird special down at the diner, and then there’s the Matlock marathon on cable.

15. Recent reading: The Anatomy of Curiosity (published by Carolrhoda Lab in March 2015). Three novellas.

    Maggie Stiefvater, Tessa Gratton, and Brenna Yovanoff are YA fantasy authors who have been writing buddies since 2008. In 2012, they decided to demonstrate what it is that their critique group does by publishing The Curiosities, a collection of short pieces that one of them had written and the other two had marked up. Now, with The Anatomy of Curiosity, they again open up their writing process, in the form of a round robin where each in turn comments on all the things that go into a work from first inklings to final revision, and each contributes a novella annotated by the author.

    This is not so much “how to write” (though tips can be gathered from it) as “how I write” × 3. Stiefvater says, of how they came to work together, “their reading and writing tastes are similar enough to mine that they enjoy my writing for what it is”; yet placing their reflections next to each other makes clear that they actually work quite differently. It should encourage a beginning writer to find what works for them personally. Yovanoff has a method that everyone including her originally thought was cockeyed: she writes according to a rhythm, leaving blanks for words and paragraphs to be filled in later. And yes, her story flows rhythmically!

    In her introduction to her story “Ladylike” Stiefvater describes starting it by thinking of a character interaction, then fleshing out the characters involved and expanding from there. The main character, Petra, is a painfully awkward girl who only loses her self-consciousness when reciting poetry; hired to visit and read to an elderly woman, the elegant and gracious Geraldine, Petra finds someone to admire and be encouraged by, and begins remaking herself into a better version from the seed of confidence she already had. The plot takes a dark turn when we learn that Geraldine has formerly remade herself more radically. A third character is introduced whose development complements the other two thematically. It’s a nice story, well-paced (except, perhaps, some of the large amount of quoting and discussing poetry). I found Geraldine more compelling than Petra, but maybe a teen would disagree.

    Gratton’s story “Desert Canticle” takes place in a secondary world; she started with a couple of small worldbuilding details, imagined what sort of cultures might go with them, and brought those cultures to life with her characters. Her very interesting notes point out the ways in which, in the final version, worldbuilding, characters, and themes are inextricably intertwined; she also convincingly shows how she used small details to tie in themes. The story’s main character, Rafel, is a soldier who was once a very effecive killer and now has been assigned to a squad disarming magical mines, working closely with a mage, Aniv, from the people whose insurgency he helped defeat. The two of them fall in love, but over the course of the story it becomes clear how each of them has been shaped (and fettered, particularly in Rafel’s case) by their respective cultures; they may not find a way to join together. The very non-real-world cultures are excellently developed, with interesting gender dynamics (central to the story, but not the only theme); the characters are memorable and the plot is suspenseful. Recommended.

    The third story, “Drowning Variations” by Brenna Yovanoff, is different because she decided to describe her writing process in the fictional form itself. The main character is an author (a version of Yovanoff) who has had two formative experiences, once when she nearly drowned as a young chld, and once when a fellow teenager drowned near her house; over the course of many years these experiences work in her head and she tries to write them over and over. We are given three very different stories (with some elements carried over from one to the next), ony the last of which she considers successful. In it, drowning, and the mental forces that sink troubled teens, are embodied as a monstrous green-haired girl. The main character, Jane, is struggling to find what to say to Ethan, the boy she’s attracted to; more so when Ethan’s best friend drowns, possibly suicide, and Ethan is visibly foundering himself. I wasn’t altogether enthused by this story, whose high-school romance seems just a bit generic and whose monster lacks consistency in description. However, the larger story’s depiction of reworking a thematic idea is interesting.

    By the way, the hardcover book is beautifully and legibly laid out and absolutely free of typos, and the editor, Andrew Karre, contributed a nice little note about working with the authors. Finally someone to nominate for Long Form?

16. Russell Letson: But you write so young! Not at all like someone who could tell me which Lennon sister Dick Cathcart was married to….

17. @dave:

    This extends even to the characterization of the protagonist, a semi-fictional Moorcock himself, and a more inconsistent, un-self-aware, self-justifying, and arrogant social dummy I’ve yet to encounter. But Moorcock is a Grand Master of SF and fantasy. So it has to be deliberate, right?

    I hain’t read it, but I read a brief interview with Moorcock where he spoke about the autobiographical part, and he explicitly reproached the young man he was. In particular, he noted that his wife at the time had a splendid writing career after the two of them divorced, which he took as evidence that he had squelched her talent while they were together.

18. It’s interesting that Amanda S. Green is still refusing to correct her blog post, despite several requests from Lamb and someone else that she do so. Seriously, what sort of journalistic “integrity” is that?

    Also, I note with amusement that “Genius” Amanda does not understand the difference between “infer” and “imply”.

19. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers has been so fully distorted in movies as to be unrecognizable from the book.

    Uh-oh. Quick! Everyone hid the Stalker and Solaris DVDs!

20. In the world of theatre, where some version of “Without older people, gays and Jews, there is no audience” is often repeated, both “oldsters” and “blue hairs” are sometimes used instead of “older people” and I think it’s with affection. I am teetering on the precipice of 60, so I don’t know if I will still think “oldster” or “blue hair” is charming when I’m 70, but at the moment, oldster is what I said to my dad about the place he lived and he thought it was funny, and blue hair reminds me of the sweet little ladies who ran a small-town library near where I lived at one period in my life and they were adorable. I think the tint might’ve been closer to violet than blue, but they were still people I wouldn’t mind emulating or being compared to.

    There’s also OAP and Aged P, the first in Noises Off and the second in Dickens’ Great Expectations. I would probably answer to either. I may not be a parent (the P in Aged P) but I am a person, so…

    Also, on a completely different matter, I find myself flummoxed by the argument that Stephen King not being “literature” is somehow evidence that there are big bad gatekeepers who are stopping people from selling their books and also stopping people from reading those people’s books, because… Stephen King is an example of someone who has trouble getting published or finding readers??? There is a conspiracy to deny Stephen King something, something that puts him on the same side as the Puppies, the same Puppies whose de jure leader, Larry Correia, was just throwing rocks at… Stephen King??? WHAT?

21. Dann –

    Start with the acknowledging that there are folks behaving poorly on all sides* and then we might have a starting point.

    That’s a terrible starting point. First we’d have to figure out who is on what side, what the standards of behavior we’re adhering to, have a vote on those standards, maybe set up metrics and goals so that later we can review how we’re measuring up to those standards and find out where it’s going wrong and come up with various process improvement protocols so that we can move forward. We should really start with an organizational chart to remove the accountability question.

    Because there’s so far two sides, Sad and Rabid, who set the bar for standard pretty low, and the unaffiliated everyone else who who don’t like slates or attempted vote manipulation. Which side is the twitter dude with the Golden Age T-Shirt, am I on the same side as him, were teams picked like dodgeball and I was out that day, does bad behavior of one person justify it in another and if so is it an equal ratio thing or sliding scale depending on the offense?

    Whoo. We’re going to have to set up some meetings. Send out a memo.

22. @Russell Letson
    Geezers and Nice Old Ladies Destroy SFF: written by people who insist the other authors are still young

    @Mike Glyer
    We’ll have you blurb it But you write so young!

    The next time I go to laugh at an anthology title I’ll remember the time we tried this simple idea…

23. “Alte Kockers Destroy Science Fiction” whizzed through my head and rushed out with howling outrage chasing it…

24. Geriatrics destroy Sci-Fi

    The Grizz in my nick comes from Grizzly Adams. One of my fellow Hot Wheels collectors back in the 90s thought I looked like him. It kind of stuck.

25. Recent reading: The Anatomy of Curiosity (published by Carolrhoda Lab in March 2015). Three novellas.

    I loved THE CURIOSITIES, recommend it to anyone interested in writing, and gave out a couple of copies as presents. So I’m thrilled to hear of this follow-up. Thanks!

26. Because there’s so far two sides, Sad and Rabid, who set the bar for standard pretty low, and the unaffiliated everyone else who who don’t like slates or attempted vote manipulation.

    There’s also the unaffiliated group of people who don’t give a crap about any of it, of course.

27. Old people keeping theater alive. When I was in a community production, I took a peek through the slit in the curtain and excitedly reported that we had an audience with people of all ages in it! Then I looked again and realized that what I’d seen was an audience with larger old people and smaller old people in it.

28. Ancient Persons as in Wilmot?
    Now I will feel ever so slightly grumpy and dissatisfied until Men Destroy Romance is manifested.

29. It’s possible to think Stephen King writes literature (and Harold Bloom should go soak his fat head) *and* still believe that it’s good to represent/read people who aren’t straight white dudes. Just like it’s possible to think that HPL was a paranoid racist but also enjoy various permutations of the Cthulhu Mythos. Either that or I have superpowers unavailable to most mortals.

    the same Puppies whose de jure leader, Larry Correia, was just throwing rocks at… Stephen King???

    That’s the other thing. While unaware of rock-throwing in particular (oh, I believe there was, because…Correia…I just missed that bit) from what I know of King’s politics and writing, the Puppies are not exactly in the same camp. At all.

30. I like “Oldsters Destroy SF” quite a bit.

    @Dann: As a progressive white dude, let me acknowledge that, yeah, sometimes it feels hard when people who’ve been marginalized push back against that, not always politely. I used to be a libertarian and in the 90s I bought into all the “anti-PC” shibboleths. So I acknowledge the feelings – it’s easy to feel like one is under attack.

    But, at a certain point, I am responsible for measuring my feelings against the reality that my being white and straight and born with plumbing that matches my sense of self amounts to, across those dimensions*, a pretty good position in life. Certainly a much better position in life, across those dimensions, than people who don’t have those markers. And that means I’m responsible for mastering my upset when the impulse to feel under assault comes upon me.

    —————–
    * Re: “across those dimensions.” Look, I was reared by one alcoholic and one clinically depressed, codependent parent. I grew up a huge nerd before nerds were cool. I was diagnosed with ADHD/PI at 49. I’ve had cancer twice. So far. I’d sing “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen” except social media exists: anyone who cares to knows the trouble I’ve seen. The point is, there is not a single affliction in my inventory that would’ve been improved by going through life black, or female, or gay, or trans. In fact, every one of them would have been harder, including – absolutely – the cancer. When we talk about privilege, it never means, “Everything is easy for you (me).” It means, everything would be harder without those markers.

31. Kurt Busiek –

    There’s also the unaffiliated group of people who don’t give a crap about any of it, of course.

    And the ones who don’t know what the hell that BS was. Frankly many members of that group acted like jerks on social media and I hope everyone apologizes for their behavior. It’d be a start.

32. @JJ – It’s interesting that Amanda S. Green is still refusing to correct her blog post, despite several requests from Lamb and someone else that she do so. Seriously, what sort of journalistic “integrity” is that?

    Eh. Actually, Green inserted a clarification into her blog post and has, I think, further modified it to suggest that people go see for themselves. She also freely apologizes in the comments for any misunderstanding.

    The thing is, improper word usage or not, I think she hit on the logical extension of Lamb’s argument. If Lamb, as a writer, buys a used book and then to compensate the author buys an e-copy and advocates for that as a good practice, it takes some careful reading of a not at all well put together argument to not go where Green went.

33. Battleaxe here. Sometimes I’m just a biddy.

    Some of the whippersnappers that I play video games with refer to senior gamers such as myself as “olds”, as in “whoa, look at all the olds in this group!” I like the idea of olds destroying things, it appeals to my aged punk rock sensibilities.

    I love acquiring new derogatory nicknames as I age but some of my friends are still in that perpetually 39-years-old mindset and hate being reminded.

34. Chronologically advanced, perhaps?

35. Oldsters Destroy SF

    I could live with it if they can. 😀
    @Mike Glyer

    I won’t be telling you anything new to point out there is a strong disincentive in our culture for anyone to be identified as old, or that the underlying reasons are more biased against women.

    Nope I’ve been fighting it my whole life. I’m hoping the Baby Boomers can help to change some of the attitudes. But I came across a beauty article for the over 70 crowd on using cosmetics, exercise, dieting, and clothing to look sexy for their man recently. I have nothing against women wanting to look sexy but following fad dieting in your 70-90s is much more dangerous than when your younger. And can’t we want to look sexy for ourselves by age 70? Please let’s change things so the following generations don’t have to go through the hell we have. It’s a legacy I’d like to help create.

36. So anyway, that other news item I had posted for awhile? Now I’m told it isn’t ready to be broken yet. That’s why I have pulled it behind the curtain.

37. Pixels have scrollen, like the first disty
    Glyer has posted, like the first crier
    Praise for the pixels, praise for the scrolling
    Praise for the comments fresh from the choir

38. Makes sense — Cat Stevens!

39. @Dann

    …there are folks behaving poorly on all sides*…

    Could you clarify what sides you mean? Because right now your statement is about as useful as saying that there are arseholes everywhere.

    @nickpheas

    So if I own a physical book it comes with an e-text which I can read in preference if that’s the kind of thing I prefer

    Primagames does something similar with their gameguides. Each physical copy comes with an unique code that can be used at their site to access the e-guide. Limitations are that it’s an online only guide, and you have to be logged in to their site to access. I suppose with some sort of DRM you should be able to work this with a ebook copy, but I’m typically enh when it comes to DRM.

40. If I ever achieve the status of “blue haired old lady” the blue will be peacock.

41. My sister has taken to dying her hair. Blue, or magenta, or sometimes henna – she looks really good as a redhead. (Her natural hair color is now white.)

42. Tasha Turner on January 19, 2016 at 2:13 pm said:

    [Nice things about @Kevin Standlee]

    Nigel on January 19, 2016 at 2:22 pm said:

    Kevin Standlee Destroys Commonly Held But Ridiculous Preconceptions About Organising The Hugos.

    Thank you both.

43. Who or what was the badly behaved RH? I thought I could toss out my who’s who Kerfuffle Kards ™ months ago and now I find myself a bit lost in the rehashing.

    Having been immersed in Dickens lately, I like the comparison to King quite a bit. Both have their weak spots–Dickens’ sentimentality and moral lectures are irritating but his ability to describe people’s foibles in ways that are instantly recognisable nearly 2 centuries later is what keeps me coming back. King certainly has some lame books and some narrative missteps even in his best works, but taken in total they are a collective portrait of late 20th century American life in the same way that Dickens’ works together provide a portrait of mid 19th century British life.

44. @Cmm,

    RH = Requires Hate.

45. Here’s my try

    Get Off My Lawn or I’ll Destroy SF!

46. So here we are today where:
    ** Heinlein’s Starship Troopers has been so fully distorted in movies as to be unrecognizable from the book.

    That’s the only concrete data point provided for “here we are today”. It happened in 1997.

47. Tintinaus: Get Off My Lawn or I’ll Destroy SF!

    That got a laugh out of me, anyway. And laughs are in short supply tonight.

48. Snowcrash,

    I have long felt you should be able to go to a publishers website post a proof of purchase for a dead-tree and get a free download of the same.

    Let’s try Painting SF Purple.

49. Mike,

    I hope things get better soon.

50. If you think the treatment Starship Troopers got was bad, I’d hate to see what you think of the hatchet job they did on Friday…

    In other news, Row Seven is done. The backlog between the end of 7H and the beginning of the untouched 8A – primarily the superhero collection – is simply huge. (7I is occupied by a couple of large box sets that are out of sequence.) Everything presently in Row Eight will move to the cabinet, and then some.

    The movies are moving.

    They must be; that’s the only explanation. One bad comedy that was supposed to be on Row Two was on a stakeout clear down in Row Eight. Some of the carefully-placed gaps that exist to accommodate movies that are currently “checked out” are bigger than they should be. The penguins had migrated from Madagascar to consult on the Nut Job; I think they used the Phantom Tollbooth to get there.

    Still, progress is progress. I’m trying very desperately not to blame the zombie Chibithulhu that lurks in a nearby tote.

    It might hear me.

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