Pixel Scroll 3/12/16 Crosseyed and Pixelless

(1) A TERRAN ECLIPSE. Click to see the Astronomy Picture of the Day for March 11

This snapshot from deep space captures planet Earth on March 9. The shadow of its large moon is falling on the planet’s sunlit hemisphere. Tracking toward the east (left to right) across the ocean-covered world the moon shadow moved quickly in the direction of the planet’s rotation. Of course, denizens of Earth located close to the shadow track centerline saw this lunar shadow transit as a brief, total eclipse of the Sun. From a spacebased perspective between Earth and Sun, the view of this shadow transit was provided by the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) spacecraft’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC).

(2) GROKKING THE FULLNESS. In “Fandom Needs to Change to Insure Its Future Survival”, Amazing Stories’ Steve Davidson devotes 3,500 words to thinking outside his box on the subject of Worldcons.  (The newer ideas are in the last half of the piece.)

Fandom is growing.  It’s growing tremendously.  Unfortunately, the major percentage of that growth is taking place under the auspices of institutions and organizations that are not themselves fannish (or are fannish so long as being so is in service to making a profit).

As fans, we like to say that we’re not in “competition” with events such as SDCC or Dragoncon.  Not only do we dismiss Anime conventions and multi-media cons as doing something that we’re not doing, we discount the experience that attendees and staff gain from these events.  In our minds there is a difference between the conventions that are connected to fan history and largely follow fannish traditions (you buy a membership, not a ticket;  we don’t pay guest to appear;  we’re focused on the literature; those aren’t real conventions) and those that aren’t.  We go to great pains to try and distinguish the bona fides of small ‘f’ fans and large ‘F’ fans.

But here’s the problem:  the non-traditional conventions are offering the vast majority of “fannish experiences” these days.  Traditional conventions have such a small footprint in national awareness that so far as most potential fans are concerned, non-traditional events ARE fandom.

In short, it is non-traditional events that are educating the public about what fandom is and what it’s all about.  Not traditional fandom.

(3) INCOMING. Neil Clarke analyzed the “2015 Clarkesworld Submissions Stats”, complete with beautiful graphs.

In 2015, we received submissions from 109 different countries. In the above chart, the blue bar represents the percentage of total submissions for that country. The green bar indicates the percentage of all acceptances. (Reminder: The Chinese translations are handled by a separate process and not included in these numbers.)

Note: If you feel inclined to proclaim that this data indicates that I have a bias towards international submissions, perhaps you should read this editorial. That said, it pleases me that Clarkesworld has a more global representation of science fiction. There’s a lot of great work written beyond our shores.

(4) AND A DEAFENING REPORT. James H. Burns had a blinding insight.

Hanging out at Joe Koch’s comics warehouse the other day, it suddenly occured to me, that if Barry West was Catholic, he would have no problem with Lent.

(Or, if he were Jewish, no problem with Yom Kippur.)

Why?

Because the Flash is the FASTEST man alive.

(5) SILENT SPRING AHEAD. Matt Novak has a clever question – “What Time Is The End of The Daylight?”

What time is the end of the daylight? The sun is expected to die in roughly 5 billion years. But humans—provided we survive any number of ecological, nuclear, or alien-based disasters—are only expected to last about another 1 billion years on Earth.

So technically the “daylight” will be over for humanity in 1 billion years, which is again, predicated upon the absurd assumption that we make it that long anyway.

(6) YA WORLDBUILDING. Alwyn Hamilton picks “The Top 10 invented worlds in teen books” for The Guardian.

8) Crown & Court Series by Sherwood Smith

I have recently been led to understand that the world in Sherwood Smith’s brilliant duology is supposed to be ours, set far in the future on a distant planet, where the magic is alien science. This would certainly explain why they share many touchstones with our world, while also having two moons for the characters to gaze up at and trees willing to exact revenge. But the true magic in these books for me is in the complexities of the ballroom. Smith has created a complete court to rival Versailles in intrigue, with fan language, complicated symbolism woven covertly into jewelry, long lineage that gives you the feeling every character does have a twisting family tree, and old traditions so tangible you’re sure they must have been in fashion once in our world too.

(7) CHICKENS, NOT POTATOES. This week’s The Simpsons has a Bradbury-esque title: “The Marge-ian Chronicles.”

(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • March 12, 1971 The Andromeda Strain opens in theaters.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY.

  • Born March 12, 1923 – Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra.

(10) UNCORK NO ALIEN BEFORE ITS TIME. Io9 will hook you up: “Orson Welles Hosted a NASA Documentary About Aliens in the ’70s and It Is Amazing”

It is damn near impossible to explain the joy that comes from watching Who’s Out There, a documentary on aliens made by NASA in 1975 starring real scientists, regular people, and then Orson Welles, pontificating into the camera. I cannot emphasize this enough: Spend half an hour watching this.

(11) FEARSOME. “11 Books That Scared The Master of Horror, Stephen King, And Will Terrify You, Too” from Bustle.com.

King obviously has a way with words, and his Twitter is no exception. Full of hilarious thoughts and weekly answers to reader questions, it’s always entertaining. He alternates between adorable tweets featuring his dog, Molly (aka The Thing of Evil), and recommending the books he’s reading. Being the master of horror that he is, I consider him an authority on recommendations in that genre. You could make an entire reading list based on Stephen King recommendations, and be set for a long time.

Here are 11 books that scared the unshakable Stephen King, and so are pretty much guaranteed to keep you up at night and/or give you nightmares. But hey, that’s the fun part!

(12) RAGE SHORTAGE. Lela E. Buis dropped a post about J.K. Rowling into the well of the internet but never heard it splash —  “No comments on cultural appropriation?”

Since I’ve not gotten any comments on this question at all, I’m going to assume either 1) it’s Saturday and everyone is out enjoying the spring weather or 2) there’s not much interest in what J. K. Rowling publishes on her Website.

Besides this, I’m not sure there’s a whole lot of concern about cultural appropriation except as a tool to attack people who are perceived as targets in some way. I expect Native Americans are fairly used to being abused, so another semi-fictional essay on skinwalkers isn’t going to affect their social outlook one way or the other.

(13) THE LONG VIEW. “11 Amazing Discoveries By the Mars Orbiter”  at Mashable.

4. Fresh craters

The MRO has also treated scientists to views of relatively fresh craters on Mars.

One crater — which appeared in photos in 2010 — was not in images taken in 2008, meaning that whatever impact created the crater happened in between those years.

(14) THE ZERO LIFE. “Fukushima’s ground zero: No place for man or robot” from Reuters.

The robots sent in to find highly radioactive fuel at Fukushima’s nuclear reactors have “died”; a subterranean “ice wall” around the crippled plant meant to stop groundwater from becoming contaminated has yet to be finished. And authorities still don’t know how to dispose of highly radioactive water stored in an ever mounting number of tanks around the site.

(15) BATMAN SINGS. In the episode of The Hollywood Palace originally aired October 8, 1966 Adam West sings “The Orange Colored Sky” and “The Summer Wind.”

(16) IT’S GOT CHARACTER. “Ed Wood’s ‘Plan 9’ Studio To Be Preserved” says LA Weekly.

A storied Hollywood building once used by late pulp film director Ed Wood will be preserved by its new owners, said the sellers’ agent, Kay Sasatomi of Silver Commercial Inc.

That’s good news for fans of the low-budget auteur and for fans of the low-budget building.

The 13,650-square-foot Ed Wood structure on a seedy stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood is said to have also been used as rehearsal space by Jimi Hendrix, The Doors and Guns N’ Roses.

The director housed his Quality Studios at the address, and classics including Plan 9 From Outer Space and Glen or Glenda were filmed there, according to Silver Commercial.

The building features a ground-floor dive bar, Gold Diggers, that plays home to Thai bikini dancers.

The residential hotel next door is a flophouse made famous when a suspect in the Beverly Hills murder of Hollywood publicist Ronni Chasen committed suicide as police descended upon the block.

There’s a lot of character here.

(17) STICKING IN HIS TWO CENTS WORTH. Spider-Man appears in the last seconds of Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War – Trailer 2.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Will R., Andrew Porter, and David K.M. Klaus for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Xtifr.]

119 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 3/12/16 Crosseyed and Pixelless

  1. Mike Glyer: I think Steve Davidson is arguing that “traditional fandom” deserves some kind of primacy among genre fandoms. That’s not my issue — I’m mainly interested in strengthening the community and continuing to work out solutions to the problems that interfere with people’s legitimate enjoyment of fandom I’m in.

    I’m with you. I’m getting rather weary of the “But Worldcon needs to be more like that thing over there! But Worldcon needs to be bigger like that thing over there!” arguments.

    It’s okay to be a niche provider, which is what I think Worldcon is. Sure, I think that there are some things that Worldcon and the WSFS can do to promote more awareness of the con and the Hugo Awards program. But fans still keep finding Worldcon, anyway. I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s dying; in fact, it’s been gradually growing.

    But if Worldcon became a lot more like the other, bigger cons, that’d be it for me. I go to Worldcon because I like that it’s a small, intimate gathering of a few thousand people, and that the authors are there as fans as well as pros, and are friendly and accessible. I like that it’s in a different location every year. I like that it’s not a cattle con, having to fight crowds everywhere, with waiting lines of hours, and panel rooms that hold several thousand people (despite which I may still not be able to get into anyway).

    It’s okay for Worldcon to be a niche con. Like Mike, I’d rather concentrate on making it the best experience it can be, rather than the biggest or the widest.

  2. I did not see Nirvana before they were famous (though I did get Stone Temple Pilots and Butthole Surfers) but years later in college, some friends took me to a show in the basement of the college. I was unimpressed, they had one good song, the rest just seemed disjointed. Most of a decade later, I was surprised to learn that Modest Mouse had actually gone anywhere.

    But I’ve caught Tool twice and Nick Cave once, so I am reasonably content.

  3. Dawn Incognito said:

    Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE! I have watched five episodes so far and find it amusing but not earth-shattering. A lot of anime have several establishing episodes before getting into the nitty-gritty of the plot, though. Should I give it more time? If so, what episode would you consider the turning point?

    If you’ve reached the point where you have to ask, I think you’re totally justified in dropping it. 🙂

    That’s okay, I have other recommendations! And please feel free to be more ruthless in checking them out! More and more series these days are only 12-13 episodes long, so they rarely take very long to get going anymore.

  4. The majority of a blogs audience are lurkers. Getting people to comment is hard work. When I was blogging I was fascinated by which pages were the most visited, people spent the most time on, versus the couple pages with the most comments.

    If your writing good, interesting content, in a way which invites comment over time you’ll see the comment section grow as your community grows if you get noticed.

    If you write good interesting content but it leaves people nodding their heads your comment section is going to be quiet even if you get noticed.

    If you link to lots of interesting content the comment section could go either way. Some of it will depend on the commentary you add and what you quote. Some will depend on the community you’ve built.

    If you are a hotbed of controversy and get noticed your comment section may be active.

    Blogging takes a lot of work. Understanding the analytical tools which help measure how your blog is used can go a long way towards feeling like it’s worth it. Comments are a bad way for getting validation on a blog.

  5. Steve Davidson doesn’t seem to be arguing that “trad fandom” should have primacy so much as he’s arguing that if trad fandom wants to sustain itself as (kind of) itself it needs to do some things differently to get some new blood. There is also, by slightly more than implication, some concern about the hegemony of “corporate-run” fandom, and certainly this critique can be read back into the first part as a “Yay, fan-run fandom!” theme.

    I don’t think the actual essay is very good, mind you. That may be a consequence of sticking your statement of the problem below the statement of your program: the program doesn’t, when we finally get to the statement of the problem, seem like an obvious corrective to the problem.

    Also, I think the idea that you can have a meaningful, annual, fan-run literary award that is truly global in scope with no language or geography bias, which has come up before, is absurd. Indeed, one of the most absurd “reform” ideas I’ve ever heard. It is, to be sure, not original to Steve.

  6. JJ on March 13, 2016 at 3:19 pm said:

    I go to Worldcon because I like that it’s a small, intimate gathering of a few thousand people,…

    While I agree with you, I also would point out that I know a fair number of people in fandom as I know it that shun Worldcon because it’s too big and are suspicious of fannish gatherings exceeding two digit attendance. To them, the idea of calling a gathering of a few thousand people “intimate” is at best laughable.

    The last time I attended ComicCon, it was “only” about 35,000 people, and that was more sensory overload than I wanted. But I guess there are a lot of people out there who only consider it a “real” event if they have to spend most of their time standing in line. Heck, I’ve encountered that attitude at Worldcons. Indeed, I’ve found people who think that if we work to make things queue-free, it means the event isn’t successful.

  7. A very interesting and enjoyable anime right now is erased – great art with more focus on expression and personality than on “looking perfect”, interesting story well-told, interesting characters, and pleasant free from ‘fan-service’.

  8. Greg Hullender on March 13, 2016 at 12:32 pm said: @The Phantom Surprisingly, I suspect a lot of people agree with you on this–in part, at least. “Cultural appropriation is a bad thing” like the idea that “race/gender are cultural constructs” seems like one of those really-bad-but-well-meaning ideas that pops up out of academia every now and then, enjoys a brief period of excited discussion among a very small group of people, and then disappears forever. It’s not usually worth fighting over, no matter how silly you think it is.

    Thank you for engaging this humble troll in a reasoned manner. I do have one small disagreement about this cultural appropriation business not being worth fighting over.

    Just this week in the news, we have activists attempting to shut down private men’s clubs at Harvard. Because a men’s club causes rape. Or something.

    Next, we have more locally to Fortress Phantom the removal of Sir John A. McDonald’s statue from (hilariously) Wilfred Laurier University in Guelph Ontario, because Indians. Or something.

    I did not go to Harvard, I did not belong to a men’s only club there or anywhere. Nor do I have a particularly high opinion of Sir John A, for that matter.

    But I do, for example, enjoy riding my motorcycle in the woods on a spring day. The same people willing to deny a man’s club the right to exist, and to memory hole the first Prime Minister of Canada, would be very excited by the idea of banning me and my motorcycle from any woods, anywhere. Because Gaia. Or something.

    Banning people and things seems an end in itself for some. This seems to be the source of the cultural appropriation balderdash regarding JK Rowling. She’s a big target, many seem to find it necessary to find something to throw at her.

    Therefore it is important to resist these things everywhere, all the time. Today’s ‘cultural appropriation’ is tomorrow’s trail closure. Wherever somebody is having fun, there will be some @$*%^#$ trying to find a poisonous weed or finger-long inedible rodent that suddenly needs protecting.

    Look up the Peirson’s milkvetch for elucidation.

  9. @Red Wombat

    How was STP before they made it? I kind of liked them when they first hit the radio. Then I saw them in concert, opening for Megadeth, and they were a total train wreck. It’s the only time I’ve seen a band boo’d off the stage. At that point I figured their albums were either heavily studio engineered or they were at the drunk and drugged out point of their success cycle.

  10. Barry ALLEN is the Flash. WALLY West was Kid Flash and the Flash in the nineties

  11. On my short list for Retro Hugo movies:

    The Bluebird (Shirley Temple!)
    Dr. Cyclops
    Fantasia
    The Ghost Breakers
    The Invisible Man Returns
    The Mummy’s Hand
    One Million BC (Victor Mature and Carole Landis, but no bikinis.)
    Pinocchio

    Not sure if Strange Cargo or Our Town count (the first has somebody with weird powers who may be Jesus and the second one has dead people up and talking in Act II) but I like them better than Fantasia. I know that’s heresy, but… It just doesn’t push my buttons. I even like Pinocchio better than Fantasia.

  12. Speaking as someone who goes to the woods for peace and quiet, my sympathies lie with the finger-long inedible rodent. (And congratulations to it on attaining inedibility; edibility has been the bane of many a rodent.)

  13. @Mike Nelson: In the current television show, police detective Joe West took 10-year-old Barry Allen in after his father went to prison and raised him, and has even referred to him as “my son” on a couple of occasions. To be sure, I can’t recall Barry ever using the family name “West” instead of “Allen”.

  14. BigelowT

    I’ve seen THE BLUE BIRD recently. It’s interesting, but not majorly so. Some good bits, and some long waits between.

    FANTASIA has what may be my all-time favorite animated sequence (Dance of the Hours) and other legendarily great bits.

    THE GHOST BREAKERS is hilarious, with Bob Hope and Willie Best both knocking it out of the park. It’s one of the movies I used to check the guide for damn near every week, and was finally rewarded years later. Willie Best does some of his signature scared act, but so does Hope, and at least Best gets other things to do in it (though I’m starting to think NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH is a slightly better movie, especially for him). Best was a wasted talent, for the most part. Not only did he spend entire movies doing nothing but being scared of presumed ghosts, he was billed, not under a normal human-type name, but as “Sleep-n-Eat,” in a number of pictures. (What a life, eh? A choice between demeaning, repetitive roles, and none at all.)

    PINOCCHIO is my second favorite movie, or was for a long time. I haven’t closely examined the matter in a while. They learned a lot from making SNOW WHITE, and after this one, they began making the backgrounds less painterly, so in a way, it’s a peak achievement for the studio. They sure as hell improved on the source material, which was “paid by the word” sort of thing. Sadly, this may have given them the idea they could always improve the source material, which led to some bad results, ranging from merely muddled to HUNCHBACK-bad.

  15. @Cat

    Speaking as someone who goes to the woods for peace and quiet, my sympathies lie with the finger-long inedible rodent. (And congratulations to it on attaining inedibility; edibility has been the bane of many a rodent.)

    My sympathies and congrats also to the inedible rodent. May they live long and prosper.

  16. “The Long List Anthology” (the stuff that SHOULD HAVE been Hugo nominees last year) is 99 cents today on Amazon and B&N US — check your local listings.

    (2) No. Just no. Others have said why gooder than me. Sorry, Steve.

    I’m going to a Comic-Con next weekend (not SDCC) and am already bracing myself for sensory overload. I have the feeling I’ll be thrilled to run back to local cons with no more than 1000 people. One of the best cons I ever went to had a total attendance — fans and pros/guests — of 63. The GoHs and a few others stayed in a motel, everyone else sacked out in sleeping bags on top of wrestling mats in a gym and used the locker room plumbing. Needless to say, new panels and even a new track of programming popped up, but much of the time was the whole convention in one room, hanging out. Great fun.

    (12) Huh? It was extensively discussed here all week, and I know Ms. Buis reads F770. Jim C. Hines did a post on it which had a lot of comments. NK Jemison also blogged about it, and the wider issue of cultural appropriation/respect.

    Naturally, the Native American web was full of it. It was on Twitter (I saw some good stuff copied to Storify), and in some newspaper web sites. So it certainly wasn’t ignored. Full-on Potterheads got all pissy that anyone would dare to criticize the Great and Powerful JK, and reactionary idiots were all “SHUT UP POC”, but even some white folk like me thought “Geez, that’s f’ed up.”

    Maybe the people who read her blog don’t care? (except the two Filers who’ve commented since) But a LOT of people spent a LOT of time discussing it.

    @Kip W: My mom had the same reaction. “That’s Spock!” Only people of a certain late middle age remember “In Search Of” now, but everyone knows Spock.

    @Tasha: I’ve given cold water to any number of those Mormon boys out peddling their bikes in the heat. I grew up in a heavily Mormon state, so I literally knew their religion before they were born. I’m never sure why they’re in my neighborhood, anyway; half the founding fathers of this town were LDS and there’s a huge church less than a mile away. But being outside in the summer wearing polyester gives a kid a powerful thirst. They did look a little bewildered when all the residents of the house piped up with their childhood religious basics — four people with three different Christian denominations, in two mixed marriages. And that’s nothing compared to our neighbors, who are Falun Gong, Vietnamese Buddhist, Mexican Catholics, Mexican Pentecostals, Chinese born-again Christians, Hindus, and just plain ol’ unbelievers, not to mention the nice lesbian couple around the corner whose faith I don’t know.

    I also gave some to a door-to-door magazine salesman. His first language was Mandarin and he’d learned his English in Glasgow. I canNOT describe his accent.

    @GSLamb: Sensible conservatives like yourself are indeed stuck with terrible candidates this year. Most of the Democrats I know would be okay with either Hillary or Bernie (or the other guy who dropped out), even if s/he isn’t their first choice. But once Kasich drops out, the Republicans are all clown car. Sympathies. Nobody of Bob Dole’s devotion to public service, e.g.

    @BigelowT: Sounds like a good movie list. Although I’ve never cared for “Our Town” in any of its manifestations.

    An inedible rodent would be quite the thing. Not only do people eat ’em, they are the favored tasty snack of all carnivores. I don’t think they’d be endangered. There’s a story about mutant hordes of rodents in there somewhere.

  17. JJ: I go to Worldcon because I like that it’s a small, intimate gathering of a few thousand people

    Kevin Standlee: While I agree with you, I also would point out that I know a fair number of people in fandom as I know it that shun Worldcon because it’s too big and are suspicious of fannish gatherings exceeding two digit attendance.

    And I’m glad that there are smaller regional cons which will likely meet those peoples’ needs, as well. That’s a good niche, too.

    Even though “a few thousand people” may sound big, about the only time you’ll see most of those people together in one place at Worldcon is the Hugo Awards ceremony, and possibly the Opening and Closing Ceremonies. The Dealers’ Room is usually pretty busy as is the signing room (sometimes the same location), but not with thousands of people (unless GRRM is signing 😉 ). A session done by Scalzi or Gaiman will pull in at least several hundred.

    But otherwise, most of the panels and sessions at Worldcon are fairly small and “intimate”, and you’d never guess that there are actually thousands of people in attendance at the con. And the programming is generally diverse enough that most people can find at least a few panels or sessions which interest them.

  18. @Lurkertype: There are seeds that can’t germinate until they pass through an animal’s digestive tract. Also some of the eggs of parasitic insects. Maybe you could have a rodent that tries to get eaten by bears, but can’t be digested. For most of the creatures, that’s the end of it. But some will get lucky and a rodent of the opposite sex will also get swallowed and they can brewed brewed a little family, in there. Then they escape in to the woods just before the bear wakes up from hibernation.

    It’s bot quite there. It needs something more to make a good sf story. Let’s see… they take over the bears nervous system, turning in tot in town to their zombie puppet. But certain harmonics mess with their control of their host. The sound of motorcycles, for example. So when people go biking in Totton the woods they can suddenly find themselves under attack by zombie bears.

  19. Christian Brunschen said:

    A very interesting and enjoyable anime right now is erased – great art with more focus on expression and personality than on “looking perfect”, interesting story well-told, interesting characters, and pleasant free from ‘fan-service’.

    Amen! It’s one of the shows I’m following week-to-week this season at the Amazing Stories blog, and it’s easily the best show this season. It’s going to be on my Hugo ballot next year unless it manages a truly epic screwup at the end.

  20. I walked straight up to GRRM’s table at 2012 Worldcon. He was all by himself, so I got the signature. The enormous line was next to him, for Gene Wolfe.

    Zombie bears with indestructible rodents pulling the strings! I was only thinking of a plague of them, millions of them flowing along, taking down everything in their path.

  21. lurkertype
    What made the incident perfect for me is that Dad never paid any attention to Star Trek, or much anything else I watched (as a general rule), and was not a big TV watcher at all. It’s debatable (endlessly, due to insufficient evidence either way) whether he knew the character’s name. But there was Lenny, trying to escape, and there was Dad, proving that it would never happen.
    For me, at any rate, the tale wouldn’t have had nearly as much magic if he’d wandered in, stood around a bit, and said, “That Ol’ One-Ear’s brother?”

  22. Re: Mormons, Witnesses, etc.
    I always invite them in and sit with them to discuss the books in question. Once my position is known, the JWs leave me in peace. Those plucky Mormons, on the other hand, keep coming back.
    I generally try to get as much proselytizing time in as I give them, teaching them that religion should not be anti-science. This has worked about as well as their tactics. Eventually, though, the Wife has me “break up” with them, which usually lasts until the next year.

  23. Full of guilt because I don’t have time to back-read comments, but I’m trying to post as many artists as possible before my self-imposed deadline of Tues. night.

    Does anyone know how to get Deviantart to cough up “top deviations of 2015?” It’s particularly annoying because, for some reason, when I do a google search I can’t click on any deviantart.com results, the links won’t work. Does this happen for anyone else? Bing doesn’t do it, so it’s not something AVG is doing, but it happens in both Firefox and Chrome.

  24. JJ said:

    Kevin Standlee: While I agree with you, I also would point out that I know a fair number of people in fandom as I know it that shun Worldcon because it’s too big and are suspicious of fannish gatherings exceeding two digit attendance.

    And I’m glad that there are smaller regional cons which will likely meet those peoples’ needs, as well. That’s a good niche, too.

    Ha! Most regional cons sit in the 500-2,000 person range, way too big. If you want double-digit attendance, you have to work hard to keep the con deliberately small, or fill a very tiny niche. (But there are cons that do manage it.)

    Even though “a few thousand people” may sound big, about the only time you’ll see most of those people together in one place at Worldcon is the Hugo Awards ceremony, and possibly the Opening and Closing Ceremonies.

    Or the Masquerade. Worldcons need to have a facility with one enormous auditorium or ballroom available for two events: the Hugos and the Masquerade.

  25. I’ll just take a moment to ask: GSLamb, how are you doin’? I’ve been worried about you — GBS is, well, very worrying. I feel relief every day I see a comment from you.

  26. I’m informed by somebody who was there that my Nirvana story is incorrect on several salient points: it was in a different town and I didn’t want to go on a bus trip.

    I prefer my version.

  27. @Kip W:

    One thing that Disney didn’t change in Hunchback that surprised me was the motivation for Frollo’s actions. Pretty much the only part of the movie I cared for was the song “Hellfire”.

    (Relistening after joining a choir and singing several Latin masses it’s even better!)

  28. Tasha Turner on March 13, 2016 at 4:02 pm said:
    The majority of a blogs audience are lurkers. Getting people to comment is hard work. When I was blogging I was fascinated by which pages were the most visited, people spent the most time on, versus the couple pages with the most comments.

    Trolls can help – so long as they aren’t the more verbally abusive kind. They provide a comment non-trolls can argue against without too much trouble or fear of looking stupid.

  29. Dawn Incognito
    The Classics Illustrated adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, gorgeously illustrated by George Evans, made me want to read the book. Apart from trimming subplots, it’s a very faithful rendition. The only faithful adaptation I’ve ever found, though the movie with Charles Laughton is better than I used to think it was. “Worst adaptation” has some fierce competition from the original Classics Comics version, which freely re-plotted the book and changed the ending, but it still loses out to the Disneyfied version. (The jury is still out on which Disney version murders the original most completely. Disney the Pooh is a strong competitor.)

  30. @Camestros Felapton Trolls can help – so long as they aren’t the more verbally abusive kind. They provide a comment non-trolls can argue against without too much trouble or fear of looking stupid.

    On groups and forums I’ve moderated trolls don’t last long. I have little patience for the lack of respect most trolls show to others. I also don’t care for the back and forth and around in circles and down the drain the conversations go in when trolls are allowed to stay around. People I like and respect, myself included, become something less when dealing with trolls.

    This has led to a life of moving on from community to community as fellow moderators tend to be more tolerant as do most communities and at some point I get tired of watching people jump for the groups regular trolls.

    On my own blog I preferred no comments to trolls. Someday I hope to be well enough to fix DNS server to new host, fix formatting problems, and get back to blogging. I miss having my own place. But I don’t have the energy to troubleshoot tech problems caused by managing it on an iPad which kept cropping up.

  31. For other reasons, I was just discussing cultural appropriation with my brother, and I feel like I am seeing the same confusion as to what cultural appropriation even is here (and at Buis’ blog, to which I am disinclined to add traffic). Even once I account for a certain troll’s paranoia.

    The sharing and exchange of cultures is kind of an essential part of how our world operates, and it starts with some fairly shallow, surfacy forms of exchange – going to an ethnic restaurant, getting a henna doodle at a festival, watching some dancers, buying ethnic jewellery or clothes*. And there is no culture, however destructive their prior relations, which does not have some items like this they are open to sharing and exchange. (Around here, an example might be beaded moccasins.)

    Some people get these tangled with appropriation because they are shallow, but here’s a key point; those shallow sharings of culture are usually offered freely, and even sometimes with delight, by the people of that culture. Buying, and later wearing, some Navajo made jewellery from a Navajo vendor isn’t appropriation, and the minuscule handful of people who think it might be are rarely the people of that culture, or people of the mainstream progressive bent.

    Things that can make an act appropriative are:
    – A history of attempts to quash that culture by the mainstream culture that is now trying to pick out some salable bits and commercialize them.
    – Someone not versed in the culture** taking the trappings of a culture and selling them (eg. factory made dreamcatcher designs stolen from Ojibway handicrafts.)
    – Usages of cultural items in purely stereotyped ways, not actually resembling the culture in reality. (Rowling)
    – Taking things with specific religious or social significance and wearing or using them when not earned. (Feather headdresses at sports games)
    – and possibly some others I am not thinking of at this second. But the gist is this: doing things related to a culture not your own doesn’t have to be appropriation. What Rowling did was.

    * Ideally, one tries to go beyond this at some point if one is genuinely trying to be respectful and is curious, but there are only so many hours in a lifetime, and a huge number of possible cultures to explore, so it doesn’t always happen.

    ** There is room for people sufficiently familiar and connected with the culture but not born into it, like a non-Japanese sushi chef. Thus “versed in”.

  32. @ Tasha Turner

    Comments are a bad way for getting validation on a blog.

    Too true, alas. My blog is just a jumped-up LiveJournal, so it isn’t as if I’m trying to monetize it or anything. But there’s this dismaying pattern.

    Post hard-researched, useful information. *crickets*

    Post nuanced, thoughtful essays. *crickets*

    Post a silly joke. *20-comment thread*

    And yet, the majority of my blogging is research, reviews, and thoughtful essays, because that’s what I want to write. It would be nice to get some validation that other people enjoy them, but I’m not going to switch to posting cat memes just for the interactions.

  33. 2) “In short, it is non-traditional events that are educating the public about what fandom is and what it’s all about. Not traditional fandom.”

    Then that’s no McGuffin.

    And a data point: We stopped going to WorldCons about a decade ago, after pretty faithful attendance for 25 years or so–too big, too busy, too hard to connect to the people we wanted to see. (And the SFWA suite got to be
    like the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera, but without the hard-boiled eggs.) Or maybe we just got old.

  34. Heather Rose Jones
    Cheer up. In nine years of blogging, I’ve gotten 59 comments. Probably half of those are me, saying, “THANK YOU FOR COMMENTING!”

  35. @Heather Rose Jones
    Does Google analytics work with LiveJournal? I was amazed at how many views and how long people stayed on various pages. It was way above the “average”.

    I think the most commented post(s) on my blog was(were) a guests post(s). I ran a virtual blog tour for newbie authors to learn how to participate in blog tours and how to write posts more interesting than the standard posts. During the tour the book world had a reviewers versus authors kerfuffle. We had a very thoughtful reviewer do a set of posts on his site and a few of the authors involved in the tour responded. One (two?) of the responses was hosted on my website. Very active comments. It was an interesting experiment as we had a fairly civil discussion while a firestorm was happening around us.

    The other most commented post is my Jewish Vampire page where people stop by occasionally to ask if I’ve thought of x and give me their thoughts on how I’m planning to tackle the series from a Jewish legal and mythological perspective. Trying to be true to our perspective on Vampires is tough as the writing is vague and there isn’t much to go on. There are bits and pieces but not a whole cloth.

    I think in the 12-18 months I was blogging I had over 20k in page views with an average of 3 minutes per page (high). Possibly a total of 80 comments including my responses. I shared my posts on FB and Twitter where conversations also took place. If I relied on the comments on my blog I would have been depressed. But looking at the number of page views & seeing that people were reading my posts helped incredibly.

  36. Heather Rose Jones:

    Livejournal is really quiet right now, fannishly. You’d be more likely to get connected with your intended readership on Tumblr, especially if you can get linked from Ellen Kushner. However, Tumblr is absolutely *pants* as a conversation medium.

  37. @ Kip W – That’s what I’m afraid will happen when I move my blog to my alpennia.com website. (I’m planning to continue echoing it to LJ, but in terms of the primary blog, it’ll mean starting from zero in terms of readers.)

    @ Tasha Turner – LJ has it’s own “statistics” information, although it’s most useful for relative interest, rather than trying to figure out absolute numbers of views. I’ll be running Google Analytics on the new version of alpennia.com, so that will help me closely track my newly lonely blog. I try to participate in various things to share readerships with other authors (blog exchanges, etc.) but I’ve found they trigger my “this is too much emotional work” buttons. I’m currently working on a fun little “my characters interview your characters” thing with a couple other authors that we should be putting up sometime soon.

    @ Doctor Science – I have yet to figure out what tumblr is good for, but as far as I can tell, it isn’t really good for the sorts of things I like doing with a blog. And moving the blog to my writing website is in part intended to drive eyes to the other content there. Which tumblr wouldn’t do. Believe me, I’d love to have someone convince all the Swordspoint fans to give Alpennia a try, but I get the sneaking suspicion that an awful lot of them are only there for the Alec/Richard thing and that the interest wouldn’t exactly transfer.

    In the end, all I can really do is to do me. And to do the best me I can. If it works, it works; and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.

  38. @Heather Rose Jones
    If you’d ever like a few hours help in figuring out your best use of social media based on temperament, energy, and interest let me know. I’m not officially working but I like to keep my hand in things so I volunteer now and then.

  39. Cheer up. In nine years of blogging, I’ve gotten 59 comments. Probably half of those are me, saying, “THANK YOU FOR COMMENTING!”

    Yeah well I clicked on your blog and couldn’t find a single post gratuitously insulting the Puppies. Get with the program! 😀

  40. @ Tasha — Thanks for the offer. My basic principle is that my best use of social media is to interact with people whose company I enjoy. In the course of that, I certainly hope that some of those people will conclude that a delightfully witty and knowledgeable person like me [hang on…I’m not sure how long I can keep this up] might have written interesting fiction as well. But given my time and emotional energy constraints, things that are specifically and only about promotion aren’t a good bargain for me. Which is most likely what your analysis would end up concluding! (Not saying I won’t take you up on it.)

  41. I hate Tumblr. Anyone attempting to find any other significance or rationale in this beyond “Lis doesn’t happen to like Tumblr” will be sadly disappointed.

    I rarely get comments on my blog, and that used to bug me. However, I’ve come to be happy with my page views, which are, honestly, rather more than I expected for a minor little review blog.

  42. I just don’t quite *get* Tumbler, in that I don’t really navigate it very well. It’s kinda depressing to me actually, given how much of, say, Korra/ Person of Interest/ Sense8 fandom activity takes place there.

    My usual out is to see the stuff that a commenter or a blog that I follow links to, but even those are disappearing now.

  43. Brian Z on March 13, 2016 at 9:21 pm said:

    Yeah well I clicked on your blog and couldn’t find a single post gratuitously insulting the Puppies. Get with the program! ?

    Well kudos to the Puppies for saving the world from the dangers of a collapse in blog traffic. They certainly saved us all from that crisis.

  44. We’re doing stories about That Time When I Didn’t See Nirvana? I got one of those.

    During high school I became, briefly, uncannily good at being the 9th caller to my local radio station and winning concert tickets. In addition to this resulting in my becoming my brother’s favorite person for a few months because I won him some AC/DC tickets, this also got me tickets to see Jethro Tull at, I believe, the Sanger Theater in New Orleans.

    About a week before the concert, the radio station called me up. Seems they had an older gentleman who’d just won tickets to the upcoming Nirvana performance, but he really would have rather seen Jethro Tull. So they scanned their list of Jethro Tull winners and found 16-year-old me as a potential candidate to swap with him. I expressed my sympathy but politely declined the offer. I may have been a teenager, but I was a) a prog rock and classic rock fan, b) a flautist, and c) not at all a Nirvana fan.

    The Tull show was amazing.

    On the “before they were impossibly big” side, I have fond memories of a Neil Gaiman reading/signing that was not even in Seattle proper but about an hour north, and attended by about maybe 20 people, of which my husband-to-be and I were two. This would be in the late 90s, and I believe the book he was touring for was Neverwhere.

    When it was my turn for signing I asked the Newbie Author question – “any advice for a wannabe writer?” and got his timeless and true answer, “Write, finish what you write, submit what you write to paying markets, repeat from start.” At the time the answer made me feel foolish for asking; years later, it hit me suddenly how empowering that answer really was. “It’s up to you to do it,” is how I now understand it, “but it really is you who does it.”

  45. lurkertype: I walked straight up to GRRM’s table at 2012 Worldcon. He was all by himself, so I got the signature. The enormous line was next to him, for Gene Wolfe.

    The reason that particular GRRM signing session was so deserted was because it was on Monday at 1:30pm, and a lot of people had already left for home. At Chicon 7, A Dance With Dragons was up for a Hugo, and badge ribbons which said “Winter Is Coming” (a reference to the HBO show which had recently been announced) were all the rage. GRRM had already had a signing session on Thursday AND one on Friday, and they had him doing another session on Monday because of the demand. Monday was Gene Wolfe’s only signing session.

    I’d gotten GRRM’s autograph at Aussiecon4 (and even in 2010 he had a pretty huge line), so I avoided the mob for him at Chicon.

Comments are closed.