Pixel Scroll 12/26 May The Fives Be Few With You

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(1) PLASTIC FANTASTIC. “That’s No Moon: The Models and Miniatures of the Original ‘Star Wars’ Trilogy” at One Perfect Shot.

swmod85

Death Star under construction.

They were aged to perfection, they had had battle scars and blaster marks, grime and grit. Vehicles, ships, cities and worlds felt fully populated when they were nothing more than brilliant creations on a work bench. If the biggest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist, the biggest trick a model maker ever pulled was convincing us that a world existed. Before CGI was a practical tool, George Lucas and his team at ILM created some of the most amazing moments in cinema using models and miniatures. Here is a gallery of over 100 photos to highlight their efforts and contributions to the art of effects.

(2) 52 MILES OF THE TWILIGHT ZONE. There will be two marathon showings of The Twilight Zone this coming week.

(3) MORE RETRO FICTION. “The Best of Amazing Stories: The 1940 Anthology” is out. Available in an Amazon Kindle edition for $2.99.

Featuring a kicking cover by Robert Fuqua, illustrating Eando Binder’s Adam Link Fights a War.  (Adam Link was featured in not one, but TWO Outer Limits episodes and, historically interesting, is the first robot character to appear under the title I, Robot.  (Ike’s publisher’s would borrow that title a few years later for a small collection of short stories….), The Best of Amazing Stories, The 1940 Anthology brings you four short stories, five novelettes and a novella.

The contents are: Don Wilcox – “The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years”; David Wright O’Brien – “Truth is a Plague”; Ralph Milne Farley – “The Living Mist”; A. W. Bernal – “Paul Revere and the Time Machine”; Malcolm Jameson – “Monster Out of Space”; Nelson S. Bond – “Sons of the Deluge”; Ed Earl Repp – “The Day Time Stopped Moving”; Ross Rocklynne – “The Mathematical Kid”; Richard O. Lewis – “The Strange Voyage of Dr. Penwing”; Donald Bern – “The Three Wise Men of Space”; with interior illustrations by Frank R. Paul, Julian S. Krupa and H. R. Hammond.

(4) YOUR FAKE STAR WARS NEWS. “Man Who Spoiled New Star Wars Movie Beaten In Theater” from TheGoodLordAbove.

A 20-year-old man named Raymond Chatfield walked out of a premiere of ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ on Thursday night and shouted out a major spoiler, which was heard by almost a hundred people waiting on line in the lobby.

“I was waiting on line to see the 10pm showing,” said witness Robert Selvidge. “Then this snot-nose kid walks past the line, shouts out the ending and starts laughing. He totally ruined the movie for everyone…what a jerk!”

Chatfield was immediately assaulted by a Wookie, a Stormtrooper and Boba Fett.

However, this story of fannish rough justice was so compelling that Snopes.com felt the need to announce it is bogus.

(5) IT HELPS TO BE CRAZY. Is fandom a mental illness? “Star Wars fans and video game geeks ‘more likely to be narcissists’, study finds”.

Was the first clue that 100% of fans responding agreed they deserve to be studied?

Those who take part in “geeky events” are more likely to have an “elevated grandiose” level of narcissism, according to a study conducted by the University of Georgia.

Psychologists examined the personality traits of those who turn to “geek culture”, developing a Geek Culture Engagement Scale and a Geek Identity Scale to help quantify the figures.

It was found that those who scored highly on both scales were more likely to narcissists.

Subjects are scored on a scale of one to five, depending on how often they take part in activities such as live action role playing games, Dungeons and Dragons, cosplaying, puppetry, robotics – and enjoying things such as video games and Star Wars.

Or maybe there’s only an issue with fans who attend Dragon Con? The article doesn’t say that’s where the survey was done, but it’s suggestive that “The research was conducted across 2,354 people attending a science fiction and fantasy convention in Georgia.”

(6) SAD BUT TRUE. Andrew Liptak, who has the right date of George Clayton Johnson’s death in his io9 obituary, is being forced to endure “corrections” left in comments by people telling him that George died on the 22nd because they read it in the Wikipedia….

(7) STRIPED PUPPIES? Amazing Stories’ Steve Davidson thinks “Puppies Won’t Change Their Stripes Even If GRRM Wants Them To”.

I don’t really like to criticize (or even disagree) with Mr. Martin (he was adamantly opposed to my No Award strategy last year and that was no fun).  Not only do I run the risk of pissing off his legions of fans, but I also run the risk of giving puppies fodder for their wood chipper;  ‘oh look, the SJWs are fighting amongst themselves;  take heart, puppies, we’re winning’ and that’s most definitely not fun.

But when it comes to the Hugo Awards, Worldcon and Fandom, I’ve got feelings.

Those feelings tell me that Mr. Martin’s good will is misplaced.  I can say this with a fair degree of confidence because they’ve already been rejected by the people who were the intended recipients.  GRRM wasn’t talking to anyone other than puppies.  It is a given that Fans already share his sentiments.  We would all be more than happy to put this sad affair behind us and move on to find something less visceral to argue about among ourselves, like whether Star Trek or Star Wars is the greatest SF property of all time (apologies to Firefly, Stargate, Babylon 5, Battlestar and fans of other epics, and a side nod to those Trekkies who will always ask “TOS or Nextgen?”).

(8) WHALE OF A TALE. The Vault displays the crew list of the whaling ship Acushnet from 1840, containing the name of a future author (and Bradbury inspiration).

This crew list for the whaler Acushnet, filed with the collector of customs in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in December 1840, incudes the name and physical description of the 21-year-old Herman Melville. The list marks the beginning of the epic trip that was to provide the author with material he used to write his maritime novels Typee (1846); Omoo (1847); Mardi (1849); Redburn (1849); White-Jacket (1850); and Moby-Dick (1851).

(9) SHE WAS FANTASTIC. AND AMAZING. “Cele Godsmith Lalli” remembered at Sweet Freedom.

A photo (oddly a rarity online) of Cele Goldsmith Lalli and her husband Michael, along with photographer and Science Fiction Chronicle editor/publisher Andrew Porter’s obituary for this key magazine editor…she who “discovered” or first professionally published in fantasy and sf such writers as Ursula K. Le Guin, Sonya Dorman (as a prose writer), Thomas M. Disch, Ben Bova, Piers Anthony, and Roger Zelazny, among others…as assistant editor of Fantastic and Amazing, earlier, she had pulled out and accepted Kate Wilhelm’s first story.

After Ziff-Davis sold their fiction magazines in 1965, Goldsmith Lalli went on to work on Modern Bride and served as editor-in-chief for an noteworthy, lengthy term, and an award in the wedding industry is named in her honor.

(10) ADDITIONAL RED CRAYONS NOT INCLUDED. The Official A Game of Thrones Coloring Book came out in October.

Game of Thrones coloring bookIn a world where weddings are red, fire is green, and debts are paid in gold, countless images leap off the page thanks to the eye-popping intricacy of the vivid settings and details. Now, for the first time, fans of this blockbuster saga can fill in the blanks and marvel as this meticulously imagined universe comes to life, one sword, sigil, and castle at a time. With dozens of stunning original black-and-white illustrations from world-renowned illustrators Yvonne Gilbert, John Howe, Tomislav Tomi?, Adam Stower, and Levi Pinfold….

(11) DEL TORO’S PICKS. “Guillermo del Toro’s Top 10” at The Criterion Collection contains a lot more than 10 movies because “he decided on ties or rather, ‘thematic authorial pairings.”

One of the “ties” is between Brazil and Time Bandits.

Terry Gilliam is a living treasure, and we are squandering him foolishly with every film of his that remains unmade. Proof that our world is the poorer for this can be found in two of his masterpieces. Gilliam is a fabulist pregnant with images—exploding with them, actually—and fierce, untamed imagination. He understands that “bad taste” is the ultimate declaration of independence from the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie. He jumps with no safety net and drags us with him into a world made coherent only by his undying faith in the tale he is telling. Brazil remains one of the most important films of my life, and Time Bandits is a Roald Dahl–ian landmark to all fantasy films. Seeing Time Bandits with my youngest daughter just two weeks ago, I was delighted when she laughed and rejoiced at the moment when Kevin’s parents explode into a cloud of smoke.

(12) EDIBLE BOT. ”How to bake a droid” displays a gingerbread BB-8 on Imgur. (Keep scrolling down.)

(13) TRANSFORMATIVE MELTDOWN. Archive of Our Own (AO3), the fan-run fanfiction archive, hit a new milestone — 20,000 fandoms — despite the fannish organisation that runs the AO3, the Organization for Transformative Works, having a bit of a meltdown involving almost the entire board quitting, leaving only two very new elected board members.

The proximate cause, according to the Fanlore wiki overview, was a decision of the outgoing directors to fill a vacancy on the board with the candidate who finished last in the recent election rather than a higher-placing runner up. At the open online meeting of the directors on November 22, there was substantial pushback – here is a transcript.

The directors resigned en masse in an announcement that also tried to justify their actions.

The OTW Board of Directors voted at its regularly scheduled meeting on 22 November to appoint Andrea Horbinski to serve the remainder of the term vacated in 2014 by Anna Genoese, ending 31 December 2016. Filling board vacancies by appointment is a normal part of board work provided for in Article V §4 of the OTW Bylaws, and the Board has done so at multiple points in the past.

After discussion with the rest of the Board, Andrea Horbinski has decided to decline the appointment to the OTW Board for 2016. She has tendered her resignation from the Board effective 15 December 2015. Soledad Griffin, Jessica Steiner, Eylul Dogruel, Cat Meier, and M.J. MacRae are also resigning from the Board effective on that date. Those who currently serve as members of OTW committees will remain with the organization in their staff roles but not their Board roles.

The remaining directors have coped with the help of OTW’s volunteer committees.

The OTW and its projects, including the Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, and Transformative Works and Cultures, are operating normally. Our volunteers are still carrying out their work and will continue to do so throughout this process. Rest assured that everyone’s first priority is to keep the projects and the organization running smoothly.

We, Matty Bowers and Atiya Hakeem, new Board members elected earlier this month, will take office on December 1st. We should have access to all the tools and information available well before the 15th.

Some of the board of directors vacancies have now been filled.

Over the past couple of weeks we have considered the possibility of holding another election. However, after reviewing the organization’s by-laws, consulting the Elections team regarding the workload and demands related to the electoral process — both for candidates and for the Elections team, which has just reached the end of a complex season — and considering the likelihood that the only people stepping forward to run in a theoretical election may have just gone through an election in November, we have decided to maintain the regular election schedule.

Instead, in accordance with the organization’s by-law provisions regarding the filling of Board vacancies, we’ve appointed the top three runner-up candidates in the November elections, Alex Tischer, Katarina Harju and Aline Carrão, to fill the Board seats left vacant by Jessica Steiner, Margaret J MacRae and Soledad Griffin’s resignations for the remaining two years of their terms. The seat previously occupied by Anna Genoese will be kept empty during the next year and will be up for election in 2016 along with a seventh Board seat.

[Thanks to Meredith, Michael J. Walsh, Andrew Porter, David Doering, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]

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109 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 12/26 May The Fives Be Few With You”

  7. Jim Henley on December 26, 2015 at 4:58 pm said:

    TRANSFORMATIVE MELTDOWN: Note that this all happened on…November 22nd! But none dare call it conspiracy.

    I concur. That this should have occurred on the 294th anniversary of the birth of Joseph Frederick Wallet DesBarres, Swiss-Canadian cartographer, politician and Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia is NO COINCIDENCE!

  8. (1) Plastic Fantastic: I love this kind of thing so much. I have a tremendous, delighted enthusiasm for all the craft that goes into making these things, and love to give some attention to the people doing the work.

    I also really like the way del Toro talks about film, shifting from very refined concerns to very low-brow ones, and all the shades in between, as needed.

  12. Bruce Baugh on December 26, 2015 at 5:09 pm said:

    (1) Plastic Fantastic: I love this kind of thing so much. I have a tremendous, delighted enthusiasm for all the craft that goes into making these things, and love to give some attention to the people doing the work.

    Oh, me too! I remember being mesmerized by the intricate model work being done on the spaceships and props. These artists are so inspiring.

  13. I have posted a long-winded review of the anthology Daughters of Frankenstein: Lesbian Mad Scientists and another of War Stories from the Future; in short, thete were a couple pretty good stories in both — nothing I’d spend money on, but at least War Stories is free.

  14. I’ve seen all but three of del Toro’s recommended films, which makes me happy. It’s a great selection (Onibaba and Kuroneko especially).

    And while I haven’t seen the new Star Wars film yet, Jeet Heer has written a short twitter essay on Ewoks, relating them to Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest (which is one of my favorite titles and a really good book) and showing how Lucas messed them up: “Problem is not with imperialist resistance analogy but fact Lucas couldn’t resist turning Ewoks into sentimental teddy-bears.”

    I loved the Ewoks as a kid and even now it’s hard for me to criticize them even though I know they’re not too popular.

  16. I’m ashamed to say I’ve only seen 6 of Del Toro’s recommended films.The ones I have seen, though, are absolutely brilliant. Plus you really just cannot go wrong with Kurosawa. Onibaba and Kuroneko are great too, actually.

    Anyway re Del Toro: I hope he makes a few more movies in Spanish. His English-language films always fall a little flat for me, for some reason.

  17. PLASTIC FANTASTIC
    I love stories about movie and model making!

    I put this in the comments a few scrolls ago but posting again as it also relates to movie making and modeling. It is part of a VICE story on Phil Tippett who talks about his fascination with stop motion animation and how he coped with the change to digital animation. It’s a very interesting profile of a very creative person whose engagement with the world was mediated and tempered with his art.

    http://youtu.be/VTGQ_K0DBPo

  18. I always get the impression with del Toro that he has some really great scenes in his head and constructs a narrative so that he can do those scenes. (Thinking of pieces like the Death in Hellboy 2 and the hand-eyed monster in Pan’s Labyrinth.) So you get moments that are unquestionably genius–and a really strange, elegant genius at that–but the whole is often somehow less than the sum of the parts.

  20. @RedWombat
    I think part of it might be his artistic process – he journals ideas and sketches constantly. He is a visual story teller who has striking imagery and atmosphere / tone but I am not necessarily drawn to the plot as strongly.

    His movies do feel centered around visually striking concepts that I imagine have been in his sketch book for years with weaker connective tissue until the next page is torn from his journals.

    I enjoyed Hellboy much more than Hellboy2 because though Hellboy2 was imaginative and beautiful, the story and characterization of the first movie was stronger.

  22. Re Twilight Zone marathons. I remember when they were a staple of (I think it was Channel 11) in New York, every New Year’s Eve, like clockwork. One year I set to watching and taping them all, and got to see some of the less famous ones I had not seen casually in syndication at that point.

    Such fun.

    I also did that with the Prisoner on a PBS station–they showed the entire run in a weekend, so I taped it. I wish I had taped the interstitial comments that the people in the studio made between episodes discussing the themes of the episodes.

  26. Trekkies who will always ask “TOS or Nextgen?”

    I’m pretty sure that is the wrong question because without a doubt DS9 is better than both.

  27. I’m pretty sure that is the wrong question because without a doubt DS9 is better than both.

    Word.

  28. I’m pretty sure that is the wrong question because without a doubt DS9 is better than both.

    Absolutely.

  30. Steve Davidson: Trekkies who will always ask “TOS or Nextgen?”

    Tintinaus: I’m pretty sure that is the wrong question because without a doubt DS9 is better than both.

    I like them all a great deal — but they are each very different things.

    Comparing DS9 to either of the others is like comparing apples and oranges. Yes, they both come from orchards, and you’ll find both in the fruit & veg section, and sometimes you’ll find them together in ambrosia (crossovers) — but other than that, they’re not really much like each other.

  31. JJ: But they are less unlike each other than they are unlike pretty much anything else 🙂

  33. 5) IT HELPS TO BE CRAZY

    a) Narcissism is a personality measure, not a psychiatric diagnosis; “scoring high on narcissism” has very little to do with mental illness.

    b) I get really, really shitty with people who use “crazy” as a synonym for “mildly unconventional”. Crazy is not fun, crazy is not dramatic, crazy is not creative; crazy sucks.

  34. 5. IT HELPS TO BE CRAZY

    By their definition, I am not a geek at all. I don’t see that their study proves anything at all, as they took a small part of geek culture (those who attend a specific event) and then whittle their selection down by selecting only for criteria that will bolster their thesis.

    It’s like saying that everyone who enjoys Shakespeare is a narcissist after whittling your selection down to people who enjoy working at the Renaissance Faire or are members of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

  35. @Wanderfound: Word!

    I just coincidentally had some similar thoughts about the expression “mad scientist”. These literary characters are too often called insane when they evidently are not; (who can pin a medical or legal diagnosis on them anyway)? Quoting myself, “What a “mad” scientist does is work far outside the usual collaborative nature of the scientifc process, whether due to obsessiveness, idiosyncratic goals, or a moral, social, or intellectual style that doesn’t mesh well with others.” Could we have a movement to call them something like “outsider scientists” instead?

  37. Hampus Eckeman, thank you for your hard work! And that goes to everyone who runs, has run, or will run a bracket here; it’s a great deal of angsty, forehead-cloth-wringing fun for us, but it’s got to be an enormous amount of record-keeping and cross-checking for you.

  42. @Hampus
    @CassyB

    Seconding CassyB’s thanks, Hampus!

    WRT the CRAZY, I also meant to say that I also strongly disagree with their premise that all extroverts are narcissists.

  44. World Weary on December 27, 2015 at 7:31 am said:

    5. IT HELPS TO BE CRAZY

    By their definition, I am not a geek at all. I don’t see that their study proves anything at all, as they took a small part of geek culture (those who attend a specific event) and then whittle their selection down by selecting only for criteria that will bolster their thesis.

    I’m still plodding through that paper http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0142200

    So they spent sometime developing an instrument for assessing Geek-engagement and a set of personality factors. They then used that instrument at Dragon*Con.

    Consistent with the great fantasy migration hypothesis, we again saw higher narcissism associated with higher self-reported geek engagement. However, although participants with high geek engagement appeared to have put more preparation in their appearance and women high in geek engagement wore more makeup (both of which can be signs of narcissism [62]), these ratings were not themselves associated with self-reported narcissism, suggesting that these ratings (along with the rest of the Vazire et al. ratings) may not be valid cues of narcissism in geek populations.

    Now, I may be misreading it but I think the cosplay aspect resulted in both higher scores on the geek-engagement and on the narcissism. Now that probably is where the problem is – not that all cosplayers are narcissists but that when cosplaying a person probably is more likely to respond positively to questions about ‘being the center of attention’. On other personality measure also I would envisage different scores for a person when they are dressed for work versus when they are cosplaying (e.g. somebody who in other circumstances scores at the introveted end of the that axis in a Big5 test may score more extroverted if interviewed while cosplaying).

    So I think they have to confounding issues:
    1. whether cosplayers anyway might in general might score higher on narcissism and extroversion (which are different things)
    2. whether cosplaying itself might impact on Big5 or other personality scores WHILE cosplaying.

  45. Yeah, I’m not sure you can generalize from people who are in costume, as they are automatically performing someone not themselves. It’s going to affect them subconsciously even when being interviewed as themselves. And there are plenty of introverted narcissists as well — but they aren’t going to volunteer to talk to a researcher. Neither are introverted non-narcissists. So their samples are wildly skewed. And makeup = narcissism? Excuse me? Cosplayers wear makeup. Regular women wear makeup because it’s expected of them. Run this at Worldcon, WFC, etc. and your numbers are going to be way different. This is just a badly designed study; whether it’s consciously skewed or not, I dunno.

    I’m supposed to be reading for retro-Hugos, but after Tuesday night’s episode of “The Expanse”, I decided I needed to glance at the first book again and maybe re-read some of it and thanks to one-touch, I’m in the middle of the third. Whoops. I’ll go back to 1940 next week.

    @Vasha: I saw “War Stories” at 99c, not free, so I didn’t purchase.

  48. @Camastros

    Thanks for digging into the meat of the paper. That’s a really good point about the costumes influencing their answers. This makes a lot of sense to me based on a friend who likes to cosplay at conventions. In his regular environment, he’s kind of a shy intellectual guy. He shows completely different aspects of his personality when cosplaying.

    @lurkertype, That bothered me about the makeup, too. I only know one woman who doesn’t wear makeup to work, and she works outside. Also, it takes more makeup to perfect the “no makeup”look unless you’re blessed with perfect skin. I don’t know anyone who was so blessed.

  49. Well, I’m finally getting around to watching the first episodes of this new SF series I’ve heard a bit about – Orphan Black. Here’s hoping it doesn’t turn out to be just a clone of something I’ve seen before…

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