Pixel Scroll 1/29/16 Purple Pixel Eater

(1) IMMEDIATE FEEDBACK. CBC reports a Twitter uproar ensued after a Marvel exec made a big contribution during the broadcast of a Trump charity event.

‘Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump announced at a fundraiser Thursday night that Marvel Entertainment CEO Ike Perlmutter would donate $1 million US to his charitable foundation, and comic book fans took to Twitter in reaction.’

Taral, who knows how fans think, says, “I can imagine a lot of Marvel readers and viewers being horrified and contemplating a boycott for almost 3/10s of a second before lining up to see Antman for the fourth time.”

(2) A DIFFERENT GIVING OPPORTUNITY. George Takei is the draw in a new Omaze donation drive — “Charity Share: Inspire Change Broadway”

Oh myyy! Social media aficionado and former helmsman of the Starship Enterprise, George Takei is offering one lucky Omaze winner the opportunity to “Takei over NYC” with him. Just $10 gets you the chance to have a private dinner with George, sit VIP at his Broadway musical Allegiance, and go inside the stage door to meet the cast! And it all supports Inspire Change Broadway.

Launched in 2009, Inspire Change Broadway provides communities across the tri-state area with subsidized tickets and round-trip transportation to Broadway productions….

…Thanks to donors from around the world and Inspire Change Broadway, 10,000 students who may have been unable to afford tickets got to experience the Tony Award-winning musical Memphis.

Now the foundation hopes to do the same for Allegiance, which is set during the period of Japanese-American internment in World War II and inspired by events from George Takei’s own childhood experience. Learn more here! 

(3) ANIMATED JUSTICE LEAGUE. DC’s Justice League will return to the Cartoon Network in 2017, with fan favorites providing some of the voices.

Well, DC’s top superteam is returning to TV in the upcoming Justice League Action. The new series will star DC’s classic triad of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman along with rotating guest stars and its episodes will be 11 minutes long, similar to Teen Titans GO! Speaking of which, Justice League Action will be executive produced by Sam Register, who also producers Teen Titans GO!

…it’s set to feature the return of Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill. Conroy and Hamill put their indelible stamps on Batman and The Joker in the original Batman: The Animated Series, but they’ve been phased out in recent years…. Both of them returning is a real treat for longtime fans of Warner Bros. Animation’s superhero cartoons. The show will also feature James Woods as Lex Luthor.

(4) THIS JOB AIN’T THAT EFFIN’ EASY! Fansided’s Leah Tedesco, who writes for Doctor Who Watch, tells what it’s like to face the forbidding temporal desert of a show’s hiatus in “Doctor Who: On Writing for a Fan Site”.

When you write for a fan site of a television program, the off season can be a particularly tricky period. Oh, there is a trickle of news, but the big stories are few and far between. Until Doctor Who returns with the 2016 Christmas special, we at Doctor Who Watch have been tasked with the challenging endeavor of continuing to generate at least the minimum number of articles each month for almost an entire new-episodeless year. I imagine that madness will soon ensue… well, more madness than is already involved.

(5) CAREER COUNSELING. At Black Gate, Violette Malan’s “You May Be A Writer” begins with a humorous hook —

Do you enjoy planning? When you want to give a party, do you start making lists? Thinking about the menu? Who to invite? When there’s a trip coming up, are there lists? Are you usually the first one packed? Or have you at least given considerable thought to your packing?

Is organizing an event almost more fun than the event itself? Then you may be a writer.

Do you think planning’s for squares? Do you decide at 6:00 pm to have a party and let people know via Twitter? Are you rushing through the airport at the last minute with your passport in one hand and a pair of (mismatched) socks in the other?

Are you all about the spontaneity? Seizing the moment? Then you may be a writer.

Of course, what I’m talking about here is process: every writer has one, and it’s likely to be different from yours, or mine.

(6) EXPANSEAPALOOZA. “’The Expanse’ Authors Talk Space Epic Size and Crazy Sci-Fi Tech” at Space.com.

Space.com: What’s the coolest technology you have developed for the series?

Franck: In the book series, when we were coming up with the visuals for the ships and stuff, I was talking to a guy I know who works out of Los Alamos Labs. I was talking to him about the fact that the primary weapon on our ships is railguns — those big, electromagnetically fired weapons. And he said you can extend the length of a railgun barrel [by blowing] this plasma out, and you run electricity through the plasma.

“Turning a Sci-Fi Series into a TV Epic: Q&A with ‘The Expanse’ Authors”, from Space.com.

Space.com: I’ve read that the initial concept for the books was actually a video game. Is that right?

Ty Franck: The fleshed-out version of the idea started out as that. I’d had the idea before that, but when a friend of mine asked me to help her come up with a pitch for a video game is when I really sat down and put more flesh on the bones of this idea that I had. It existed before that, but it was sort of nebulous. The video game thing is what really kind of solidified it.

But as soon as they realized how expensive making an MMO [massively multiplayer online game] was, they sort of backed away quietly.

Space.com: What happened to the story next?

Franck: It went from a video game to a pen-and-paper RPG [role-playing game] setting because I wanted to keep playing around with it. And then Daniel did the rest.

Daniel Abraham: I was in Ty’s tabletop game, and I saw the amount of work that he’d done with the background and world building. And I’d written probably six or seven novels at that point, so my pitch was, “Look, you’ve already done all the hard work; let’s just write it down, and it’ll be a book.”

(7) RAFTERY OBIT. SF Site News reports British filker Joe Raftery died January 29.

Raftery debuted his first filk song at the 1979 Worldcon in Brighton before gafiating until 2000, when he attended FilkContinental. Following his reintroduction to fandom, Raftery became a regular at filk meet ups and was nominated for the Pegasus Award in 2007 for his role in the n’Early Music Consort.

Farah Mendelsohn credited his behind the scenes design work on Loncon3’s Exhibit Hall with enhancing accessibility:

If our accessibility was so good, it’s because Joe designed the corridors, the seating areas, the shapes of booths and the spaces between boards. We couldn’t have managed the intricacies of the exhibits without him.

He is survived by his wife Gwen Knighton Rafter and his children Anna Raftery and Emily January.

(8) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • January 29, 1845 — Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven was published.

(9) SPEAKER TO GENIUSES. Today Mad Genius Club featured “Hugo History – A Guest Post by Ben Yalow”. It’s fascinating to watch an accomplished fanpolitician at work, but — Why is Yalow working the Mad Genius Club? And he makes an interesting choice to discuss Hugo history as something “we” did — will MGC regulars feel included or excluded? Consider the way Yalow phrased the rules changes that produced the semiprozine category.

When it became clear that, during the late 70s, we had three fanzines whose circulation was many thousands, while most fanzines were having circulations in the low hundreds (when you’re printing and mailing physical fanzines, and generally they were available for free, there were real limits on circulation, depending on people’s budgets), we split out semiprozines, just to get them out of the fanzine category. And we tweaked the rules somewhat, so that there were more contenders than just the three that we moved out of fanzine; if it were only that, then semiprozine wouldn’t be a viable category. We were starting to see the beginnings of small run fiction magazines, and serious academic small circulation magazines, and the semiprozine rules put those into the new category, so it was a category offering reasonable choices.

(10) HAD ME GOING. It turns out Sigrid Ellis’ “Best Brussel Sprouts” post is a recipe, not an idea for a new Hugo category.

Okay, these are not the BEST Brussel sprouts. I am pretty sure the BEST ones are cooked with bacon. But these are pretty good.

(11) MORE RECOMMENDATIONS. Nerds of a Feather continues its recommendations in “2016 Hugo Longlist, Part 4: Nonfiction and Institutional Categories”.

This time we are looking at what are, for lack of a better term, the “nonfiction and institutional categories”: Best Related Work, Best Semiprozine, Best Fanzine and Best Fancast. Now, those who follow this blog know how cranky I can get on the subject of certain categories and their bizarre eligibility guidelines–and we’ve got two of them today (Best Semiprozine and Best Fancast). Nevertheless, I will do my best to stay calm and stick to the rules, frustrating as they can be. I reserve the right, will, however, get a little snarky and passive-aggressive in the process.

(12) ANOTHER ELIGIBILITY POST ADVOCATE. Abigail Nussbaum has a few thoughts about the opening of the 2016 Hugo nominations.

The announcement that Hugo nominations are open (as well as the nominating periods for several other awards, such as the BSFA and the Nebula) is usually accompanied by authors putting up “award eligibility posts,” followed by a discussion of whether this is a good thing or whether it makes the entire process into a PR effort.  I’ve already said my piece on this subject, so at the present I’ll just repeat what feels to me like the most important point from that essay, which is that my problem with award eligibility posts is less that they’re crass and commercialized, and more that for their stated purpose, they are utterly useless.  I don’t want to trawl through an author’s blog history to find the list of works they published last year.  What I want is a bibliography–easily found, up-to-date, and ideally sorted by publication date and containing links to works that are available online or for purchase as ebooks.  If you haven’t got one of those on your website, I have to question how seriously you want my vote.

(13) THAT MAKES EVERYTHING OKAY. Antonelli reminds himself (and the internet) that John Clute said nice things about his writing.

After spending most of 2015 – the period from April 4 until August 22 – being told I was an worthless hack writer and overall loser by the s-f literary establishment because I was a Sad Puppy nominee for the Hugo awards, I sometimes go and read my entry in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia by John Clute to remind myself I sometimes rise to the level of occasional competency:…

(14) MASSIVE MULTI-LAWYER ROLEPLAYING. Motherboard explains how “Sony’s Greedy Attempt to Trademark ‘Let’s Play’ Was Shot Down”.

Gaming is a hugely popular category for video content on the internet. It’s why Amazon acquired the video game streaming platform Twitch for $1 billion, and why the most famous creator of “Let’s Play” videos Pewdiepie has the most popular channel on YouTube with 41 million subscribers. Basically, if Sony managed to register this “Let’s Play” trademark, the company would be in a good position to sue any YouTuber or Twitch streamer who used the term to promote their videos, even though the term has been commonly used in the gaming community for roughly a decade.

The USPTO said it would likely reject Sony’s application in its initial form, but gave Sony six months to address its concerns, namely that Sony’s application is too similar to an existing trademark called “LP Let’z Play.”

(15) SAVORY TWEETS. The connoisseurs at Fantasy Faction bring you “The Top 15 Tweets & Top 7 Blog Posts of Robert Jackson Bennett”.

The Twitter-feed of Robert Jackson Bennett is a wondrous, but dangerous place to spend time. If you follow Robert in addition to another 1000 or so people, the normality and reason of the masses will likely dilute the strangeness and zaniness of Robert’s feed to the extent there will be no lasting damage or changes in personality from what you consume. If you spend time looking through Robert’s Tweets on a Tweet-by-Tweet basis though, as I was asked to do by Jo Fletcher Books for this feature, there may be some lasting damage…

Here is their comment about Bennett’s 2009 blog post “Finished.”

Link: http://robertjacksonbennett.com/blog/finished

I love this blog post because, as someone who writes, it is a reminder that not everything you write is publishable or even good; in fact, ‘80% of your output will be unacceptable shit, even if you polish it.’ I’ve spoken before about my thoughts that too many novelists of 2016 are too quick to use Amazon direct publishing as an alternative to admitting their work isn’t ready to be published and that they need more practice. Robert’s ability to take the good and learn from it combined with a willingness to ‘toss the rest and start all over again’ is undoubtedly the reason his books have gotten better and better.

It’s interesting to note the book The Long Wake of which Robert says ‘I like it. I really like it a lot.’ has not been published yet (i.e. it became another, unexpected, learning experience). You can read about that here and here.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Andrew Porter and Steven H Silver for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]

159 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 1/29/16 Purple Pixel Eater

  1. Camestros Felapton:

    I enjoyed the Ben Yalow piece at MGC. I think demystifying things for them as well as humanizing the people who have been active in Worldcon.

    As a fan writer, when my goal is “humanizing the people” I actually name people. Who is named in this piece besides the author? Terry Carr and Jack Gaughan, who have been dead for years.

  2. I see that Crazy Uncle Lou is still milking his Self-Pity Cow for every gallon he can get.

    Lou Antonelli: After spending most of 2015 – the period from April 4 until August 22 – being told I was an worthless hack writer and overall loser by the s-f literary establishment because I was a Sad Puppy nominee for the Hugo awards

    Dear Lou: You aren’t being told you’re a hack writer because you’re a Sad Puppy.

    ETA: Also, 4-1/2 months is not “most of 2015”.

  3. I thought Ben’s piece on MGC was “appropriate”. Ben is a fixture of fandom and of Worldcon. Puppies (of whom many write for and read MGC) claim they are being excluded from fandom – (excuse me, from the teeny-tiny, ineffective, meaningless, agenda-ridden, corrupt, puppetized, clueless, controlling, elitist, meaningless, politically-correct, cult-like, unfun Trufans who have manipulated the Hugo Awards for the past twenty years) – and Ben is including them via the process of revelation.

    Outreach is a good thing, even when it is likely to be a futile gesture.

  4. Dear Lou: You aren’t being told you’re a hack writer because you’re a Sad Puppy.

    To be as fair to the man as possible: Because he is/was a sad puppy an order of magnitude more people than normal read his work and judged it according to their personal taste, or not as was generally the case. So people aren’t marking him down because of his puppiness, but they are marking him because of it. Which might well feel like the same thing.

  5. I liked Antonellis story about the zombies, apart from the ending. Much better than the one he was nominated for. Still not Hugo level, but there is potential.

    Would prefer that he worked on his writing to get to next level, because that would be really interesting, instead of complainng.

  6. As a fan writer, when my goal is “humanizing the people” I actually name people. Who is named in this piece besides the author? Terry Carr and Jack Gaughan, who have been dead for years.

    It’s a balance thing. I’ve been reading SF&F since the 70s and had it read to me before then (my mother said that one of her aims in having children was to have someone to read the Hobbit to), but I’ve only been involved in convention Fandom for a couple of years, and only peripherally at that.
    The way one sometimes finds older generations of fans, who you don’t know and have never heard of venerated can be deeply off putting. Very much the kind of thing that can be seen as a historic clique running the whole thing and patting themselves on the back. Since that is a puppy talking point, I think it best avoided when speaking directly to them. In other places, sure.

  7. Ben Yalow: The baseline for the current Constitution, and the current set of Hugo categories, was set in the 1976 Business Meeting (in Kansas City, in the same hotel as this upcoming Worldcon).

    I thought the upcoming Worldcon is being held at the KC Convention Center.

  8. (3) ANIMATED JUSTICE LEAGUE. – While it’s good to have the One True Batman and Joker back, I hope that Bruce Timm and Paul Dini are back in some sort of story/ production capacity.

    Also, I’d like to thank whoever it was who recommended Sword and Laser, as well as (and especially!) Tea and Jeopardy. The former is quite good for the format, but the latter is excellent! I know have three possible fancasts in my longlist – at this rate I may actually have a full ballot for that category! Up next:

    Coode Street
    Rocket Talk (eligible?)
    Midnight in Karachi (eligible?)
    X-Plain The X-Men
    Skiffy & Fanty
    Verity!

  9. And I see that Brian Z. is busy posting untruths about EPH over the Yalow article at MGC. Quelle suprise.

  10. 1) This is utterly unsurprising- it’s been evident for a while that the Marvel films and merchandising were intended to be a boy’s realm, driven not just by marketing, but by ideology. This supports my basic contention that gestures toward diversity won’t go far without a purge of the people in control.

  11. I stopped reading Marvel after the infamous recon of Spidermans mariage. Been thinking of starting again, but glad I didn’t.

  12. 1) Not to defend a multi-billion corporate subsidiary of Disney’s, but guys, If you decide that a private individual making a political donation who happens to be CEO of a corporation is a reason to stop buying (assuming you were buying in the first place) Ms Marvel, female Thor (excellent comic), POC Captain America (pretty good comic) and assorted Avengers titles which includes one heavy-hitting team that is nearly all POC (had a few title-changes, but now The Ultimates) and another that has an openly gay couple, smart and fun female-led titles like Squirrel Girl and Patsy Walker, not to mention Marvel’s inching their way oh so slooowly towards a more diverse pool of creative talent, then I think you should reconsider.

    HAVING SAID THAT Perlmutter’s awful awful awful:

    http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/09/marvel-studios-ike-perlmutter-kevin-feige

    According to The Financial Times, when Don Cheadle was hired at a much cheaper rate to replace Terrence Howard in the Iron Man franchise, Perlmutter allegedly told former chairman of Disney consumer products Andy Mooney that no one would notice because black people “look the same.” Mooney has since left, reportedly over conflicts with Perlmutter, and he was quickly followed out the door by three African-American female executives who have since sought settlements.

    I honestly don’t give a toss about the films – they’ll be good or they’ll be bad, roll on. The comics are going good places, though, I think, on the whole, for certain values of corporate superhero good places, and if that’s an indication of the kind of people in charge, all the more admirable for trying to go the way they are, however imperfectly.

    ON THE OTHER HAND there are lots of great indy comics out there and if after reading that you decided to stick with them, who’d blame ya?

  13. (13) THAT MAKES EVERYTHING OKAY.
    I haven’t read much of Antonelli’s fiction but he has written better than “On a Spiritual Plain”. The Puppies did him no favours getting that into the final ballot. His own continuing missteps? What was the Law of holes again?

  14. @snowcrash
    I have heard that there is some question about the eligibility of Rocket Talk and Midnight in Karachi for Best Fancast. I don’t think they’d be thrown out if they were nominated because of their association with Tor.com. For that matter, Coode Street was with Tor for part of the year. I wouldn’t think that disqualifies them, either.

    I do hope you like Skiffy and Fanty (for obvious reasons). We are a rather eclectic podcast, from deep genre discussions to interviews to getting a bit silly about terrible movies.

  15. Paul Weimer: I don’t think they’d be thrown out if they were nominated because of their association with Tor.com.

    I think you might mean: “If they were nominated, I don’t think they’d be thrown out because of their association with Tor.com.” ???

  16. Paul Weimer: I don’t think they’d be thrown out if they were nominated because of their association with Tor.com.

    Breitbart will be all over this official confirmation from the secret cabal …
    🙂

  17. Nickpheas wrote (in response to a comment by JJ)

    To be as fair to the man as possible: Because he is/was a sad puppy an order of magnitude more people than normal read his work and judged it according to their personal taste, or not as was generally the case. So people aren’t marking him down because of his puppiness, but they are marking him because of it. Which might well feel like the same thing.

    Well and again to be fair to Lou, if you are part of a movement whose spokespeople have made a concerted effort to be unpleasant, those new readers don’t come to your work with the most receptive of attitudes. Perhaps there was a certain amount of “marking down because Puppy” going on.

    And to be fair to the readers, Lou’s personal words and actions have rather stood out for unpleasantness in a crowd where that is no easy achievement. There may also have been a certain amount of “marking down because Crazy Uncle Lou” over that.

    Which reminds me I need to check my e-mail again for my nomination PIN. More nominators won’t be enough to stop the Pups from slating again, but perhaps a few more categories can have non-slate nominees if we all pitch in, and I’m going to give it a try.

  18. Hey-o! Purple pixel eater made it. Fly, my pretty! Eat those pixels, I tell you. (Thanks to Soon Lee for choosing it.)

    (5) “Is organizing an event almost more fun than the event itself?”
    Viz’s “Top Tips” took this to the logical conclusion once, by suggesting that “since planning a trip is half the fun, this year plan two trips and stay home. Hey presto! All the fun and none of the expense!”

    (8) Poe.
    It took reading an explanation by Poe himself to make me realize that the point of the poem is that the narrator was such a bleak bastard that after he knew the bird only said one thing, he then crafted all his questions so that the answers would be the most heartbreaking. It’s true! I didn’t realize that it was on purpose in either case. P’OH!

    (10) BRUSSELS sprouts, man. Like the place that awarded the gold medals on soup cans and stuff in the 1500s.

    In other words, tickybox. (Which previews, but doesn’t show up. Here I was figuring if it showed up as a ‘character not found’ box, it was still a tickybox.)

  19. I like Don Cheadle but I’ve said all along that Terence Howard was a better Rhodey. Now that I know the story behind the change I am Not Happy.

  20. @Snowcrash: Thanks for the link. It doesn’t really seem to indicate the issue was “something else” though. Marvel wanted to cut Howard’s salary. It just provides more detail around what Marvel was doing with the money. Plus how Howard judges RDJ’S role.

  21. Mike, whenever you’re ready to change the blurb on the front page from Wright’s attempted insult, I think the description from Nerds of a Feather (“the beating heart of fandom”) would be an excellent (and true) tagline.

  22. Re: Ben Yallow’s piece. Even more than the use of “we” in identifying who made the rules changes, is this:

    The Worldcon (an SF convention that’s been held annually since 1939, except that we skipped 1942-5 during WWII),

    I’ve met Ben Yallow, and while he’s probably a bit older than me, I don’t think he’s old enough to have had the option of going to WWII era Worldcons if they had existed. Clearly this is a man who identifies with fandom generally and Worldcon specifically.

  23. Breitbart will be all over this official confirmation from the secret cabal …

    I wish that was funny, in an outlandish, never going to happen but still fun to contemplate way, but no.

    I won’t excuse his many inexcusable life choices, but there is something about CUL’s post-Hugo ramblings that make me sad. He wouldn’t be the first person to get caught up in something and later face the complicated debris left behind.

  24. Well, I keep checking my email but nothing has arrived; I have heard nothing whatsoever from Worldcon since voting last year, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised…

  25. [1] I wish I could know that none of my money ever goes to support people with views I despise, but…

    [13] I understand the need for ego protection, but I really think ALL the Puppy types will be better off if they work harder at learning to accept that sometimes people aren’t so thrilled with your writing, and that’s okay.

    I mean… my favorite book in the universe probably, in spite of everything, continues to be LOTR, but my own dear husband, who shares a lot of my literary tastes, doesn’t like the book. Because it’s so famous, and nearly every nerd I know has at least tried to read it, I hear from a lot of people who don’t like it.

    The lesson I try to take away, is that if people can dislike LOTR, they can dislike anything. Including my own work.

    Also, as @nickpheas has observed, this is why manipulating your way onto an award ballot is particularly dangerous, if your ego is of the type to be particularly bruised by encountering negative criticism. It’s basically a setup to have the maximum possible number of people read, and dislike your work.

    Also, I watched the first two episodes of the new X-Files last night. The first episode was weak in a familiar mythology arc episode way, but It was season 5 weak more than season 8 weak, so I counted that as a plus. And, Scully has really perfected her skeptical look over the years. I swear she can now shoot rays of skepticism out of her eyeballs at people.

    The second episode seemed like a return to form. So I’m optimistic about future episodes.

  26. It took reading an explanation by Poe himself to make me realize that the point of the poem is that the narrator was such a bleak bastard that after he knew the bird only said one thing, he then crafted all his questions so that the answers would be the most heartbreaking.

    I have to credit The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror with that realization. Having it peformed as a dark comedy made me realize that the humor is intentional.

    Also, if you have somehow missed that particular bit, you need to check it out. James Earl Jones does the narration.

  27. @PeterJ I almost think I should ask Mike to delete my comment.

    Post without caffeine, regret forever

  28. The “best” Brussels sprouts recipe is an incredibly low bar. Perhaps the recipe that dares to leave out the Brussels sprouts.

  29. Say, if we were Supporting Members of Sasquan, were we supposed to already have heard from MidAmericon regarding Hugo nominations?

    What if we haven’t?

  30. What if we haven’t?

    They said they were mailing details out in batches, so I’d hang on a bit longer. Plenty of time to put things in. I haven’t had mine either.

  31. I have my email with Hugo ID and PIN, as of January 27. But my last name is early in the alphabet.

    Oddly, they included a personal note that my progress report had to be returned with an incorrect address, which they told me; the address had my name, and the correct city, but a street name I’ve never lived at and which I don’t think exists in my city. And I don’t remember requesting hard-copy progress reports, since I’m not planning on going to the convention (although memory being what it is, perhaps I did.) So something may have munged their database. (I hope not….)

  32. nickpheas: I wasn’t arguing that Yalow should have done a better job of humanizing people by using names, I was arguing to Camestros that the lack of names was evidence against the claim that humanizing Smofs was Yalow’s motive for writing the piece.

  33. I am old enough to almost remember the lyrics:

    Well I saw the thing coming out of the sky
    It had one long horn and one big eye
    I commenced to shakin’ and I said oo-wee
    It looks like a purple pixel eater to me
    It was a one-eyed one-horned flying purple pixel eater
    Sure looks weird to me

    Well, he flew down to earth and held on to a vine
    I said Mr Purple Pixel Eater don’t eat mine
    I heard him say in a voice so gruff
    I wouldn’t eat yours ‘cos they’re too tough
    It was a one-eyed one-horned flying purple pixel eater
    It sure looks strange to me

    I said Mr Purple Pixel Eater what’s your line
    He said eating purple pixels and it sure is fine
    But that’s not the reason that I came to land
    I wanna get a job in a rock ‘n roll band
    Well, bless my soul rock ‘n roll flying’ purple pixel eater
    Pigeon-toed under-growed flyin’ purple pixel eater
    One-eyed one-horned it was a pixel eater
    What a sight to see!

  34. McJulie – As I watched the episodes of the new X-Files, I started to wonder how I hadn’t realized the degree to which Scully is mansplained to in the original series. The degree to which it happened in the first new episode made me want to throw something at the tv.

  35. Lou Antonelli: After spending most of 2015 – the period from April 4 until August 22 – being told I was an worthless hack writer and overall loser by the s-f literary establishment because I was a Sad Puppy nominee for the Hugo awards.

    The thing is, if you’re nominated for a Hugo you’re not being judged against the rest of the stories in the magazine, or the rest of your output, but against the all the great stories that ever won, Le Guin and Delany and Zelazny and Tiptree and so on. It’s a much tougher standard than just clearing the bar to get published, and I think a lot of the criticism was just that the story wasn’t Hugo quality. If you don’t think your story can stand it, you always have the option of withdrawing (though of course no one ever does).

  36. My mother used to boil brussel sprouts growing up. It was disgusting. I have refused to eat them since I was a kid. I went to Wegmans and they grill them in oil and char them. I was surprised someone could make disgusting brussel sprouts taste good. Never tried them with bacon.

  37. @JJ

    And I see that Brian Z. is busy posting untruths about EPH over the Yalow article at MGC. Quelle suprise.

    Oh, that’s who that was. I wondered who my Plonk script blanked out.

    Today’s Scroll title is so obvious, I’m surprised it hasn’t been used till now.

    re: “Lou the loser”

    No, you were just told that this particular story was not Hugo quality. Which is not at all the same thing. (Of course, your subsequent actions did not aid your cause.)

    re: Brussels sprouts

    I get the frozen ones with sea salt and black pepper. (Sorry, my industriousness does not involve actually turning on anything other than the microwave.) Mmm mmm good.

  38. WRT CUL and the rest of the pups’ tender fee-fees:
    I write fanfiction. There are writers in the fanfiction world who are less sensitive to criticism than these presumably professional writers. And if you’ve ever watched a ff writer totally freak because someone wrote a review like,”great story but the two main characters were a little out of character in this chapter”, you’d see the resemblance.

  39. Cat said:
    Lou’s personal words and actions have rather stood out for unpleasantness in a crowd where that is no easy achievement. There may also have been a certain amount of “marking down because Crazy Uncle Lou” over that.

    THIS. Antonelli was barely even on my radar before I heard about the shit he was pulling IRL, and that moved him firmly into the same category as Orson Scott Card.

    Also, someone else can have my lifetime share of brussels sprouts.

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