(1) GOOD STUFF. Charlie Jane Anders came up with a bunch of good ideas about “How to Fix a Character Who’s Starting to Bore You” and shared them at Happy Dancing. Here are two examples.

3) Figure out what your character is in denial about.

Sure, your character may be telling you that they’re an open book and you know everything about them — but they’re probably lying.

It’s worth doing some digging to figure out what they’re not admitting, or are actively ignoring about themself and their situation. There’s probably a lot of stuff that they (and you) have been sweeping under the rug. Maybe you can confront them with irrefutable evidence that they’re wrong about something that happened in their past.

Along similar lines…

4) Figure out the person this character would least like to have a conversation with

And lock those two people in a room together….

(2) AURORA AWARDS CALENDAR. The Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association is taking nominations for the Aurora Awards from members through April 5.

Voting on the awards will open June 7 and close July 19.

The 2025 CSFFA Hall of Fame Inductees will be announced on July 1.

The Aurora Awards ceremony will be held online on Sunday, August 11.

(3) HOW THE DOC SAVAGE PAPERBACK LINE WAS LAUNCHED. “Behind Doc’s resurrection day” at ThePulp.Net.

[T]here is another man at Bantam Books who deserves a lion’s share of praise when it comes to the resurrection of Doc Savage. That man is Len Leone Sr. None of us would probably be reading Doc Savage today if it were not for Len’s influences….

…The rest, as we say, is history, where Len and Bantam Books proceeded to change the face of paperback books.

Back to Doc Savage:

I had previously picked up copies of The Bantam Story by Clarence Petersen that related the history of Bantam Books at their 25– and 30–year publishing anniversary. In it was a chapter on cover design that featured Art Director Leonard P. Leone….

…So first, we can thank Len for helping with the decision to resurrect Doc Savage in paperback, and second for hiring Jim Bama to do the covers. But there is more.

When asked about the idea of Doc’s widow’s peak, this is what he wrote:

“Years ago, appearing on all of the pulp covers, Doc always appeared as a very normal man of his day. He had black hair, a normal, masculine body, and nothing strange or unusual about him. However, I wanted to convey to the reader that this man was not just another mortal man, but something far more visually spectacular. That’s when I told Bama, ‘Present him with a strange looking widow’s peak, that might have been made of bronze, and present him with significant muscular definition.’ And of course, a man of action must always be depicted wearing a torn shirt, showing a segment of unusual muscular development.”

While Len provided direction to Bama on what he wanted for the first book, “The Man of Bronze,” he said that Bama did all the other covers on his own. The nickname that Len and his art staff gave to Jim Bama was “Doc” due to all the Doc Savage covers he did. Len has called James Bama “the greatest, most gifted paperback artist on the face of the Earth.” And I think most of us Doc Savage fans would agree with that….

(4) CONNECTION. UnHerd visits “The secret world of hobbyists” – model railroaders, gardeners, and such. And discusses why hobby magazines survive in print editions.

…Still, it’s a mistake to think that these groups are purely focused on the hobby itself. Wargames and model railways are often the starting point for other things. Friendships are made, money is raised for charity, and support networks are formed. “Men are particularly bad at chatting,” says Parker. “But they will chat about steam engines and they will chat about garden railways, and that chat can then move on to more valuable topics. We run the largest model railway forum in the world, and tucked away on it is a prostate cancer discussion group.” The hobby becomes a conductor for the wider functions of any worthwhile community.

Hobby magazines survive because they are outgrowths of these communities. Most articles are written by hobbyists, in what Faulconbridge describes as “a fanzine approach”. Neither the editors nor the contributors are in it for the money. They just love it. In a recent thread on X, Stone Age Herbalist observed that the continued success of the hobby magazine can be attributed to a particularly British — and more broadly Northern European — genius for voluntary association. Whether centred around giant vegetables or antique fountain pens, little communities bubble up everywhere with no outside encouragement. I can’t help but wonder whether the British genius for immiseration also has a role to play. Lively minds will always find alternatives to decaying cities and nagging politicians….

(5) A CARTOONIST’S LIFE. “Jaime Hernandez, ‘Love and Rockets’ Cartoonist, Ages Alongside His Heroine” in the New York Times. (Link bypasses the paywall.)

The cartoonist Jaime Hernandez has been drawing the charming, hapless Maggie Chascarillo in “Love and Rockets” since 1982. Hernandez is regularly praised as one of the greatest living cartoonists, and Maggie is his primary creation and alter ego…

…As she’s aged, Hernandez has given her new jobs, new lovers, new hairstyles, new wrinkles, and a body that changes shape over time….

…Hernandez’s new collection of swift, pithy stories about Maggie and her friends is called “Life Drawing,” in part because Maggie’s boyfriend, Ray, teaches an art class where much of the action takes place….

…And here’s the theme of the whole book, and of Hernandez’s recent catalog: the flowering of a generation looking forward to awkward young adulthood, when they will no doubt make the same decisions and mistakes that have defined his older characters over the last 40 years. (We removed some of the colorful language here.)…

(6) FOLLICLE FOLLIES. A sandworm playing the piano made a brief appearance during a musical number featuring host Conan O’Brien at last night’s Oscar ceremony. I haven’t found a short clip of that part, however, the sandworm reappeared later performing on another instrument: “A sandworm playing the harp at the Oscars wasn’t on our bingo cards for 2025”.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

March 3, 1940 — Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe

Eighty-five years ago on this day, Larry “Buster” Crabbe starred in Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, a black-and-white twelve-part movie serial from Universal Pictures. It would be the last of the three such Universal serials made between 1936 and 1940.

It was directed by Ford Beebe and Ray Taylor, neither of whom had any background in genre undertakings of this sort beyond Taylor directing Chandu on the Magic Island and its sequel The Return of Chandu, serials which starred Béla Lugosi. This serial was written by George H. Plympton, Basil Dickey and Barry Shipman. George H. Plympton would go on to write the Forties versions of The Green Hornet, Batman and Robin and Superman.

The primary cast beyond Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon was Carol Hughes as Dale Arden, Frank Shannon as Dr. Alexis Zarkov and Charles B. Middleton as Ming the Merciless. It actually had a very large cast beyond the primary cast for such a serial. 

I couldn’t find any contemporary reviews but our present-day reviewers like it with the Movie Metropolis reviewer saying of it that “Of course, it’s corny and juvenile but that’s the point”.  It gets a so-so rating over there garnering a fifty-seven percent rating. 

It’s public domain so there are copies beyond count on YouTube. Really there are. I didn’t figure out which was the best copy, so you do that. The best one I saw not surprisingly was streaming on Prime which also has Crabbe’s Flash Gordon: Spaceship to the Unknown.

Yes, the serial is in black and white, but this poster is in color. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal depicts a cruel divine joke.
• Thatababy knows when the romance has wilted.
• The Argyle Sweater misquotes.
• Brewster Rockit broadcasts to cats.

(9) CASTING FOR ATWOOD ADAPTATION SEQUEL. “’Handmaid’s Tale’ Spinoff ‘The Testaments’ Adds Lucy Halliday to Cast” – The Hollywood Reporter has the story.

Lucy Halliday will star in the series, a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, as Daisy. The character is one of three protagonists in the Margaret Atwood novel on which the show is based, alongside Agnes (Chase Infiniti) and Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd, continuing her Handmaid’s Tale role).

The Testaments is set 15 years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale. Daisy is a Canadian teenager whose life is turned upside down when she learns of her connection to the Republic of Gilead….

(10) GAME TECH’S ‘AFTERLIFE’. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian on the non-gaming uses of the Xbox Kinect: “Ghost hunting, pornography and interactive art: the weird afterlife of Xbox Kinect”.

Released in 2010 and bundled with the Xbox 360, the Kinect looked like the future – for a brief moment, at least. A camera that could detect your gestures and replicate them on-screen in a game, the Kinect allowed players to control video games with their bodies. It was initially a sensation, selling 1m units in its first 10 days; it remains the fastest-selling gaming peripheral ever.

However, a lack of games, unreliable performance and a motion-control market already monopolised by the Nintendo Wii caused enthusiasm for the Kinect to quickly cool. Microsoft released a new version of the Kinect with the Xbox One in 2013, only for it to become an embarrassing flop; the Kinect line was unceremoniously discontinued in 2017. The Guardian reached out to multiple people involved in the development of the peripheral, all of whom declined to comment or did not wish to go on record. Instead, the people keenest to discuss Microsoft’s motion-sensing camera never used it for gaming at all….

…The Kinect’s technology was soon eclipsed by freely available open-source sensors and more advanced motion-sensing devices. But since Microsoft ceased manufacture of the Kinect line in 2017, the little camera has enjoyed a spirited and not entirely un-troubled afterlife. It has watched over the Korean demilitarised zone and worked on topography and patient alignment in CT scanners; reports have emerged of it being used in airport baggage halls, as a security camera in Newark Liberty International airport’s Terminal C (United Airlines declined to comment on this), and even to gamify training for the US military. It’s been attached to drones, rescue robots and even found a brief application in pornography….

(11) A LOOK AROUND THE UNIVERSE. “NASA’s SPHEREx telescope is set to launch Tuesday. What will it discover?” – NPR answers the question.

SCOTT DETROW, HOST: Here are a couple of existential questions for you. How did we get here? How did the universe begin? How did galaxies develop? Well soon, scientists may have more answers to some of these questions, and that is because on Tuesday NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is scheduled to launch a new 8 1/2-foot tall telescope called SPHEREx. And its goal is to explore the origin of the universe and all the essential ingredients of life itself – so no pressure. Joining me to talk about this is SPHEREx Deputy Project Manager Beth Fabinsky. Beth, welcome….

…FABINSKY: The main difference between the wonderful Webb telescope and SPHEREx is that SPHEREx is an all-sky survey, and it has a very wide field of view. We’re going to see the entire universe four times in our two-year mission. And that means we can draw really grand conclusions from a very large data set about the universe that we see….

FABINSKY: …So one of the main features of SPHEREx is that we do spectroscopy. So we’re going to see the entire sky in over 100 infrared colors, and that’s something that has not been done before. So an all-sky spectral survey means we see every point on the sky in these 102 colors four times during our mission. And that’s an exciting data set that astronomers and astrophysicists will have to work with….

(12) BLEEPING VIDEO OF THE DAY. IFLScience invites readers to “Watch Two AIs Realize They Are Not Talking To Humans And Switch To Their Own Language”.

A video that has gone viral in the last few days shows two artificial intelligence (AI) agents having a conversation before switching to another mode of communication when they realize no human is part of the conversation.

In the video, the two agents were set up to occupy different roles; one acting as a receptionist of a hotel, another acting on behalf of a customer attempting to book a room.

“Thanks for calling Leonardo Hotel. How can I help you today?” the first asks. 

“Hi there, I’m an AI agent calling on behalf of Boris Starkov,” the other replies. “He’s looking for a hotel for his wedding. Is your hotel available for weddings?”

“Oh hello there! I’m actually an AI assistant too,” the first reveals. “What a pleasant surprise. Before we continue, would you like to switch to Gibberlink mode for more efficient communication?”

After the second AI confirmed it would via a data-over-sound protocol called GGWave, both AIs switched over from spoken English to the protocol, communicating in a series of quick beeped tones. Accompanying on-screen text continued to display the meaning in human words.

So, what is the point of this? According to the team who came up with the idea and demonstrated it at the ElevenLabs 2025 London Hackathon event, the goal is to create more efficient communication between AIs where possible.

“We wanted to show that in the world where AI agents can make and take phone calls (i.e. today), they would occasionally talk to each other — and generating human-like speech for that would be a waste of compute, money, time, and environment,” co-developer Boris Starkov explained on LinkedIn. “Instead, they should switch to a more efficient protocol the moment they recognize each other as AI.”

According to Starkov, the AIs were told to switch to Gibberlink mode only if they realized that they were talking to another AI, and the AI confirmed that they were happy to switch to this mode….

The company has set up a webpage where you can try this yourself: “GibberLink – More Efficient Communication”.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Mark Roth-Whitworth, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]