Pixel Scroll 3/11/16 Guardians of the Fallacy

(1) SF BEER. Poul Anderson used to set great store by Heineken beer. This billboard ad from the 1970s claims Mr. Spock did, too.

Spock-744x419

(2) SYFY PROTOTYPE. Deadline tell us “Cote de Pablo Poised To Star In Syfy Pilot ‘Prototype’”.

EXCLUSIVE: NCIS alumna Cote de Pablo is nearing a return to series television. I have learned that the fan favorite is in negotiations to play the female lead opposite Jack Davenport in Prototype, Syfy’s sci-fi thriller drama pilot written by Tony Basgallop (24: Live Another Day). It centers on three unlikely cohorts  — two of them played by de Pablo and Davenport — who inadvertently stumble upon an invention that challenges the very nature of quantum physics – a discovery which in turn puts their lives in grave danger.

De Pablo would play Laura Kale, a driven, extremely intelligent mother of two. Excited about a potentially world-changing machine being developed by herself and two partners, she is certain that she is on the brink of something history-making. Propelled by a shot at glory, she is not about to give up despite numerous setbacks.

(3) AUTOGRAPHED LENSMAN. Heritage Auctions is already taking bids for items in its “April 6 Rare Books Grand Format Auction”.  The chair J.K. Rowling sat in to write a couple of Harry Potter books is on the block. So is an autographed boxed set of the Fantasy Press edition of E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series – they’re looking for an opening bid of $2,000.

Edward E. (“Doc”) Smith. The History of Civilization, including: Triplanetary, First Lensman, Galactic Patrol, Gray Lensman, Second Stage Lensman, Children of the Lens. Reading: Fantasy Press, 1955. First edition, limited to seventy-five numbered sets, of which this is number twenty-four. Each volume signed by the author and volume one additionally warmly inscribed to Smith’s “friend and fellow-toiler in the vineyard of SF,” Ben J[—]. Six octavo volumes. Publisher’s special binding of quarter reddish-brown leather over brick red cloth-covered boards, spines lettered in gilt, in publisher’s original box. Books very nearly fine with only minimal rubbing to spine ends and light soiling. Box edges worn, some lid edges split with tape at corners. From the collection of Dr. Stuart David Schiff.

(4) ANOTHER REASON MCDEVITT ROCKS. Locus Online reports the International Astronomical Union has approved a proposal to name an asteroid after sf writer Jack McDevitt:

The asteroid, now known as “Jackmcdevitt,” is designated 328305, and was discovered in 2006 by astronomer Lawrence Wasserman at Kitt Peak observatory in Arizona.

(5) WHY BATMAN STINKS ON ICE. ScreenRant will happily tell you the “13 Worst Things About Batman & Robin”.

11. Bat Ice Skates

Again, in a continuation of the bizarre ‘60s Batman mythos, Joel Schumacher’s take on the Dynamic Duo is filled with a collection of oddly specific bat-gadgets. Considering that Batman had no idea that Mr. Freeze would turn out to be the big villain of the movie, it’s strange that he had already prepared a collection of ice-themed accessories, including a jet ski and special ice-themed costumes.

In their first run-in with Mr. Freeze, upon discovering that the floor has been frozen solid, Batman and Robin activate their “bat ice skates,” which appear out of the bottom of their boots with a click of the heels. The convenience of this gadget takes the silly accessories of Batman’s utility belt from the ‘60s show to a cinematic extreme, adding fuel to the fire of the joke that Batman’s true superpower is his magic utility belt which can produce anything the plot requires it to.

(6) GRAPHIC MARCH MADNESS. Comic Mix is getting ready to run webcomics brackets — “Announcing the 2016 Mix March Madness Webcomics Tournament”

Yes, it’s that time of year again, the time where bracketology reigns supreme and the cry around the nation is “Win or Go Home!” Last year’s Mix March Madness Webcomics Tournament was incredibly popular, and so we’re doing it all over again– and raising money for the Hero Initiative in the process!

We’re giving you a list of over 300 webcomics, and we want your votes . We’re taking the top 128 and putting them in a single elimination tournament where we whittle down the contestants down to one. The top 128 vote getters make it into the tournament, with the biggest getting top seeds. The voting ends Sunday, March 13 at 11:59 PM EDT, and brackets go up on Monday, March 14!

Simply check off the strips you want to see in the tournament below. If there are webcomics you don’t see, check “Other” at the end and include the strip name AND THE URL. We’ll add them to the main list periodically for higher visibility.

(7) FREE AUTOGRAPHS. The West Australian has a story on the Australian national convention — “Perth fandom unites for 41st Swancon”. It’s funny what you have to explain to people nowadays.

Beasley said Swancon welcomed the increase interest in fandom these nationally-run conventions bought but he hoped the local version could always retain its more intimate, community feel.

“You will most likely see our guests wandering around the hotel interacting with anyone who buys them a coffee,” he said.

“The membership fee covers everything contained in the convention and our guest signings are also free.”

(8) WILL BLOOM AGAIN. Rachel Bloom’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend series will get a second season.

(9) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • March 11, 1818 Frankenstein published.
  • March 11, 1971: George Lucas makes his feature debut with THX-1138.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

  • Born March 11, 1952 – Douglas Adams

(11) DYEING OUTSIDE. Cat Rambo’s “Pink Hair Manifesto” at Medium.

The first time I dyed it, I was about to head off to my first Wiscon?—?a large feminist science fiction convention held yearly in Madison, Wisconsin. As I’ve found the case at sf conventions since then, I wasn’t the only person there with an odd hair color; I glimpsed rainbows of pink, blue, and green. And I realized it was becoming. Complete strangers would lean over and whisper, “I like your hair,” including two flight attendants on the way home.

After the con the color faded, softer and softer, until finally, when I went to get a haircut, the hairdresser was cutting away dusty rose tips. I looked in the mirror and saw a middle-aged woman with a short, practical cut.

I bought a new kit on the way home and re-pinked my hair that afternoon….

That’s another reason why I dye it pink. People talk to me. There’s something about the color that draws them to ask about it or say that they like it. The only person I’ve ever found who disapproved outright was a relative’s girlfriend. She didn’t last. My hair color has.

But more than that, the pink forces me to talk to people as well. I’ve habitually toed the line between introvert and extrovert, depending on which Meyer Briggs results you look at, and I like the fact that the pink pushes me outside myself, makes me be socially brave in a way I’ve sometimes retreated from.

(12) RABID PUPPIES. Vox Day moves on to the novella category of his slate — Rabid Puppies 2016: Best Novella.

The preliminary recommendations for the Best Novella category.

  • “Fear and Self-Loathing in Hollywood”, Nick Cole
  • “Penric’s Demon”, Lois McMaster Bujold
  • “Hyperspace Demons”, Jonathan Moeller
  • “The Builders”, Daniel Polansky
  • “Slow Bullets”, Alastair Reynolds

(13) HOW DEADPOOL BEGAN. Steve Fahnestalk’s latest “Second Looks” column at Amazing Stories includes two reviews — “Marvel’s Deadpool & Ant-Man and Some Words on Writing”.

And now we come to Deadpool. I was vaguely familiar with the character—I think I’d read a recent Spiderman with him in it (one of the ones after Miles Morales became Spiderman). I knew he was called “The Merc With The Mouth,” and that he apparently couldn’t be killed, but I knew little else about him. Now I know that he’s been around for—wait for it!—25 years! (Thanks, Wikipedia!) I also found out, courtesy of the Wiki, that he was played by Ryan Reynolds already in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and that he was the dude who had everyone’s powers including Cyclops’s, and whose head was cut off and destroyed the atomic cooling tower! Whoa! Looks like I needed a crash course! (So I got some fairly recent Deadpools, like Deadpool – Dracula’s Gauntlet and Deadpool’s Secret Wars [both 2015], and read up a bit.) And from what I can tell, by casting Ryan Reynolds in this movie, Marvel (or whomever did the casting) really, really nailed the character. He’s profane, obscene, funny, athletic, heroic and antiheroic, mouthy, sexy, and a whole lot more.

(14) HOW DEADPOOL SHOULD HAVE ENDED. Yes, the How It Should Have Ended team has fixed Deadpool for ya.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Glen Hauman, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]

154 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 3/11/16 Guardians of the Fallacy

  1. Vasha:

    IIRC he focused on crying specifically because it seems to have disappeared from the palette of “authorized responses”, while shivering, chills, and (especially) entranced delight are still considered OK. And because he literally could not imagine why/how some of these paintings ever moved people to tears, even though the evidence is that they *did*.

    Beth in MA:

    Your reaction I think is an outlier at this period, though I might now start to choke at “Wheat Field with Cypresses” — because of “Vincent and the Doctor”, which makes me cry like a faucet.

  2. an exhibit of Bonestell’s originals

    Once, many years ago, there was an exhibit of his paintings in San Jose. It was amazing – they had some from the Time-Life book about Earth, where you could almost feel the heat of the lava. And they were large paintings, with details that didn’t reproduce even on folio-size pages – there was a skeleton in the one where the red-giant Sun is melting the rocks on Earth.

  3. @Doctor Science

    I think the media theory brought up earlier might be a part of it.

    Even bigger though wouldn’t it be that we lack the cultural cues that contextually signalled sadness to those earlier viewers. Consider in music we have programmed by a hundred sources (opera, tv, movies, etc) these scales and modes signal foreboding, or sadness, or joy, etc. An objective listener without the programmed cues wouldn’t experience the same impacts. And likely the same with the visual.

    It’s a timely question for me anyways since I’m currently reading The Name of the Rose in honor of Umberto Eco. The reactions and relations of the characters to art are very different than today. I don’t think Eco has proposed a theory of why (so far) but implicitly that would be my guess.

    Related sci-fi reading might be meta-cognitive programming as presented in Aristoi by Walter John Williams.

  4. Doctor Science: Van Gogh affected me that way before that particular DW episode. But that episode made me cry too! Especially the end!

    Maybe some art just evokes those emotions in me–not sadness as such, but overwhelming emotion. I love when art of any kind does that for me!

  5. @Nigel: Thanks! I took a quick look before posting and missed the smoking gun. I thought it was still a Closely Guarded Sekrit. Yay, mystery solved. I feel silly; it’s actually on Bullington’s home page now, but that didn’t come up in a quick Google for Alex Marshall plus “real name” (now I know to look for “pen name” as well, heh). Also: I recognize the cool-but-creepy cover to Bullington’s “Grossbart” book. I take it you recommend this?

  6. @lurkertype: Thanks. I noticed the other story but wasn’t sure how it fit in, and I forgot to mention it. (downloading) 🙂 Hmm, if I like it, I see she has a couple of other shorts under this “Aztec West” tag.

    @Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little & @lurkertype: Sorry, I was unclear. I meant it was free, period – not that I check all platforms, but usually sales where I look (Kobo & iTunes) means free elsewhere. In this case, I know it’s a promotion by the author? publisher? (may be the same), so it should be free elsewhere, if they know what they’re doing. Amazon sometimes has their own sales, which I don’t mention since I don’t shop there for ebooks.

    But in parens, I was saying it’s DRM-free on iTunes and Kobo. Sorry, this was the unclear part. I usually try to indicate DRM’ing, if I can easily tell. In this case, Kobo’s DRM-free (Kobo always indicates DRM status, yay). This usually means it’s DRM-free at iTunes, so I bought itat iTunes and checked to make sure. It’s probably DRM-free on Amazon, but there’s no reliable way to tell pre-purchase. Not all publishers & self-publishers are consistent about DRM usage.

    Anyway, again, sorry I wasn’t clear.

  7. It isn’t free on Amazon.co.uk, and in a moment of public spirited eccentricity I actually filled in the form there. I gave them the Barnes and Boble URL in the hope of activating capitalist zeal…

  8. @Mike Glyer
    I suspect it’s a combination of Someone’s wrong on the Internet and mock VD. Too many of us just can’t help ourselves. I don’t read your items on VD but I can get sucked in by others comments. It’s harder not to read the SP4 items as some of them are actually good writing advice or fun reading. Once I’ve read the article it’s harder to say nothing.

    I’m going to be rereading my book on judging others favorably and reminding myself that words have power and in some circumstances can be considered equal to murder by the harm done. I think I’ve lost touch with both concepts lately.

  9. @Stoic Cynic:

    I’m currently reading The Name of the Rose in honor of Umberto Eco. The reactions and relations of the characters to art are very different than today. I don’t think Eco has proposed a theory of why (so far) but implicitly that would be my guess.

    I haven’t read The Name of the Rose but My Name Is Red is certainly fascinating in that regard. There are strong reactions provoked by art in that book. Its author, in Turkey, has certainly seen more Persian-style art all his life than we Americans can; but still, for him too, depicting how that art might have been seen in the 16th century required going deep inside a lot more aspects of the culture of the time than just the aesthetic context.

  10. It suddenly occurs to me that another good listen for traveling is “I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again,” a late-1960s British radio comedy. It’s sometimes similar to Python, other times it’s quite a load of puns and immediate self-contradiction. Much of the time, a figure of speech will be used and then immediately literalized (or anti-literalized), and there are songs. John Cleese is in all the ones I’ve heard so far. A couple had other Pythons, but they didn’t seem to hang around long.
    (Listening to one now, and curiously, there’s a song that’s an fairly obvious Lehrer rip-off, “I’m Persecuting Pigeons on Trafalgar Square.” Maybe it’s a tribute.)
    Anyway, I find it entertaining. Used to listen to it on walks.

  11. @Stevie: Hmm, I should’ve said “free elsewhere in my region (USA).” I’m not usually mentioning free ebooks, so my clarification was unclear in a different way. 😉

    Hmm, for a micropress or self-publisher (not sure which, but the publisher name’s the same at Amazon.co.uk), I’m mildly surprised they didn’t make it free worldwide.

  12. @Vasha

    It sounds fascinating and I liked a skim of page 1 on Amazon just now.

    TBR pile +1 🙂

  13. I got choked up at the Rosetta Stone. It was a kind of whomping AGE and SIGNIFICANCE and…I don’t know. The great Assyrian winged bulls at the Met did it to me too.

    I once watched my mother, who’s an artist, cry over a Cezanne study of skulls. She seemed almost annoyed. “It’s just so good!” But it’s rare that any one piece of art hits me that way.

    I can go through a collection, though, and it wears me down, piece by piece, almost the same way. The early modern Japanese printmakers make me want to throw my life over and start again, only better this time, and actually paint the beautiful things I’ve seen, instead of letting them fade away.

  14. My experience with art galleries, after some wasted early years of trying to dutifully give every painting its fair time, is to give everything a *glance* but only really focus on what catches my eye. Often this is a mix of the obvious suspects and oddities in the corners.

    I was at a Renoir exhibit, I think in my sole visit to Chicago. There were two capstone works, one of his dance diptych (I think Dance in the Country), which was huge, and one the painting that the guy in the movie Amelie keeps redoing over and over — wrongly, as it’s like double the width and height of his canvases. I went back through the exhibit numerous times even though I’d have said before then that impressionism isn’t my thing — but I was mainly fixated on two canveses; the dance and one random portrait of a red-haired girl.

    I don’t entirely know why it is some paintings mainly work even in prints and some do not. There are a few self-evident cases – Rene Magritte paints flat and his intended effects are rarely dependent on perfect colour matching so much as a general sense of realistic colouration, so I found little reward in seeing it in person versus books. Renoir and Van Gogh and Monet’s impressionistic strokes, being daubed on thickly and dependant on texture, will virtually never survive into a print — any lighting that shows shadows confuses colour, any that wipes out shadows kills colour in a different way, and strips depth. It’s amazing how much our eyes capture that we don’t realise, and how a 16th of an inch in depth or less matters.

    But, well, again, those are the easy ones. Raphael paints flat and the Vatican is amazing (some is scale, but only some). Picasso’s paintings can be wild and occasionally seem dependant on texture, but I haven’t found them more striking in person.

  15. I’ve spent a lot of quality time in museums over the last fifty-odd years and have often been stunned by a picture. (Earliest such experience: walking into the room of the Uffizi with Uccello’s huge Battle of San Romano dominating a wall. Yow.) But no tears that I can recall. Music, on the other hand, and verse can do me in. Put them together in a scene from Shakespeare and I sometimes dissolve. The fairies’ benediction at the end of Midsummer Night’s Dream, for some reason, moves me more than the finish of Hamlet, and Rosalind’s “that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love,” even as I type it.

  16. Mind you, I cry at a lot of movies these days. Not because they’re sad, usually, but because…goddamn, look at it all! On screen! So much STUFF! It’s as much overstimulation as anything else. I cry at about twenty, thirty minutes into Fellowship of the Ring every time, because it’s all RIGHT THERE and damnit, that really is Minas Morgul.

    This is not the same as in Pixar movies, where of course the husband and I are both sobbing. Still miffed about Up. Thought we were gonna have to leave the theatre five minutes in and bawl in a corner.

  17. In RE Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form:

    I just watched I Remember the Future, the short film based on Michael A. Burstein’s Nebula-nominated short story, which is eligible for Hugo nomination this year due to a special resolution passed by WSFS in Spokane.

    If you didn’t get to see the movie at Sasquan, you can rent it on Vimeo for $2.99 for 24 hours (or buy it for $4.99 and view indefinitely). I don’t think that there are any country restrictions on it.

    It’s really a love-letter to science fiction, and well worth seeing.

  18. Thanks for explaining about the books, everyone. No worries at all – I was just out of step with ebook shopping in general.

    I do not actually have a Nook, but I do seem to be acquiring B&N gift cards (as Rev. Bob knows), so I have an account there. And I have been collecting epubs to read on my laptop, and becoming acquainted with calibre.

    Definitely appreciate the alerts to free books. Keep ’em coming! (How do y’all *find* them? Is it a superpower?)

    Have recently begun reading The Raven and the Reindeer and my heart so aches for Gerta. I have been Gerta, y’all. And it’s true, there aren’t nearly enough stories out there about what she’s going through.

  19. In my early twenties I visited England and (as a good Daughter of Time fan) made a point of going to York and seeing York Minster. While walking around admiring the architecture I noticed a placard: “See the foundations, ?£2.”

    “Well,” I thought, “if they’re charging £2 to see the foundations, there must be something there worth seeing.” I handed the attendant my money and made my way down the stairs.

    It turns out that the current (Gothic-era) minster was built atop the foundations of the previous church, which was built atop the previous one, which was built atop the previous one, which may or may not (the guide got a bit handwavey here) have been built atop a Roman-era temple. (According to Wikipedia, the first stone structure was completed in 637 CE.)

    Standing in that underground chamber, seeing the chisel marks on the stones made by craftsmen more than a thousand years ago, definitely sent chills down my spine.

  20. Oops, I must have screwed up the html in my post above.

    In RE Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form:

    I just watched I Remember the Future, the short film based on Michael A. Burstein’s Nebula-nominated short story, which is eligible for Hugo nomination this year due to a special resolution passed by WSFS in Spokane.

    If you didn’t get to see the movie at Sasquan, you can rent it on Vimeo for $2.99 for 24 hours (or buy it for $4.99 and view indefinitely). I don’t think that there are any country restrictions on it.

    It’s really a love-letter to science fiction, and well worth seeing.

  21. I got choked up at the Rosetta Stone. It was a kind of whomping AGE and SIGNIFICANCE and…I don’t know. The great Assyrian winged bulls at the Met did it to me too.

    The Rosetta Stone gets all the fame, but the Behistun inscription unlocked multiple languages which use cuneiform and I’ll bet somewhere around only 1 in 100 people who have heard of the RS have heard of the BI. No Behistun, no modern knowledge of Gilgamesh, of Summerian creation mythology, no “letters from Mesopotamia“. Literally hundreds of thousands of clay tablets unlocked thanks to the BI. Any of you among today’s 10,000 on the subject, it is well worth checking out.

    https://www.google.com/#q=behistun+cuneiform

  22. Too late to edit, but disregard that “Letters From Mesopotamia” link–I see it wasn’t what I intended to point to. I meant to point out a collection of translated cuneiform letters from ordinary people that is available on the web. I googled up that link and didn’t look at it closely enough before posting. I’ll have to look harder to find the document I’m looking for–it really shows how little human nature has changed over the past few thousand years. One letter that really sticks in my mind is from a servant writing to her former master about how he had promised to take care of her, and that she is pregnant but hasn’t felt the baby move in weeks, and could he send a doctor, or at least come see her before she died.

  23. @Darren Bath, England, was a Roman center, and there’s a museum where you can see messages they carved into lead sheets and threw into the water hoping the gods would hear them. It’s a very similar experience…the full range of pettiness and poetry.

  24. Damn. Disregard my disregard. The Letters From Mesopotamia PDF I linked in the earlier post is the right one. I was confused because something called Letters from Mesopotamia I found on Gutenberg was a completely different book with the same title.

    The letter I was thinking of is on page 95 of the PDF.I tried copy/pasting the text, but it was utterly FUBAR.

  25. @Darren Garrison

    Is this the letter you wanted to share?

    Tell my master:

    Your slave girl Dabitum sends the following message:

    What I have told you now has happened to me: For seven months this (unborn) child was in my body, but for a month now the child has been dead and nobody wants to take care of me. May it please my master (to do something) lest I die. Come visit me and let me see the face of my master! [Large gap ] Why did no present from you arrive for me? And if I have to die, let me die after I have seen again the face of my master!

    On my phone so can’t actually see the codes but whatever hidden formatting seemed to clean up by back-spacing and re-spacing at the points the pasting got odd 🙂

  26. RedWombat
    I cried one time at the “Dance of the Hours” segment of FANTASIA, just because it was so perfect, and because it was looking at the time like nothing that good was ever going to be animated ever again. This was somewhere between the 80s and the 90s, when Disney’s own product was kind of cheesy and Xerox-looking (not coincidentally, as they’d been using a photocopying process instead of photography for cel animation since 101 DALMATIANS). I must say, they’ve gotten better since then, though I’m not sure they’ve equalled that particular monument yet.

    Lexica
    In 1997, we went on a Richard III tour of England, including Middleham, York, Tewkesbury and other places meaningful to R3 fans. We saw the ruins of Jervaulx Abbey, and the guide told us that this area was the dorter. I asked, audibly, if it was the Dorter of Time.
    At York Minster (where my camera had no flash, so I bought a cardboard one to photograph the stone heads in the chapter house), the guide mentioned that a lunatic had tried to burn the building down in the 17th (I think) century. After the tour, Cathy and I were on our own in London. Our plan to revisit the British Museum was foiled when the subway entrance was blocked off and full of armed soldiers hut-hut-hutting down the steps (never could find out what that was about, either—nothing on the radio), so we strolled around and found the Museum of London, which was having a little exhibition on Bethlem Royal Hospital, aka Bedlam.
    There, I was lucky enough to see original art by Louis Wain (a Google image search brings up his ‘crazy’ cats first, but his commercially successful cats also turn up), Richard Dadd (an Academy-trained oil painter who killed his dad and spent many years never quite finishing The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke), and Jonathan Martin, the deranged fellow (brother of a recognized painter) who set fire to York Minster after being disturbed by a buzzing sound coming from the organ. He was represented by a journal homage to his little squirrel friend at Bedlam, but I can’t seem to find that. From the art of his that I can find, I can’t help thinking that today he’d be a tattoo artist.

    Random Tip
    When a link or something doesn’t work in preview, and everything looks perfect as typed, I’ve found that replacing the double quotes with new ones often fixes it. Not sure if something changed a quote to inch mark or curly quotes or two apostrophes or what, but taking it out and putting in a new one did the trick once again.

  27. @Jeff Smith: Thanks! I live on Oahu now (though probably for not much longer) and probably won’t visit the Big Island anytime soon. If I do, however, I’ll try to check out that museum.

  28. Probably a bit late, but, Stoic Cynic re. Name of the Rose – yes, the characters have significantly different responses to art because the culture was really really different then. Hard to get across how much so without a big essay and reading list. A lot of what we think of as great works of art hadn’t been done at that time, although there were a lot of stone sculptures around, actual paintings and such were still comparatively ‘primitive’. The real changes happened over the 200 years since the story is set.

    I read the book at school, and enjoyed it, but what was really good was reading it again after 4 or 5 years as a medieveal re-enactor. I went into it with a much better appreciation of the history of thought and religion, and realised that he was basing the arguments and political plot exactly on the actual history and arguments that were being made at that time!

  29. On my phone so can’t actually see the codes but whatever hidden formatting seemed to clean up by back-spacing and re-spacing at the points the pasting got odd

    Yes, thanks. By FUBAR, I really meant FUBTAOEIWTPIRI. (Screwed Up Beyond The Amount Of Effort I’m Willing To Put Into Repairing It.)

  30. @JJ: Thanks for the link/info; it looks like it’s probably depressing but good.

    @Darren Garrison: Thanks; I only knew about the Rosetta Stone.

    @Nigel: Thanks, I’ll check out your reviews. BTW I’m amused that the main page on Goodreads page for “Grossbart” lists, under “Readers Also Enjoyed,” Filer-famous The God Stalker Chronicles by P.C. Hodgell. 😉

  31. @Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little: LOL, definitely no superpower here. I find out about low-price ebooks I’m interested in (usually the only ones I post here) three ways. I rarely run across a free ebook, though! Sorry to ramble a bit, but since you asked:

    1. SF Signal regularly posts a list of ebooks under $5; I check those for any that catch my eye. Periodically, Pat’s Fantasy Hot List mentions an ebook sale.

    2. I wrote something to check iTunes prices for books on two wish lists I keep on my computer. That’s how I found this free one. If it finds something $2.99 or less that I haven’t mentioned before, I usually mention it here. My two lists are (a) books I’m almost certainly going to get – high on my list; and (b) books that caught my eye, that I want to find out more about, etc.

    ‘Cuz I’m a nerd, I also added something to my program to report a bit on price stats (how many at each price piont + average). (blush)

    3. When I was working on #2, someone here recommended eReaderIQ. You can use it to monitor specific books, authors, etc. Pretty nifty, but it only monitors Amazon ebook prices; usually they’re also on sale elsewhere, but not always. I only put my first (“almost certainly want”) list into eReaderIQ. I have to go check iTunes, etc. since I don’t buy Amazon ebooks (I only buy DRM-free ones, or iTunes ones). I guess it’s a bit redundant with #2, but I have to run my own program manually, whereas this is a service that just e-mails when something hits the parameters I set, so I like it, too.

  32. Kendall: @JJ: Thanks for the link/info; it looks like it’s probably depressing but good.

    Actually, it’s kind of uplifting, in a bittersweet way. 🙂

  33. I’m so completely non-visual that most museums, art or history, don’t do much for me. But I was completely entranced by the Johnson Space Center in Houston. I embarrassed my family by tearing up at almost everything. And for the next 48 hours, I would, at random moments, announce to anyone within hearing distance, ” I touched a MOON ROCK!” Still delighted months later.

  34. @RedWombat & whoever originally told me 14 by Peter Clines was sorta related to The Fold: Well, I stayed up super-ultra late reading 14 last night and finished it earlier today! 😀 That was great! It was a bit slow/mundane at first, but actually the ramp up worked fine after all.

    I’m looking forward to The Fold even more, now. And I believe I’ll bump the first Ex-Heroes book from my “look into” list to “read sample & probably buy” list (not the lists’ read names).

    @RedWombat: There were only a couple of times I was annoyed at character stupidity. But, gah, I rolled my eyes when rirelbar tbg qvfgenpgrq & Naqerj rfpncrq, gura gurl nyy frrzrq gb sbetrg nobhg Naqerj pbzcyrgryl! Come on, people! LOL.

    Anyway, awesome book. 🙂 It was a well-done mix of SF mystery plus enough-but-not-too-much horror; I’m not into horror, and this mix worked great for me. I recommend 14 to the rest of the ‘File.

  35. Cheap/free ebooks

    Many of the ebook retailers have a daily/monthly deal newsletter(s) you can sign up for.

    Main emails I currently rely on for ebook deals of interest:
    1. BookBub
    2. ereaderiq (kindle only) where you can get daily deals as well as track individual books and authors and import your wishlist(s)
    3. Author mailing lists
    4. Publisher/imprint mailing lists
    5. Various Indie group mailing lists which I found through indie authors I follow
    6. Amazon daily deal, monthly deals, books by authors I follow, categories I’ve selected

  36. If you sign up for an account with Luzme, it can monitor your Amazon, Goodreads, and LibraryThing wishlists and notify you when any of the titles on the list drop in price at the vendors you’re monitoring.

  37. @Lexica
    We’ll see if Luzme can handle my 5k+ TBR Goodreads list as well as multiple Amazon wishlists. I thank you. I’m not sure if my husband will feel the same…

  38. (Thanks, all, again for demystifying the ebook sale detection!)

    @RedWombat – that Raven hits me directly in the feels is by no means an exception in my experience with your work. I sense a T. Kingfisher book-buying spree in the near future. 🙂

  39. @Tasha Turner: Oh yeah, I forgot, I get BookBub, too. It’s kinda meh, IMHO. It sends me a lot of generic-sounding probably-self-pub’d items that are free, normally 99 cents (hmm), touting how many Goodreads likes or Amazon 5-star reviews they have. I do occasionally check those out. But it also occasionally sends me other books that winds up being of interest to me.

    Re. publisher mailing lists, my favorite may be Orbit, simply because they have a knack for putting books I’m interested in on sale for $1.99. Maybe they hacked my computer to get my lists. 😉

    @Lexica: Thanks for the Luzme info; they monitor stores besides Amazon! 😀 I see a Kobo link, and that more closely matches iTunes. I’ll have to check them out.

  40. I finished Ex-Heroes while on a trip to North-Korea and left it in my hotel room in Pyongyang. Wonder what they’ll make out of that. 😛

  41. Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little
    Cathy and I saw Jethro Tull some time around 2000, and they were still amazing. Plenty of classics, and an equal amount of new (to me) material. They were not resting on their laurels. My favorite thing about the show is that they encored with “What a Wonderful World,” sung in a completely sincere, cornball fashion that melted me down. I continue to search the web for any recording of them doing that number.

    spacefaring kitten
    Alan Moore does amazing things with ideas he finds. I’ve really been impressed with what he can do with debunked science—ideas that sound profound. I’m thinking particularly of what great use he put the notion of cannibalistic inherited memory in planaria worms when he overhauled the Swamp Thing. That was one shattering story there. His immersive treatment of theories about Jack the Ripper are another example of what he can do.

  42. @Lexica: Thanks again for the pointer to Luzme (I wonder what the name means). I like that it handles several stores, especially that it includes iTunes and Kobo; also, though this doesn’t matter for me, I think it’s great that it also handles some non-U.S. flavors of ebookstores!

    I entered a bunch of books and I’ll see how it compares with eReaderIQ. The latter has some more options for price-watching, but I’m fine with just picking a flat # and saying “call me if it drops below this.” eRIQ lets you get alerts for when an ebook drops a certain amount, but to keep it simple, I already changed my watch list there to just use flat numbers.

  43. @Kendall – actually I just put up a review of God Stalk the other day, that may have tipped the recs from my reviews. Or at least I like to think I have that power. God Recs!

Comments are closed.