(1) LUKE SKYRANTER. Movie Banter brings you “10 minutes of Mark Hamill being HONEST about The Last Jedi.”
No matter what you think of the film and the way Luke Skywalker was portrayed, thank goodness Mark isn’t afraid to speak his mind. He is sincere and cares about the franchise as much as he cares about the fandom.
(2) THE BREW THAT IS TRUE. Inverse explains that “Ewoks Are Coffee Farmers According to Star Wars Canon”.
The upcoming Han Solo movie will, no doubt, make all sorts of changes to Star Wars canon, but a just-released book about Han and Lando’s adventures quietly revealed that Ewoks are actually renown coffee farmers. Yep, those cute little Imperial-killing teddy bears are responsible for the best cup of java you’ll find outside of Dex’s Diner.
The book, Last Shot: A Han and Lando Novel, came out earlier this week, and it follows the two coolest characters in the galaxy across three distinct time periods. In one of them, set after Return of the Jedi but well before The Force Awakens, baby Ben Solo kicks his dad in the face. Later in that scene, Han’s culinary droid, BX-778, brews up a mean cup of Endorian caf. (Coffee is called “caf” in the book because, well, that’s how Star Wars rolls).
(3) STURGEON ANALYSIS. At Rocket Stack Rank, Eric Wong’s analysis shows the Sturgeon Award nominees are highly correlated with other guides to outstanding short fiction: “Sturgeon Award Finalists Versus Other Top Stories of 2017”. Greg Hullender says:
Last year too, the Sturgeon Award Finalists were the most accurate guide to which stories would be broadly recommended (by serious reviewers, major anthologies, and prestigious awards). http://www.rocketstackrank.com/2018/01/2016-best-sff-short-fiction-guides.html
There’s definitely something special about this award. It should get more attention than it does.
(4) THESE POTATOES AIN’T GONNA PLANT THEMSELVES! Or will they? “All by Itself, the Humble Sweet Potato Colonized the World”.
Of all the plants that humanity has turned into crops, none is more puzzling than the sweet potato. Indigenous people of Central and South America grew it on farms for generations, and Europeans discovered it when Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean.
In the 18th century, however, Captain Cook stumbled across sweet potatoes again — over 4,000 miles away, on remote Polynesian islands. European explorers later found them elsewhere in the Pacific, from Hawaii to New Guinea.
The distribution of the plant baffled scientists. How could sweet potatoes arise from a wild ancestor and then wind up scattered across such a wide range? Was it possible that unknown explorers carried it from South America to countless Pacific islands?
An extensive analysis of sweet potato DNA, published on Thursday in Current Biology, comes to a controversial conclusion: Humans had nothing to do with it. The bulky sweet potato spread across the globe long before humans could have played a part — it’s a natural traveler.
Likewise, ArsTechnica says “Sweet potatoes may have reached Pacific Islands 100,000 years ahead of Polynesians.”
“This finding is likely to be controversial because it calls into question the alleged contacts between Polynesians and Americans in pre-European times,” Oxford University botanist Pablo Muñoz-Rodriguez, who led the study, told Ars Technica. “[The] sweet potato was the only remaining biological evidence of these contacts.”
Muñoz-Rodriguez and his team sampled DNA from 119 specimens of sweet potatoes and all of their wild relatives, including a sweet potato harvested in the Society Islands in 1769 by the Cook expedition. With those samples, Muñoz-Rodriguez and his colleagues built a phylogenetic tree: a family tree that shows evolutionary relationships among organisms based on the differences in their DNA. For plants, researchers often build two phylogenetic trees: one for the DNA stores in the nucleus of the plant’s cells and one for the chlorophyll-producing organelles called chloroplasts, which have their own DNA. Genetic material doesn’t always get passed on in the same way for both, so it’s sometimes useful to compare the two.
The team used the phylogenetic trees to estimate how long ago each branch of the tree split off from the others. It turned out that the Society Islands sweet potato hadn’t interbred with Central and South American lines for at least 111,500 years…
(5) TODAY’S JOB LOST TO ROBOTS. WIRED Magazine reports “A Robot Does the Impossible: Assembling an Ikea Chair Without Having a Meltdown”. I’m beginning to suspect Brian Aldiss wrote the wrong ending for “Who Can Replace A Man.”
Researchers report today in Science Robotics that they’ve used entirely off-the-shelf parts—two industrial robot arms with force sensors and a 3-D camera—to piece together one of those Stefan Ikea chairs we all had in college before it collapsed after two months of use. From planning to execution, it only took 20 minutes, compared to the human average of a lifetime of misery. It may all seem trivial, but this is in fact a big deal for robots, which struggle mightily to manipulate objects in a world built for human hands.
(6) ALL IN A DAY. Initially, Patrick Nielsen Hayden made his feelings clear about a new book coming out which has the same title as an Emma Bull novel. (Jump on the thread here.)
https://twitter.com/pnh/status/986396778906910720
Later he apologized. (Thread begins here)
Patrick, I wasn't aware of the Bull book until about a month ago, & you've known my title since last summer. I wish if you had concerns that you'd just contacted me? You know me well enough to know I wouldn't intentionally step on anyone's toes. I'm sad this is how this fell out.
— zanzjan.bsky.social (@zanzjan) April 18, 2018
(7) DOG DUTY. The New York Times inquires: “Do You Know Which Dog Breeds Are in a Mutt? Scientists Want to Find Out”.
One of the favorite pastimes of dog people is guessing a mutt’s ancestry.
Is that scruffy little guy in the dog park a mix of Afghan hound and Catahoula leopard dog? Is the beast that bit someone really a pit bull, or a cocker spaniel-beagle potpourri? And how about your aunt’s yippy pillow on paws — Maltese/poodle/peke?
If you’re wondering about your own dog you can, of course, get a DNA test. But there’s a lot of open territory for that familiar figure in the canine world, the dog guesser. You know who I mean, they’re like dog whisperers, but louder.
Now all self-proclaimed experts have a chance to prove their mettle or meet their comeuppance. The MuttMix survey debuted on Monday. It is citizen science for people who are willing to be proven terribly wrong, a dog quiz that tests how good you are at figuring out what a mutt is made of.
The survey is being run by the Darwin’s Dogs program at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., a center for genome studies, and the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants. Fellow dog guessers (yes, I confess) proceed at the risk of your exceedingly high self-regard….
(8) THE MODERN PROMETHEUS. Mary Shelley biopic opening in theaters May 25.
Starring: Elle Fanning, Maisie Williams, Bel Powley, Douglas Booth, Joanne Froggatt & Stephen Dillane She will forever be remembered as the writer who gave the world Frankenstein. But the real life story of Mary Shelley—and the creation of her immortal monster—is nearly as fantastical as her fiction. Raised by a renowned philosopher father (Stephen Dillane) in 18th-century London, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Elle Fanning) is a teenage dreamer determined to make her mark on the world when she meets the dashing and brilliant poet Percy Shelley (Douglas Booth). So begins a torrid, bohemian love affair marked by both passion and personal tragedy that will transform Mary and fuel the writing of her Gothic masterwork. Imbued with the imaginative spirit of its heroine, Mary Shelley brings to life the world of a trailblazing woman who defied convention and channeled her innermost demons into a legend for the ages.
(9) NEXT ON HIS AGENDER. Jon Del Arroz, worried there might still be a few people he hasn’t alienated this week, announced he is “Coming Out As A Woman” [Internet Archive link] – which is to say, adopting a pseudonym.
After serious deliberations, I will be only submitting short fiction to professional markets from a new female pen name. I’ve come up with the name, I’ve got the email address, it’s ready to go. I will be, for all intents and purposes, a female author. It’s the only way to get ahead in the business, and the smart thing to do. I won’t be broadcasting the name here in case of any inadvertent discrimination, but I will keep you informed as to how reactions change based on having a female name. It’ll be interesting to say the least.
(10) PRELUDE TO SPACE. NPR tells about “Antarctic Veggies: Practice For Growing Plants On Other Planets”.
…Now, the greenhouse project, called EDEN ISS, is fully operational. Bamsey’s colleagues in Antarctica harvested their first salads last week.
And while growing greens in Antarctica is exciting — for much of the year there’s no fresh produce at Neumayer Station III — Bamsey says the end goal of this project is much farther away. EDEN ISS is a practice round for cultivating food in space.
The eight-nation team of EDEN ISS researchers chose to grow “high-water-content, pick-and-eat-plants,” Bamsey says, “things that can’t normally be stored for long periods of time.” The crops include lettuce, cucumbers, radishes, swiss chard, and herbs — basil, chives, cilantro and mint. One-tenth of the yield will become research data, while the rest will help feed Neumayer Station III’s crew….
(11) SPACE DIAMONDS. “Inter Jovem et Martem”? “Meteorite diamonds ‘came from lost planet'”.
A diamond-bearing space rock that exploded in Earth’s atmosphere in 2008 was part of a lost planet from the early Solar System, a study suggests.
The parent “proto-planet” would have existed billions of years ago before breaking up in a collision and was about as large as Mercury or Mars.
A team has published their results in the journal Nature Communications.
They argue that the pressures necessary to produce diamonds of this kind could only occur in planet of this size.
Using three different types of microscopy, the researchers characterised the mineral and chemical make-up of the diamond-bearing rocks. The fragments were scattered across the Nubian desert of northern Sudan after the asteroid 2008 TC3 exploded 37km above the ground on 7 October 2008.
(12) MUSICAL INTERLUDE. Another Instant Classic by Matthew Johnson:
Yub nub, yub nub, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Well you tell by the way I use my spear
I’m a murder bear, I got no fear
Speeder bikes and Empire goons, I’ve been kicked around
My forest moon
And now it’s all right, it’s OK
I’ve got stormtroopers to slay
And way above, I think I spy
A Death Star hangin’ in the skyWhether you’re a Jedi or just a little yeti
You’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Feel the walkers breakin’, this tree trunk is a-shakin’
And we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ aliveYub nub, yub nub, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Yub nub, yub nub, stayin’ aliveWell you might think I’m a teddy bear
My god’s a droid in a wooden chair
I may just have stone age tools
But I’m the end of those Empire fools
And now it’s all right, it’s OK
There’ll be some fireworks this day
And way above, I think I spy
A Death Star fallin’ from the skyYub nub, yub nub, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Yub nub, yub nub, stayin’ al-i-i-i-ve…
[Thanks to JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, Carl Slaughter, Andrew Porter, Mike Kennedy, Daniel Dern, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editors of the day A.G. Carpenter, Ingvar and Cassy B.]
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HEather Rose Jones:
I agree completely, with both the quoted bit and your observation that how it looks to strangers also matters greatly. I had meant to add a clause to the effect that it was still a dick thing to say in public and I am glad either he caught on or someone called him on it, and he made his follow up just as publicly – then the bus was getting too close to my stop and I halted where I did instead.
I’ve also seen the dynamic where one friend thought they were friendly-teasing and the victim… clearly felt hurt but didn’t want to say so in front of others/liked the person too much to want to call them on it aloud. So I am very glad Palmer spoke up.
I wonder what title is the most used. “Out of the Silent Land” seems to turn up more often than you’d think.
@ Joe H. Put me down for a pre-order
5) Ikea assembly instructions are fantastic and never lead to meltdowns. Unlike the instructions of other furniture sellers. The robot needs further testing on other brands.
“We’re not allowing you to install Ikea chairs any more. It’s too dangerous for you humans. To serve and obey, and guard men from harm. “
I remember one gas grill that I put together, some twenty-five years ago. I’m an old hand at putting stuff together (my dad owned a hardware store and I grew up assembling lawnmowers and suchlike to be sold), but after the third time I had to take it partially apart again because step 11 actually needed to be done before step 5, I gave up on the “instructions” and put it together using the (blurry) exploded diagram in the back.
Took me four hours. Only took 30 minutes after I gave up on the official instructions.
(9) NEXT ON HIS AGENDER. That’s one way to work around the whole “the entire world feels you’re utterly toxic” problem. Nothing stays secret forever, and of course you still have to write well. (Disclaimer: I don’t know if he writes well or not.)
@Mike Glyer: LOL at your headline for this one. 😉
@Lurkertype: “I realize that, combining info from yesterday’s and today’s Pixel Scrolls, we soon will have robots that can both assemble furniture and break it down for recycling when it’s no longer useful.”
Will we become unneeded in this life cycle of furniture? 😉
@JJ: The tweet’s phrasing made it sound like the novel name thing was just the latest, and this kind of thing’s been bugging him for a while – a straw that broke the camel’s back kind of thing. I’m not excusing (and may be wrong), and I’m glad he apologized.
@JJ, part 2: I have been very annoyed at getting recs for a different spelling of the book I own, Rachel Hartman’s Seraphina (which I may be typo’ing myself). Gak. Stupid Amazon should not rec based on book titles, and it seems especially odd to do it based on a different spelling. Maybe this is why it keeps recommending the Spanish-language version of Artemis to me (which is stupid for other reasons, namely, they should be connected via metadata, e.g., “X is foreign-language version of Y” – but that may be the publisher’s fault, or maybe Amazon has no such connection between language versions of books).
@JohnFromGR: IMHO it’s always okay to say, “Oh, hey, pseudonym author X is really author Y,” unless you know them/their publisher and were explicitly asked not to, of course. But if JDA said, “Now don’t anyone tell what my secret new name is,” nope, that wouldn’t carry the same weight with me as another author or publisher personally asking me the same thing. (The whole “vote with your dollars” thing; I don’t want to be tricked into reading work by a toxic a’hole.)
But discovering who a pseudonymous author really is? That’s a time-honored tradition, last I checked! 😉 No matter who the author is! Some folks love this kind of mystery. Shoot, people were guessing at who K.J. Parker was for eons; it almost sounds like it was a game between him, his publisher, and readers, e.g., having him interview himself and all that.
4
I understand that some important work on how long sweet potato seeds can survive in salt water was done by a guy named Charles Darwin.
Pixelpodia is the key insightThe mouse that scrolls the pixels rules the file.
(9) Just be on the lookout for any work by Zorra Lednoj.
(6) People can be strange about titles. I once saw someone comment that Scott Lynch should kick my ass over The Thorn of Dentonhill, because, in their mind, there was One True Thorn, and it wasn’t me writing him.
@PJ Evans
I came across a song named Blame it on the Boogie yesterday, which was recorded early on by The Jackson 5, and written by a guy named “Mick Jackson” who is entirely unrelated to Michael.
Have we done band names lately: Something made me think of “Thromberry Alarm Clock” (whose hit song was “InScroll and Pixelmints”).
@Kendall —
Rest assured, he does not.
See my review of Stars Entwined on Goodreads.
@Contrarius: “Rest assured, he does not.”
Ooof. Them’s some powerful clunkers right there.
As for JdA’s experiment, I think the better approach would have been to perform it in silence and announce the results afterward. Not only does that get you the advantage of stealth, but it allows you to sweep the whole thing under the rug in the event that the results run counter to expectations. But then, he’s not exactly renowned as a master of forethought…
@Rev. Bob —
Exactamundo. Einstein, he ain’t.
(6) What JJ said in #1, and I must admit Im not aware of the original. I suspect whoever came up with the title thought of „The secret life of pets“.
(I guess suggesting“The secret Life of pixels“ as scroll title is just lazy…but Im doing it anyway)
JDA: My guess is, he will blog a lot about all the success he has with his pseudonym and then hopes nobody will remember about it, if he doesn’t publish. He is currently self-publishing, I presume?
For someone who claims to be a science fiction writer, JDA sure isn’t demonstrating much knowledge of how to conduct a proper scientific experiment, is he?
And the sad part is that his misdesigned experiment is likely to produce positive results, for the simple reason that it’s probably easier to sell a work under any random name than it is to sell one “by Jon Del Arroz”.
For a few misguided moments, I though JDA was going to change sex. Not that it would actually be of any help.
Lurkertype: “The Midas Plague” was adapted by the BBC into a show. It comes off very well, though some of the ideas were shifted around.
Instead of replying here, JDA has retreated to twitter with a screenshot of the comments here, assuring us that he is NOT MAD, he in fact LAUGHING.
Also, the tweet where he mentions that he regularly reads the tweets of people who have blocked him. A cliche and a coward.
4) That Potato article would have been better if writ by RedWombat
Welp, I just put in a Kindle preorder for C.J. Cherryh & Jane Fancher’s Alliance Rising, currently listed with a January 2018 release date.
https://www.amazon.com/Alliance-Rising-Alliance-Union-Universe-Cherryh-ebook/dp/B07CG3RW8H/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1524161180&sr=1-10
@Joe H
I’m 50% squeeing and 50% worried because Cherryh has been poorly served for ebooks in the UK. Mind you, if the worst comes to the worst it’s an excuse to get the hardback, which I can find for pre-order 🙂
Joe H., I think you mean a January 2019 release date. (I thought, “wait, what, I missed a Cherryh release?!?”)
@Cassy B — D’oh! Yes, 2019, not 2018!
@Mark — Her eBook situation here in the US isn’t great either, at least for her back catalog (most of the DAW stuff is available, and the Fortress books, but no Cyteen, Rimrunners, Tripoint, etc.; and a few more are only available directly from her website), but hopefully since this is a new release it won’t be a problem in the UK.
Just listen for the howls of outrage when he learns he has to give his legal name to any editor interested in his work. A pen name won’t do for contracts.
A fool and his pixels are soon parted.
@Joe H
Oh well, at least it’s consistent. I’ve noticed some double book sets of the Alliance-Union books slowly coming out in ebook, which seem to be the DAW ones, but as you say some of her major AU ones are missing, not to mention the whole of Foreigner.
We do have all of the Foreigner books, at least. On the DAW side, the big gaps seem to be Brothers of Earth, Hunter of Worlds and Angel with the Sword.
FWIW, Heavy Time and Hellburner, and the Eastern European fantasy books (Goblin Mirror, etc.) are available directly from her website and I’m sure they’re not region-locked or anything; at least, I’d be very surprised were that to be the case.
… wait, there’s a new Graydon Saunders out?!
and re other notes in this scroll, it’s apparently not the first book to be called “The Human Dress”.
[interestingly, I’ve discovered that Graydon’s stuff can – can – be easier to parse if you read it out loud.]
Ah, yes. But by that time he was already promised a contract and if said editor would then bail out, then Only Because JDA was a man after all and totally not because he started a business relationship with a lie, which is absolute normal behavior and practically self-defense.
Remind me why we care about him again?
There is a pixel scrolled every minute
@Peer —
He has done both. His latest novel was put out by Superversive — which, judging by the results/non-editing, is about the same as self-pubbing.
@Xtifr —
Keep in mind that this is a guy who wrote in his latest book that a character was worried about his skull being crushed by vacuum. Science is not his strong suit.
@Joe H and other Cherryh fans, CJ read the first chapter last year at Bubonicon. One friend said she wanted to read it right then, I said I was ready to read it and a sequel or two.
@Contrarius — Maybe the vacuum was inside the skull?
That would explain it! ;-D
@Joe H
Thanks for the tip on Heavy Time and Hellburners, they’re definitely not region locked because I just bought them!
My first experience of Cherryh was getting a 3 book set from a book club catalogue – Heavy Time, Hellburners, and Cyteen. A very odd pairing but it certainly gave me a good flavour of how wide the series was.
This has possibly been mentioned here at some point and I missed it, but on the off chance it hasn’t been, there’s an excellent piece at Tor.com on Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It’s by Amber Troska:
https://www.tor.com/2018/04/17/ellen-datlow-and-terri-windling-an-appreciation/?utm_source=exacttarget&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_term=tordotcom-tordotcomnewsletter&utm_content=na-readblog-blogpost&utm_campaign=tor
Count me as a fan of their work, as well as those wonderful Canty covers.
@Contrarius
Having been exposed to that crowd and the contents of their skulls, I would not entirely dismiss the possibility that vacuum would exert a positive pressure on them.
@Kurt Busiek: Edith Pilaf, maybe? [snerk…]
@Lia: there’s a very good chance the editor will remember reading the story the first time But not necessarily correctly; TNH told a story about a writer incompetent at market choice who shipped the same manuscript to If after having changes requested (but not done) by Galaxy; Pohl said the work was much improved and bought it.
@Laura (re “George”): 1 instance may not be a trend — but 8.5x more interest doesn’t pass the smell test.
Damn it another reason to regret missing Bubonicon this year! Missed a Cherryh reading and Red Wombat. Such is life…
Would have loved to see the reading — I’ve been a fan of Cherryh’s since I read either Pride of Chanur or Downbelow Station back in the early 1980s. (Although I have yet to start a Foreigner novel.)
9) That’s a valid test. I see two ways that it may go very wrong, though: (1) the person running it is a known unreliable narrator; (2) it may come up against the reality that other such tests have demonstrated — namely, that there is a lot of institutionalized bias against people with female-identified names.
11) That gives me an idea for a piece of jewelry…
12) Very well done!
@ Kurt: “Edith Pilaf”? Ow. I should throw peanuts at you.
@ JohnfromGR: I thought I remembered that. He couldn’t even be arsed to come up with a name of his own, but stole the name of a former classmate — who was Not Amused when the story broke.
@ P J Evans: There’s a well-known kumihimo artist named Jacqueline Carey, who has written several instructional books on the topic. I’m pretty sure that this is not the same person as the author of the Kushiel books.
6) Being music-focused as I am, I thought of Stevie Wonder’s strangest record: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI6qsiarLKs
I used to collect pairs and even triples or more of books with the same title but different authors and contents. I had lots.
https://www.librarything.com/topic/19725 has a game going of it… They point out “Night Watch” and “The Hard Way” each are the title of a whole lot of books.
http://flavorwire.com/376237/the-doubles-10-pairs-of-great-books-with-the-same-titles/3
Peer, we are similarly inspired, however I shielded it from your inquiry by cleverly saying “There’s a pixel scrolled every centon.”
(I saw a photo once of a clock from revolutionary France that went to 10 instead of 12. Decimal time! Oh, those crazy revolutionaries! Must have been centons.)
In the first season of Out of the Unknown, in fact – the surviving episodes have all been released on DVD, and I watched them all recently.
“The Midas Plague” is an interesting adaptation – instead of the sharp social satire of the original story, it turns itself into a madcap surrealist farce, with lots of very broad comic action. It goes on a bit too long (a flaw of many hour-long adaptations of short, punchy short stories), but it’s effective nonetheless.
Dear Ky,
“Just listen for the howls of outrage when he learns he has to give his legal name to any editor interested in his work. A pen name won’t do for contracts.”
Not so. For years, before I had my name legally changed — yes, “Ctein” is my sole and full legal name — I maintained a strict firewall between my two identities**. There was/is one book publisher, five magazine publishers, and probably a dozen corporate clients who have never known me as anything but Ctein.
It’s pretty easy (at least in California, where I and our esteemed Prominent Local Author live). Suppose you want to write under the name Condigeo Montoya. First you want a bank account with Connie’s name on it, so there’s a place for money to go. Depending on your bank’s policies, you can either add it as a second name to your personal account, a DBA, or you open up an entirely separate business account. Doesn’t matter which.
Next you contact the IRS and say that you are a sole proprietor (most authors are) operating under the name Condigeo Montoya and you need to get an Employer ID Number. The EIN works just like a Social Security number and it goes on your personal tax filing on Form C. The EIN and your SSN link to the same account, Condigeo Montoya + EIN are just an alias for the outside world.
This is so that when the publisher files a 1099 at the end of the year for you the name and SSN/EIN information match up in the IRS records.
That’s it! Nobody you’re doing business with ever need know you as anything but Connie.
(** yes, I had/have my reasons, and I would appreciate it if no one breaks that wall)
– pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. Dragon Dictate in training! ]
======================================
— Ctein’s Online Gallery. http://ctein.com
— Digital Restorations. http://photo-repair.com
======================================
So, hypothetically, do you think Condigeo could buy a Worldcon attending membership and go in drag?
I missed this politically-infused genre movie that came out last year. Did anyone see it? Should it have been in the running for the Hugos?
@Ctien: Thanks. I was wondering how JDA could pull that off. Obviously Alice Sheldon maintained her secret identity for years without apparently even her editors knowing. I just was curious about how it could be done today.
Ken: I wonder what title is the most used. “Out of the Silent Land” seems to turn up more often than you’d think.
“Millennium” has been used a lot. But John Varley’s version will always be the “primary” version for me.
@Dex: I’m not taking that bet. Although Jon-boy does often write (in comments at Camestros, f’rex) exactly like a bitchy Mean Girl who’s pretending to be SO NICE, how can you hate her? I’ll wager many of us knew those in high school.
@Heather (who is NOT a “Heather”!): well-said. “I was only teasing! Can’t you take a joke?” is another thing we’ve all heard when someone was actually bullying.
@Kendall: That’s exactly the denouement of the story I mentioned! The bots use up all the (legally mandated to purchase) consumer goods. Being anthropoid, they do just fine with people stuff.
@Contrarius: re your review quotes. Wow. That’s just… bad in so many ways.
@RevBob: Well, sure, but you’d be doing it as a real experiment, not as a piece of performance art/virtue-signaling. Entirely different rules.
@Ky: He’s self-publishing or Pup-publishing. There won’t be any outside editors/publishers involved.
@Robert and Steve: Must try to track that down. The story was occasionally surrealistic, but not slapstick. Interesting about toning down the satire, which IMO is the whole point of the (illogical) set-up.
I’ve known Ctein for, ehhh… 30 (!) years and never heard a hint of his original name. Didn’t JK Rowling sign her mystery contract as “Galbreith” and we only know b/c some star-f’ing lawyer blabbed to his wife?
@Ctein: “You killed my NASFiC. Prepare to die.”