Pixel Scroll 2/18/16 Pixel Bell Rock

(1) INTERNET HIGHWAY ROBBERY. Chuck Wendig tees off on a Huffington Post UK editor who preens about not paying their 13,000 contributors.

Because it isn’t “authentic.” To pay writers.

You toxic tickledicks.

You venomous content-garglers.

You thieves, you brigands, you media lampreys.

Let us expose this hot nonsense for what it is: a lie meant to exploit writers and to puff up that old persistent myth about the value of exposure or the joy of the starving artist or the mounting power of unpaid citizen journalism.

The lie is this: writing is not work, it is not fundamental, it is a freedom in which you would partake anyway, and here some chucklefuck would say, haw haw haw, you blog at your blog and nobody pays you, you post updates on Twitter and nobody pays you, you speak words into the mighty air and you do it for free, free, free. And Huffington Post floats overhead in their bloated dirigible and they yell down at you, WE BROADCAST TO MILLIONS and DON’T YOU WANT TO REACH MILLIONS WITH YOUR MEAGER VOICE and THIS IS AN OPPORTUNITY FOR YOU.

But it is an opportunity for them, not for you.

But it seemed to me after a strong start Wendig’s rant winds down and loses headway:

Writing is work. Most things begin with writing. Though I find writing a pleasure, it is also a thing that requires great mental effort. It is not mere content — that word said almost dismissively, as if it is a synonym for styrofoam peanuts. (And by the way: you actually have to buy styrofoam peanuts. They aren’t free unless you rob them from boxes shipped to you.) Content is not slurry. It’s not protein goo. It’s not mud or air or some readily available resource…

Intrinsic value and market value are different things. While I don’t think Chuck Wendig believes all writing has the same market value, or necessarily any market value, it seems to me he has conflated spiritual and economic value in this paragraph.

Wendig is right that Huffington Post capitalizes on uncompensated labor, of course. If HuffPo is making money, that establishes that the content collectively has some market value. Since none of that value flows through to the contributor, you can argue an injustice.

But are all these contributors trying to launch writing careers? I do agree that if somebody is trying to be a pro writer, which not all HuffPo contributors necessarily are, they should be working on material that has a paying market.

(2) THAT GETTING PAID THING. In a series of tweets, John Scalzi thanked Wendig for doing the heavy lifting today, and tossed in a few more points:

(3) WRITING VS. WIDGETS. Elizabeth Bear tells about detoxing as a writer, metaphorically speaking, in “if you live for something, you’re not alone”.

One of the things I’ve realized that I need to work on in order to develop a healthier relationship with my job involves certain toxic aspects of the professional writing/publishing culture that I’ve done an overly good job of internalizing. And I’m trying to scrape it out of my soul, because in the long term it winds up being the opposite of productive when dealing with a creative career.

Some of that is a competition thing: “Writer X turns in three books a year and I’m a slacker if I don’t, too!” And that’s not great, honestly, and the sheer pressure to produce isn’t great, either, and doesn’t necessarily lead to good work. One has to think up new things to say between books, after all, or one ends up writing the same book over and over again. No use in that.

I think there’s a certain bravado of culture among may writers that is actively toxic in a lot of ways. And it’s tied to the NaNoWriMo kind of mode of “produce a bunch of stuff really fast, lather rinse repeat” pressure, and also the “THIS JOB SUCKS AND WE’RE WARRIORS FOR DOING IT” thing. It’s this weird Puritan machismo in suffering.

I mean, you don’t learn to write well by turning out 50K in a month once a year. It’s the two pages a day or whatever that get you there. Constant practice, as with any art. And mammals don’t respond well to punishment for performance. If we do a thing and the result is horrible, we generally avoid doing that thing again

(4) STARSHIPPING. From the Initiative for Interstellar Studies, Principium, Issue 12, February 2016 [PDF file]. The overview begins —

In this edition our guest introduction is by Gill Norman. Gill is a former director of i4is. She has helped us become the reasonably well organised body that we now are. Her thoughts here are on the necessity of human engagement in Interstellar Studies and space in general, Space: It’s all about people. She tells us how we need to engage resources and talents from all who feel our outward urge. Scientists and engineers are essential but so are entrepreneurs, PR experts and, of course, the best administrators we can find!

(5) FRAUD AT ICE CREAM COUNTER. “Astronaut ice cream is a lie”!

Astronaut ice cream — did it really fly? Vox’s Phil Edwards investigates, with the help of the Smithsonian and an astronaut.

 

(6) MOVING DAY. “China displaces nearly 10,000 humans for huge telescope in search for aliens” reports Asia One.

China will move nearly 10,000 people to make way for the world’s largest radio telescope which promises to help humanity search for alien life, state media reported on Tuesday.

It’s compensating them less than $2,000 each to relocate.

(7) CONGRATULATIONS: Becky Thomson and Tom Veal, friends for over 45 years, have announced they are engaged to be married. The wedding will be on June 25, in Ft. Collins, Colorado.

(8) SIGNALLING THE BEST. At SF Signal, “Top 15 Sci-Fi Comics of 2015 (Becky Cloonan, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Greg Rucka, More” .

We don’t write many articles about comics here at SF Signal. That’s not to say that we dismiss comics as literature, though. Many of the contributors to this blog are huge fans of the medium, but sites devoted the field abound, and whether superheroes are actually science fiction or a form of fantasy that simply employs sci-fi conventions as convenient MacGuffins is debatable. The one notable exception to our comic freeze out is our annual list of the top science fiction comics of the year… which number exactly one, because last year’s list was our first.

To my surprise, though, last year’s list of the Top 14 Sci-Fi Comics of 2014 turned out to be one of our top ten most popular articles of 2015. So, back by popular demand, here’s a rundown of the best on-going science fiction comics to hit stands in 2015. It’s not exhaustive, because there were a LOT of great sci-fi series this year, but it’s what we consider these to be the cream of the crop. Feel free to debate or contribute your own suggestions in the comments below….

(9) KENYON/CLARE ARTICLE. Laura Miller at Slate writes with a fannish slant about “The Shadowhunters vs. the Dark-Hunters”.

A lawsuit between two best-selling authors involves fantasy, romance, charges of plagiarism, and fan fiction gone mainstream….

I have friends with deep roots in fandom—albeit without much connection to this particular sector of it—who believe that this is the true source of the undying animosity toward Clare: She left fandom “badly,” or, worse yet, she seemed to be repudiating her own origins in that community by changing the spelling of her name. Fan-fiction writers are routinely and viciously ridiculed and shamed for their hobby, which makes their communities especially insular and self-policing. “Back in the day,” Cleolinda Jones, a onetime regular at Fandom Wank, wrote to me, “we used to say, ‘The first rule of fanfic is, do not take money for your fanfic.’ Because the overriding fear was intellectual property holders would sue everybody and shut fandom down.” Rights-holders that once issued cease-and-desists against fan sites for using promotional photos now encourage fan art and other tributes, Jones says, but in the early 2000s, “I just really cannot overstate the sense of living on borrowed time by the grace of the IP holders.” This would explain why word-for-word plagiarism, as opposed to the transformative appropriation of another creator’s characters and setting, would seem a catastrophically reckless sin against the entire community.

Of course, Clare was reviled—and adored—in Harry Potter fandom even before the plagiarism charges against her came to light. And fan fiction itself has come a long way, spawning numerous real-world stars, fan writers such as E.L. James who move on to publish best-sellers. Clare was among the very first to do this. But the prospect of going pro and striking it rich seems to many fan-fiction writers like a serpent in the garden, corrupting what once felt like an idyllic, egalitarian gift-economy of like-minded dabblers. Once, fandom was a destination in itself; now it’s just another stepping stone for ambitious writers with their eyes on a richer prize. Like so much of the idealism of the early Internet, this, too, has become an offshoot of the marketplace. “I think what you don’t understand,” one friend told me when I expressed bafflement that Clare’s fellow fan-fiction writers didn’t view the popularity of her books as a feather in their collective cap, “is that a lot of them just feel used.” When I admitted that didn’t make sense to me, she added, “It’s hard to explain, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

(10) CON OR BUST. MidAmeriCon II has also pitched in:

MidAmeriCon II, August 17-21, 2016, Kansas City, MO, USA. MidAmeriCon is the 2016 WorldCon; its Guests of Honor are Kinuko Y. Craft, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Tamora Pierce, and Michael Swanwick, and its Toastmaster is Pat Cadigan.

MidAmeriCon has donated four memberships to Con or Bust, either in full or as upgrades to supporting memberships (if the recipient already has one).

(10) TAKING ART IN NEW DIRECTIONS. “Best Fan Artist?” asks Steven H Silver. GPS Doodles’ Stephen Lund creates figures by riding his bike in meatspace on routes tracked by Strava. Some are Star Wars-themed.

GPS Yoda

“Doodle a Jedi I must”

Wasn’t it Yoda, Grand Master of the Jedi Order, who said “Doodle. Or doodle not. There is no try”?

Well, doodle I must. And on May the 4th, there’s little choice but to doodle the Jedi Order’s most disciplined master of the Force. Good ol’ Yoda.

“Take a ride on the dark side”

Subject: ride along I’d like to request one. Can you come up with a suitable topic? Vader and his young apprentice perhaps?

It sounded like fun – not just the Star Wars theme but the idea of having someone along for the ride.

Kudos to Geoff, who stuck with me for the entire 4.5+ hours with no inkling whatsoever about what we were doodling. He was completely in the dark (“on the Dark Side,” I suppose you could say) until he got home afterward and downloaded the ride to Strava.

(11) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • February 18, 1930 – Clyde Tombaugh discovered planet Pluto, before it became a dwarf.
  • February 18, 1977 – First unmanned test flight of space shuttle Enterprise mounted on another aircraft.

(12) ARE YOU SHOCKED? Kate Paulk’s award overview series continues with “Hugo Categories Highlight – The Short Fiction Categories”.

The problems of the Hugo voting/nominating population being relatively small and to a large extent long-term fans who could be termed the science fiction “establishment” (in the sense that many of these people have been to the same conventions for twenty and more years and helped each other run quite a few of them) have probably had years where they actually could read everything eligible with the result that they’ve seen practically everything.

This leads to a kind of weird inversion of killer mailbox syndrome (what happens to your marvelous tale about a killer mailbox when the slush reader has just read the third killer mailbox piece in the slush dive and the other three were horrible. The horrible gets imputed to your story because of the human mind’s extreme pattern-making and association ability) where something that isn’t all that great seems the freshest, most wonderful piece of the year because it’s sufficiently unlike the rest of the entries it stands out. This gets good-but-not-extraordinary works nominated and winning awards because they aren’t like everything else.

There’s no need for a conspiracy to explain some of the “winning the future” selections in recent years – this effect will do just as nicely, particularly since many of said voting group have very similar opinions about what constitutes a desirable message and from what I’ve seen are honestly shocked that their views of what is right and proper are not shared by the rest of fandom (two rules that we fans have to remember: sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice; and highly intelligent people are capable of extremely advanced stupidity).

(13) THE REBUTTAL. Vox Day at Vox Popoli makes additional arguments supporting his contention that he is a better editor than David Hartwell.

The SF-SJWs at File 770 are appalled at the fact that Tor Books and Castalia House author John C. Wright is willing to go on the record and state that, in his opinion, I am a better editor than the late, Hugo Award-winning editor David Hartwell:…

You see, I have perspective that they do not. Unlike them, I have seen Mr. Wright’s unedited prose. I know exactly what it looks like. And as it happens, it looks very much like the prose that appears in Mr. Wright’s novels that are published by Tor Books. John is an excellent writer; he is one of the greatest SF/F writers alive. But he writes very, very quickly and he is prone to what one might describe as an exuberant approach to writing. Last year, Castalia House offered him a contract for a 60k-word book. I am now reading the manuscript, which clocks in at nearly 200k words. Even those authors who don’t like Mr. Wright or his style might well contemplate suicide if they truly understood how speedily and effortlessly the man writes… and writes well. When I say he is a great writer, I do not do so lightly, nor do I do so because I am fortunate enough to publish some of his works. I say it out of pure envy and awe.

…. UPDATE: It appears my surmise about the extent to which Mr. Wright’s books were edited at Tor Books was correct, as per L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright

Just in case anyone wondered: John has tremendous respect for Mr. Hartwell, whom he admired, appreciated working with, and liked as a person. But Mr. Hartwell almost never made any changes to John’s manuscripts.

(14) ADMIRATION. John C. Wright’s contributions to the foregoing discussion included this compliment to another author:

I would have trouble editing George RR Martin’s books. Most of the comments here mock him, but he is an exquisitely skilled writer, a consummate writer. His writing is a little dark for me, but reread the opening prologue of GAME OF THRONES: the text establishes a fullfledged three dimensional character, a man who is realistic yet sympathetic, and who is snuffed out as a redshirt a few paragraphs later to show you how the monster works — and it comes as a surprise because usually the redshirts are not given a backstory. What in other hands would have been a boring B-movie horror scene in Martin’s is a masterful, and even moving, establishing scene. Now, to be frank, I have not read his last two volumes, and I may never, because he has killed off too many likable characters and is taking too long to get anywhere: but once the series is done, and I know it reaches a satisfying conclusion, I may revisit that decision. So Mr. Martin may be suffering from the victory disease, where some of his discipline lapses due to his popularity. Or he may be, as I am, an exuberant writer who likes his digressions.

(15) TROPE TRAP. At The Book Smugglers, Carlie St. George “examines the Sexy Douchecanoe trope” in “Trope Anatomy 101: Reader, I Didn’t Marry Him – I Kicked His Jerk Ass to the Curb”.

The Sexy Douchecanoe isn’t an official trope, as such; at least, it’s not one that I often find people analyzing, subverting, and/or railing against. It is one, however, that I run into constantly because, while they’re often unfairly associated with strapping, half-dressed men on paperback covers, Sexy Douchecanoes actually pop up in every medium and every genre. The first time I remember coming across one, I was maybe 20 and reading Naked in Death by JD Robb. At the time, I’d been interested in giving romance a go, but as I hadn’t read much of the genre, I wasn’t entirely sure where to start. I figured the best plan was to pick a romance that was also a murder mystery set in the future.

And maybe that plan would have been successful, if I hadn’t hated the love interest with the power of a thousand suns.

(16) MONSTER HIGH NOTE. Lady Gaga and Mattel are teaming to create a Monster High doll.

You know you’ve made it big when you’re commissioned by a major toy manufacturer to design a doll. That’s exactly what’s happened to Lady Gaga. The singer/actress is adding “toy designer” to her resume now with a forthcoming Monster High doll. Is there anything she can’t do? She’s designing the doll with her sister, costume designer Natali Germanotta. Which is totally fitting, given Gaga’s Mother Monster moniker.

 

https://twitter.com/LGMonsterFacts/status/698251609860485120

(17) THIRD MILLENNIUM. Part three of “Who Are Millennial Fans: An Interview with Louisa Stein” by Henry Jenkins at Confessions of an Aca-Fan.

[Louisa Stein] I mentioned above the TV series Supernatural’s ambivalent depictions of female fans over the years. Supernatural is a series that has a dynamic and rich transformative fandom, and the majority of those participating in the fandom are women. Supernatural fans, while expressing love for the series and its characters and potential, have long been critics of its gender and racial politics, and have spoken out at times about how they have felt misrepresented and even attacked by the series and its metatexts, for example, in response to a preview that declared the teenage girl the “ultimate monster.”

(18) STUBBY ON SPUDS. At Tor.com Stubby the Rocket says, “Matt Damon Has Replaced Sean Astin as the Face of Pop Cultural Potato Enthusiasm”. Yes, I guess he has…. (It’s a reference to this antique video from the dawn of YouTube.)

[Thanks to David K.M. Klaus, Brian Z., Dave Doering, Will R., and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day redheadedfemme.]

309 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 2/18/16 Pixel Bell Rock

  1. @Nicole: Viggle on Android/iOS

    Honestly, since the Great Transition, I only touch Viggle for two things. I can use it on Android to convert points (something I only intend to do about once a week), and it’s a handy way to check out the TV schedule on iOS. Otherwise, I’m using the Perk TV and Perk TV Live apps, which are for no obvious reason two completely different things – one of which has nothing to do with television.

    The perk.tv site seems like more work than it’s worth. It looks like a version of the Perk TV app that may give more points, but requires more babysitting. (It doesn’t seem to go from one video to the next without input – at least, not reliably.) Remember that in both versions, you can skip to the end of the video (but not the ad that shows before it!) and really ramp up your throughput. After all, they want you to see the ads; the videos are just an excuse.

  2. Meant to reply to this last night but I ran out of internet, and I’ve also lost track of the comment so…

    I don’t think the person who mentioned Fugue For A Darkening Island was correct – perhaps they were referring to Priest’s more recent The Islanders? Still haven’t read that yet, but Fugue is told in a very straightforward manner, all the more chilling as the story transitions from scenes of academic rivalry and domestic tension to horrific societal breakdown.

    But the description reminded me of Kim Newman’s Life’s Lottery, a novel written as a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book – the very first choice is whether you prefer Illya Kuryakin or Napoleoon Solo. It runs brilliantly through a variety of different genres – western, horror, sf romance and so on, and is a lot of fun, but it also rewards skipping and jumping which anyone who read CYA books almost certainly engaged in, because you notice a series of passages throughout the book not linked to from any other passages.

    THAT reminded me of Geoff Ryman’s 253, a novel that consists of a series of 253-word long character sketches of 253 passengers on an Underground Tube train. There was an online component to the book, innovative for the time it was published, but I’m not sure if it’s still accessible.

  3. @Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little,

    The biggest difference is that a normal landing in a glider with no engine is no emergency – quite the opposite. Under normal conditions, a glider doesn’t need to be coaxed to reach the airfield, so best glide speed is rarely a factor. Thus, approach speed is not set at best glide, but at a speed that gives a sufficient buffer above the glider’s stalling speed to protect against low stalls due to wind gusts or similar (factoring in the actual wind speed and conditions near the ground).

    A glider on final approach is actually flown in a deliberately inefficient configuration (airbrakes / spoilers extended to reduce lift), to get it down onto the ground at a much steeper angle than its normal flight.

    The FAA’s Glider Flying Handbook seems to give pretty good overview information from an American perspective (and is a free download).

    I think you’d enjoy flying gliders – and you might find it a useful experience: several pilots I’ve spoken with claim that flying gliders has improved their powered-plane flying as well, in particular their use of the rudder. Plus, it’s great fun, and there’s no noisy engine shaking everything around 🙂

    // Christian

  4. Come to think of it, WATCHMEN is a novel, and among its structural features are the symmetrical chapter. I’m not sure if the shadowing and visual puns are a structural feature or not, but they sure give it fiber.

    Camestros Felapton
    My mind has been returning to Blatty’s novel, Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane as one that dealt with reason and unreason and the question of evil in an interesting way. I haven’t re-read it since the 70s, so it may not be as good as I thought. There are distinct echoes of Catch-ww in it as well, like the guy who claims he’s putting on an all-dog production of “Julius Caesar,” which includes the line, “Et tu, White Fang?”

    Rev. Bob
    On the subject of adoption in movies, I found MEET THE ROBINSONS somewhat unexpected. [SPOILERS follow] Much of the movie is spent in an adopted kid trying to learn who his mother was, who is seen tearfully leaving her infant at the orphanage steps (which is basically how our daughter came into the picture: she was left at the gate of the Feixi Institute when she was a couple of days old). Since Sarah had surprised us once with her reaction to the young witch leaving home in KIKI’S DELIVERY SERVICE (she was about five, and she just freaked out, and everything was put on hold for a good long time while we comforted her), I was sort of monitoring her when I realized what the movie was about. (As an adoptive parent, you begin to realize just how many movies are about adoption and incomplete families.) Along with other plot developments, the young protagonist eventually decides that his adopted family is his real family, and declines the opportunity to learn more about his birth mom. Since Sarah has always wanted to know more about her birth parents, a relative impossibility, I really wondered how she would react to this — and she hardly reacted at all, to my surprise. I was curious enough to ask her, in an offhand way, what she thought of the movie, and her answer was equally offhand: it was okay, not her favorite movie ever (a fairly standard formulation from her for faint praise that’s not actually condemnatory). She’s perfectly willing to say when she doesn’t like something, so I guess it just didn’t affect her much either way.

    Nigel
    Your being reminded of 253 (which I haven’t read) reminds me of another book, The Usual Suspects, which is also a series of character sketches, only they are of characters from a variety of movies, and it becomes a novel by accretion.

    Come to think of it, The National Lampoon 1963 Yearbook Parody always felt like a novel to me. A mystery story is part of it, and reading eventually reveals the identity of the mysterious “M.C.” whose noisome presence stinks up much of the book. Literally, I mean: the perp is a human stink machine. I think it’s one of the best things the Lampoon ever did, though I agree with Tony Hendra that O’Rourke’s editorial guidance weakened the magazine seriously. For me, this falls somewhere between a magazine, a book, a fotonovella, and a movie. It has a cast, it has themes and plots. Also, it doesn’t matter what order you read it in.

    NUTS
    File 770.com is down — for everyone, not just me. And I’m right in the middle of five things, of course. If you’re reading this, presumably, things have cleared up.

  5. Thanks, everyone! Once I finish this contract, then. 🙂

    And yep, NPL is mine. Looks like I put .org in my website link when I meant .com, because I’m brilliant. I used to have an Actual Webpage and everything, but uuugh, uploading files and changing HTML and I Just Can’t Even.

  6. @Shao Ping – wow, I don’t remember it being told out of sequence at all! And yet I feel the book stayed with me quite vividly… I’d better find it and check – for myself obviously. I quite like when books play around with structure, so it’s odd I’d forget that aspect.

  7. Ooh, yes, Robert Wilson’s Historical Illuminatus Trilogy – I think it’s the second volume that has a whole other narrative told via a series of crabby footnotes where the writer of the footnotes keeps digressing to give out about a rival academic – named DeSelby, I think, in reference to The Third Policeman – which intersects suddenly and unexpectedly with the main narrative. It was very funny.

  8. @Nigel: If you re-read it, I’ll be curious what you think about it. Given the refugee situation in Europe, it seems like a depressingly relevant work. It’s also quite different from the other works of his I’ve read (including The Adjacent which has some similarities). Despite not being written chronologically, I think you’re right that it is a more straight-forward read than most of his books.

    It actually reminds me a lot of Coetzee’s earlier work, e.g. Waiting for the Barbarians or Life & Times of Michael K. Both Fugue and Coetzee’s works are disturbing explorations of racism and politics set in imaginary worlds. I think Fugue is a much more physical book than some of Priest’s others and I think physicality is one of the strengths of Coetzee (the second half of Dusklands in particular is harrowing because of that). The focus on physicality, on bodies, make the books hard to read but that focus is inseparable from their themes. Coetzee also likes to explore the complicity and bad faith of “good white liberals,” which obviously is a major theme in Fugue. And of course both authors are, in my opinion, very much in control of what they write, are very deliberate to the point they may seem cold, but are in fact ultimately quite passionate. The books are decidedly not just intellectual exercises.

    Finally, now that I think of it, The Childhood of Jesus wouldn’t be entirely out of place among Priest’s works.

    tl;dr: I’m going full-on “Tlön, Uqbar, Urbius Tertius” and declaring Coetzee and Priest are the same author.

  9. @Christian Brunschen re: Gliders – Well, yes, I did understand that unpowered landings were normal operations for a glider! 🙂 I was just comparing it to emergency operations in, for example, a Cessna 172, because not having use of an engine in one of *those* is a bug, not a feature, and because that’s as close an experience to gliders as I’ve had yet.

    I’ve had glider lessons on my to-do list for some time now, partially because of what you mention hearing other pilots say about it being a good experience, but partially because the idea of soaring around up there without an engine rattling away in your ears sounds *magical.* And the opportunity is about a mile down the road from my house! Alas, I’ve got the same problem with that as I do with getting back into powered fixed-wing piloting – time. My piloting went on hold when the cats needed expensive end-of-life medical care, and when that was over, I’d joined a competitive roller derby league, and you can imagine what that does to both one’s time AND money…

    Much appreciate the link to the handbook! I’ll have to take a look at that…

    @Rev. Bob (those uninterested in Perk/Viggle may tune out…) – Were you by chance running the Perk.tv website in Firefox? Someone on Vigglerumors told me to try it in Chrome. It’s like day and night. In Firefox, I’d have to hit the big PLAY arrow every two video+ad pairs; in Chrome, the thing just runs itself for an hour before asking me to pass a Captcha test. (Also, the browser extension works as advertised in Chrome. It’s buggy like woah in Firefox. Or at least in my Firefox.)

    Meanwhile, in Viggle, there’s still the “click this ad and get rewarded” interface, which now earn +1 point where they used to get 20 (so no loss given the conversion rate), but because those ads take maybe 15 seconds, the points rack up very quickly–much more so than on Perk.tv. I just keep it off to the side of whatever I’m really doing on my computer, and I just absentmindedly click on it when I see it’s ready for another click.

    My other big earner was VL trivia; not sure if that will feel worth it anymore, but I might try it this weekend and see.

    Afterthought – I was under the impression that too much fast-forwarding through the videos would bring one’s account to Perk’s negative attention; I’ve seen people report their accounts getting suspended for it. But you’ve been doing it safely enough?

  10. Another story that has a very different structure than most: the wecomic “Decrypting Rita”. The life stories of four different Rita’s in four different parallel universes, each of them in a very different genre (Transhuman SF, High Fantasy, Modern Realism, Surrreal), each represented by parallel paths on an infinite canvas. Also, there’s the panopticon watching them from off the page. And then the characters start to cross over…

  11. @Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little,

    yes, that comment about it being a non-emergency was intended to be a tad facetious 🙂

    But the point is still not entirely invalid: whereas in a powered plane with an unexpected loss of the engine you have to try to counteract the plane’s suddenly a bit more brick-like propensities in order to perhaps extend the flight to land safely, in a normal glider landing you have to make it deliberately more brick-like to land it safely.

    Glider pilot training also includes training for “landing out”, i.e., when running out of lift and altitude outside of gliding distance of an airfield, how to pick a suitable field and how to land in it safely – again, this is considered to be no emergency, just another day at the office, because the glider is equipped for it and the pilot is trained for it as a normal occurrence.

    My point is that I don’t think that an emergency no-engine situation is going to be particularly similar to a deliberate and par-for-the-course one. Though of course, knowing more about how to handle a plane without an engine will probably be useful whether or not there’s supposed to be one 🙂

    Gliding is not, by the way, silent: the wind noise, especially at high airspeeds, can be quite significant; and you’d probably have an audio-variometer: a lift/sink indicator that beeps at you so you don’t have to look at it to determine what the air around you is doing. But you can also take a more relaxed approach and fly more slowly just for fun and to enjoy the scenery.

    One of my favourite thing about gliders is still that one of the most useful instruments is literally a piece of yarn or string, taped to the front of the canopy in front of the pilot: It shows very easily and clearly whether the glider is flying straight through the air, or in some sense sideways, and that thus applying a bit of rudder might be a good idea. Keeping the string nice and centered means that you’re not wasting any energy on creating drag my presenting the glider’s side to the airflow.

    Ah well 🙂 I miss gliding; I should try to get back in the air. Money and time are, as usual, the obstacles …

    // Christian

  12. @Christian Brunschen: I just wanted to thank you for these posts about gliding. I love the random opportunities to learn cool stuff from people. 🙂

  13. @TheYoungPretender:

    Use Of Weapons really stands out for using a odd structure brilliantly; I did wonder whether Leckie was referencing it in at least parts of Ancillary Justice.

    Leckie told me on Twitter she’s only read a couple of Banks novels, and neither Use of Weapons nor – to my surprise given Sphene and Zeiat’s match – Player of Games were among them.

  14. @Bruce Baugh,

    I like sharing things 🙂 And you may enjoy this little third-hand anecdote, relayed to me by one of my instructors, who said that he had done this (and, frankly, I don’t disbelieve him on this):

    A glider flies forward through the air at a certain speed relative to the air, and when it does so, it also sinks through the air in which it is flying. However, all of this is relative to the air, so if the air itself is moving relative to the ground, the relative speeds add up. A glider flying at 40 knots into a 10 knot headwind will fly at 30 knots over the ground. This is also how gliders can gain altitude: By finding an airmass that is rising relative to the ground, faster than the glider is sinking through the air; one common source for this is a “thermal”, which is a pocket of that has been heated above the ground, and is rising through surrounding colder air (like an invisible hot-air balloon).

    On one occasion, my instructor was flying an older glider (I think a Slingsby T.21), which often have a lower stalling speed (minimum airspeed required for flying) than newer gliders – and because they are lighter, they often also climb quite well even in weak lift conditions. This was a particularly blustery day; but with nice sunshine, in particular onto the black (asphalt or tarmac) runway on the airfield.

    I think you can see where this is going. My instructor found that he was able to find a position above the airfield where the glider was flying just above its stalling speed, into a headwind that happened to be blowing at precisely that speed – thus canceling out the glider’s motion relative to the ground; and that position was also inside a thermal rising from the runway below, which happened to generate enough lift to just cancel out the glider’s sink through the airmass.

    All of which had the overall effect that while the glider was flying forward and sinking through the air around it … it was hovering, perfectly still and stationary both laterally and vertically, above the ground.

    If you are at all so inclined, you should find a gliding club / company and have a flight, or “trial lesson” – it is a great experience. If you’re an adrenaline aficionado, ask the instructor to show you some aerobatics – there’s something rather special about a loop in a glider! Or you might get your desire for acceleration fulfilled simply through a winch launch – which has the glider being pulled forward by a kilometer-long rope, accelerating from 0 to 100km/h (60 mph) in about 4 seconds, and then going up into the air like a kite at about a 45 degree angle.

    (Here’s the obligatory youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE5J5w6DYeI )

  15. I just read last May’s Crooked Timber symposium on Ken MacLeod, which includes Jo Walton talking about what she calls helical structure in MacLeod’s books, specifically The Stone Canal, The Sky Road, and Cosmonaut Keep, and what she thought his inspirations were for that.

    The last piece of the symposium is MacLeod responding to the other pieces, including to what Jo said about structure.

    I looked at that symposium in part because a friend tweeted that it was so far her only nomination for best related work, and asking what else to look at. It’s now on my ballot as well.

  16. Vasha, Kimberly K, CKCharles

    Agree with you that Tropes 101 has an extremely shallow readings of these books. In Rebecca our unnamed heroine goes from having stars in her eyes and believing that only someone as magnificent as Rebecca could be worthy of her new husband to a much more accurate assessment of his character. It is not a romance novel by any realistic definition.

  17. David Gerrold’s “Under The Eye of God” leaves out “be” verbs. Brust plays around with structure in several of the Taltos books, and the other Dragaera books began as him playing around with Dumas’ style.

    An idea for the Amish werewolves – I’ve always wanted to see a werewolf book treat the alpha/omega trope as what it turned out to be in the real world: something that only happens in stressed-out captive wolves, not normal wolf packs.

  18. @Christian Brunschen: Chronic health problems make it out of the question, alas. But my father never got over the love of flying he developed while flying a P-38 in World War II, and he passed it on. That “hovering” story is amazing.

  19. @Nicole: (Perking right up)

    I was indeed using Firefox. I use Chrome seldom enough that it’s something of a hassle; opening it leads to the inevitable Dance of the Systemwide Updates.

    The Viggle “click for a point” is fine if there’s nothing else, but if you can use Perk TV Live, the ads are at least two points each (the first 100 of the day are three points each), so I focus my effort there instead. Tapping once every two or three minutes for a packet of five ads for ten points is better for me than tapping for a point every twenty or thirty seconds.

    The new VL trivia is a losing proposition. Even pre-conversion, I got more points from the ads between questions (3×20) than the questions themselves (50), and it appears that the changes have done nothing to improve that. Here again, Perk TV Live earns faster.

    As for fast-forwarding being bad… my answer to that, at least in the apps, is that the interface forces you to watch a certain proportion of the video. It literally won’t let you skip the whole thing. That’s under Perk’s control; if they didn’t want to allow fast-forwarding at all, all they’d have to do is keep the slider locked, which is actually easier than having it unlock under certain criteria. That tells me they’re fine with skipping the rest of the video once the slider’s open.

    If I were hacking the app, that’d be one thing… but I’m not. I’m only taking advantage of an opportunity they have made available. I also don’t do it all the time. If I’m watching a movie or a TV show (like now; I’m taking a break from SPECTRE), I might glance over once every several minutes and realize I can skip to the end of the current video. It’s not like I’m focused intensely on the screen, skipping every video ASAP for hours on end.

  20. Mike Glyer on February 21, 2016 at 12:01 am said:

    Camestros Felapton: Thank you for noticing. 🙂

    I recently bought some chilli beer – that is what it sounds like, beer with chilli in it. Some of it exited through my nose. Just so you know – I blame you 🙂

  21. Mike Glyer: Thank you for noticing.

    I’m picturing you as Eeyore, moping about with a File770 ribbon tied to your tail, convinced that everybody loves the other SFF blogs more than yours… 😉

    (I dare you, RedWombat… I dare you to make this a thing)

  22. Hampus Eckerman on February 21, 2016 at 1:31 am said:

    Chili beer!? I needz it.

    Honestly, I suspect the same effect could be achieved by putting a dose of tabasco in a cheap lager.

    Come to think of it, that sounds like a smart way to brighten up a cheap lager.

  23. I have heard from many a person who fly that fixed wing aircraft and helicopters are so completely different that knowing one doesn’t give you much of an advantage at the other, save for the fact that you’re familiar with the whole being off the ground thing. Indeed, some of the reflexes on one will crash you on the other. Pretty sure that fixed wing pilots have to learn how to use their beasties as gliders just in case, but helicopters are really not at all aerodynamic when the power goes out.

    They have similarities. Wind speed and direction matters to choppers a lot for, say, long-lining loads (ie. attaching an external load to the belly of the helicopter via a long cable) and landing/takeoff (you want to be into the wind… helps with lift and control), but unless you’re flying close to something it doesn’t matter so much when you’re just cruising.

    If your engine goes out it’s better to be higher up than lower, because you have more options. There are mechanical processes in place that will cause your rotors to spin out in such a way as to make the landing more gentle, and the higher up you are the better chance you have of picking a safe-ish spot to land, although you aren’t going to ‘glide’ so much as you are going to go into a semi-controlled direct descent. If you’re already pretty low or if those mechanisms fail then you just drop like a rock.

    I don’t have any sort of pilot’s license, but I have hundreds of hours of flight time as a passenger in at least 7 different models of rotary aircraft. And while I’ve never actually been in an unplanned landing (ie. a crash) I’ve have been around for several–only minor injuries, luckily. You can pick up a lot, especially because chopper pilots love to talk about flying.

  24. I once tried adding hot-pepper sauce to a random and boring fermented-malt beverage, thinking the odds were that it had to make it more interesting. I was wrong on those odds; it turns out that drinking pepper sauce on its own isn’t really that interesting either.

  25. 15-20 years ago I bought a six pack of a beer with what I remember as a dried chile in each bottle. It might have been Cave Creek Chili Beer, but I don’t remember for sure.

    The heat tended to overwhelm the beer, and the longer the chile sat in the beer the worse it got.

  26. The continued discussion of rotary, fixed-wing, and non-powered aircraft is fantastic. Thank you @Christian Brunschen and @August, and others whose names I may have missed!

    @Rev. Bob (perky) – Sometimes they had bonus trivia; the Ellen Design Challenge ones were +250 for every correct answer (though usually only one +20 ad in between questions, as opposed to the usual +50 answer and 3 +20 ads), which about the only time I maxed out on a day. However, I’ve discovered the current version of Android Viggle is failing to load the game at all, at least my installation on Bluestacks. And it’s failing to check into shows, too. I’m just going to stick with backgrounding Perk.tv until they release a new version. (As mentioned before, I’m not going to risk running Perk apps on Bluestacks; such is life.)

    I can get a little obsessive about these things. I clearly get far too much satisfaction from “I got this for free!”

  27. Lowell Gilbert:

    ” I was wrong on those odds; it turns out that drinking pepper sauce on its own isn’t really that interesting either.”

    I’m one of those who actually like pepper sauce by itself. And has chili in my teat. So chili beer sounds like something for me.

  28. I should note that the same brewery does a mango beer that really sounds like it shouldn’t work but is actually OK. It isn’t super-sweet but rather captures a sort of mango aftertaste that works with the beer. Still not something for a beer purist.

  29. I’d love it if there were some way to use TeX as a basic story-writing/editing platform:

    LyX?

  30. @Nicole:

    I’ve heard bug reports about Viggle/Android not checking in; that’s supposed to get resolved soon. And yes, the 250/question trivia was worth playing, but that’s about all that compares to the Perk TV Live earn rate. (6000 Viggle points in an hour translates to 300 Perk points. It’s not hard to get Perk TV Live to give you 20 points in 5 minutes, if you hit the red circles promptly. That’s about 240 points/hour. If they’re your first ads of the day, you’ll top 300 easily.)

    I’m at 10,100 Perk points right now. I probably won’t hit 12,500 by the end of Monday, but I’ll get there early Tuesday. EDC trivia may or may not play a part in that. (I’m certainly going to check it out, though; right now, it still says it’s worth 6000 points!) Either way, I should have another $25 card sometime Wednesday.

  31. I recall back when “Cajun” was a thing in the late 80s, I had something that called itself a Cajun beer that was spiced with peppers. It wasn’t particularly good, but better than it sounded.

    One of the bugs/features of the craft beer explosion is that brewers often feel a need to distinguish themselves from all the other breweries by including strange ingredients in their beers. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. I tend to think it’s never quite as good or bad as I imagine it from just reading the description.

  32. @Jack Lint:

    I recall back when “Cajun” was a thing in the late 80s, I had something that called itself a Cajun beer that was spiced with peppers. It wasn’t particularly good, but better than it sounded.

    TUCO: What’s in it?
    JESSE: Chili powder.
    TUCO: [SWEEPS OFF TABLE] I hate chili powder!

  33. See also the difficulties in getting cider that’s made from apple juice. Honestly, if I wanted kiwi fruit or forest berries or all that kind of thing I wouldn’t be asking for cider.

  34. Getting back to a previous topic of innovation vs. quality, the weird beers and ciders are a little like the different approaches to cocktails. I remember reading about a drink called the Mexican Wrestler and if you ordered one the bartender would put on a wrestling mask to mix it. Compare that to the Japanese bartenders who spend their lives trying to serve the perfect martini. I think both have their place, but sometimes I wish brewers would spend more time trying to perfect the basic brown ale and less time with the double black IPA with cocoa nibs.

  35. @Jack Lint

    Seconded. And if they’d also stop treating the alcohol % of wine as a viable target for a beer then I’d appreciate it as well.

  36. And has chili in my teat.

    Now I have that Eurythmics song stuck in my head – You Have Placed A Chilli In My…

  37. @Camestros Felapton: Now I’m conflicted; I love mango, but hate beer. 😛

    @Nigel: Sweet Beers Are Made of This, Who Am I To Disagree….

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