Pixel Scroll 12/22/16 “You’ll scroll your eye out, kid!”

(1) NEW BOOK REVEAL: The Refrigerator Monologues – basically it’s The Vagina Monologues for superheroes’ girlfriends. Catherynne M. Valente tells the book’s origin story at The Mary Sue.

My partner answered, “Sweetheart, you know you can’t fix Gwen Stacy dying. She was always going to die. She always dies. It’s kind of a thing.”

And I said, “YES I CAN. I’m going to write something and it’s going to be called The Refrigerator Monologues and it’s going to be The Vagina Monologues for superheroes’ girlfriends. I’m going to fix it. Hold my drink. Don’t believe me? Just watch!”

It’s not like I didn’t know Gwen Stacy was going to die. As has been noted, she always dies. But the way the movie was paced, I kind of thought they’d keep that for the third movie, because the Emma Stone/Andrew Garfield chemistry was kind of all that iteration had going for it. So, it blindsided me in a way that Gwen Stacy taking her dive should never blindside anyone born after 1970, and it was a sucker punch, because more or less the last thing Emma Stone does before she quite literally flounces off to meet her doom is snit, “Nobody makes my decisions for me, nobody! This is my choice. Mine.”

I can make my own decisions! Boom. Splat. Death. Girl down.

It felt like such a harsh slap in the face. People so often think of iconic characters as organic things that proceed semi-autonomously while the writer just records their actions, but someone chose to give her those words. They made it through many rounds of editing and screen-testing. Someone chose to have her say that right before it all goes to hell. To make those powerful words the punchline to a sad joke about female agency by punishing her for them, by making sure that no matter how modern and independent the new Gwen might seem, everything is just as it has always been. That old, familiar message slides into our brains with the warm familiarity of a father’s hug: when women make their own choices, disaster results.

(2) WRITER HOSPITALIZED. Peter David’s wife, Kathleen, reports “Yes, Peter is in the hospital. No, we are not entirely sure why”.

Well this time it is not a stroke or a heart attack. Right now we are eliminating things rather than getting a diagnosis because every time we think we know what is going on, we get another curve that sets us back to figuring out what is going on.

What we do know that Peter is in the hospital with severe leg weakness. He can’t walk and even standing is dicey.

(3) BEST TV. SciFiNow ranks the “20 Best TV Shows of 2016”. At the top of the polls is —

1) Stranger Things

We bet Netflix wished all of their shows delivered like this. Stranger Things became a phenomenon almost instantly, and it’s easy to see why. The Duffer Brothers created a show that was a love-letter to all of our favourite horror and fantasy films and books from the 80s (hands up who started re-reading Stephen King’s IT after finishing the last episode), while remaining thrilling, scary and accessible to a wider audience. It’s perfectly paced (going for eight episodes instead of 13 was a great decision), it’s both sharp and sensitive, and it is perfectly cast. There’s a reason why everyone went nuts over the Stranger Things kids, and why we were just as invested in Joyce (Winona Ryder) and Hopper (David Harbour) as we were in Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown). There’s no weak link in the ensemble, and there is nothing about the show that lets it down. From the awesome opening credits to the teasers for the second season, we love everything about this show.

(4) BEST HORROR FILMS. Lower on the same page SciFiNow also picks the 16 Best Horror Films of 2016. And what movie was the most horrific?

  1. The Witch

Now that Black Phillip is a bona fide cultural icon, what’s left to say about Robert Eggers’ The Witch? Well, perhaps the most important thing is that it’s still, after repeat viewings, a truly chilling experience. It doesn’t get less powerful, it just gets more interesting. Eggers’ much-publicised attention to detail creates a film that really does immerse in you in the cold, uncaring wilderness with this broken family that’s wondering why God has decided to abandon them, and it is a very scary place to be. There’s nothing about the film that isn’t perfect, from the cinematography by Jarin Blaschke to the score by Mark Korven, and the cast is amazing, with Kate Dickie and Ralph Ineson bringing a heartbreaking tragedy to their Puritan pilgrims and Anya Taylor-Joy providing a complex emotional anchor. There are moments when it definitely establishes itself as a genre film, but it’s the harsh reality of that life and the fear of God that really drive the horror of The Witch. It’s the horror film of the year and we can’t wait to watch it again.

(5) CURIOSITY. The child in me wants to know what story Lou Antonelli created to go with his title “If You Were a Dinah Shore, My Love”.

Looks like I will have one last publication before the end of the year. Gallery of Curiosities is slated to podcast my story “If You Were a Dinah Shore, My Love” as part of a double bill on Dec. 28. Mark your calendars!

(6) HINES BENEFIT AUCTION #23. The twenty-third of Jim C. Hines’ Transgender Michigan Fundraiser auctions is for an autographed book and an album from Seanan McGuire.

Our final auction comes from award-winning and bestselling author, filker, and all-around talented person Seanan McGuire. Today’s winner will receive an autographed hardcover of EVERY HEART A DOORWAY, as well as a copy of McGuire’s album WICKED GIRLS.

About the Book:

Children have always disappeared under the right conditions; slipping through the shadows under a bed or at the back of a wardrobe, tumbling down rabbit holes and into old wells, and emerging somewhere… else.

But magical lands have little need for used-up miracle children.

Nancy tumbled once, but now she’s back. The things she’s experienced… they change a person. The children under Miss West’s care understand all too well. And each of them is seeking a way back to their own fantasy world.

But Nancy’s arrival marks a change at the Home. There’s a darkness just around each corner, and when tragedy strikes, it’s up to Nancy and her new-found schoolmates to get to the heart of things.

No matter the cost.

(7) A 3M REVIEW. James Davis Nicoll has posted a review of Heather Rose Jones’ The Mystic Marriage “Mistreated, misplaced, misunderstood”.

2015’s The Mystic Marriage is the second volume in Heather Rose Jones’ Alpennia series.

Antuniet Chazillen has lost everything: her foolish brother has been executed for treason and her mother is dead by her own hand. Antuniet has been stripped of her aristocratic rank. Determined to restore the family honour, Antuniet flees Alpennia for Austria, there to use her alchemical skills to win back for her family the respect and position her brother cost it.

In Austria she finds a treasure of rare value, a treasure others are determined to wrest from her. She escapes from Vienna to Heidelberg, but her enemies are still close on her heels. She sees no choice but to trade her virtue for transportation to safety.

Which means returning to Alpennia…

(8) SHORT BEER. Beer’d Brewing in Connecticut has a beer called Hobbit Juice. Martin Morse Wooster asks, “Is this what hobbits drink when they are tired of being small and want to ‘get juiced?’”

He’ll be here all week, folks.

(9) A VINTAGE YEAR IN SPACE. Robert Picardo hosts another installment of the Planetary Society’s video series The Planetary Post – “2016: A Magnificent Year for Space Exploration”

Greetings, fellow space fan! Robert Picardo here. As 2016 comes to a close, I thought it would be nice to look back at the year’s highlights in space science and exploration (and a few of the best bloopers from yours truly).

 

(10) BSFA AWARDS SUGGESTION DEADLINE. Members of the British Science Fiction Association – remember that December 31 is the deadline to suggest works for the BSFA Awards. The categories are — Best Novel, Best Short fiction, Best Artwork, Best work of Non-Fiction. Use the online form. Members will have the month of January to vote for the works that belong on the shortlist.

(11) WHEN SCOTTY INVADED NORMANDY. War History Online tells how  “Star Trek star shot two snipers on D-Day and was shot seven times in WWII”.

The beach was so thick with Canadians the later arrivals could not advance. As darkness fell, there was a risk they would end up shooting at each other – which was exactly what happened; not just at Juno Beach, but also at the other landing sites.

At about 11:20 that evening, Doohan finished a cigarette and patted the silver cigarette case he kept in his breast pocket. It had been given to him by his brother as a good luck charm… and a good thing, too.

Some ten minutes later, he was walking back to his command post when he was shot. Six times. By a Bren Gun. The first four bullets slammed into his leg, the fourth whacked him in the chest, while the sixth took off his right middle finger.

It was not a German sniper.  He had been shot by a nervous, trigger-happy Canadian sentry. Fortunately, the cigarette case stopped the bullet aimed at his chest. Doohan later joked it was the only time being a smoker saved his life.

(12) BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR. “The Twelve Days of Christmas:  A Tale of Avian Misery” is a cartoon on Vimeo about what happens when a British woman living in a small flat gets ALL the presents from the Twelve Days of Christmas.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, and Jim C. Hines for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip W.]

61 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 12/22/16 “You’ll scroll your eye out, kid!”

  1. 9) I recently had to watch Beethoven’s Christmas for a podcast. Robert Picardo was one of the few good things about the movie. He seemed to be having fun playing the over-the-top villain.

  2. 12) I never understood that song, who wants any of that stuff? In my head canon, it was written in the same spirit as All I want for Christmas is a Hippopotamus, but that meaning got lost over time.

  3. 11) And of course the story of Christopher Lee’s exploits in WWII just reinforces the idea that a lot of the actors in that cohort and generation were badasses.

  4. bookworm1398 on December 22, 2016 at 8:15 pm said:

    12) I never understood that song, who wants any of that stuff?

    I hadn’t taken it to be additive i.e. all the previous stuff gets sent again but I guess that is what the song says. Nice if you like triangle numbers.

  5. 12) (I see what you did there)

    What many people don’t realize is that the familiar Twelve Days of Christmas is only one of a number of recorded cumulative number songs. Another, much less well known one, is “Jolly Goshawk” which counts off the days of May rather than of Christmas.

    One suspects that originally such songs were spontaneous memory games., with each verse being sung by a new person who needed to remember all the previous gifts as well as adding their own. See also the more general category of cumulative song, which doesn’t necessarily have the counting aspect or seasonal association.

  6. (12) BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR – Whenever I start hearing this, I realise haven’t checked the Christmas Price Index yet.

    (This years is $34,363.49, up 0.7% due to “price increases for the Turtle Doves due to lack of availability, and wage increases for the Drummers and Pipers.”)

  7. (2) WRITER HOSPITALIZED
    Best wishes for recovery.

    (3) BEST TV.
    I’m so woefully behind: Stranger what? (Also, I don’t have Netflix)

    (11) WHEN SCOTTY INVADED NORMANDY.
    Wow. I never knew.

  8. Some of the various Christmas Revels (and other seasonal Revels) CDs include other cumulative and counting songs: there’s a nice one about tending sheep on one of the non-Christmas CDs. But the most interesting context where I’ve encountered a cumulative song was in one of the David Suchet Hercule Poirot episodes: Poirot and Captain Fraser sing a song that apparently began “One man and his dog went to mow a meadow” while on a long auto trip.

    ’99 bottles of beer’ is sort of an inverse counting song.

  9. Camestros, what a lovely card!

    Have a lovely holiday season, everyone, whatever holidays you celebrate.

  10. One of my dark secrets is that I’m a fan of Magnum P.I., and I recently found out that Starz has it available for streaming. I was watching one episode when, mch to my surprise, Robert Picardo made an appearance as a smart Mafia gunman. So being a villain is evidently a long-standing part of his repertoire.

    [godstalk]

  11. I loved 12 and laughed many rofls while at the same time very much appreciating the filersplaining of the possible origins of the song.

  12. As one might expect, my taste in “12 Days” songs is a bit out there. I had cause earlier today to reference James & Kling’s “A Terrorist Christmas” (someone asked which of the 12 Days involved nuclear weapons – I doubt they expected to find one), and I can stand Foxworthy’s redneck version about as often as I can Bob & Doug’s. (“G’day, and welcome to Day 12.”)

    And now I want a dozen doughnuts. I’ll settle for the iced oatmeal cookies that are actually in reach, though. 😉

  13. 12) Yeah I’ve had a couple of pub quizzes which ask either how many gifts in total the true love sends (assuming it’s cumulative!) OR how many birds do they get.

    I remember being quite authoritatively told the origin of the song was to teach Catholic traditions while they were banned in England, but the things I remember from that (2 turtledoves = old and new testaments, 12 drummers = disciples) are things that are general Christian rather than specifically Catholic, and wikipedia also says that’s a theory rather than any sort of fact.

    1) Really excited for this book – superheroes aren’t my thing but the fridging of women is enough of a cross cutting issue that I hope it will be a good read anyway.

    @Camestros thanks! Happy holidays to you too. Also have you ever considered collaborating on a video game with Zoe Quinn? Because I’d pay quite a lot of money to make that aesthetic happen!

    FINALLY: I’d like to formally announce that the 23rd (today for me, tomorrow in File Time) marks an important universal milestone in Holiday Season as it is My Birthday; I therefore wish you all a very happy My Birthday and an excellent Friday of work and/or fun.

  14. I agree with Anne Sheller on the example “Green Grow the Rushes O” as a counting song. It was one of the songs I used in my research paper on “Songs and the Analysis of Algorithms” (linked from Wikipedia’s page on “The Complexity of Songs“). Some cumulative songs I included in that paper that aren’t in the “Cumulative Songs” link that Heather Rose Jones provided are:
    • She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain;
    • There was a Tree Stood in the Ground; and
    • Counting Apple-seeds;
    emgrasso mentions the use of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” as a “counting down” song. Another example of that is “B I N G O”, where the six verses each “shrink”, in terms of the number of syllables sung, as the song goes on. Other counting down songs include things like “Ten in the Bed” and “Ten Little Freckled Frogs”, and related songs.

  15. emgrasso mentions the use of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” as a “counting down” song. Another example of that is “B I N G O”, where the six verses each “shrink”, in terms of the number of syllables sung, as the song goes on. Other counting down songs include things like “Ten in the Bed” and “Ten Little Freckled Frogs”, and related songs.

    A thousand eggs all nice and warm
    Crack, crack, crack
    A little chick is born
    Peep peep peep peep!
    Peep peep peep peep!

  16. Rev. Bob: I can stand Foxworthy’s redneck version about as often as I can Bob & Doug’s. (“G’day, and welcome to Day 12.”)

    I give Bob and Doug high marks for skipping when it starts to get really tedious. 😀

  17. Happy birthday, Arifel! May you receive many good books to read for your joint holiday celebrations! 🎂

  18. SFF author Adam-Troy Castro is a huge movie aficionado (I would damn near call him an expert on films), and (SPOILER!) he has some things to say about Passengers.

    (This post is viewable by all; if you don’t have a Facebook account, it will try to get you to log in, but you can click “Not Now” and the nag box will go away.)

  19. One of my dark secrets is that I’m a fan of Magnum P.I., and I recently found out that Starz has it available for streaming. I was watching one episode when, mch to my surprise, Robert Picardo made an appearance as a smart Mafia gunman. So being a villain is evidently a long-standing part of his repertoire.

    I probably haven’t watched Wonder Woman since the original airing or the very early syndication years, so have forgotten most everything about it. So I catch an episode last weekend where Rene Auberjonois is the bad guy (well, the baddish guy–there were badder guys there.) Not only that, they were both at a SF convention. At the time, I bet he had no inking that he would spend much of his future at SF conventions (assuming, of course, the he does attend cons–I figure he’s up there taking obscene amounts of money for 5 seconds of his time to sign his name like the rest of them.)

  20. Amazon UK have started a “12 days of Kindle” sale today. “American Gods”, “All the Birds in the Sky”, several V E Schwab, Brandon Sanderson and a couple of Claire North available today mostly for 99p but some at 1.99.

    New selection every day until the 3rd, other regions may vary, poster not responsible for wallet damage, etc…

  21. A famous countdown song is “Ten Little Indians,” by Philadelphia composer Septimus Winner (a favorite of mine, also wrote “Whispering Hope,” “Listen to the Mocking Bird”—both as “Alice Hawthorne”—and “Der Deitscher’s Dog” [Where, Oh Where]), which contains both the counting down bit and “One, little two, little three….” Needless to say, it belongs to an era of casual racism, though there were certainly worse examples on display. As my pal Gecko would say, “It was a simpler, more natural time.” (This has become my go-to line for any horrific or inexplicable examples of everyday racism or bizarro sexual innuendo or what-have-you, in archaic pop culture.)

    (11) It’s also interesting to note how many of the actors in “Hogan’s Heroes” were directly affected, negatively, by Nazi prisoner-of-war camps or concentration camps. You have to wonder what was going through their minds as they portrayed the insane situations in the comedy. I guess it was a simpler, more natural time.

  22. This one time, I was out on a drive with the aforementioned Gecko, and he missed a stop sign. This was unusual. I pointed it out to him, and he stopped right where we were, and said, “Retro-stop!” (I later learned he’d seen this in an obscure comic strip called Dupey that he showed me.) Thus was karmic balance restored, I guess.

    Anyway…

    retro-tick!

  23. “My son has noted that in SPIDER-MAN’s universe, the only person who has stayed dead is Uncle Ben. No one else.”

    Captain George Stacy?

  24. James Doohan was, from all accounts (some of them his own), quite a character… IIRC, a lot of close-ups of Scotty working the transporter controls or something were shot with someone else’s hands in vision, so his missing finger is only occasionally noticeable in the original Star Trek.

    I also vaguely recall an interview with Patrick Macnee (might have been during one of the Channel 4 re-runs of The Avengers) where he said that John Steed almost never carried a gun because he (Macnee) had had quite enough of guns during the war.

  25. (4): Also, the “16 Best Horror Films of 2016” link takes you to a review of Assassin’s Creed.

  26. A short subtractive-counting song is “I’ve Got Sixpence“, which I learned in Girl Scout Camp about, oh, forty years ago. (Yes, American Girl Scouts, with a song that is obviously from the point of view of a male Tommy in… WWI? WWII? We sang unironically about the “pretty little girls to deceive me” without ever once realizing the sexual innuendo….)

  27. @Darrah Chavey – I’m interested in hearing more about She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain. I googled the lyrics and can tell you they are not the ones I sang. We never had red pajamas (verse 3) or sleep at grsndma’s (verse 4) In the version I learned, we will kill the old red rooster (verse 3) and all have chicken and dumplings (verse 4).

    @Camestros, thanks for the lovely card.

  28. My son has noted that in SPIDER-MAN’s universe, the only person who has stayed dead is Uncle Ben. No one else.

    If you count alternate timeline versions showing up, he’s come back too. If you don’t, then I don’t think Gwen has actually “come back.”

    Plus, of course, plenty of other characters have died and not returned, from George Stacy (as noted) to Bennett Brant to Peter’s parents (have seemed to return, but were a hoax) and so on.

    Uncle Ben falls into the category of “origin deaths” — not a dramatic death story that happens along the way of the series, but part of the series foundation. Those deaths don’t usually get overturned — or if they do, it’s a fake or temporary, as with any seeming resurrection of the Waynes or Jor-El and Lara.

  29. @Heather: “Jolly \Old/ Hawk” was on one of the early Revels Xmas records (the USoid one, IIRC Wassail! Wassail!) although I’m still not clear on what links it to this season aside from being twelve days. We did it as a simple countdown; I don’t know whether it’s also done as a cumulation, since “twelve days” is part of the refrain.

    @emgrasso: the Spring Revels (for some of their short existence) did the verses of “Rattlin’ Bog” that I did \not/ learn in elementary school (the feather is used to make a bed…); unlike most cumulative songs it circles (the resulting child sows a seed producing a new tree), so we had an … interesting … time when Jack Langstaff trimmed the lyrics in real time for a matinee performance. Somehow this version doesn’t seem to have made it to the web.

    And there are filk versions of some of these. I remember refrains of “One for the One Ring, Lord of All, that was destroyed by Frodo”/”One for Sauron, Lord of All, who rules us all from Mordor” (latter titled “High Fly the Nazgul-O”), and a title “The Thirty Days of Amber” (because Corwin says something about a 2.5:1 time correspondence) because they’re in one of the oldest large compilations, the NESFA Hymnal, but I expect there are lots of others.

    @Arifel: happy pre-birthday!

  30. According to an ex that got drunk with him once, James Doohan’s finger was shot off while he was fighting in WWII, and he was sensitive about it and did his best to hide it from the cameras, even using hand models at times.

  31. Charon: That was in item 11 in today’s scroll (where I got it.) The photo I linked to was from this article (the top 10 SF actors who can’t count to 10.)

  32. @ Chip Hitchcock

    The version of Jolly Gos/Old-Hawk that I first encountered was definitely cumulative. Alas, those were the days when I scribbled interesting song lyrics down in my notebook without adding citations or sources.

  33. I wanted to post the “Twelve Days of Christmas” video on Facebook, but YouTube cryptically warned me that the video was unlisted and I should think carefully when I posted it. Is there some moral reason I’m not getting as to why I shouldn’t do it?

  34. @Varous re. Carrie Fisher: :-/ I hope she’ll be okay.

    @Anne Sheller: OMG how did I forget about “Green Grow the Rushes O”?! Thanks for reminding me of this; it was a staple of the funky folk songs my parents sang with us as kids at home, on long car trips, etc. I need to make a list of all of the songs we sang.

    @Arifel: A huge Happy Birthday to you and my mom! 😀

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