Pixel Scroll 3/16/18 My Very Educated Mother Just Scrolled Us Nine Pixels

The Management regrets that a long day necessitates a short Scroll.

(1) PERFECT PITCH. Seanan McGuire’s Twitter sonnet is linked here too late to influence your Hugo nominations, yet you might enjoy it anyway. Jump on the thread here —

(2) SPEAKER TO KERMIT. Muppet Guys Talking is available today – see it for $9.97. (There’s probably some reason for that nice round coff number.)

Five of the original Muppet performers/innovators come together to discuss the creation of their iconic characters under the visionary leadership of Jim Henson.

(3) REBUTTAL. Will Shetterly airs his full and complete responses to File 770 comments in his own post: “Writers at File 770 validate my concern about the Fourth Street ban”.

For the record, I omitted the emails about planning the seminar before I was kicked off it, I omitted the emails we shared once it was settled that I’d be doing a panel at the convention, and out of consideration for Alex Haist, I omitted some insulting notes that she incompetently or maliciously left on the copy of the letter she sent me to answer my four questions. If there’s anything I left out that seems pertinent, I invite anyone from the Board to share it with the assurance that I have no intention of suing anyone.

(4) CANTINA SCENE. Io9 asks “Can You Name Every Alien in This All-Encompassing Scifi Cantina?” Artists Vance Kelly and Kevin M. Wilson have created a cantina scene filled with characters from different sf works, prints of which go on sale 21 March at the Hero Complex Gallery in LA. See the image at the link,

(5) HAVE YE SEEN THE GREAT WHITE SATELLITE? Thar she blows!: “Big harpoon is ‘solution to space junk'”.

Airbus is testing a big harpoon to snare rogue or redundant satellites and pull them out of the sky.

The 1m-long projectile would be attached, through a strong tether, to a chase spacecraft.

Once the target was captured and under control, the chase vehicle would then drag its prey down into the atmosphere to burn to destruction.

(6) KIRBY ADAPTATION. The BBC says “Ava DuVernay ‘to direct superhero film'”.

Ava DuVernay, director of Selma and A Wrinkle in Time, is in talks to direct a superhero film based on DC Comics characters, according to reports.

DuVernay, whose other films include the Oscar-nominated documentary 13th, has been linked to The New Gods, based on a comic book created by Jack Kirby.

DuVernay seemed to confirm the news by posting a photo of Kirby on Twitter.

The New Gods would be the second major superhero film directed by a woman, after Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman.

(7) JEOPARDY! TONIGHT. Andrew Porter says “In the category African-American Literature, the answer and the photo shown was: ‘This author of Kindred and Xenogenesis combined African-American literature with science fiction themes.’

“No one got the question: ‘Who is Octavia Butler?’”

(8) VIDEOS OF THE DAY. 2CELLOS, “Game of Thrones.”

And JJ assures me, “If you’ve never seen these guys before, they do an absolutely hilarious version of AC/DC’s Thunderstruck.”

[Thanks to Mark Hepworth, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Mike Kennedy, Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bill.]

66 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 3/16/18 My Very Educated Mother Just Scrolled Us Nine Pixels

  1. The finding of the lost cat snuck away on top of a cabinet and being quiet is so cat that it almost autonomously generate a whole pile of SF books the top of which is faintly warm all by itself.

  2. What difference does it make if a poem meets a sonnet’s definition or not? Like the Duke said about music, “If it sounds good, it is good.”

    Tom Pixel and the Scrollbreakers

  3. “We must file forward, not backward: upward, not forward—and always scrolling, scrolling, scrolling toward freedom!”

  4. “We must file forward, not backward: upward, not forward—and always scrolling, scrolling, scrolling toward freedom!”

    Hm. Do I want an abortion or a miniature American flag?

  5. I suppose when it comes to things like poetry I can be a bit of a prescriptivist. Don’t call something a sonnet if it clearly doesn’t have the identifying characteristics of one. Yes if you understand the rules you can break and twist them in interesting ways, but at some point, when you’ve got 17 lines, no volta, a different rhyme scheme, it’s written in something other than pentameter… It stops being what we’d call a sonnet. Slapping the word “sonnet” on a poem doesn’t make it one anymore than referring to dolphins as fish makes them fish.

  6. Contrarius: I forgot to post it earlier, but thanks for the 2Cellos info!

    Occasionally, when I need a good laugh, I will go watch the Thunderstruck video, and imagine them as 12-year-olds, being told by their parents, “NO YOU CAN’T HAVE AN ELECTRIC GUITAR GO TO YOUR ROOM AND PRACTICE YOUR CELLO!!!” 😀

  7. JJ: heeee.

    I haven’t paid as much attention as I might to 2 Cellos because they seemed to be another one of the trend of people like the Piano Guys and Lindsay Stirling making classical string instruments into pop hits. This is a bit odd as I am all for the trend itself — anything that gets cellos into the mainstream is awesome. But when youtube brings up playlists of alm of them in a row it can get overwhelming.

  8. Lenora Rose, I got a hearty laugh from Igudesman & Joo’s “I Will Survive,” though the joke goes on several minutes too long for me, but I consider that an adequate price to pay for the part around 2:25 where Mr. Igudesman starts playing his instrument with a Dremel tool.

  9. That’s mad. (Or that’s I&J; “mad I&J” would be tautologous.) I have sent that to a friend who thinks the Dremel is a universal tool; I don’t think he realized howuniversal. Their present-this-composer’s-style number is also mad, although abstruse — judging by the silence, nobody else in the hall knew why Cage (posed silence) was funny….

  10. Regarding the Cat Town burglar – I doubt they’ll catch him, but he’ll likely get nicked for something else soon enough. Cat Town will be replacing their current plate glass windows with shatterproof windows soon.

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