(1) LE GUIN DOCUMENTARY FUNDED. Arwen Curry e-mailed word to supporters of the Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin documentary Kickstarter that they reached $200,000 in pledges today.
Now that we have raised our entire budget, our NEH grant will be released. That means we’ll be able to stop fundraising and start production right away….
That also means everyone will get Ursula’s list of What to Read in 2016! I can’t wait to see what’s on there.
With 48 hours left in the campaign, pledges are still trickling in. Rest assured, we’ll use every dime toward making the film more worthy of its subject. As we move forward over these next months, I’ll keep you posted on our progress.
(2) THE EAR DOCTOR. Big Finish will bring back David Tennant and Catherine Tate as the Tenth Doctor and his companion Donna Nobel in three forthcoming audio dramas reports Radio Times.
More details in “Everything we know about the new David Tennant and Catherine Tate Doctor Who Adventures”.
And there’s an audio excerpt at “Keep calm – but we’ve got the exclusive first clip of David Tennant and Catherine Tate’s return to Doctor Who”.
According to the Big Finish website, the stories will see the Tenth Doctor and Donna Noble travel to a spaceport, discover a deadly weapon called the Time Reaver and find deadly iPads at the London Technology museum. In other words, some classic action from for the returning characters.
(3) INGENIOUS FELAPTON. Camestros Felapton asks: Can you identify the titles of these 2015 novels from a combination of emojis? (Repeated here for the benefit of anyone who didn’t see it in last night’s comments.) Note — there may be a problem with this transcription — it shows up okay in the draft, but the preview is all question marks. We’ll see….
1. 🐘 🌙
2. ⌚ 🐙
3. 🍎 🍏 🍎 🍏 🍎 🍏 🍎
4. 🌱 🌞 🍂 ❄ ❓
5. ⬆ √
(4) YOU WILL BELIEVE A BOOK CAN FLY. Rob Boffard thinks launching a book is a literal act. He celebrated his new book by sending a recording of himself doing a reading into suborbit — “Sci-Fi Novel ‘Zero-G’ Soars to Edge of Space”
A new sci-fi novel launched on a truly fitting mission last month, as documented in a new video: Rob Boffard’s “Zero-G” cruised to the upper stratosphere for a very unusual author reading at the edge of space.
The book ascended via weather balloon on Jan. 18 from the town of Ross on Wye in southern England. Once the rig got high up in the sky, an audio recording of Boffard reading the prologue and the first chapter began to play loudly. Boffard’s crew documented the process in an extended video, as well as through tweets as it all happened.
(5) ROWLING’S SECRET PAN PLAN. Emily Asher-Perrin makes her case for believing “Dumbledore’s Origin Story is the Predecessor to Peter Pan” at Tor.com.
When J.K. Rowling was writing The Tragic Tale of Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald, do you think she realized that she was actually writing a very scary version of Peter Pan? I had a minor brain explosion last week while rereading The Deathly Hallows, and the more I think about it, the more adamant I become…
…wanna go down a weird rabbit hole with me?
Sure, it’s not an exact parallel, but there are plenty of uncanny similarities that remind me of Peter Pan when I think of Albus Dumbledore’s youth. Before I go trying to explain my train of thought, let me first give you my cast of characters—
- Grindelwald: Peter Pan
- Albus: Wendy Darling
- Aberforth: John Darling
- Ariana: Michael Darling
Here’s the piece of Rowling’s text that put me in mind of Pan in the first place:
…and there on the window ledge sat perched, like a giant bird, a young man with golden hair. In the split second that the lantern’s light illuminated him, Harry saw the delight upon his handsome face, then the intruder shot a Stunning Spell from his wand and jumped neatly backward out of the window with a crow of laughter.
(6) GROSS INCOME. “Ask the Tax Czarina: Bartering ” at the SFWA Blog tries to dispel magical thinking about a common source of noncash income.
To sum up, here are some real world examples. My client provides editing and mentoring services for writers. I prepare and sign her tax return, which includes her writing business. I will have bartered tax return preparation income and a deduction for her editing services. My client has bartered editing income and a deduction for her tax return being prepared. While tax return preparation usually goes on Schedule A as an itemized deduction, it may be deducted directly against a business, if that’s the reason my client has her tax return prepared and signed by a paid preparer. The transaction offsets for both of us, it’s a wash. Assuming the amount is under $600, neither of us issues the other a Form 1099-MISC….
In summary, barter transactions are reportable. Transactions that wash are less of an issue than transactions that don’t. The above examples demonstrate that bartering might or might not result in net taxable income for either or both parties. Sometimes it’s clear how the transaction should be treated and sometimes it’s not.
(7) SPACE TO THINK. Tor.com has 10 of Kyle Cassidy’s photos of sf authors’ writing spaces. The lens used to shoot Samuel Delany’s work area makes it look like the International Space Station. Most of the others look like the comfortable living rooms of affluent people – no shots of people with laptops on borrowed tables at Starbucks – with the exception of Joe Haldeman who is writing in the dark by the light of a lantern.
(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.
- March 2, 1933 — The movie King Kong premiered in New York.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY GIRL
- Born March 2, 1949 — Gates McFadden. Cheryl Gates McFadden is an American actress and choreographer. She is best known for playing Dr. Beverly Crusher in the Star Trek: The Next Generation television series and in the four subsequent films.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born March 2, 1904 — “Dr. Seuss,” Theodor Geisel.
(11) A SERIES OF WORLDCONS REMEMBERED. Kevin Henney writes down his vivid impressions of Worldcons of decades gone by for asemantic.
Two years later, again with Josh, I visited Worldcon ’86 in Atlanta. For a teenager from North London, even cocooned within the convention hotels, this visit to the American South was an eye-opener…. the view from the front seat revealed a shifting cultural landscape you didn’t see on TV. Sidewalks were invisibly colour coded, black one side, white the other. Worldcon’s name that year, ConFederation, also shows how far we’ve come — you’d have to be a sad puppy to think that name was appropriate now.
I was there for the full five days. There were five of us saving money and shift-sleeping in a room for two, but I used that room for little more than storage and showering. I did the first three days on three hours sleep, giving myself the luxury of seven hours over the final two — a sleeping pattern I could get away with only as an adolescent (or, a few years later, as a new parent). Worldcon was big even back then. It was non-stop sessions, parties, caffeine, bumping into American gods like Frederick Pohl, faux phaser fights in hallways between Klingons and Starfleet (pick a side, go on pick a side…), talking to people you didn’t know, making friends that you did actually keep in touch with for a couple of years, even without cyberspace assistance of email and social media.
And some of whom I would meet again at Conspiracy in Brighton at the same Metropole hotel I’d visited in 1984. Tom and I were there for the weekend…
This Worldcon was smaller and less grand than the one in Atlanta, with a 1980s British seaside-town twist. But it still dwarfed 1984 Eastercon. There were writers I’d seen at SeaCon and in Atlanta, there were guests of honour (including Jim Burns), there were up-and-coming writers (a certain Iain Banks, with and without the M, comes to mind), there was Hawkwind (Tom’s kind of thing, but thanks I’ll pass), there were parties (in the hotel and on the beach) and more.
And then I took a break from cons and fandom. Quite a long break. A fairy-tale sleep whose spell was broken in part by Josh (yup, same one, after all these years) and BristolCon. And in good time for Loncon, Worldcon 2014….
(12) OF ALL THE NERVES. Soft tissues like this are rarely preserved — “Exquisitely detailed 520 million-year-old fossil shows individual nerves” in the Washington Post.
Chengjiangocaris kunmingensis wasn’t exactly a beautiful animal: The crustacean-like Cambrian creature had a long, segmented body and an unholy number of legs that it used to scuttle across the ocean floor. But scientists are oohing and ahhing over the ugly arthropod anyway, and for good reason. The nervous system of one 520 million-year-old specimen shows some of the best and most well-preserved nerves ever seen in an animal of that era.
According to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the fossil may be the oldest and most detailed example of a central nervous system yet identified, with even individual nerves — rarely preserved soft tissue — visible enough to study.
(13) CORMAN SUES CITCO. A 1996 Worldcon GoH, “Roger Corman Lawsuit Blames Citco for Losing $60 Million of Family’s Money”.
The famed filmmaker says he wasn’t told that his money was being managed by troubled hedge fund manager Buddy Fletcher.
Roger Corman and his wife Julie Corman, together responsible for hundreds of films and the mentoring of some of Hollywood’s biggest directors and actors, have filed a lawsuit that says they put money in an investment fund managed by George Soros before the money was moved and they ended up losing up to $60 million.
According to the complaint filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Monday, the administrator of the Soros fund was the Citco Group. The Cormans’ primary contact there was Ermanno Unternaehrer.
In 1996, Unternaehrer convinced the Cormans to put money in a fund managed by Citco, instead of with Soros, alleges the complaint. The Cormans say they were told that “the Citco fund was a safe, secure place to invest their moneys, and that Citco would administer and manage the fund to ensure continued high performance.”
For the next six years, things seemed fine. In 2002, Unternaehrer is said to have recommended that a vehicle named “Pasig, Ltd” be set up in the British Virgin Islands for tax reasons. Corman says he initially was a director of the newly incorporated company, but a few months later, upon advice, Corman says he resigned, becoming only a signatory on the account. By 2008, the lawsuit says that there was $73 million under Citco’s “complete control” and management fell to Alphonse “Buddy” Fletcher.
(14) NOT ON YOUR AM DIAL. “Repeating fast radio bursts recorded for the first time” at Science News.
Fast radio bursts from deep space have never been seen to repeat — until now.
Ten blasts of radio waves recorded last May and June all come from the same direction, researchers report online March 2 in Nature. So did a signal detected in 2012, say Laura Spitler, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, and colleagues. All 11 signals were detected at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, last a few milliseconds and, except for one, all appear to originate in other galaxies (SN: 8/9/14, p. 22). For the repeater, each of the signals encountered the same amount of intergalactic plasma, meaning they traveled the same distance. That shared feature makes an ironclad case for a common source, says Duncan Lorimer, an astrophysicist at West Virginia University in Morgantown and co-discoverer of the first FRB, reported in 2007. The question now is what fraction of sources repeat, he says. There may be multiple classes of FRBs, with some recurring and some not, each triggered by something different.
(15) THE GUY WHO DIDN’T MAKE MILLIONS. “Russ Heath’s Comic About Being Ripped Off By Roy Lichtenstein Will Give You A New Appreciation For The Hero Initiative” at Comics Alliance.
If you’re not familiar with the Hero Initiative, they’re one of our favorite organizations here at ComicsAlliance — a nonprofit set up to create a “financial safety net” for comic book creators in need, helping with medical bills and living expenses. It’s one thing to know that they’re doing good things in the world, but Heath’s comic, showing both the help provided during his surgery and the simple pleasure of a bottle of wine, really shows just how much good they’re doing.
(16) THE BEAST WITH THREE BACKS. J.K. Rowling has the story:
J.K. Rowling just confirmed that Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the Harry Potter prequel currently in production with Warner Bros., won’t just be one movie. It will be THREE.
She made the announcement on Twitter, in response to a tweet from a fan who’d heard that the stage play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, would also be a movie. It won’t. But that’s okay, because now we’ve got three prequels to look forward to
You heard wrong, I'm afraid. #CursedChild is a play. #FantasticBeasts will be 3 movies, though! https://t.co/7tvw4rolcR
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) February 29, 2016
(17) SPACE AGE LEFTOVERS. Abandoned In Place: Preserving America’s Space History by Roland Miller, published on March 1, collects images of the now-discarded facilities that helped America reach outer space.
Stenciled on many of the deactivated facilities at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, the evocative phrase “abandoned in place” indicates the structures that have been deserted. Some structures, too solid for any known method of demolition, stand empty and unused in the wake of the early period of US space exploration. Now Roland Miller’s color photographs document the NASA, Air Force, and Army facilities across the nation that once played a crucial role in the space race.
Rapidly succumbing to the elements and demolition, most of the blockhouses, launch towers, tunnels, test stands, and control rooms featured in Abandoned in Place are located at secure military or NASA facilities with little or no public access. Some have been repurposed, but over half of the facilities photographed no longer exist. The haunting images collected here impart artistic insight while preserving an important period in history.
(18) A UK MARKET. Unsung Stories is an independent publisher of “intelligent genre fiction – science fiction, fantasy, horror and importantly those works that blur the boundaries between genres.”
They have recently launched a new digital line of short works and novellas, Unsung Signals.
Unsung Signals features mid-length fiction, stories too long for magazines or journals but too short for traditional book-length publication. We believe stories should be as long as they need to be. We’re giving the writers the freedom to write the way they want without the need to pad or trim unnecessarily, to give a home to work that would otherwise be left unpublished, or altered to fit a format.
Here are a few details about their market for short stories —
How long is short?
We will consider stories up to 3000 words (preferred length is under 2000 words though).
Payment and Rights:
We pay £25 per story. For this we get first electronic rights exclusive for three months, with non-exclusive archival rights. We’ll pay within 30 days of publication via PayPal.
(19) FINDING DORY TRAILER. Disney-Pixar has dropped the first full Finding Dory trailer.
The long-awaited sequel to the beloved 2003 hit Finding Nemo puts the focus this time on the forgetful fish Dory, voiced again by Ellen DeGeneres. Taking place six months after the original underwater adventure, the sequel sends Dory on a quest to find her long-lost family, with the help of Marlin (voiced again by Albert Brooks), Crush (voiced by returning director Andrew Stanton) and several other returning ocean creatures
[Thanks to JJ, and John King Tarpinian, Gregory N. Hullender, Gary Budden, and James H. Burns for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]
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@James Moar: “Which worked fine, other than that one time a party of D&D characters tried to attack it.”
LOL! I haven’t read that comic in ages, but I know the reference.
@Writers: I don’t understand how people can concentrate in a coffee shop, but maybe there’s something in the air (the aroma of coffee?) that makes it work. 😉 Disclaimer: I love the smell of coffee, but I don’t drink it.
@Petréa Mitchell: That “The Boy and the Beast” trailer looks kinda cool! Thanks for the link.
(16) THE BEAST WITH THREE BACKS. In fairness, and IMHO, this isn’t like the Hobbit turning into three books, since AFAIK, there’s no published novel I know of that this is based on – it’s simply “let’s make a trilogy of Harry Potter universe movies.”
When it comes to writing spaces, I kind of get a boost from the unfamiliar. Writing at home, even in a quiet, convenient spot, is one thing, but I find I’m more productive in some random library or even the back corner of a Tim Horton’s. I’ve always wanted to try Kevin Anderson’s tactic of bringing a tape recorder on a long hike.
In other movie news, there’s a Kickstarter campaign for a tongue-in-cheek sequel to Manos: The Hands of Fate.
CNET has some additional background.
Kendall said:
It’s based on a supplementary book which is much shorter than The Hobbit. Okay, technically, it’s supposed to be about Newt Scamander writing the book. At least, last I heard. But it feels like another case of “why let people pay for only one movie when we can make them pay for three” rather than “we have far too much story to squeeze into one movie”.
From the trailer, Finding Dory looks pretty much like Finding Nemo. Lost again, captured again, put in an aquarium with menacing children again.
As for the Fast Radio Bursts, there seems to be a bit of a dispute over the validity of the findings..
(7) The full version of Kyle’s series, linked to from the Tor article, actually has a shot of Catherynne Valente in a Starbucks.
@mark The full site also has Neil’s gazebo, I think.
(also, I feel obliged to mention that Kyle is on our bid committee)
– Mike VanHelder
Chair, Valley Forge 2017
http://www.valleyforge2017.org
@petrea @kendall
Like butter scrapped over too much bread, as it were.
@Mike VanHelder
I was disappointed you never returned to continue our discussion. Also saddened to see after our discussion bios weren’t updated to show the diversity of the committee for Valley Forge 2017. Is that something you are working on or did you decide not to do anything about the committee looking white except for Billy Hung?
Thanks for dropping by to promote your bid.
Reminds me of a story a friend of mine told me. Somebody was testing building materials, and decided to make ‘reinforced concrete’ to build a dome. But instead of using big long pieces of rebar as usual, they used thousands of more needle and crochet-hook sized pieces scattered about and pointing in random directions.
Eventually all the tests were done and the demolitions equipment was brought in.
The wrecking ball bounced off of it.
Mike VanHelder: That’s fun to hear, about the Starbucks shot. As you deduced, I only looked at the Tor post.
re: writing in coffee shops
For me, as mentioned above (argh, previous page so I can’t reference the poster easily), it’s a matter of “programming” the brain to associate a particular type of location with a particular activity. I started out writing in coffee shops when working on my dissertation. At the time, one of the advantages was no internet connection (this was before the days of ubiquitous wi-fi in coffee shops…you know, twelve years ago). But it also made it feel like “going to the office”.
Another rather odd part of it for me is that, even though I’m an introvert, having people around (but not interacting with them) is a psychological equivalent of “white noise”.
It’s not that I can’t write at home, but home is associated with a lot of other activities. It’s easier in the summer when I can take my beach chair out in the garden and write there, because I’ve created a mental association of garden=writing.
But it gets even more complicated. Carving out a chunk of writing time on a work day has to work around my commute and my day-job. I can get up early to write, but if I do it at home, then I’m on the road at rush hour. Whereas if I get up early then drive to a coffee shop near work, I get more usable time. If I’m writing a first draft, I can even dictate story while driving. Whereas if I’m editing, then I have the option of taking public transit and hypothetically get the same amount of editing time in as if I drove to the coffee shop. (Lots of interfering variables, though.)
But I find that the location-activity connection can become attenuated over time. Especially given that one of my morning writing activities is posting my daily blog. It can easily devolve into general web-surfing and social media. So it helps to shake up my routine every few months. Fortunately, this often coincides with changes in which stage of the writing process I’m in, or seasonal changes in my commuting habits.
Vaughn Heppner, Christopher Nuttall, and similar prolific people seem to be expanding into the sort of publishing niche that was filled, once, by mass-market paperbacks… they are the literary heirs of people like Ted Tubb, Ken Bulmer, R. Lionel Fanthorpe….
It makes a sort of sense… the decline of mass-market paperbacks was largely driven by economic factors unrelated to popular taste (the Thor Power decision and all that). Those factors don’t apply to e-books, so they can proliferate on platforms like Amazon. Could we be witnessing the reappearance, here, of the much-lamented SF midlist?
@Darren Garrison: Actually, the FRB result OGH links to above is not the controversial one. The repeating FRB seems pretty solid; there was a result last week in Nature about localising a single FRB that was heavily critiqued almost instantly, as discussed eg here – I’d say it’s not so much controversial as already debunked. Ouch.
The gallery of photos from Cape Canaveral is interesting, and evocatively shot, but would be better with some captions talking about what these structures were and their history.
My favorite book in this genre is Paul Virilio’s Bunker archéologie, which is his documentation, circa 1960, of WWII fortifications along the coast of France.
Re: the Hero Initiative: There used to be a comic creator living within 10-15 miles of me, and I never even knew it until his death made the local news. Seems he had health and money problems such as the Hero Initiative looks to address. Some of you here might have known him. David Cockrum.
@Mike Glyer: Actually, I take it back. It used to have that picture of Cat in a coffee shop, but it looks like Kyle may have swapped it out for some other photographs. Well, anyway, that photo exists. Ditto Neil’s gazebo. He recently showed them at a Philadelphia Science Fiction Society meeting.
Mike VanHelder: Maybe some Filer who’s writing in a coffee shop today will take a selfie and send it to me, and let me remedy the internet’s lack of such a photo? 😉
Alternatively, a shot of a writer in a coffee shop with his cat would also fill a need.
According to the site it is the third of March 2016. It’s surprisingly disconcerting…
Usually they don’t let animals in dining establishments. Presumably a Seeing-Eye Cat?
@Darren Garrison
Cockrum was a greatly influential comic artist for decades, best known for co-creating Storm, Nightcrawler and Colossus of the X-Men, and the redesign of the book in Giant Sized X-Men which relaunched the series.
Well, there are cat cafes…
Mike: Perhaps at a cat cafe?
(Skips over jokes about “Do you serve cats?”) I’ve never heard of a cat cafe before — who says this blog isn’t educational?
Utterly unrelated to any of today’s Scroll topics, I just stumbled across this and had to share. A retelling of Alice in Wonderland set in Africa. Really beautifully illustrated.
http://alicesadventuresinafrica.blogspot.com/
A few shots from a cat cafe.
They did a temporary cat cafe in New York for a week and had a live cam up. The news stories said they had huge lines. I think it was sponsored by a brand of cat food and the cats were from a local shelter. Pretty much a win-win-win situation.
How come no (intentional) rodent cafes?
There is in fact a cat cafe just down College Street from where I’m staying these days. As far as I know it’s the first one in Toronto.
There are owl cafes:
http://kotaku.com/who-thinks-japans-owl-cafes-are-a-hoot-1453247424
This is a test following yesterday’s very exciting emoji news:
My brain:
🌋 !!!
IT WORKED!
Re: my absence from File770 the past 3-4 weeks: I’ve been in the process of changing jobs; I now do paralegal and social media work for an awesome law firm< Bergman and Allderdice, which helps nonprofit organizations. If you're in California and have a non-profit organization that wants a free consult, email me (gregmachlin at google's mail), I'll connect you to one of our lawyers.
Also, I and my writing partner have been submitting ALIEN VISAS to various places, one of which is a production company we had a good meeting with and wanted more info about the show, which we've now submitted. Fingers crossed!
@ Greg M.
Double congratulations.
Poking around, thinking about Campbell nominations, I found the Bad Menagerie anthology, which was discussed in the 2/20/2016* Pixel Scroll. The discussion a couple weeks ago revolved around the anthology soon coming out. It’s out now. I grabbed the MOBI version. It’s a daunting 12+MB. Whee!
I just finished reading Envy of Angels. Definitely a quick, fun, read, but I don’t think I was quite as enamored as Hampus (I say “don’t think” because I bought it at his recommendation and seem to recall it being a glowing one, but I could be misremembering). I do agree that it was nugget of fun, though, don’t get me wrong. I’m interested in getting my girlfriend’s take on it, as she works back of house in the restaurant/catering world. The author mentions Poppy Z. Brite’s books on restaurants, which she read and dug.
But the rough thing with this whole 12+MB anthology is that I’m about 20 or so pages into A Succession of Bad Days**, which is great so far, and which my Kindle informs me I have 11 hours and 42 minutes left to read. I love that I have a lot longer to be immersed in the book, but oh man, the Campbell reading! And I need to get to Chambers…
(I complain, but don’t let me fool you – I’m enjoying myself.)
Cat cafe-wise – there’s a place in Oakland (California) called Cat Town, where you can reserve hour long sessions in the cat area for $10. They have good coffee and what look to be delicious dessert-like snacks, and all the cats inside are rescues and up for adoption. We got our latest cats from Cat Town, and they are delightful people***, who’ve been extremely helpful getting our cats settled in. If any Filers are ever in Oakland and would like to go there, let us know and we’d be happy to go with you.
=====================================
* That’s 20/2/2016 for Europeans, 2016-02-20 for sysadmins, 20160220 for particularly thrifty sysadmins.
** I am having so much fun with this book. I think I’d be a lot more confused and unsure if I hadn’t read The Long March, but already having a general understanding of the world is very helpful. I’ve never read a story about magic from such a pragmatic, engineer-like, point of view. I’d nominate this for Best Novel already if that didn’t seem unethical 5% of the way in to it. I’m betting my mind won’t change by the time I finish it, though.
*** The cats, and the Cat Town volunteers and owners.
Link for those lurkers possibly confused by the “attack the gazebo” reference:
http://www.dndadventure.com/html/articles/gaming_stories.html
And, part 1 in cartoon form:
http://www.kodtweb.com/comics/2011-05-20-gazebo1.jpg
Part 2: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_J79azkNeEec/SmaBLQaypII/AAAAAAAAAZQ/UXKlGfiLHd0/s400/WS_Gazebo_p3.jpg
@Tasha
Hi! I’m Marguerite, and I’m another member of the Valley Forge 2017 bid committee.
Part of what we’re trying to push back against is the idea that all fans are white, straight, nondisabled cis men until they publicly declare otherwise. Similarly, we firmly believe in each individual’s right to privacy: We will never require someone to declare their under-represented status in any sphere, though we welcome when people choose to do so. With that in mind, our bid biographies and photos will remain as they are — with each committee member choosing what to share and how to present it.
We may expand our bid committee based on our needs and the skills of the people we invite. If and when we do so, the same courtesy will be extended to them.
Cat Cafes. Chicago has been promised one for over a year now:
http://chicago.eater.com/2016/3/3/11155908/chicago-cat-cafe-three-months
Cat cafes, owl cafes, bah! How many cities in the world can say they’re oversupplied with penguin bars?
Here’s the cat cafe that’s in our neighborhood here in Portland:
http://purringtonscatlounge.com/home/
I had a shed, which came with the house. It was thin plywood and that wavy translucent green plastic for a roof. Gravel and dirt floor. It mostly contained rusted gardening tools, some 2x4s, a lot of spiderwebs, and some rather alarming chemicals. I paid a handyman to take it apart and away and take the chemicals to the waste facility for proper disposal. One or two of them were useful in his business and he kept them as a bonus. I didn’t go in it, much less feel inspired to write.
@Kathodus: I might take you up on the cat cafe offer later in the year! Have always wanted to go to one, but lone middle aged woman in cat cafe just seemed…
@lurkertype – Absolutely! I think they’re closed Mondays, and they definitely aren’t open on Tuesday, but give us some heads-up and we can get reservations.
Kathodus:
From the intro
OMG so much good reading so little time before nominations close.
@Marguerite:
I suggest adding text of that kind to your bio page. Simply putting the word diversity all over the place doesn’t change how fans will see the bid committee IMHO. Nor convince them you take their needs seriously when the committee looks white except for the diversity position held by Billy Hung. Perception is a funny thing. The current default is white and straight. Studies of how readers see characters in books who aren’t described shows in the US no matter what their racial background and gender the majority assume those characters are white males.
John Scalzi’s book Locked In has fascinating reader reactions depending on whether they read it first, listened to the female or male narrator, even when they knew he hadn’t assigned gender to Chris the main protagonist.
Should people have to disclose private information about race, sexuality, disabilities? No they shouldn’t. I have multiple invisible illnesses, have been abused, and am Jewish. When people mistake me for healthy and not knowing what it’s like to live in fear my first reaction isn’t to jump down their throat because they are wrong. Depending on the situation I either let it slide or take the time to educate them on why looks don’t always tell the real story about who someone is or what their life is like.
The message your sending doesn’t seem to be the one you want to send. Hopefully the bid committee can find ways to add/change wording to get the various messages out. You all seem clear in your heads. Both you and Mike have articulated much better things on file770 which aren’t on the website.
Mike, I’ve got a photo of the coffee shop I write in, but no humans in it! (I feel weird taking shots of humans without their knowledge.)
For me…I dunno, I think it’s my Going To Work thing. I go out, I get lunch, I write a thousand words minimum, I go home. I do occasionally get madly inspired and write in the studio, or sitting in bed on the laptop, but the coffee shop is my I Am At Work Now place.
Home is too distracting. I see too many things I could fix. The coffee shop, everything but my computer is someone else’s problem. And I write in short frantic bursts followed by staring at Twitter, and I know the barista well, so I can just say “Tell me to stop screwing around on the internet and work” and she will do so.
(Actually, I think she knows me too well. I start moaning that the book is terrible and everyone will hate it and she says “So…Two thirds of the way done, are we?” Sigh.)
On a Hugo-related topic, I have reviewed the movie Tomorrowland. The short version is that it was far better and far smarter than I anticipated.
I fear the Valley Forge committee has overlooked the fact that if you are bidding to hold a major convention you do have to grapple with the fact that people from other countries may well look at, say, Marguerite’s post above, and conclude that the Committee are totally clueless about the fact that the U.S. is not the world, and that fandom is not confined to the U.S.
They seem to have completely failed to notice that international fandom is not happy about being dragged into the US culture wars; looking at their website there isn’t even a glimmering of comprehension that the events of recent years mean that delivering high minded platitudes in USspeek really doesn’t help. Instead it sends up warning flares, and rings large numbers of bells, which is probably not what Margeruite expected to happen when she rehearsed that one in front of her mirror.
IN 2017 there will be a Worldcon in Finland, where, unsurprisingly, there will be a lot of people not from the U.S.; diversity in action, the real thing.
Does the committee really believe that high minded platitudes in USspeak provided by Margeurite above, and on the website, are going to convince anyone that they even understand the meaning of the word diversity, much less are capable of running a large con which reaches out and embraces diversity? Whether they like it or not, they will be compared and contrasted with Worldcon in Finland, diversity of the sort which isn’t interested in the US culture wars which resulted in the Sad/Rabid debacles, but is truly working towards inclusion.
It looks as if it will also be a lot of fun, which is a great deal more than can be said for Valley Forge…
@Stevie
To be fair Valley Forge 2017 isn’t a Worldcon bid. It’s a bid for 2017 North American Science Fiction Convention. I’m not sure if North American actually means more than the USA or if it’s our usual overreacting. It’s competing against a bid for San Juan.
@Tasha,
Please remember that I am lousy at languages and I don’t do USspeek; it’s still clear as mud to me. Unfortunately it’s clear as mud in a very distinctive and destructive way; waffle* is now, and has always been, and probably always will be, the way in which people slide over the things they really don’t want to answer in the hope that no-one will notice.
Valley Forge is waffling; I would wager folding money that they didn’t have any intention to change their site until they encountered File 770, our genial host, and the combinations of Filers who notice things which people don’t want them to notice. And I do feel strongly about real diversity, so I am less than tolerant towards people who are talking the talk whilst refusing to walk the walk…
* edible waffles are wonderful…
Tasha, I know perfectly well that Valley Forge is not a Worldcon bid; I made that very clear in my post.
I was pointing out that I’d expect someone organising a major con to be aware of the problems over the last few years, and yet it has apparently not noticed them, or noticed them and thought they were so unimportant to be not worth mentioning.
That really is unacceptable…
@Stevie
You are lousy at languages. I have no clue when you are talking USspeek what you are talking about.
One can have strong feelings about diversity (representation) and accessibility and still feel it’s important to keep the facts straight.
*I miss waffles. They aren’t the same without real milk. Being allergic to dairy sucks.
Seeing-eye cats, no; but I have encountered service cats out and about. The time I was cheeky enough to inquire, I was told the cat could detect the signs of an oncoming siezure. The service cat was a Siamese, and her person said that a particular yowl meant it was time to lie down and prepare to wait it out. But that minute or two let her get off of stairs, warn companions, and all sorts of other useful things. And the cat was handling even a very crowded situation very well. I was impressed.
Congrats Greg!
We have a cat cafe in San Francisco called Kittea (in Hayes Valley). I haven’t visited yet but it’s on my to-do list. I also have no cafe photos, but I do have a photo of my cat writing a novel. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Do72ZFi2sEw/VBekQdJoEvI/AAAAAAAAAEg/HlBPE9eEG54/s1600/B.JPG
My writing lair (aka “living room”) actually got redesigned thanks to my huge cat, and now it consists of an Ikea sectional combined with a modified hospital bed tray that swings out (for the keyboard) and a monitor stand clamped to a side table that holds all my writerly needs (such as tylenol, nicotine gum and coffee). All my prior cats had no trouble with sleeping on my lap while I sat in a chair at a desk, but this cat seriously overflows laps so I had to improvise.
LunarG: I was told the cat could detect the signs of an oncoming siezure. The service cat was a Siamese, and her person said that a particular yowl meant it was time to lie down and prepare to wait it out. But that minute or two let her get off of stairs, warn companions, and all sorts of other useful things.
I was aware that dogs can be trained to do this (in fact, Laura Resnick fosters such service dogs until they are old enough to enter specialized training). I hadn’t heard that cats were also capable of being trained for this.
ETA: It seems that cats trained before 2011 can be certified under a grandfather clause; however, when the ADA was updated in 2011, cats were omitted from the list of service animals and can no longer be certified.