Pixel Scroll 3/23/18 It’s A Beautiful Day In The Pixel Scroll. Won’t You Be My Filer?

(1) SPIT TAKE. All you short fiction fans pay attention: “Short Story Dispenser to spit out free stories at three locations around Philadelphia” reports the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Like picking up a pack of Oreos from the cafeteria vending machine, a new kiosk concept in partnership with the Free Library of Philadelphia will allow visitors to obtain short stories at the touch of a button.

Announced Thursday as part of the Public Library Association’s 2018 conference, Philadelphia was selected as one of four cities to receive a grant for Short Story Dispensers. The thin, sleek 5-foot-tall kiosks will be at three yet-to-be-determined locations throughout the city.

Each will offer one-, three-, and five-minute stories from a range of 20 genres. Stories will be spit out like an ATM receipt to users — and for free — on eco-friendly paper.

(2) IT’S THAT TIME AGAIN. “Time for a new episode of my Eating the Fantastic podcast,” says Scott Edelman, “And time to test the Internet gods!” Episode 62 invites you to chow down on calamari with Paul di Filippo:

Paul Di Filippo has published more than than 200 short stories—which as you’ll hear, I teased him about as conversation began—and has appeared in such magazines as Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,  Interzone, and many others. Some of those stories have been collected in The Steampunk Trilogy, Ribofunk, Fractal Paisleys, Lost Pages, Little Doors, Strange Trades, Babylon Sisters, and many, many others. And then there are the novels, such as Ciphers, Joe’s Liver, Fuzzy Dice, A Mouthful of Tongues, and Spondulix. He’s been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, British Science Fiction Association, Philip K. Dick, Wired magazine, and World Fantasy awards. He was also my go-to reviewer back when I edited Science Fiction Age and then, for the Syfy Channel’s Science Fiction Weekly.

Paul’s the one who suggested Angelo’s Civita Farnese as our venue. The Italian restaurant was opened in Providence 1924 by Angelo Mastrodicasa. Paul’s entree of french fries with meatballs, a combination I’ve never seen before, turned out to be one of Angelo’s signature dishes, started during the Depression as a way for customers to fill up without emptying their wallets.

We discussed why the first story he ever wrote was Man from U.N.C.L.E. fan fiction, the pact he made with a childhood friend which explains why he owns none of the Marvel Comics he read as a kid, what caused the editor who printed his debut story to make the bold claim it would be both his first and last published piece of fiction, how his life changed once he started following Ray Bradbury’s rule of writing at least 1,000 words per day, why he’s written so much alternate history and for which famous person he’s had the most fun imagining a different life, why after a career in science fiction and fantasy he’s begun a series of mystery novels, what happened to the never-published Batman story he sold DC Comics which we never got to see, and much more.

(3) KURT BUSIEK OPTION. Todd Allen has the details: “Kurt Busiek Working on an Astro City Pilot With FreemantleMedia – Another Super Hero Universe License Acquired”.

If memory serves, Astro City has been under option of some kind since at least the early-to-mid ’00s.  Back then, super hero movies were just starting to heat up with Spidey and X-Men, but Marvel hadn’t gotten their own studio together yet.  These days, TV is arguably as needy as the film studios when it comes to comics licenses. (See: Netflix)  And so, FreemantleMedia North America has come into possession of the film rights for Astro City.

FreeMantle is actually pretty big.  They produce everything from The Price is Right to American Gods.  What’s a bit more interesting is that Kurt Busiek, himself, is co-writing the pilot….

(4) THE UNFORGOTTEN. Pulp Librarian (@PulpLibrarian) ran a retrospective on Laser Books today. Mark Hepworth’s comment accompanying the link ended, “…complete with some really bad covers!” Since one of my favorite artists, Kelly Freas, did every Laser Book cover, I’m not going to print that…. Jump on the thread here —

(5) STORYBUNDLE. Time is running out on The Feminist Futures Bundle curated by Cat Rambo.

Rosemary Kirstein, one of the contributors (The Steerswoman), describes the bundle as “10 authors with novels that simply assume that their female protagonists are equal participants in society and able to pursue their goals — no preaching or excoriating involved!” The Storybundle is in its last week and ends March 29. You’ll find several posts with more info about the bundle at Kirstein’s blog.

Nicole Kimberling, another of the bundle authors, wrote a piece for The Mary Sue on “Why We Still Need Feminist Science-Fiction”.

When Cat Rambo first approached me about including my novel, Happy Snak, in a StoryBundle, I thought it would be representing the “outer space” niche in a collection of genre-based comedies. So when I realized my story would be included in “Feminist Futures,” I was taken aback. Happy Snak is about a woman who owns a dinky snack bar in space. She fraternizes with aliens and refuses to comply with arbitrary regulations but is otherwise largely apolitical. Why, I wondered, would anybody consider this feminist? Then, thinking further, I realized that for many women, just being themselves and making (and spending) their own money is still considered a threatening and subversive act. (I’ve got my eye you, Quiverfull.)

And Cat has two video interviews of the authors included in the bundle:

(6) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • March 23, 2012 — The first installment of The Hunger Games made its theatrical premiere.

(7) OVERTIME. JonnyBaak’s video takes a behind-the-scenes look at the 1966/67 Irwin Allen hit The Time Tunnel.

(8) LEGO IDEAS WINNER ABOUT TO HIT MARKET. io9 advises “Start Saving Your Quarters Because Lego’s Tron: Legacy Light Cycles Set Finally Arrives Next Week”.

Originally approved for production back in late November of last year, the light cycle design that BrickBros UK submitted to the Lego Ideas site looks significantly updated and streamlined by Lego’s own designers for the production version of this set. But the changes certainly seem to benefit fans of Tron: Legacy, as the set now includes two light cycles, and three minifigure versions of Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), Quorra (Olivia Wilde), and Rinzler (Anis Cheurfa), complete with identity discs.

(9) ABOUT THOSE SJW CREDENTIALS. Dogs and cats – never the twain shall mark.

(10) UNBELIEVABLE. A professional cartographer makes fun of real-world map of New Orleans: “A guy who makes Role-playing games has criticised a map of New Orleans for being “unrealistic” and it’s gone viral”. Start the thread here:

(11) BRADBURY’S WRITING TIPS. Tripwire has rediscovered “Ray Bradbury’s 12 Rules For Writers”. Here are the first two —

  • Don’t start out writing novels. They take too long. Begin your writing life instead by cranking out “a hell of a lot of short stories,” as many as one per week. Take a year to do it; he claims that it simply isn’t possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row. He waited until the age of 30 to write his first novel, Fahrenheit 451. “Worth waiting for, huh?”
  • You may love ’em, but you can’t be ’em. Bear that in mind when you inevitably attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to imitate your favorite writers, just as he imitated H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle and L. Frank Baum.

(12) ACCESSIBLE EMOJIS. Proposed emojis for various disabilities: “Apple proposes 13 new emoji that represent people with disabilities”

The original Apple submission to the Unicode Consortium [PDF file] (the ruling body for emoji selection and all things else Unicode) states (in part):

  • Completeness Does the proposed pictograph fill a gap in existing types of emoji?

The proposed set in itself provides a significant advance in coverage to depict various forms of disability, and fills a significant gap in representation and inclusiveness among existing emoji. We welcome other considerations that can help complete the set.

Mike Kennedy sent the link with a note: “It occurs to me that people who work Access for cons might have some ideas for additional emojis to “help complete the set.”

(13) SETTLEMENT IN TREK ACTOR’S DEATH. “Anton Yelchin: Star Trek actor’s parents settle legal case with car firm”: The rollaway that killed the new Chekov led to 11,000,000 cars recalled; damages will support a foundation.

Gary Dordick, the lawyer for Yelchin’s parents, said the money would go to the Anton Yelchin Foundation. The amount hasn’t been disclosed.

The money will also help fund a documentary about Yelchin’s life.

The actor was born in Russia and played Chekov in the rebooted Star Trek films released in 2009 and 2013.

He died when his 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee pinned him against a concrete mailbox at his LA house in June 2016.

His parents filed a wrongful death case against Fiat Chrysler in August that year, saying the gear changer was defective.

In April 2016, the company had recalled 1.1 million vehicles across the world because of concerns that they could roll away after drivers exit.

(14) STAY FROSTY. “Thrills and chills at Broadway’s Frozen musical” — a hit with the audience, and the critic.

The puppet design provided for Sven and Olaf the snowman is a highlight of this Frozen, which had its official opening night on Thursday.

Credit for this goes to puppet designer Michael Curry, who previously made magic as Julie Taymor’s collaborator on The Lion King, Disney’s longest-running Broadway hit.

Yet for all the clever design elements involved in the production, it’s the performances, guided with wit and tenderness by acclaimed British director Michael Grandage, that propel the story.

That story is spun by librettist Jennifer Lee, adapting her own screenplay, and composer/lyricists Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez – Academy Award winners both for Frozen and, more recently, Coco.

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. I can’t resist this video of the “Flaming Tomb on Easter Sunday.” People begin to see the light at the 1:18 mark.

[Thanks to JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Mark Hepworth, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Carl Slaughter, Bill, Rosemary Kirstein, Scott Edelman, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Lenora Rose, with an embellishment by OGH.]

53 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 3/23/18 It’s A Beautiful Day In The Pixel Scroll. Won’t You Be My Filer?

  1. (9) Nevertheless, cats and dogs can learn to communicate. Indeed, I had Dora’s aunt before I had Dora, and my beloved Addy spoke cat rather better than she spoke dog, due to an interesting first year before she came to me.

    Despite that, most cats still didn’t trust her, but there were a few in our neighborhood who were open-minded. Dogs found her accent really strange, too.

    (10) He does an excellent job of explaining why the map of New Orleans simply will not do. It will have to be significantly reworked, if not done over completely from scratch, before its application for a role in a board game of fantasy novel can even be considered.

    Better luck next time, New Orleans. Just remember: Fiction has to make sense.

  2. Re Laser Books covers:
    I attended a con many years ago where Kelly Freas was Art GoH, and he had originals for a number of the Laser Books covers on display. I found myself wondering how they could take the vibrant works Kelly had painted and turn them into such drab covers.

    Kelly was actually happy with the Laser Books deal. They had a standard cover format he had to follow, but they assumed he knew what he was doing. He didn’t have to go through roughs and comps till the Art Director liked it – he sent them a finished image and that was what they used, and they paid promptly and well.

    >Dennis

  3. That review of ‘Frozen’ on Broadway was pretty balanced. I have tickets for a performance in a couple of weeks with two friends. The youngest of us is 53, so it’s not just for the 8 year olds.

    Perusing all the reviews, they are a mixed bag, and sometimes contradict themselves from one paragraph to the next (I’m looking at the New York Times)

    This version is darker than the movie. I’m sure Michael Grandage had something to do with that, but Jennifer Lee and the Anderson-Lopez team knew that darkness was always lurking behind the chirpy animation. Elsa’s second-act 11-oclock ballad, “Monster” is loaded with suicidal ideation as Elsa is trying to decide if she ended herself would that fix things? Fortunately, that nuance will go right over the heads of the little ones. Although I saw on FB one mother complaining about how dark it was for her 4-year old. LOL – lady the theater website states clearly that they think 8 YO is the youngest patron for the show. But if you have the kind of money it takes to buy tickets to this, have at it. (face value is around $200, but most performances are already sold out and resales are around $1000 in the orchestra.)

    I had to laugh at one guy (it’s always a guy) who was huffing that Anna was the real hero, not Elsa. Dude, that was ALWAYS the case. In the movie, Anna has about twice as much, if not three times as much screen time as Elsa. And in the movie, it is ANNA’S heroic self-sacrifice that saves everyone, even herself.

    Having said that, Elsa’s character has gotten more love than Anna’s because she is so complex that almost everyone can relate to her and wants to wrap her in a blankie and make it all better for her.

    Anyway, I can’t wait to get to NYC. Squeeeeee…..

  4. The Busiek article had this interesting sentence:

    Busiek’s decades of success in the creator-owned comics space has also included the titles Arrowsmith, Shockrockets, Superstar: As Seen on TV, The Wizard’s Tale, Jonny Demon, The Liberty Project and Ransom.

    ….Ransom? I’ve read all the others (own most of them), but I’ve never heard of Ransom. Is there a major work of Kurt’s that I’ve somehow missed?

    Kurt, are you there? What’s the deal?

  5. (2) IT’S THAT TIME AGAIN.

    I’m not sure I can say that I’ve ever read any of DiFilippo’s fiction (so many books, so little yada yada), but I would expect it to be good, because wow, can that guy write a review. I would give my nonexistent firstborn to be able to write a review with his skill.

  6. Oh, just realized something. Since ‘Frozen’ the movie was nominated for a Hugo, is the Broadway musical eligible this year? I mean, there’s a Harry Potter opening soon also. Have Broadway theatricals been nominated in the past? (I’ll ‘fess up that I’m too lazy to go look)

  7. David:

    “Ransom” was a series I did that ran in an Eclipse anthology magazine, MERCHANTS OF DEATH. I doubt many people remember it. But it’d make a fine TV series or movie franchise, in the right hands.

  8. Techgrrl1972: Since ‘Frozen’ the movie was nominated for a Hugo, is the Broadway musical eligible this year? I mean, there’s a Harry Potter opening soon also. Have Broadway theatricals been nominated in the past?

    Since it is an all-new production in a different media, it would be eligible. However, it would probably need at least a couple hundred nominations to actually make the ballot, and I doubt that kind of support could be drummed up for a Broadway musical.

  9. (3) Looking forward to seeing whatever comes of this! I’ve long thought it would make a great anthology series.

    (Is it considered gauche to use the File770 comments to tell Kurt Busiek how much you love Astro City?)

  10. @JJ: “However, it would probably need at least a couple hundred nominations to actually make the ballot, and I doubt that kind of support could be drummed up for a Broadway musical.”

    The kid made the point, while we were talking this week, that more DVDs of stage performances would make the Broadway musical more accessible. It’s not like we could afford to go to Manhattan and try for a cheap ticket to Rent. Very few folks can.

  11. Andrew, my family used to react to PASS WITH CARE signs by chanting, “Pass with care! Pass with care! Pass in the presence of the punchenjare!” So I guess I can’t cringe too much at “pixeljare.” (We either did this or it was suggested and ignored, but I think it had to do with the tickybox that time. Not looking it up.)

    The scroll title is a good occasion for me to share a new post at New Pals that takes the reader on a guided tour through a 1950s LP by Fred Rogers and Josie Carey (with Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians), based on his Pittsburgh kid show, “The Children’s Corner.” It’s a recounting with added words of a track-by-track look at the album, which is a musical fantasy and a detective story that has several great numbers in it. The album was owned by my cousin’s girlfriend (in 1983), and she decided I might enjoy it, so she let me record it at her apartment. I ripped the tape to mp3 when I got my first player, and shared these with the blogger of Way Out Junk back about ten years ago. His links have since rotted, but someone at YouTube has put the same tracks up there.

    Of particular note is Lady Elaine Fairchild’s song that parodies another song on the album. First, X the Owl sings to Josie “You’re Special.” Lady Elaine, in turn, sings about how she, herself, is special. Quoting from an old RASFF post:

    “I’m a grapefruit crate
    I’m a rusty can
    I’m a piece of wax; I’m a box of tacks; I’m a glass with cracks
    I’m a frying pan…
    I’m special!

    “I’m a leaky pipe
    I’m a garlic bud
    I’m a soggy match; I’m a burlap patch; I’m an itchy scratch
    I’m a sea of mud…
    I’m special!

    “I heel and toe it when I walk,
    My nose grows, oh so charming
    My friends all say I’m like a clock
    Because I’m so alarming

    “I’m a case of mumps
    I’m a crooked boot
    I’m a pile of rags; I’m a chair that sags; I’m a paper bag
    I’m a broken tooth, darling!
    I-I-I-I’m special!”

    The microtonal singing is worthy of Darlene Edwards. It may be one of the most awesome puppet solos recorded.

    I was going to tweet this yesterday and didn’t manage to do it, so you lucky earthlings are the first to hear the news. I may go back and edit it a little now to include those verses.

    I linked to the first song on YouTube. After that, the rest present themselves in the sidebar. I didn’t want to put a bunch of individual links in and have them go away and have to fix that one by one at a later date. Mister Rogers doesn’t appear on the album as himself, but he is every voice apart from Josie, whose words he presumably wrote, and he wrote all the songs (one or two of which I heard on his neighborhood later on), so he is present.

    Seriously, it’s one of my favorite albums. Don’t wait till ‘tomorrow.’

  12. @1: so it’s a movement? I ran across one of those a couple of weeks ago in Boston’s The Shops at Prudential; the short-short-short it gave me wasn’t bad.

    @4: After Freas’s gloating (an in-your-face response to Bova’s modesty) at the 1976 Hugos, another artist was more than willing to play ~”O’Shaughnessy Slush, capable of doing 150 [Slush nudges speaker] make that 200 covers a year provided they all have an ugly little face in the lower foreground”. Based on Elwood’s reported demands for his other work, he was already a pickle-faced prude who didn’t have to “accede” to any Harlequin restrictions. The author of the above quote argued after Laser burned up that Harlequin couldn’t live with the books selling according to quality (or at least the author’s reputation) — some doing 5K, some 15K or more — rather than uniformly; I’d love to see confirmation/correction of that.

    @10: cute. One of the things I wouldn’t believe in a fantasy city is the amount of effort the real-world layout represents, e.g. the Mississippi would have cut down to the sea way before the points he shows if not for massive Corps of Engineers works. Occasionally a fantasy author will talk about a bit of harbor dredging, but NoLa is orders of magnitude stranger — makes even the wizard who held Gont together through an earthquake look less important.

    @11: not sure all of those would work for everyone — I suspect most authors find there are days when Yolen’s “butt in chair” rule works better than Bradbury’s “enjoy it” — but his advice to read widely still sounds good even if he spoils it by telling people to get out of their computers; every library I’ve been in was organized by topic, where hyperlinks make topic hopping easy.

    @12: I’m glad they admit these are just a start, as having M/F depictions but only one skin tone seems arguable. I’m also wondering how these will be used, given the level of detail; do social media (which I don’t do) allow more bits for emojis than F:700 comments?

    @15: that’s undoctrinal, but unsurprising given some US approaches to Xianity. Any idea where the music comes from?

    @DMcCunney: I found myself wondering how they could take the vibrant works Kelly had painted and turn them into such drab covers. Very easily; good color cost a lot more back then (as I found out the hard way, when producing the Fantasy Showcase Tarot (1980) and the Noreascon Two memory book (1985)), but cheap color was better than monochrome for formula paperbacks. I wonder whether the romance examples were done with a limited palette, somewhere between standard cover art and comic books; Freas’s book makes clear that he once knew how to work with some limits (at least with 2-color process), but part of his happiness with the job (that you note) may have been that he didn’t need to learn a new palette.

    Techgrrl1972 (expanding @JJ): I don’t think any staged production has made it to the final ballot (and I’m too lazy to dig through a mess of pages). It’s not surprising as fandom is a very wide, thin layer while a stage production depends on a concentrated audience; by the time enough nominaters have seen a show (if it has legs to travel), it’s out of date. I would certainly have nominated Copenhagen, but it was already past due by the time it reached Broadway. Staged productions sometimes get televised, but usually not until too late (e.g., Menotti’s Help, Help, the Globolinks! ) opened in 1968 but was aired in 1969). A DVD (per @Arkansawyer) seems unlikely until the show has run out, which usually takes longer for a stage production than for movies.

  13. JJ on March 24, 2018 at 12:28 am said:
    (2) IT’S THAT TIME AGAIN.

    I’m not sure I can say that I’ve ever read any of DiFilippo’s fiction (so many books, so little yada yada), but I would expect it to be good, because wow, can that guy write a review. I would give my nonexistent firstborn to be able to write a review with his skill.

    He’s a great short story writer. I don’t think I’ve read anything of his recently but 10-20 years ago I recognised his name as a mark of quality on magazines and anthologies.

  14. recent reading:
    Lossiter, Noumenon. I picked this up because it sounded a bit mindstretching, but was unpleasantly surprised; the author sets up the debunked notion that personality/skills/… are completely determined by genes. (I might be more sensitive to this than some after being next to ground zero when Herrnstein proposed the crap that later became The Bell Curve — but the author so completely ignores environment that I had to remind myself the book was borrowed and hence unthrowable.) Then Lostetter breaks that idea whenever the plot needs room to grow. I suppose the author could have intended a lengthy meta-diatribe against racism, except that racism never ~worked well enough to keep even one of 12 generation ship going for 200 years. (And that’s not the only unbelievable stupidity in the ship’s social design.) A great writer could get around this, but I found the Big Dumb Object the ship was heading for unawesome and the personal stories unconvincing/uninteresting; the vignette format, with characters rarely appearing more than once, may not have helped this.

    Bonesteel, Breach of Containment. Third in the Central Corps series, but the author inserts backstory in digestible bits, well enough that knowing the previous two isn’t critical. (I’ve a fair metric for this: it’s been long enough since the last one that I hadn’t even remembered that the lead resigned from the CC.) Elena now works on a PSI (civilian) trading ship that gets asked to make an emergency delivery into the middle of a low-level conflict; the problems build up from there, but mostly believably. I found the motivations of the villains (even more villainous than in previous books) not entirely convincing:
    Ubj pna Ryyvf fb qrfver na NV gung gurl unir nyernql unpxrq? Qba’g gurl ernyvmr fbzrobql ryfr pbhyq qb gur fnzr? Naq vs gurl unir gur NV, jul qbrf vgf erzbgr znggre?
    Jul qbrf Nqzvenygl guvax gurl’yy fheivir gur vairfgzrag bs Rnegu? Vs gurl’er va pbafcvenpl jvgu Ryyvf, jub ner gurl pbafcvevat ntnvafg? V fhccbfr gurl’er n ercerfragngvba gung cbjre hygvzngryl orpbzrf nobhg znvagnvavat vgfrys, ohg vg’f abg pyrne gung gelvat gb nyybj gur fheiviny bs na rarzl jub gur choyvp guvaxf vf n sevraq urycf rira gung creirefr tbny.
    It ends with a twist that will make later works (if any are planned — the author’s website is mum) very … different. Not on my nonexistent Hugo list, but Bonesteel is continuing to improve — and to expand the setting interestingly.

    And I made the mistake of reading The Clockwork Boys without having book 2 in hand. Normally I’m hard-nosed about not reading incomplete stories, but this was too good to hold back on.

  15. (9) Pedantic grammar police

    Arghh! Shane Ivins fell prey to the “loose/lose” error. That drives me nuts. Although I suppose you would have a “loose” finger (as in not attached) if you “lose” it.

  16. (9) Maybe “loose a finger” as in “detach and release a finger”?

    Nah, it’s just an oopsie.

  17. (11) I was whining just the other day about how writers who write rules are rarely role models, and then here comes Ray Bradbury to retroactively prove me wrong. He does that a lot, which is one of the reasons why I love him.

    (9) I had a cat who was fluent in rabbit, a rich and non-vocal language. I had a crusty old house rabbit with a bottomless need for attention and a love/hate relationship with his own species, so I got him a kitten to raise. When she later found herself living with another cat she would tease him mercilessly.

  18. Recent rediscovery – I just read Rick Raphael’s “Code Three” from Gutenberg.org: it’s an extrapolative bit of SF about a North America criss-crossed with superhighways allowing speeds up to 400 mph, and the people who patrol those superhighways in mobile police/medical vehicles built like tanks (dealing with accidents, dangerous drivers and vehicles and other types of emergencies over multiple days of patrolling).

    @Kip W: Now that you mention it, I do kind of remember the “tickbox” variant of the Punch with Care chant.

    @JJ/rob_matic: DiFilippo’s series of short humor pieces in F&SF are a lot of fun (and available online – here’s a sample https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/1999/pdf9907.htm).

  19. Chip Hitchcock on Bradbury’s writing advice: Eh. Don’t know that I’d privilege one recommendation over the other, really. Jane Yolen’s advice to put your butt in the chair and write stands beside her advice that the writer “take joy” in writing–remember that it’s supposed to be a joy, not misery. Her Take Joy: A Writer’s Guide to Loving the Craft is a collection I still dip into regularly . . .

  20. 12) If they want to be encompassing with regard to disabilities, they might want to include images of people on crutches. Having been on crutches prior to increasing use of a wheelchair (I still use crutches at home, over predictable surfaces) the two have very different sets of limitations and require different mindsets.

    9) A friend of mine once had a German Shepard who was convinced he was a cat.

    Meredith Moment:

    The Novels of the Jaran by Kate Elliott, a four novel boxset, is on sale at Amazon US for $2.99.

  21. There's a feeling I get
    when I look to the West,
    and my Pixel is crying for Scrolling...

  22. “Loose” vs. “lose” used to bug me a lot more until I realized just how bizarre and unconventional it is. The number of vowels controls the pronunciation of a nearby consonant, but doesn’t affect how the vowel is pronounced? That’s just weird. Plus, I can’t find any other cases in English where “ose” gets pronounced with an “oo” sound instead of a long O, except “whose”, which only works that way because it’s derived from a word that ends in a vowel.

    Lose vs. (takes deep breath) dose, nose, prose, hose, rose, close, those, chose, dispose, diagnose, compose, expose, sucrose, varicose, lachrymose, etc. The pronunciation of the “s” may vary, but the pronunciation of the “o” ordinarily doesn’t.

    Really, this is a case where you almost have to blame the folks who decided to standardize the spelling in such a weird way as much as anyone else.

    It still sets my teeth on edge to see it done wrong, but now that I realize how wonky it is, I try to retain a little sympathy for the folks who struggle with this oddball edge-case.

  23. @Chip Hitchcock: Two of the Best Dramatic Presentation: Short Form Hugo nominees in 2006 were stage presentations from the previous year’s Worldcon, “Lucas Back in Anger” and “Prix Victor Hugo Awards Ceremony.”

    But I’m pretty sure that no “regular” stage plays have ever been nominated for the BDP Hugos, although I don’t have a simple definition for what constitutes a “regular” stage play.

  24. @Chip Hitchcock:
    “I found myself wondering how they could take the vibrant works Kelly had painted and turn them into such drab covers.”

    Very easily; good color cost a lot more back then (as I found out the hard way, when producing the Fantasy Showcase Tarot (1980) and the Noreascon Two memory book (1985)), but cheap color was better than monochrome for formula paperbacks

    I was a graphic designer and print production guy back when, so I’m familiar with the processes and technology. Harlequin was using four color process printing, and there was no inherent limitation in the palette. But what you print on matters, so I assumed it was an issue of cover stock, not printing. The colors as printed were the ones Kelly painted, but simply lacked the vibrancy and intensity of Kelly’s originals.

    I wonder whether the romance examples were done with a limited palette, somewhere between standard cover art and comic books; Freas’s book makes clear that he once knew how to work with some limits (at least with 2-color process), but part of his happiness with the job (that you note) may have been that he didn’t need to learn a new palette.

    I don’t believe the romance examples were done with limited palette. Kelly was a highly experienced commercial artist and knew how to work within limits imposed by the reproduction process. But he also understood that once he submitted the work, it was no longer under his control, and what wound up on the cover or wherever might not be much like he submitted. That they bought what he sent them and he got paid promptly and well was about the best he could hope for.

    Based on Elwood’s reported demands for his other work, he was already a pickle-faced prude who didn’t have to “accede” to any Harlequin restrictions.

    I met Elwood, years back. Before turning to the Laser Books line, he had edited wrestling magazines (in apparent incomprehension that matches were scripted with predetermined winners, and was reportedly dismayed and quit when he found out.) He was also the biggest force in SF anthologies for a while, and flooded the market. A writer back when sold to Elwood and reported going to an editorial conference at his home. “He’s got a picture of Jesus painted on black velvet with eyes that follow you around the room!” When I discovered later that Elwood’s next stop was editing Christian magazines, it was no surprise.

    And yes, we was a prude. I met him at a Philcon in the 70’s. He didn’t stay long – he encountered one of the more flamboyant female fans who dressed outrageously and decided to play with his head. He seemed to feel he encountered the Harlot of Babylon and left quickly after. :-p

    The author of the above quote argued after Laser burned up that Harlequin couldn’t live with the books selling according to quality (or at least the author’s reputation) — some doing 5K, some 15K or more — rather than uniformly; I’d love to see confirmation/correction of that.

    So would I. Harlequin was simply trying to apply the formula that they used for romance to SF – a uniform product where if you like one of their books you might well like another because it would be more of the same.

    Donald Wollheim did essentially the same thing in the early days of DAW Books, and Baen is carrying on that tradition – mid-level action/adventure SFF, where if you liked one book in the line, you were likely to like another and trust the publisher enough to take a chance.

    But even Harlequin didn’t have uniform sales, and some authors became popular and had more books bought, while others didn’t make the cut because the initial effort might have sold but followups didn’t. I don’t believe Harlequin folded the line because sales weren’t uniform – the folded it because sales across the board failed to reach the targets Harlequin wanted. Romance is far more popular than SFF, so sales of an SFF line not matching sales of the romance imprint shouldn’t be a surprise. The significant thing from my POV is that Harlequin tried it in the first place, and provided a market for then new writers like Tim Powers and steady work for Kelly Freas.

    >Dennis

  25. Chip Hitchcock: Lossiter, Noumenon. I picked this up because it sounded a bit mindstretching, but was unpleasantly surprised; the author sets up the debunked notion that personality/skills/… are completely determined by genes… Then Lostetter breaks that idea whenever the plot needs room to grow.

    My impression was that the book was making very clear that there is both a nature and nurture aspect to personality and aptitudes, and that one of the reasons the plan failed so spectacularly was that the planner went with the assumption that it was all genetic — or at least that the nurture part could be enforced — and that the planner assumed that each person originally chosen was an exemplar of their genetic tendencies, rather than an exception.

  26. John A Arkansawyer: The kid made the point, while we were talking this week, that more DVDs of stage performances would make the Broadway musical more accessible. It’s not like we could afford to go to Manhattan and try for a cheap ticket to Rent. Very few folks can.

    I would love to be able to access Broadway musicals in this way. Even in a good year, the chances that I could go to NYC for a show are pretty much nonexistent. And a DVD release of a Broadway production, even if not released in the same year as the play, would be (I should think) considered a substantially-new version of an in-person play, such that it would be eligible, if you could get enough people to nominate it.

  27. Y’all who are interested in accessing stage events should keep checking the Fathom Events website. I don’t especially like Broadway and I haven’t kept track of those, but these days many stage events — opera, ballet, plays — are getting HD broadcasts. My mom and I go to most of the “Live in HD” Met Opera broadcasts, and we often see Bolshoi Ballet broadcasts as well. And just a couple of weeks ago we went to see the HD broadcast of the Hamlet production that had Benedict Cumberbatch in it. So it’s worth checking Fathom to see if something from Broadway comes along!

  28. Broadway musicals (and plays) available on DVD tend to be those picked up for PBS Great Performances. Last fall, you could’ve seen She Loves Me, Indecent, Holiday Inn or Present Laughter on PBS. Of those, Indecent and Present Laughter (the two plays, although Indecent did have some music) opened in 2017 but the two musicals opened in 2016. Still, if you look at the filmed performance as a film instead of a stage performance, maybe the broadcast date should be what’s important and not the opening night of the show. It’s not the same as the stage show, after all, what with camera angles and closeups and being able to go back and watch your favorite scene or song over again. There are a bunch of things sent to movie theaters from England, like National Theatre Live or shows from The Globe, some operas and ballets, too. I haven’t seen any of those available to buy on DVD, though. I don’t think the Great Performances things are available to buy, either, but they may be later if they’re like last year’s Gypsy, which was not a Broadway show but from London, although not NT Live or The Globe, and IS on DVD. You would still need to figure out what counts as the eligibility period and whether something like one of the two parts of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child counts for 2016, when they opened in London, or 2018, when they open in New York, or some other date if they get picked up by Great Performances, which isn’t likely to be anytime soon for a hot property like that.

  29. Robert Reynolds says 12) If they want to be encompassing with regard to disabilities, they might want to include images of people on crutches. Having been on crutches prior to increasing use of a wheelchair (I still use crutches at home, over predictable surfaces) the two have very different sets of limitations and require different mindsets.

    The last time that I on crutches for an extended period was after knee surgery from a motorcycle accident thirty years ago. I’ve been wearing a sling when out and about on my very slowing healing left shoulder injury since the accident that caused it some months ago. It’s interesting to see how it effects folks as they get incredibly courteous.

    I saw the future of disabled assistance vehicles outside the local Westin sometimes in the past month. There was a conference there on them. Some literally looked like articulated exoskeletons, others were a tractor like unit for farming, and another was designed for MS inflicted folk.

    I’m personally looking to digital agents that are intelligent enough to assist me in overcoming my almost complete loss of reliable short term memory.

  30. DMcCunney on March 24, 2018 at 3:02 pm said:

    [many pixels deleted]

    I don’t believe Harlequin folded the line because sales weren’t uniform – the folded it because sales across the board failed to reach the targets Harlequin wanted.

    In the late 70s/early 80s when I worked at WaldenBooks we received monthly shipments of the new Harlequin romances. Something like 5 or 6 cartons for the Harlequin spinner, much like this: https://www.demco.com/products/Furniture/Displays/Multimedia/Revolving-Video-Paper-Spinners/_/A-B00173277 . And the sell through was incredible, probably something like 90%, so yes, Harlequin probably had high hopes.

  31. (15) I feel compelled to object to the lyrics in that flaming tomb clip. The resurrection story is not three days and three nights – it’s two nights a day and two fractions of a day. Let’s not confuse cardinal numbers and ordinal numbers this Easter.

  32. Seriously, WTF.

    From the first paragraph of the SFF book I just opened, by a purported NYT and International Bestselling Author, published by a major publisher:

    [the planet] rotated in the same direction as Earth, so sunrise was still in the East.

    I’m going to keep reading for a bit, to see if the rest of the book is better, but wow, is this an inauspicious beginning. 🙄

  33. But on the neighbouring planet it rotated the other way and they were forced to swap north and south. Eventually the two planets went to war as they couldn’t agree on which of their sun’s poles was the northern one.

  34. JJ on March 24, 2018 at 5:03 pm said:

    Seriously, WTF.

    From the first paragraph of the SFF book I just opened, by a purported NYT and International Bestselling Author, published by a major publisher:

    [the planet] rotated in the same direction as Earth, so sunrise was still in the East.

    I’m going to keep reading for a bit, to see if the rest of the book is better, but wow, is this an inauspicious beginning.

    So, the book has sort of slipped a gear?

  35. From Wikipedia: Gear’s [historical fiction] writing was inspired by historical inaccuracies he encountered in reading historical fiction.

    Apparently he feels no similar compunctions about SFF. 🙄

  36. That feeling when your fever breaks and you discover the book you spent all day reading doesn’t really exist.

  37. [the planet] rotated in the same direction as Earth, so sunrise was still in the East.

    I define “north [rotational] pole” using the right-hand rule: your fingers point in the direction the planet rotates, so your thumb points toward the north rotational pole. (It makes the sun rise in the east, every time.)

  38. Hmm, would a new production of a Shakespeare play be eligible, I wonder? It would surely count as roughly like a film remake. Unlikely to make the ballot, of course, but I don’t nominate based on what I think will get wider support.

    The NT is pretty good about broadcasting some of its plays to cinemas around the UK.

    (3) Kurt Busiek Option

    Yaaay! *kermitflail*

    (4) The Unforgotten

    Wow, that was very interesting, I’d never heard of Laser Books before.

    (9) About Those SJW Credentials

    My understanding of it is that cats lash/wag their tails when they’re stimulated, not necessarily just when they’re angry. You see them doing it when they’re figuring out a puzzle, for example.

    (12) Accessible Emojis

    I have some minor quibbles about the self-propel wheelchair (the wheels are too far back and the feet too far forward for a good active user ‘chair, but that might be dictated by the image size) and I, too, hope this will be expanded later on, but this is certainly a good start. Not sure about using the ASL sign for Deaf. Not necessarily very universal.

    I’m bemused by how many people in comment threads elsewhere have protested the inclusion because “they’d only be used to mock people” – are they unaware that disabled people use the internet too?

    (15) Video of the Day

    Oh my. Quite impressed the guy managed to keep singing.

    @Charon D

    That guide to Rabbit is thoroughly charming. 🙂

  39. #2 Di Filippo’s collection “Lost Pages” is a great place to start, if you want to get introduced to his writing. My personal favorite: “The Happy Valley at the End of the World” features Antoine de St. Exupery flying out of a plague-ridden Europe to find Beryl Markham in a remote valley in Africa. There’s a surprise cameo role at the end of the tale which seems like a sucker punch at first, but then fits perfectly when you think about it. Most of all, you can just feel the humor and roaring good time Di Filippo had writing those slip-stream fantasies.

  40. @Mary Francis: I specifically did not privilege one piece of advice over the other; I said there were days when plan B was needed, where Bradbury claimed that plan A was everything.

    @Joshua K: thanks for the correction; as you note, those are very specialized instances. (IIRC there was a discussion of Oor Wombat’s Hugo acceptance at Helsinki being eligible.)

    @Dennis McCunney: my experience with color was that the theoretical palette did not vary — but what could be achieved varied according to the quality of the separations, which came in a range of prices covering about an order of magnitude. Handwork could also make a difference; I spent several hours at the printer tweaking ink feeds to get the least-bad reproductions of the wide assortment of palettes and techniques in the FSTarot — work that I doubt Harlequin did (but that might have made a difference if they were printing many different covers at once, which I expect they did — cf the story about why Astounding was founded). I suppose Harlequin could have found a cover stock so cheap it wasn’t coated on even one side, but after >40 years I don’t know that this could be shown (e.g. by reflectance measurements). And while Freas was certainly good enough to work with palette restrictions, I wonder whether the art director would have told him enough to be useful, given the statement that there was no back-and-forth with him.
    I’ve heard about “trapping” (inks mixing as laid down on the paper) as an issue in color printing; I can imagine that being an issue given cheap production, but have never seen a clear example and so can’t guess whether it would produce that murk.

    @JJ: for that ship, the plan didn’t fail extensively until the accident. And genes-over-all wasn’t just the planner’s assumption, but accepted by almost all of the crew.

    @JJ (re plays): from what I’ve read, the DVD is an attempt to exactly reproduce the stage experience; e.g., departed cast of Into the Woods were called back for one performance (and some pickups) in front of a live audience. decent camera work certainly deepens the experience (as I’ve seen in NT Live productions of Follies and Threepenny Opera), but I wouldn’t count it as a different show. (Absent a clear rule, I would however not expect an administrator to overrule ballots; I expect somebody will propose a rule if there are ever enough nominations to raise the possibility.) In case you haven’t seen: http://ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk/ is a good place to find out about videos of theater occasionally shown in cinemas — not nearly as convenient as a DVD, but a better experience unless you have a very serious home system, and much less noise than Fathom, which I see mostly doing reruns of movies of varying quality.

    @Meredith: Oh my. Quite impressed the guy managed to keep singing. Why? I assume they’d rehearsed….

  41. I saw one of the National Theatre Live plays, and before it started there was an ambient noise recording of an audience talking while waiting for the play to start. I was, of course, sitting in a movie theater with people talking while waiting for the “movie” to begin, but the movie audience was much smaller.

    I saw the Cumberbatch/Miller Frankenstein, with Cumberbatch as the Creature, one Halloween season. I was hoping that the next year the theater would show the other version, but it didn’t happen.

    I think this is the show NT Live gets asks the most about when the home DVDs will be released. Their answer is the same time as all their other shows will: never.

  42. A new production of a Shakespeare play—or of something specifically SFF, like R.U.R—should be eligible, I think. And if enough Hugo voters agreed with me, the administrators would probably go along with that, based on their general tendency to leave as many decisions as possible to the nominators. They might move the nominations from “short form” to “long form,” or “that’s a dramatic presentation, not a related work,” but I doubt they’d want to decide how much originality is needed for something to count as a remake rather than a reprint/re-release.

    If I wanted to nominate something like that, I would put it on my ballot as “Director Name’s R.U.R” (or “Leading Actor’s R.U.R.” or even “the 2018 Broadway production of R.U.R., starring X and Y,” whatever I thought would be clear and recognizable).

  43. @Camestros —

    Eventually the two planets went to war as they couldn’t agree on which of their sun’s poles was the northern one.

    It’s the one on top, of course.

    @Jeff —

    I saw the Cumberbatch/Miller Frankenstein, with Cumberbatch as the Creature, one Halloween season. I was hoping that the next year the theater would show the other version, but it didn’t happen.

    Oh, I so wanted to see that — either version. It played at our local theaters (not quite local to me — local to Nashville), but I wasn’t able to get there. 🙁

    We are considering going to the National Theatre broadcasts of Julius Caesar and/or Macbeth, but Caesar is being played in modern dress — which neither of us have much patience for. The Macbeth broadcast is farther out, and we’re still considering.

  44. @Chip —

    @Meredith: Oh my. Quite impressed the guy managed to keep singing. Why? I assume they’d rehearsed….

    Have you actually watched the video, Chip? I don’t think they’d rehearsed for fire extinguishers and people running all over the stage putting out flaming props!

  45. @Contrarius: I watched the video until I got fed up with the text and music, after the flames were high but before the chaos you report. I’m still unsurprised the singer kept on; the rehearsal may have been worse.

    @Jeff Smith: I’m unsurprised that NT says they’ll never do DVDs; they probably would have to get everyone (backstage, not just actors) who agreed to the short-release film to agree again to a DVD, and someone would probably hold out for more money than is feasible. I wonder whether they’re thinking of this going forward, or have already tried to get an agreement and had too much front money demanded.

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