Pixel Scroll 12/26/16 Yippee Ki-yay, Pixel-Scroller!

(1) ON THE SIDE OF THE HUNTERS. SF author Myke Cole will be taking a celebrity turn in the new CBS series Hunted  — “Meet The Command Center Investigators From Hunted”.

myke-cole-hunted

Myke Cole, Former Military Cyber Expert

Command Center Title: Cyber Analyst A self-proclaimed “hardcore nerd,” Myke Cole uses his passion in gaming and comic book culture to give him an edge as a highly skilled Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst for several military and law enforcement agencies.

(2) AWKWARD JUDGES NEEDED. Chuck Wendig asks readers to vote on their favorite of 43 photos posted in his The Awkward Author Photo Contest.

You will find a couple famous-faced authors in there, including Jeff VanderMeer, James Sutter, and Yvonne Navarro. Those cheeky little penmonkeys.

Your job, if you choose to accept it, is to go through these photos, find your ONE TRUE FAVORITE, and then go into the comments below and put down the corresponding number. Write only the number, if you please. I need the number to be plainly visible and easy to tally.

Voting ends 12/27, noon EST.

(3) YOU’VE SEEN THE SHOW, NOW READ THE BOOK. Vanity Fair explained in this 2014 article why TV and movie novelizations still exist.

Novelizations may have made more sense before the advent of home video. Back then, films were released in the theater and often not heard from again. The best way to relive those original memories was to read them in book format (or to use your imagination). So, in an age of DVR and digital outlets, why do people continue to buy these books? It’s the same reason they read 5,000-word TV recaps every week. It’s a way for fans to feel more connected to a story or property they love. When you have a novelization, you get to remember at least a piece of that enthusiasm you experienced the first time around.

“People just see it as one other element of the entertainment experience,” says Katy Wild, the editorial director of Titan Publishing Group Ltd., which publishes movie novelizations, including Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and the soon-to-be-released Interstellar. “I think people who read movie novelizations are the people who go see those movies.”

Novelization authors are typically paid a flat fee in the low five-figure range to complete the work (if they’re lucky, they may get 1 to 2 percent royalties). The money, however, is only one reason writers sign up in the first place.

(4) THERE’S AN ARMY APP FOR THAT. In “How the smartphone became so smart”, the BBC’s chief observation is that all twelve of the key points started as government-sponsored or -supported research.

As for hard drives, lithium-ion batteries, liquid crystal displays and semiconductors themselves – there are similar stories to be told.

In each case, there was scientific brilliance and plenty of private sector entrepreneurship. But there were also wads of cash thrown at the problem by government agencies – usually US government agencies, and for that matter, usually some arm of the US military.

Silicon Valley itself owes a great debt to Fairchild Semiconductor – the company that developed the first commercially practical integrated circuits. And Fairchild Semiconductor, in its early days, depended on military procurement.

Of course, the US military didn’t make the iPhone. Cern did not create Facebook or Google. These technologies, that so many people rely on today, were honed and commercialised by the private sector. But it was government funding and government risk-taking that made all these things possible.

That’s a thought to hold on to as we ponder the technological challenges ahead in fields such energy and biotechnology.

(5) FAKE NEWS YOU CAN SEE COMING A MILE AWAY. The Onion has the story — “This Is The Golden Age Of Television,’ Claim Executives Who Have Not Yet Made Show About Robotic Wizards”.

Praising the expansive slate of high-quality fantasies, comedies, and period dramas currently in production while negligently overlooking a gaping hole in the entertainment landscape, cable and network executives reportedly continued to claim this week that we are living in a golden age of television despite having never made a show about robotic wizards. “The shows we’re seeing right now are incredibly smart and cinematic in scope—television has reached its pinnacle,” said profoundly ignorant HBO executive Julien Rhodes, who has yet to greenlight a show featuring an army of advanced cyborg warlocks who were created in a lab and armed with a full database of knowledge about the dark arts in order to fight evil spirits besieging our world. “You can turn on the TV any night of the week and find multiple complex, beautifully told stories on just about every subject [except robot wizards falling in love with one another, and occasionally their human creators, while fending off malevolent forces of untold power using hexes programmed into their hard drives]. We’re lucky to have access to such a breadth of exceptional programming.” Rhodes went on to assert that there was more diversity than ever on television despite the complete lack of pansexual android sorcerers named Aerio Zero.

(6) BROADER BAND. Chip Hitchcock forwards a news item about “A topic dear to many fans’ hearts: A British farmer builds a local broadband network — and it runs much faster than the UK standard. Especially grating to me, as Verizon has been busily running FiOS in the suburbs but has just signed an agreement to go into Boston proper where the potential users are much closer together.”

Her DIY solution to a neighbour’s internet connectivity problems in 2009 has evolved into B4RN, an internet service provider offering fast one gigabit per second broadband speeds to the parishes which nestle in the picturesque Lune Valley.

That is 35 times faster than the 28.9 Mbps average UK speed internet connection according to Ofcom.

It all began when the trees which separated Chris’s neighbouring farm from its nearest wireless mast – their only connection to the internet, provided by Lancaster University – grew too tall.

Something more robust was required, and no alternatives were available in the area, so Chris decided to take matters into her own hands.

She purchased a kilometre of fibre-optic cable and commandeered her farm tractor to dig a trench.

After lighting the cable, the two farms were connected, with hers feeding the one behind the trees.

“We dug it ourselves and we lit [the cable] ourselves and we proved that ordinary people could do it,” she says.

“It wasn’t rocket science. It was three days of hard work.”

Her motto, which she repeats often in conversation, is JFDI. Three of those letters stand for Just Do It. The fourth you can work out for yourself.

(7) PETER DAVID BACK. After being immobilized by a medical problem, Peter David is on the move again.

This time around, even a week later, I am still a bit uncertain as to what happened. First my left ankle was wracked with pain, and then my right, and then I could no longer stand up. It was as if I was going dead from the waist down, but this time the work of some virus rather than my brain turning against me. Seven days and a buttload of antibiotics later, I am now able to stand up and walk with the aid of a walker that I’ve nicknamed Imperial because really what else are you going to call a walker?

(8) GOLDEN GOOSE HUSBANDRY. The Washington Post’s Brian Fung says “The thing that ruined superhero movies could easily hurt Star Wars, too”. Rogue One has convinced Disney that the Star Wars franchise can go beyond the main sequence of films amid fears that audiences will suffer “superhero fatigue” as the number of superhero movies continue to grow.

Now, Disney faces an even greater challenge: developing Star Wars at a pace that won’t exhaust audiences, or the source material, too quickly as executives seek to grow the sci-fi franchise into the size of a small moon. Under Disney’s stewardship, Star Wars is already being compared to the Marvel universe, a sprawling media empire also owned by Disney that has contributed to what some experts call “superhero fatigue.” Although superhero movies still make loads of money, a persistent critique of the genre is their formulaic homogeneity and a relentless firehose of content. And it’s a trap that Star Wars would do well to avoid.

(9) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • December 26, 1973 The Exorcist makes its debut in theaters.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BIRD

  • December 26, 1933 — Caroll Spinney, Sesame Street’s Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch.

(11) BELATED BIRTHDAY BOYS

  • December 24, 1910 – Fritz Leiber
  • December 25, 1924 – Rod Serling

(12) ELF AND 8 TINY REINDEER TO BEAM UP. Santa left Mary Anne Mohanraj a Star Trek The Original Series Sticky Notes Booklet.

star-trek-tos-sticky-notes

(13) ON THE TOY TRAIL. John King Tarpinian shares a marketing discovery —

A buddy of mine is from Port Arthur, TX (next door to Beaumont where Charles Beaumont took his name and where Janis Joplin grew up).  Anyway he collects all the Star Wars junk buying two of everything, one for him and one for his nephew.  When hunting down stuff around L.A. he often has to go to multiple places.  When he goes home-for-the-holidays he can find all that crap first try.  He believes that dealers will buy up dozens of an item at once for resale at places such as Frank & Sons, at four-fold markups.

(14) FORMERLY NOTABLE. If you ever wondered whether there is a Wikipedia article about Crystal Huff  – today she pointed out that there used to be one but there isn’t anymore. The deletionists did not approve an “NN person whose sole claim to fame is that she chairs science fiction conventions.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Crystal_Huff

(15) ON THE ROAD. Ken Liu announced his confirmed appearances for the first three months of 2017:

  • “Translation as Performance—Dual Creativities in Chinese and English” — roundtable/reading with Canaan Morse, Eleanor Goodman, and Eric Abrahamsen, part of “Asia: Past, Present, Future,” by the New England Association for Asian Studies, January 29, 10:40-12:50, Boston College.
  • Guggenheim Museum, speaker at the special exhibit, “Tales of Our Time.” Afternoon of Friday, 2/17, 2017, NYC.
  • Perth Writers Festival 2017, 2/23-26, Perth, Australia.
  • Writefest 2017, 3/10-12, Houston, TX.
  • AnomalyCon 2017, 3/17-19, Denver, CO.

(16) UNTURNED PAGES. The Book Smugglers’ Ana Grilo has another genius idea for a post — “Books I Shoved Into My Friends Faces But They Didn’t Read Anyway Smugglivus List”.

Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor

When my friends ask me what they should read next, they immediately complete their sentences with “EXCEPT BINTI, I KNOW”. It was the first book (I can call anything with an ISBN a book and it counts towards my GR challenge, ok?) I read in 2016 and probably the best. Nnedi Okorafor’s descriptions of scenes, people and movements are so vivid that all I could think about while I was reading it was that I really wished I had the ability to draw because she was creating a whole animation in my mind with her words. I’ve felt SO MANY THINGS with this novella that when I try to form a cohesive argument about why people should read it I become a little pile of guttural sounds and my last appeal usually is “but it’s only 96 pages!”. I’m really, really happy that Binti: Home is on its way, but reading Binti was a whole experience in itself, and I really think you should read it as well.

(17) MORE CHRISTMAS LOOT. Matt Kordelski showing off the C3P0 leg lamp:

Seems like the “major award” from toy story. Except its C3P0 and R2-D2 from Star Wars!

major-award-as-sw

(18) TOO SOON? That’s the Serenity, done in gingerbread.

serenity-in-gingerbread

(19) AN EARLY START ON NEXT CHRISTMAS. A piece by Robert Evans called “The Secret, True History of ‘Jingle Bells, Batman Smells’” appeared on Cracked last year, but it’s still worth linking to as Evans traces the roots of this Jingle Bells parody deep into the 19th century.

(20) BEST COMICS OF 2016. We previously posted the link to another NPR best of list – here’s the link to NPR’s selection of the best comics and graphic novels of 2016.

(21) DOCTOR APPROACHING. The Doctor Who Season 10 trailer was released ahead of last night’s Christmas special.

[Thanks to JJ, David K.M. Klaus, Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, and Michael J. Walsh for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip W.]


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73 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 12/26/16 Yippee Ki-yay, Pixel-Scroller!

  1. (1) ON THE SIDE OF THE HUNTERS. – Is this an on-screen thing, or is it one of those “technical consultant” gigs (ie, Scalzi on Stargate Universe)?

    (5) FAKE NEWS YOU CAN SEE COMING A MILE AWAY. – I’d watch it.

    (8) GOLDEN GOOSE HUSBANDRY. – Ah a timely article. It’s been ten minutes since someone else was doing the whole superhero fatigue argument. Though this is creative in it’s assertion that that’s already happened.

    ETA: First! Do I get a partridge in a pear tree?

  2. @16: don’t know what went wrong with your cut-and-paste, but the sequel’s title is Binti: H\o/me

    PS: how have I not noticed there’s something weird about your server’s clock? I understand the minus-three-hours since we’re on opposite coasts, but where does the plus-seven-minutes come from? (as in, this comment was displayed at 9:17 EST.)

  3. Christmas has come and gone (though I daresay it has some days left on it). Time to look to the future!

    Should scroll’d acquaintance be forgot…

  4. I’d find it useful if the current time of whatever timezone that is used for timing comments was displayed on pages. I find references to US timezones unhelpful.

    Keep up the good work, and thanks to Mike as well as the other contributors and commentators.

  5. @20: Not sci-fi, but I second the recommendation of Ben Katchor’s Cheap Novelties, which has just been republished. It’s a bit sad, a bit surreal, and entirely beautiful and entrancing. I was lucky enough to stumble upon it a few years ago and it became one of my favorite books.

  6. @snowcrash re 1)

    It’s kind of a game show/competition. Myke is on one of the “investigation” teams going up against the participants. So I expect plenty of screen time for him.

  7. Errol Cavit: For the first few years of this blog it was set to Laotian time because I was too clueless to figure out how to work the controls. And now you want WordPress to display the user’s subjective time? Dinna ya have a watch on yer phone? Next ye will be callin’ for egg in your beer!

  8. Chip Hitchcock: PS: how have I not noticed there’s something weird about your server’s clock? I understand the minus-three-hours since we’re on opposite coasts, but where does the plus-seven-minutes come from? (as in, this comment was displayed at 9:17 EST.)

    Both you and Errol? OK, I confess, I sat on the Omega-13 button by accident. No excuse.

    And seven minutes from now, appertain yourself your favorite beverage…

    ETA: I just checked the WordPress control panel — it is displaying 7 minutes later than the timestamp on my own computer. That doesn’t seem to be something I can reset manually.

  9. @Mike: I wasn’t asking for an interpretation, just an explanation. I wonder what’s wrong with WordPress’s clock? Most systems I’ve worked with for the last decade-plus resync periodically so they’re never more than some seconds off. (re Laotian: there was the time Scott Adams laughed at a system that said ~”If you’re not in one of these 24 time zones, please identify” and got overwhelmed with emails explaining just how many eccentric time zones there are — IIRC, 37 a couple of decades ago. Or I could tell you about the bug caused by somebody “solving” a problem by arbitrarily resetting the timezone to US Eastern regardless of where the program was running…) I’ll have a Corsendonk Abbey Brown Ale (Corsendonk Pater for those outside the US) if I can find it around here.

    @Errol: this time of year, the comments are marked in GMT-8. Can you translate from that?

  10. (14) FORMERLY NOTABLE

    I’m sorry for Crystal, but I don’t think this was an unreasonable call.

    Wikipedia has notability criteria, and it’s good that they do.

    IMHO, a prominent staff-member in a prominent convention is a pretty borderline case — there’s really not much content other than to say “$PERSON was chair/staff for $EVENT”, and that’s pretty useless information to anybody outside the specific community/fandom. I think you could make a case for significance, but… it’s borderline; it would be very difficult to write in a way that explains significance “encyclopedically,” to people outside the community; and I don’t really see fault in going for a deletion.

  11. Chuck Wendig didn’t even have a bio until February of this year, and he was a Campbell Award Finalist in 2013, co-author of a work nominated for a Digital Emmy in 2011, had a work which was a Goodreads Awards Finalist in 2012 and again in 2015, and is author of the Star Wars bridge trilogy for which the first novel was published in 2015.

    So yeah, I think that this is a fair call.

    I’m still trying to figure out who was paid off, such that Buis’ Wikipedia entry has not been removed for failing to meet notability requirements.

  12. Huff may have dodged a bullet there! I know a few people who find having Wikipedia pages about themselves as much of a PITA as anything. A very visible web page about you which anyone can edit is not always a good thing. 🙂

  13. Mike, if comments were time-stamped by my current timezone(/when my computer thinks I am), that would be super-duper. I also realize that this is unlikely to happen.
    If there was somewhere I could easily see when the blog thinks it is /now/, it would be handy on occasion. I’d guessed one of the US timezones, which means a few to some hours ahead (but yesterday) for me. The exact number is irritating to work out, especially if my morning coffee hasn’t kicked in yet, and if memorized, changes four times a year.
    No biggie, as Chip brought up time I thought I would mention it.

    PS NZ has one of those odd timezones. The Chatham Islands, somewhat to the east, are +45 minutes to NZ time (which is UTC+12, despite straddling the ‘natural’ 11/12 border.) And we every so often have to think about another of the oddities, with South Australia being 30 minutes out. Australian states also go to summer time (or don’t) on a different weekend from NZ – gah! There are a couple of weeks a year when we double-check teleconference times with Head Office in Melbourne.

  14. (8) As far as I can see, it’s not the airforce that have superhero fatigue, but the critics. They want to see something new, something original. Like say…a suspenseful movie about a police detective facing off with a killer, or a movie about comraderie and heroism in W.W.II. Or maybe a biography of someone or a historical epic?

  15. “Next ye will be callin’ for egg in your beer!”

    This sounds vaguely intriguing.

  16. That lamp looks like something from a crime scene left behind by the robot Hannibal Lecter of the Star Wars universe.

  17. (6) BROADER BAND.
    This is unsurprising, and have to do with how much bureaucracy there is when putting cables in the ground.

    It’s easy for a farmer to dig a trench across her own fields and lay a fiber cable in it. It’s reasonably easy to ask your neighbor if it’s OK to cut across a corner of his field. However, it is not easy to come as an outside company and build a fiber network that crosses many people’s properties, crosses roads (some municipal roads, some state roads), that won’t get pulled up the next time the water utility does something, etc etc.

    Also, yes, time zones are fun.

  18. June 19. A man from an electrical contracting firm was first to arrive this morning. He has something to do with bringing in that extra power [for the upcoming live chat with Edward R. Murrow]. He wanted to know if my neighbor would object to the wire crossing the corner of his property. I asked him how much of the neighbor’s land would be crossed. Just a few feet, at the corner, up in the air, just for a couple of days, then it’d be taken down. “You mean,” I said, “that he owns all the air above his property, and could keep you from stringing a wire through it?” He bobbed his head and answered, “Cert’n’y.” “Well,” I asked, “could he keep a plane from flying through his air? I mean, how high up does he own?” He said he ‘sposed he owned as high as it goes. “And,” I insisted, “he could cause me trouble if I allowed that little old wire to cross his property, just a tiny corner of his property, for two days without getting his permission?” He gave me a long look and then said, “The only reason people own property is to make trouble for people that want to string wires around.”

    H. Allen Smith
    “An Intimate Chat with Ed Murrow”

  19. I used to have a copy of a movie adaptation for one of the schlocky FOOD OF THE GODS film that didn’t bother to list H.G.Wells anywhere in the book.

    Once in a while there are things adapted from a screenplay that doesn’t make the film, as in MY SCIENCE PROJECT where the machine that causes all the trouble is sentient.

  20. Robert
    I have it in a paperback, The Best of H. Allen Smith, which doesn’t tell which book things come from. It could possibly be from Larks in the Popcorn, or Let the Crabrass Grow, or it could be an uncollected article. I, too, have most of his books, and was thinking the other day that I wish I’d sprung for his sports anecdotes when I saw them at a used bookstore in the 80s—but $10 was kind of steep for me that day. I might seek them out. The last acquisition I made in his line was Mr. Klein’s Kampf, thanks to Ned Brooks, years ago.

    I just checked to see if there’s a complete listing of his books. None of the ones I found have all the ones I see on my shelf. I identified two I’m sure I don’t have (the sports anecdotes) and two I am dubious about (Low Man Rides Again and Write Me a Poem, Baby), and ordered all four from Amazon, so you’ll be relieved to know I now have no reason to break into your home.

    Which one don’t you have? (I suspect that the one Amazon has on how to fly small planes—from 1998—isn’t really by him.) The first one I ever got was Poor H. Allen Smith’s Almanac, which is one of several that don’t appear in any of the lists I found.

    Smith’s viewpoint pulled me in right away. He’s somewhat subversive, yet very traditional (kind of like “Richard Hooker,” original author of M*A*S*H, for instance). He never hesitates to put himself into whatever he’s writing about. I wonder if there are more pieces by him in old Reader’s Digests that I haven’t read yet. Someone needs to do a thorough collecting job on him—I remember at least one piece in a Sunday newspaper magazine that I probably didn’t keep. It was about people who watch TV shows for unusual reasons. (There was a family whose dog once frolicked briefly with a star of the kennel clubs, and whenever the dog is on, they try and make their dog look at it: “Lucky has never once recognized his old friend.”)

  21. Robert Gair: a Study is the only Smith I don’t have.

    I have the Thorne Smith influenced MR KLIEN’S KAMPF, which is not much good as a novel.

    WRITE ME A POEM BABY is a collection of kid written stuff, much of it funny. LOW MAN RIDES AGAIN is non fiction, Smith’s best territory.

  22. Out of all his fiction writing, I think Mr. Zip holds up the best. I assembled three or four of Slanthead Elder’s soliloquies into one speech (inspired by a similar aggregation in the Best Of volume) which I used a number of times as an audition piece for shows.

    There ain’t no West. I was what you call a real cowboy, thirty years ago in Wyomin’. Now, you take back in the eighteen-eighties, maybe they was a west a little like in TV and the movies. Come to think, not much like. You know how they got it on TV, about all you got to do with cattle is herd ’em a little, and rustle ’em, and unrustle ’em, and drive ’em through the pass. Hell’s farr, boy! You ought to see what a real cowboy’s got to go through with them critters!

    Fust place, a cow’s the dumbest animal on earth. Ornery. Mean. A mule ain’t in it for bein’ stubborn. One a the worst jobs a real cowboy’s got on a ranch is pullin’ the bog. The stupid critters get stuck in the bogs, and you got to pull them out. So you get a couple guys on horses, and you get some ropes on ‘er, and eventually you drag the son-of-a-bitch out, and what does she give you in the way a gratitude? In-verryibly she tries to kill you! Tries to kill the men what drug her out and saved her stinkin’ life!

    And the doctorin’ you got to do! A critter’s almost always got some kind a disease, and if she does happen to have a little spell a health, why, then the bugs are at ‘er, and you got to fight them too, and if you put your hat down on the ground she’ll walk right over and crap on it, and all the time you’re not playin’ nursemaid to them dumb bastards, why, then you’re workin in the hay fields, workin’ like a section hand, hoein’ the garden, fixin’ fence, and, so help me, hangin’ out the warsh for the missis a the ranch!

    That works out to about the right length for an audition monolog. I only regret the omissions, about how real cowboys got granulated eyelids and they hunker and spend all their time drawing maps in the dirt about what’s the best way to go into town, and how they play a game called “readin’ can,” where they sit and recite all the words on a can a beans or a can a vaprated milk. I also liked his drunken rant about how he saw Ole Hitler and recognized him, and he’s got a cave up in the hills as big as a soundstage, with slave labor turning out Adam Bombs fast as Gineral Moders makes Shivverlays, but I knew that would never fit in there.

    Yeah, Mr. Klein’s Kampf is a weak entry, and kind of a sad note for the last thing of his I have gotten to read so far, but now I have some hope for new stuff, including another book of nonfiction (agreed that it’s his forte).

    Now you’ve got me wondering about Robert Gair. (eta: Amazon has one copy for sale, through a third party. $196! And the single customer review says: “ * * * * * Incredible story!” (edited again to add: Holy bleep! There’s a copy at the U of R, ten miles from here. I think the library is closed for the holiday, but I’ll be heading there soon.)

  23. No time to read the Pixel Scroll just yet – quick drive-by ebook sale before I get ready for work, though!

    V.E. Schwab’s A Gathering of Shadows is $2.99 from Tor Books (no DRM!). This is book two in the “Shades of Magic” series. It’s on sale in the U.S., at least at some outlets.

    No time for a Pixel Scroll
    No time for the book you rec
    Pixels scroll and so did I
    You need not wonder why
    You need not wonder why
    There’s no scroll left for you
    No scroll left for you

    (With apologies to The Guess Who)

  24. Robert
    I was all set to drive to the U of R—they’re open today—and photocopy the book (I can’t get a card for inter-campus checkout until after New Year’s), but then I found one for sale for under $10, and have ordered that. I’ll let you know if it’s really an incredible story or not.

  25. @Snowcrash

    (1) ON THE SIDE OF THE HUNTERS. – Is this an on-screen thing, or is it one of those “technical consultant” gigs (ie, Scalzi on Stargate Universe)?

    If it’s the same format as the UK show of the same name, then these “Hunter” staff appear on screen in a HQ set.

  26. ROBERT GAIR was a commissioned piece of work and Smith took it apart in one of his books.

    In HOW TO WRITE WITHOUT KNOWING NOTHING there is a science fiction story. It is titled “Small”. It is very good.

  27. @ snowcrash

    (8) GOLDEN GOOSE HUSBANDRY. – Ah a timely article. It’s been ten minutes since someone else was doing the whole superhero fatigue argument. Though this is creative in it’s assertion that that’s already happened.

    On an anecdotal basis, it has already happened. At least for me. I went from “OMG they’re making movies about my favorite childhood comic book characters!” to “Eh, it was ok I guess. Maybe the next one will be more creative.” to “I’ll give this one a miss, but maybe the next one will sound exciting.” to “What’s the point?”

  28. Wikipedia’s “notability” standards are spectacularly subjective and flexible, depending on who or what the topic is, and the topic’s significance to certain segments of relentlessly energetic editors. Given that there are extensive and startlingly detailed entries for very minor characters in very minor media properties, I decline to accept the notion that there is any objective basis for the presence or absence of a Wikipedia entry.

  29. At this stage I fully expect Screewipe 2016 to be nothing but an hour of Charlie Brooker screaming incoherently at the camera.

    Still probably better than most of the Christmas telly.

  30. Robert
    I’m pretty sure all of us can move faster than we can think. Playing certain pieces on the piano would be well-nigh impossible if not for that.

    Also, Texas Monthly with a 1976 article on H. Allen Smith in Alpine, TX, which I found while checking availability of Return of the Virginian, which I think I only read from a library and never owned.

  31. (5) I would also watch the hell out of the robot wizard show.

    Read “Terminal” by Lavie Tidhar yesterday. Beautiful story that hit many of my buttons regarding mortality and the scale of the universe. There is a moment where a character ponders the speed our planet spaceship is moving (“all this and we think we’re still“) and gets dizzy. Happens to me all the time.

  32. @Rose Embolism

    (8) As far as I can see, it’s not the airforce that have superhero fatigue, but the critics. They want to see something new, something original. Like say…a suspenseful movie about a police detective facing off with a killer, or a movie about comraderie and heroism in W.W.II. Or maybe a biography of someone or a historical epic?

    I have the same impression that a lot of this alleged superhero fatigue or Star Wars fatigue is due to critics who aren’t fans and don’t quite get why so many people are eager to watch those movies. Which is okay, there are plenty of movies I don’t want to watch either, but I don’t write think pieces about Pixar fatigue or biography of important people, usually male and/or white, fatigue.

    That said, I’ve noticed that my standards regarding superhero movies and SF films in general have risen. There was a time I’d watch pretty much anything, but now I give quite a few movies a miss or wait for the DVD or even for TV to catch them. For example, I have been skipping the past three X-Men films or so. But I’m still enjoying the Marvel movies, though, even the weaker entries.

  33. Carrie Fisher.

    Dammit. 2016 decides that letting up in the end of the year would be slacking, apparently.

  34. I’ve been keeping an eye for the news that Carrie Fisher had died. Those original reports were not very heartening, and I had an idea that “stable” still meant “critical”. Very very sad. RIP to an amazing woman.

    I watched the Star Wars Holiday Special with the bf over the past couple days and her song at the end is the height of hilarity. She is so wasted.

    Princess Diarist is still on order at the library. I’m looking forward to reading it.

  35. Dawn Incognito on December 27, 2016 at 10:36 am said:
    I wish I could say that I hadn’t been expecting it.

    But the party in the next world must be something else, considering all the people there.

  36. Well damn. I knew it was a bad situation, and Ididn’t have my hopes up. So no suprise, just sorrow

    But still…we’ were crying in the car on our trip. In fact, there’s a couple young people in the Starbucks I stopped at, 30 years younger than me, and they’re crying over it. It’s an awful loss.

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