280 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 2/2/16 A Spoonful Of Pixels Helps The Medicine Scroll Down”

1. @ Vasha

   Thanks for the link to Rejected Princesses; that is an amazing site and I can tell I’m going to spend more time there!

2. Rev. Bob said:

   “@TYP: “Looks like his recommendation for fan art are Tits & The Grim, Dark, Manliness of Manly Men.”

   Thanks to the way that wrapped on my screen, I now demand a buddy cop movie titled “Tits & the Grim.””

   It’s all in how you break it up, isn’t it? “The Grim, Dark, Manliness of Manly Men” is an ironic nerdcore band. “Tits & the Grim” is the worst folk-rock duo ever.

3. Rejected Princesses is great isn’t it? I’ve been using it to give my daughter ideas for school history reports/projects/Halloween costume. Yeah, they combine them all.
   So far, she’s gone as La Jaguarina and Grace O’Malley.
   I dread the day she finds out about La Maupin and Cheng Shih. 😉

4. Rock ‘n’ Roll lyrics? How about an old-timey one:

   Well I saw my baby readin’
   In another book today
   Well I saw my baby readin’
   In another book today
   When I asked her what’s the matter
   This is what I heard her say

   See you later, puppy slater
   After ‘while crocodile
   See you later, puppy slater
   After ‘while crocodile
   Can’t you see you have no taste now
   Don’t you know you cramp my style

5. @Rev. Bob: A second for “Tits & The Grim,” though I’d prefer an animated series starring the grim reaper and his perky bird friends.

   @Kevin Standlee:

   The WSFS pages are “frozen” because we intend to migrate to a completely new host and redesign the WSFS, Worldcon, and NASFIC sites when our long-suffering webmaster has time to do it, but she’s busy all of February (and that’s on top of her Day Jobbe). The material you want is therefore hosted for now at the MidAmericon II WSFS page.

   Thank you! Wow, it’s sure handy to have a Standlee Signal around. 🙂 That’s just what I was looking for.

   @Mike Kerpan:

   On the YA Not-a-Hugo thing, I think that we should totally have one. I think that if we played things right, it could even serve as an “entry point” into Hugo voting for younger fans, which is something that we’re doing a bad job of encouraging.

   I agree. Young reader and young adult SF/F is how I grew into the genre myself (the SF/F books spoke to me so much more than the dull teen romances which shared shelf space in the library and bookstores). The definition for a potential award is of course tricky, and maybe older fen won’t be as interested in that part of the field. But I’d personally enjoy voting for a YA Not-A-Hugo, and would be far more informed about that than I am about BE:LF or Semiprozine, for example. So I’ll vote for it if it happens to come up at a Business Meeting I attend.

6. Based on last civic election, the Ford crazification factor is about the size of the classic crazification factor, and is weighted towards poorer, older, and less educated members of the population. (And it isn’t just Ford they elect; consider Karygiannis and Mammoliti.) This may skew slightly away from con-going fandom.

7. He’s the anthropomorphism of death. They’re the Paridae. And together, they fight crime.

   London scrolling, now don’t look to us
   Phony pixel mania has bitten the dust.

8. @Cat

   A household might reasonably have three or even four people voting but not a hundred and sixty-five or even ten. I think there are ways to spoof this, but it adds to the difficulty of the exploit.

   That can be done via open proxies, but yeah, it’d be more work. Diversifying the money sources seems like it’d be the toughest part.

9. (3) Perhaps my memory is faulty, but all of VD’s fan art selections look much better than what was nominated last year. Even if none of those 5 make it this year, having 5 nominees that are in the same class as those images would be a welcome improvement.

10. John Seavey on February 3, 2016 at 12:47 pm said:

    It’s all in how you break it up, isn’t it? “The Grim, Dark, Manliness of Manly Men” is an ironic nerdcore band. “Tits & the Grim” is the worst folk-rock duo ever.

    Or the author of ASOFAI’s attempt at microblogging AKA
    tweets and the GRRM

11. Peter J:
    “Less than one.”
    I take the utmost exception to this! Shouldn’t that be “fewer” than one, since we’re talking about counting?

    John Seavey:
    I don’t have any problem with saying “Linus’s blanket,” “Brahms’s Lullaby,” and so on. [In other words, what Vasha said.]

    Rev. Bob:
    Tits & The Grim
    Ten or fifteen years ago I hung out for a day or so with a friend who was managing a comic shop (I think I met him about thirty years before that when I was managing a comic shop), so I had lots of time to look at new releases. It seemed like everything was tits and vampires. Voluptuous death maidens: Fear Sex, fanboys! Want it and fear it! My prediction was that someone would do a mag about a tit and a fang that went around having scary sex adventures together. Fangy and Boobie.

12. On a quick comparison, I like Elizabeth Leggett’s work substantially more than any of that done by Beale’s picks. I also prefer Foster’s style to that of Beale’s picks. Schoenhuth is a difficult case, because a jewelry artist is hard to compare to a painter. I wasn’t really enamored of Stiles’ or Aalto’s work.

13. (1) Alternative Futurism at UCR – What a cool line-up of speakers! I wish I lived closer than a 4-5 day drive…

    (7) FINDS LOVE – (blush) (beam) Thanks!

    (11) TOO MUCH LAVA — Really interesting (and scary)! Especially after reading Robert Harris’ POMPEII this summer, a novel that opens with a Roman aqueduct engineer trying to figure out on Aug 24, 79 AD why the aqueduct is suddenly dry and the water reserves suddenly stink of sulfur…

14. Random question for writers in the group: Does anyone else avoid protagonist names ending in “s” purely so they can avoid the awkward possessive construction?

    I do. Not obsessively, but I mostly avoid ending a fictional character’s name with “s.”

15. @ Dex:

    Just because someone is a fan of sci-fi like me doesn’t automatically make us kin. I’ve never been big on the idea of fandom as family,

    I agree. There are any number of things I enjoy, have worked at, or am passionate about which by no means makes me “family” with Everyone Else who feels the same way about those things or invests the same effort in those things. If being sf/f fans made people kin, then presumably so would working for JP Morgan or the US government, or painting watercolors or playing a sport, or any other pursuit that involves huge commitment (such as work) or makes a person happy (such as a hobby).

    There are animal lovers, writers, people who live in my neighborhood, and fellow fans of opera whom I can’t stand. Why would sf/f be uniquely different?

    I have no interest in rapprochement with the Puppies (or “approchement,” since I’ve never met most of them). Why would I? I have found their rhetoric repugnant in multiple ways for about a year (or in some cases, for longer than that), and therefore I want no contact with any of them. I’d rather not even think about them. (I’m not at all inclined to make a melodramatic scene if I encounter any of them, but I’d rather not encounter them and don’t plan to hang around if I do.) Why should a mutual interest in sf/f change that?

16. @ Vasha
    Thanks for introducing me also to Rejected Princesses!

    @ Stevie
    Best wishes for a speedy recovery. Have you seen the Shakespeare videos on the Guardian site? I love ’em, and none is likely to make you laugh.

17. Does anyone else avoid protagonist names ending in “s” purely so they can avoid the awkward possessive construction?

    While I don’t go out of my way to use names ending in “s,” I don’t see why my characters should have it any easier than I do.

18. A thing I don’t see much in fiction is when several people in a group have the same first name, even though it happens all the time in real life.

19. @Kip W: John McGahern’s novel That They Shall Face the Rising Sun is a realistic portrait of a small Irish town and it has characters named James (two of them with different last names), Jimmy, Jamie, and I forget what all.

20. > “Random question for writers in the group: Does anyone else avoid protagonist names ending in “s” purely so they can avoid the awkward possessive construction?”

    It takes me so long to come up with character names that I like that I am *not* going to throw in another reason to reject them. Seriously, I have a ridiculously hard time with names.

    (Off the top of my head, the thing I’m writing now has a Tess and a Jesus in it, and I used Artemis as someone’s name in a different piece, although she got called Artie a lot.)

21. > “A thing I don’t see much in fiction is when several people in a group have the same first name, even though it happens all the time in real life.”

    This, on the other hand, is something I do generally avoid, because when it happens in a book I’m reading I find it as confusing as all heck.

22. @dann665

    (3) Perhaps my memory is faulty, but all of VD’s fan art selections look much better than what was nominated last year. Even if none of those 5 make it this year, having 5 nominees that are in the same class as those images would be a welcome improvement.

    I went through the RSR fan artists page and I agree his picks are better than average. None was good enough to get me to change my current top-5 list, though, but I did take them seriously.

23. @Kip W:
    I tend to think of VD’s minions as an undifferentiated mass, rather than actual individuals, so I think ‘less’ is permissible. (I believe he buys them by the pound. Yes, I know he lives in Europe, but I can’t see him as the sort to take to local customs like using the metric system).
    Slightly off point, but the “less than one” formulation was regularly used by a friend of mine in my distant student days. Its dismissive nature seemed to be greatly enhanced by being delivered in a Yorkshire accent.

24. A thing I don’t see much in fiction is when several people in a group have the same first name, even though it happens all the time in real life.

    Have you not met The Nac Mac Feegle then?

25. Has anyone else read Tom, Thom, by K.M. Ferebee in Tor.com today? I’m not thrilled with my analysis of it. It feels as though the author is saying something profound that I’m just not quite understanding.

26. @ Kip W

    A thing I don’t see much in fiction is when several people in a group have the same first name, even though it happens all the time in real life.

    I’ve had some fun with that in the Alpennia books. As a serious name historian, it’s hard to stop being aware of what percentage of one’s characters should be named equivalents of John and Elizabeth.

    In the backstory, there are two schoolgirls who became best friends in part because they’re both named Elizabeth, but got called different variants of it for convenience. And it’s a minor plot point that someone trying to track down records on one of the girls knows only the given name…which makes the project almost hopeless. (About as hopeless as the time my mother’s genealogical research dead-ended in a “John Wesley Smith”.)

    There’s a point where Princess Anna notes that she shares a name with another character it it forms a brief bonding moment. And, for that matter, how the princess tacitly encourages people to refer to her by a pet-form of her name as a means of distinction (as well as a sign of affection).

    In the book I’m currently working on, a baby is given one version of a name shared with another character who uses a different version, with the understanding that the choice acknowledges a fictive kinship. (Being cagey about what name is involved because: spoilers.)

    I get a lot of mileage out of using diminutives in order to make distinctions, but also because that’s how real people operate. But I do avoid duplicating given names in general — I save it for the times I want to do something interesting with how people deal with the situation.

27. @Kip W & Vasha:
    W.O. Mitchell’s play The Black Bonspiel of Wullie MacCrimmon has three characters all named Charlie Brown, all from the same small town and all on the same curling team. (Wullie MacCrimmon is the skip, so of course he gets to be different.)

    Needless to say, all three of them have nicknames, based mostly on their jobs. (Pipe-fitting, Malleable, and Clock.)

    It gets played for humour when dealing with announcers from outside their town.

28. Glad to hear that there are some examples of it out there. In the scheme of things, I think my comment was correct, but I don’t mind learning of exceptions. I’m always reminded of a MAD piece from around 1960 (art by Wood) of the progress of a party, and at one point, two guys named Dave show up. (“We’re BOTH named Dave!”) And of course, there was the mother in Dr. Seuss who had fifty-three sons and named them all Dave.

29. He observed that Beale didn’t publish his slate last year until after it was too late for anyone to register and still be able to nominate

    “Register so you can nominate” and “here’s what to nominate” are two different stages. Neither set of puppies posted their slates before last year’s register-to-nominate deadline.

    @HRJ: “One main argument for a YA Hugo category seems to be, “even truly excellent and award-worthy specimens of Flavor X have never made it onto the Hugo shortlist, therefore people must silently be categorically excluding them from their own mental model of ‘Hugo worthy’, and therefore in order to recognize these Hugo-worthy books they need their own category.” (I’m not trying to set this up as a strawman — I’m trying to synthesize a position from what I’ve read.) My response to that position (and only that position) is that there are a lot of identifiable/labeled flavors of SFF whose best works have never made it to the Hugo short lists.”

    That sounds a lot like an inversion of the “my mother got a bank account in the 1950s, so we don’t need feminism today” argument from a few scrolls back, doesn’t it?

    @Emma: “I don’t know. I just find it unlikely in the extreme that Beale just so happened to have 160+ blog followers that all had forty dollars to spare to Do His Will.”

    There are people who road-trip to attend multiple Trump rallies. Heck, there are “small-money donors” giving money to the Santorum campaign. (I would’ve said O’Malley to give both parties their due, but he dropped out after Iowa. Santorum’s still running.) I don’t find it implausible that Beale’s managed to attract about 160 similarly-rabid minions to whom $40 is “ehh, why not?” money. For that matter, how many of us have spent at least that much on books that look appealing in the store but somehow never reach the top of the TBR stack? Two unread hardbacks or half a dozen paperbacks will set you back about $40 when bought new…

30. Mind if we call you ‘Bruce’ to keep it clear?

31. Santorum’s still running.

    Ewww.

    Anyway. Nope. Gone. Toast. Casper. He is an ex-candidate. (Unless he’s changed his mind.)

32. Repeated names are more realistic than not: but they can get confusing, in books or real life.

    I was once hired into an engineering department where a quarter of the existing employees were named ‘Steven’. (I don’t remember whether there were 6 or 8 Stevens after all these years.) The department head claimed they had instituted a moratorium on hiring engineers named Steven, and I was never quite sure how serious the statement was…

    I am also reminded of a song “27 Jennifers” that got some radio play some years ago, that was supposedly based on a class year of some actual high school.

    (And I expect the next male child of the British royal family may be named Edward or Albert: they’ve already got Charles, Henry, William and George in play in the main line.)

33. @ Kip W:

    A thing I don’t see much in fiction is when several people in a group have the same first name, even though it happens all the time in real life.

    Too confusing for readers. For similar reasons, I try not to have the same first letter for characters names. It’s unavoidable if you’ve got 200 named characters, as I did in the Silerian trilogy, but then you try to make sure that at least major characters’ names don’t start with the same letter. Readers can confuse those, too. The potential for problems becomes really noticeable when you’re revising and realize you’ve got three characters in the same scene whose names all begin with K.

34. Laura Resnick: Thank you. I’m one of those who tends to recognize characters by their initial letter, and am grateful when authors don’t have main characters with similar-looking names.

35. I once read a book about the Bounty Mutiny that I found completely baffling. There was this one sailor who was sometimes an ideal crewman and sometimes about pain in the backside, sometimes an ally of Blige and sometimes an enemy. Eventually the penny dropped that these were two different people – Mr Heywood and Mr Hayward – but every time I read either name it sounded the same In my head.

36. @Jack Lint:

    I see that he’s preparing to drop out, not that he’s formally done so. (And why do they say they’re “suspending their campaign” instead of just saying they’re out? Some forlorn hope that God will strike every other candidate down and they’ll have an opening to get back in there?)

    Anyway, I was unaware of that bit of news when I wrote the comment. Feel free to substitute Jeb‽ Bush if you prefer.

37. I spent some time working in a company with another Steve Wright; he was in a different department, but it still led to plenty of emails along the lines of “you have sent this message to the wrong Steve Wright, I will forward it to the right Steve Wright, unless I am wrong and I am the right Steve Wright, in which case I will forward it to the wrong Steve Wright, all right?”

    (It was easy enough to tell us apart in person. He was the one who looked like Nikita Khruschev, whereas I’m not nearly that handsome.)

    It was at the same company that I worked on the Project Consisting Entirely Of Men Called Steve. Me and another Steve from the company, two more Steves from the client. Different surnames all around, though, in that case.

38. @Laura: “The potential for problems becomes really noticeable when you’re revising and realize you’ve got three characters in the same scene whose names all begin with K.”

    Multiple names for the same character – aliases, diminutives, and so on – can also get fun. The chapter I groused about editing the other day has Mia/Manuel and Jenny/Jimmy/James, and the one before it has Jade/Kazu, Sheila/Shie/Jasmine, Gerald/Jerry, and Rebecca/Bec. And that doesn’t even count titles…

    Also, congrats on the movie option!

    @Steve Wright:

    I occasionally interact with big-boss-Steve and more commonly with Steven, but programmer-Steve was immediately dubbed “Steve3” to avoid confusion… until he left.

39. That’s all completely true, but if the Hugo voters don’t read “YA”, aren’t the target demographic, and the work he wants considering is work that isn’t “appealing to a large portion of adult readers”, then what exactly would be the point of the award?

    I think when he says that “the bulk of voters don’t read YA” (which is a milder statement than translating it into “Hugo voters don’t read YA”), he may be exaggerating or simplifying.

    I think the actuality is likely closer to “More Hugo readers read adult novels than YA novels, which puts the YA novels at a disadvantage in the category, and the additional factor of (some) readers segregating the two mentally and not think to nominate or vote for YA choices only increases the effect.”

    But if that’s so (and I can’t exactly support it with data, can I?), or even if we stick with his original wording, that doesn’t mean that YA novels are of no interest to Hugo voters. There are other categories that get far fewer votes than the Novel category, which is in many cases likely indicative of less interest (as readers or voters) on the part of Hugo voters in those categories than in the Novel category.

    However, since Novella and Related Work has their own categories, the fact that fewer Worldcon members read/vote in those areas than they do in Novels doesn’t mean there’s no interest in them. There’s enough interest to give out Hugos. But if those nominees were going head to head with the Novel nominees, they’d probably get steamrolled, and we’d be able to point to one or two that had won, but not many.

    If that’s so, then the YA category’s problem isn’t that no Hugo voters at all read them, it’s that they’re subsumed into a category where more Hugo voters value something else more highly. Splitting them out would allow excellent work in the category to be recognized and awarded, as it theoretically did for short fiction of various lengths and (even more theoretically) for Editor/Long Form.

    If a Campbell-style award was added, I suspect it wouldn’t languish for lack of interest on the part of voters. If the Golden Duck awards were better promoted, maybe they’d serve the need. But in the meantime, I think the idea that Hugo voters don’t read YA is likely both an exaggeration and an artifact of not having a separate category in which to compete, as other less-read/less-voted categories do.

40. At least you give your character names. A few times when I was a first reader for SFBC, I would get books whose protagonists were unnamed. That made the obligatory synopsis more challenging.

    One interesting book I was sent had given names whose form depended on the relationship between the person being named and the person naming them. How the details worked were never explained.

41. Another thing sprang to mind: Sharon Penman tying herself in knots in Christ and His Saints Slept (her historical novel set in the reign of King Stephen, better known as “The Anarchy”), where she had to deal with the problem of two major characters and uncounted minor princesses and noblewomen all being called Matilda (or Maud), after William I’s wife Matilda (or Maud).

    At least there was only one Steve to bother with in that one… although one was more than enough.

42. I occasionally interact with big-boss-Steve and more commonly with Steven, but programmer-Steve was immediately dubbed “Steve3” to avoid confusion… until he left.

    At college, I was part of a group that had Old Steve, Big Steve and Little Steve in it. I think there was a New Steve after I mostly lost touch…

43. Apologies if I missed prior mention, but Jackie C. Horne wrote up Heather Rose Jones’ Daughter of Mystery at Romance Novels for Feminists: http://romancenovelsforfeminists.blogspot.com/2016/02/heather-rose-jones-daughter-of-mystery.html (Spoiler alert: she liked it a lot.)

    On same-name characters in fiction, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Ysabel has two incidental characters that just get referred to as, if memory serves, Vera-cook and Vera-clean. At least for me, it served nicely to make them part of the background until we get reminded that sometimes the background pays attention and knows stuff you might want to know too.

44. And why do they say they’re “suspending their campaign” instead of just saying they’re out?

    It has to do with fundraising the retire debt, or some other way that funds can be handled in a suspended campaign but not in a defunct one.

45. Re: Similar character names

    Long ago I read an Alistair MacLean novel, I think “The Golden Gate.” The hero’s name was “Branson,” and the villain’s name was “Revson,” or possibly the other way around, and I remember frequently getting to the end of a sequence where I suddenly realized I thought I was reading about the hero but it was really the villain doing something. Made me realize the need to make names very different to avoid confusion.

    Another example: I submitted a story for critique at Windycon (and those were a very valuable experience). My hero was name “Foxe,” and another fairly minor character was named “Max.” One of the reviewers constantly referred to the hero as “Max,” and I ultimately figured out that two names with a constant, a vowel, and and X were too confusing. I forget what Max’s name changed to.

    So I think names are important. FWIW.

46. @Kyra:

    “It takes me so long to come up with character names that I like that I am *not* going to throw in another reason to reject them. Seriously, I have a ridiculously hard time with names.”

    This website:

    http://www.behindthename.com/

    is an absolute godsend when it comes to naming characters. It breaks it down by nationality and gender (including unisex names), it includes surnames and alternate spellings/shortened versions, and it’s searchable by letter so you can say to yourself, “I need three protagonists and they can’t all start with the letter K,” and have a reasonable chance of finding good names. I recommend it very highly to all writers everywhere as a resource.

47. In my schooldays I was in a class with four David Thomases, one of whom also had a twin brother.

48. @Greg, re “Tom, Thom”. Yeah, I don’t quite get it either. I’m going to rot13 the rest of my comment and try to parse the story.

    Guvf vf n fgbel nobhg n obl jubfr sngure vf qrnq, yvivat va n pbggntr jvgu uvf zbgure, nsgre n jne; gurer vf engvbavat naq uvf zbgure pna’g trg perqvg, naq V vavgvnyyl gubhtug gung uhatre jnf tbvat gb or n xrl gurzr va gur fgbel, ohg vg jnfa’g (ernyyl gurl fubhyq unir orra uhatevre, ubj qvq gurl trg nf zhpu zrng nf vf qrfpevorq?) Gehr, gurer vf n snve ovg bs gnyx nobhg sbbq, ohg vg vf zber bs nabgure yrvgzbgvs nzbat gubfr qvfgvathvfuvat gur zbegny jbeyq sebz gur bgure bar. Fb fbzrubj, nsgre n punatryvat neevirf, jub erirefrf gur hfhny beqre bs guvatf ol guevivat va jvagre naq jvgurevat njnl va fhzzre, lbhat Gbz orpbzrf vapernfvatyl nyvrangrq sebz uvf fheebhaqvatf gb gur cbvag gung ur ehaf njnl gb gur jbbqf/gb snvelynaq. V qvqa’g trg n frafr bs jul gung fubhyq unccra. Ur vf fbzrjung unhagrq ol uvf sngure’f qrngu ohg abg gb gur cbvag bs rkcynvavat gur raqvat jurer gur jbeyq vf qrcvpgrq nf abguvat ohg n ernyz bs qrngu. Gbz vf frg ncneg sebz bgure puvyqera ol yvivat qvfgnag sebz gur ivyyntr naq ol uvf zbgure orvat nccneragyl n qvssrerag phygher sebz gur ivyyntref, ohg ntnva, abguvat gbb rkgenbeqvanel. V qba’g xabj ubj gur zveebe-vzntr angher bs gur punatryvat svgf vagb nyy guvf. Gubz’f fgenatrarff znxrf Gbz frrz zber ng ubzr va guvf jbeyq ol pbagenfg. Znlor gur flzobyvfz vf gung guvf jbeyq vf gur ernyz bs qrngu naq gur bgure jbeyq bs vzzbegnyvgl, fb qlvat znxrf Gubz zber guvf-jbeyqyl, naq Gbz orvat n zveebe vzntr bs uvz zhfg trg zber bgurejbeyqyl? Gung jbhyq or n sbeprq vagrecergngvba, abg bar gung frrzf angheny gb zr. Gubz’f neeviny vf flzobyvmrq ol n jbhaq (va Gbz’f svatre) naq ur genafsbezf gur jbeyq, yvxr punatvat na beqvanel rtt vagb n oveq gung unf gb tb gb gur bgure jbeyq, fb ur vf n guerng gb ernyvgl znlor? Ohg bayl n grzcbenel bar jub jvyy or birepbzr ol qrngu.

    I’m not sure that the story works at all. But I could be convinced, if someone comes up with a better interpretation.

49. I’m currently in the middle of reading Valente’s Radiant, so I’ve been avoiding reading all of the recent discussion of it here. Just reached the end of Part I. If it sticks the landing, it’s going to rocket onto my Hugo Longlist with a bullet.

    (Which is slightly enervating, although sort of in a good way?, because I had just about narrowed things down to a list of five all-stars. We’ll see if that has to become six …)

50. For many years people have called me Stevie; the usage has started with authors at a water cooler on the crew deck, and expedited so that few people will fail to recognise the suddenness of the consequences..

    But the people who call me Steve have known me a very, very long, time;
    I’m not at all sure about what was going on there. Excalibur as a pretty wonderful weapon seems

Comments are closed.