(1) KEPLER STRAIGHTENS UP AND FLIES RIGHT. NASA reports that the Kepler spacecraft has been stabilized and is no longer wasting fuel. They won’t resume science operations until they think they know what went wrong.
(2) GALAKTIKA PIRACY. Author Malcolm F. Cross discusses what it feels like to discover his story was swiped by Hungary’s Galaktika magazine.
And the bad?
My short story, Pavlov’s House, which was both my first pro-sale and something I wrote as part of the early work on figuring out Dog Country, was ripped off by Galaktika.
What is Galaktika? It’s a Hungarian SFF magazine, which has over the past few years apparently ripped off a lot of authors. (There are some articles by A.G. Carpenter on the issue here: here) They went ahead and translated it into Magyar/Hungarian, then sold it in print, without asking me for translation rights, without notifying me, without offering me a contract or payment. They stole my story.
Getting my head around that has been kind of traumatic for me. My writing career is one of the most important things I have in my life, and part of that career is having a say in where and how my work appears. Stories are part of a conversation, by submitting my fiction for publication, by trying to sell it, by getting involved in where and how it appears, I am adding to that conversation. But when I get ripped off…? I’m not sure I’m part of that conversation anymore, and that’s been bugging me immensely.
For now I’m in touch with SFWA (I’m a member, if you did not know!) and figuring out what I can/should do about it.
In the meanwhile, though, if you haven’t already, go enjoy Pavlov’s House where it was originally published, at Strange Horizons, over here….
(3) BURNSIDE ON WEIGHING CREDIBILITY. At Medium, Ken Burnside takes issue with those skeptical about the sexism and assaults reported by women gamers, in “For Good Men To See Nothing”.
I specifically AM addressing this piece to the people of “my tribe”: white, heterosexual male gamers who wouldn’t dream of grabbing anyone in a non-consensual or sexual way in public, and find descriptions of these kinds of acts inconceivable, because they don’t happen in front of us.
Our starting point is an article by Emily Garland, who won a judgment from a Canadian court about entrenched sexism she experienced as a customer at a game store. It’s the “Tabletop Gaming Has a White Male Terrorism Problem” piece that came to public notice in early April 2016. To our credit as human beings, it’s gotten a lot of positive responses?—?positive in the sense of “Yes, this is believable, and we’ve got to do something about it.” However, it’s also gotten the “I think she’s making it up to get attention” backlash that’s common when discussing sexism.
No, guys. She isn’t. And as long litanies and lists of licentious license being taken won’t convince you…I’m going to pose this a different way….
The people who do this are incredibly facile with a plausible explanation for why what they’re doing is “not wrong” or “normal”?—?“It’s just a joke.” “Oh, she left something with me and I needed to return it to her.” They know that the vast majority of good men (like you, the people I’m writing this to) will accept that kind of explanation rather than act on it.
A friend of mine, New York Times bestselling author Steven Barnes, has a term for these kinds of people: “Smiling monsters.” They’ll smile and be cheerful to your face when you confront them, and expect you to forget them entirely while they go back to whatever it was you caught them at. These people rely on two facts: The first is that their victim doesn’t want to trigger a confrontation: even bold, brave women like the cosplayer I befriended at Sasquan get jittery about direct confrontation. The second is that good men, like you, won’t believe they’re doing what they’re doing, because they can’t imagine doing it. It’s easy to overlook smiling monsters when they give a glib answer and scuttle out of sight.
When you accept the explanation of the smiling monster, you give the victim the impression that you won’t listen to what they have to say. The smiling monster is betting on that, and 99% of the time, he’s right….
(4) A SPECULATIVE REVIEW. From Stephenie Sheung, “Review: Almost Infamous by Matt Carter” at The Speculative Herald.
If you’re a fan of comics and are looking for a clever, humorous, and merciless riff on the superhero genre, then Almost Infamous is most definitely the book for you! Matt Carter’s novel is a wildly entertaining, satirical take on the characters and worlds we imagine when we picture the Marvel or DC universes, and as a twist, his protagonist is a horny, uppity teenage supervillain.
To get a sense of the zaniness you’re in for, just take a peek at the book’s first few pages, featuring a “Brief History of Superheroes.” Super powers—whether you were born with them, cursed with them, granted them as a result of radioactive freak accident, changed by a gene-splicing experiment gone wrong, and so on and so forth—are just a common fact of life. Superhumans are real. Oh, and by the way, so are Atlanteans, Lemurians, magicians, aliens, demons, golems, mortal gods who walk the earth, and pretty much every kind of power-endowed beings you can think of. All real.
(5) A BRIEF HISTORY OF FANFIC. Andrew Liptak explores “Unauthorized Stories: Fan Fiction and Fandom” at Kirkus Reviews.
Looking at the phenomenon, Fan Fiction is a wholly new type of medium that arrived because of the close-knit genre communities, and it demonstrates the unique environment of these communities. They’re also coupled with the rise of larger media franchises that typically expand far beyond the reach of novels. Fan fiction has provided a unique opportunity for fans to push the boundaries of the stories that they’ve come to love, and contribute to it in their own ways.
(6) HOPPING. In part 8 of Black Gate’s Choosing Your Narrative Point of View Series, Tina Jens reveals “Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: The Multiple Personalities of Omniscient 3rd Person: Spotlight on ‘Head-Hopper’”, at Black Gate.
Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse, does a brilliant job with our next POV style:
7. Head-Hopper
If you’ve not read her novel, I urge you to do so. I also urge you to read it aloud, even if you’re sitting outside at a café, which I did a few summers ago. The book is graced with many long, complex sentences that loop and flow, and sometimes change point of view from one clause to the next. Reading it out loud helps the brain make sense of the phrases and clauses in a way that eyes-only reading can’t manage as well. When done well, as Ms. Woolf did, it is a brilliant writing stratagem. But it works best in stories where there is very little physical plot. The conflict comes mainly from the contrast of how different characters perceive the same moment, and in the shifting emotions of characters.
Which means, generally, it is not a good point of view choice for action-packed genre stories.
(7) ISLAMIC SF CONTEST. The Islamicate Science Fiction short story writing contest is open and will accept submissions until to the beginning of Ramadan/Ramzan/Ramjan (June 8, 2016). The winner will be announced on the day of Eid – July 6, 2016. Cash prizes will be given to the first, second and third place stories.
The Islam and Science Fiction project has been running since 2005, we just entered our second decade. While the depiction of Muslims in Science Fiction and Islamic cultures has improved we still have a lot way to go, as is the case with many other minority groups. To kickstart things in this genre we have decided to start a contest centered around Science Fiction with Muslim characters or Islamic cultures (Islam in the cultural sense and not necessarily in the religious sense)….
Scope:
Islamicate refers to the cultural output of predominantly Islamic culture or polity. Thus while the culture has its foundation and inspiration from the religion of Islam, it need not be produced by someone who is Muslim. The term Islamicate is thus similar to the term West as it encompasses a whole range of cultures, ethnicities and schools of thought with shared historical experience. The contest is open to all people regardless of their religious affiliation or lack there of. Thus a person of any religion, nationality, ethnicity race, gender, sexual orientation can submit. A collection of the best stories from the submissions will be released as an epub and available to download for free.
Submission rules:
- The stories must be either set in a predominantly Muslim culture AND/OR have Muslim protagonist(s).
- Short stories in almost any variant of Science Fiction (space opera, time-travel, apocalyptic, reimaging classic themes, techno-thrillers, bio-punk, science mystery, alternate history, steampunk, utopian, dystopian etc) is encouraged.
- No reprints: No simultaneous submissions: No multiple submissions.
- Submission are limited to one per person.
- Since we are talking about short stories, any story with less than 8,000 words will be accepted.
(8) A KITTEN’S PERSPECTIVE. “Happy Kittens Smile Back” at Spacefaring, Extradimensional Happy Kittens.
Whew, Hugo nominations have closed and I managed to actually consume enough good SFF to nominate five things in most categories. The extraordinary new resources like Rocket Stack Rank and various longlists really came in handy.
Of course, the Hugo nomination deadline is just an excuse. Discovering new writers and fanzines you hadn’t heard of before is the thing, not some weird, phallic awards that never (or very very seldom) are given to your absolute top favorites anyway. I do like the fan community aspect of it — people reading the shortlisted works at the same time and discussing them, and getting together to throw the annual party — but it’s all more or less sideshow. The books, the stories and the other exciting things are what it’s about for me.
So, to some extent, nevermind what the eventual nomination results are going to look like on April 26th. Even if a certain former disco musician manages to make his MRA troll army sweep the ballot like he did last year, there will be terrific thing to read and watch on the various recommendation lists that many fans have put together. Next year, the necessary rule changes are ratified and we get rid of him. (Truth be told, I don’t think that it will be as easy for them to wreak havoc as it was last year, but who knows.)
(9) LOCUS AWARDS DEADLINE. Voting closes April 15.
Make the Locus Awards count! Deadline April 15. Vote today at https://t.co/Y1UqRoaBwE
Please retweet!
— Locus Magazine (@locusmag) April 11, 2016
(10) SF AUTHORS WRITE BREAKFAST STORIES. By gifting some virtual birthday waffles to Sarah Pinsker, A. C. Wise started a breakfast meme on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/KMSzpara/status/719605732304429058
@Wiswell @ac_wise @KMSzpara @SarahPinsker @andreapawley The Waffle House In the Woods
— Serenity “Leap Year Capybara” Dee ???? (@sapphixy) April 11, 2016
@ac_wise @Wiswell @asymbina @KMSzpara @andreapawley I Have No Mouth and I Must Eat Waffles
— Sarah Pinsker (@SarahPinsker) April 11, 2016
@asymbina @ac_wise @Wiswell @KMSzpara @andreapawley The Book of the New Sunny Side Up
— Sarah Pinsker (@SarahPinsker) April 11, 2016
@asymbina @SarahPinsker @Wiswell @KMSzpara @andreapawley The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelets.
— A.C. Wise (@ac_wise) April 11, 2016
And lots more where those came from….
(11) WE ARE IN KANSAS TOTO. What happens when you are accidentally assigned 600 million IP addresses? Learn about “How an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell” at Fusion.
For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They’ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They’ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They’ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat….
The trouble for the Taylor farm started in 2002, when a Massachusetts-based digital mapping company called MaxMind decided it wanted to provide “IP intelligence” to companies who wanted to know the geographic location of a computer to, for example, show the person using it relevant ads or to send the person a warning letter if they were pirating music or movies.
There are lots of different ways a company like MaxMind can try to figure out where an IP address is located. It can “war-drive,” sending cars around the U.S. looking for open wifi networks, getting those networks’ IP addresses, and recording their physical locations. It can gather information via apps on smartphones that note the GPS coordinates of the phone when it takes on a new IP address. It can look at which company owns an IP address, and then make an assumption that the IP address is linked to that company’s office.
(12) HANNA BARBERA. See the photos at Fred Seibert’s Tumblr, “Hanna & Barbera, the last portraits. By Jeff Sedlik”.
Without knowing it, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera presented me with the reasons I got into the cartoon business in 1992.
Looney Tunes, Popeye the Sailor, Tom and Jerry and Crusader Rabbit were the first favorites in my cartoon diet, but my fandom really kicked into gear with Hanna-Barbera’s The Huckleberry Hound Show, and their first wave that ended with The Jetsons. When I started traveling to Hollywood in my 30s, whenever I passed their classic Googie studios, I would wonder what went on in that hallowed fortress. Little could I know that I’d end up as the last president of the company.
One of the missions was to give some respect to Bill and Joe that I felt they’d missed over the decades when they’d disrupted the industry and vintage cartoon partisans never forgave them. They were abused as having limited creative imaginations, so I commissioned a series of essays written by Bill Burnett to set the record straight.
In 1996, towards the end of my tenure (owner Ted Turner sold his entire operation to Time-Warner), I commissioned a series of formal portraits by one of my favorite Los Angeles based photographers, Jeff Sedlik. Bill was 86, Joe 85, and they deserved to be remembered as the American cultural titans that they were.
(13) NEW SUICIDE SQUAD TRAILER. Aired during the MTV Movie Awards.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Andrew Porter, Darren Garrison, Barry Newton, Will R., and Greg Hullender for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Sylvia Sotomayor.]
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First Fifth!
Second because I can
Second fifth! Or third, or whatever. Godstalk! Laugh while you can, monkey boy! Hahaha!
Fourth. And the second godstalk!
The coveted actual fifth!
Fifth?
ETA: Curses. *shakes fist at Aaron*
Good on Ken Burnside. Maybe some people who won’t listen to women like Emily Garland or men like me will listen to him.
Meanwhile, this Suicide Squad trailer is not as good as the last one. It’s not as bad as the teaser-trailer, but it does make me worry. Especially after the flaming ruin that was Batman v. Superman.
Meanwhile, this Suicide Squad trailer is not as good as the last one.
I pretty much already don’t care about any of the characters. I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to like about this movie.
@Jim Henley,
There have been Suicide Squad reshoots:
Who knows how it’ll turn out, but I’m cautiously optimistic.
(3) BURNSIDE ON WEIGHING CREDIBILITY.
(3) That’s rather a good article by Ken Burnside. He asks a very pointed question:
What does it cost you (yes, you!) to assume the women coming forward are telling the truth?
Lots of food for thought there.
Gotta say I am still onboard for Suicide Squad in spite of the flaming pile of poo that was BvS. And Barnes’ “Smiling monsters” description is just too sadly true.
I’m feeling ok about Suicide Squad, precisely because I don’t care about any of the characters, so they can’t ruin them for me. Also, no Snyder.
3) Very good piece by Burnside. For quite a while now, I’ve tended to believe the person making the complaint-because I’ve seen the Jekyll/Hyde sides of way too many people to just dismiss complaints because “oh, he’s such a nice guy, he couldn’t possibly do something like that!” when I know that in fact does happen. The smiling affable ones can be the most coldly calculating sociopaths you’ll ever meet. I hope the Burnside piece makes a lot of people think.
3) That’s a good article by Ken Burnside. Reminds me of how I happened to walk into the old Birmingham Forbidden Planet (since moved to a different location) when there was a gaming session in progress upstairs and constantly had gamers who were probably half my age stare at my backside, while I was checking out their SFF selection.
The more I see from Ken Burnside, the more impressed I am.
(3) BURNSIDE ON WEIGHING CREDIBILITY.
That’s a very good piece by Burnside. I hope that it will sway some minds.
It will be interesting to see whether the Puppies turn on him, now that he’s “sided with teh wimminz”. 😐
11) WE ARE IN KANSAS TOTO.
After reading that whole article (which is, incidentally, very interesting), all I can say is that I hope the data will get cleaned up tout suite, and that those who’ve been getting besieged by haters (or blamed for their actions) will now get some relief.
(3) BURNSIDE ON WEIGHING CREDIBILITY. – Good stuff, and it does get to the meat of how isolating an experice it can be when you put all the onus on a target of harassment to undertake the fixes.
Whatever my concerns are regarding “call-out culture” are (both as an actual thing and an epithet), a quote I heard a few years back is one of those things that really resonated with me was The standard you walk past, is the standard you accept
3) BURNSIDE ON WEIGHING CREDIBILITY
Ken undoes some of his good in a comment he makes under his article: One of the failure modes of feminism in enlisting men is “lack of an even keel”…
He continues from there so go read the comment yourself. It turns into a victim blaming comment IMHO. I’d copy it but the iPad won’t let me.
(10) Flow my syrup the pancake said.
The moon over my-ham-y is a harsh mistress.
Dunkin’ egg
Omelette and Crake
Inspired by (1)
Scroll up and file right
Ken Burnside: One of the failure modes of feminism in enlisting men to help is “lack of an even keel”. I understand WHY women are scared, emotional and pissed over this.
They’ve been gnawed on by monsters that only they can see. They’re certain that men won’t pay attention to them, won’t believe them, and certainly won’t help them.
But someone being desperate and loud and scared about a threat you can’t even see? Yeah. Frame it in those terms and the male non-response flows logically.
Did he just say that women are at fault for the failure by good men to speak up, because of the way women have reacted to harassment?
Way to completely deep-six what had been a good post, dude. 🙄
The thing about the squad trailers is that they’re good, but they’re good because of editing and music, not because the content is compelling. Not a great sign, and neither is the fact that they chose to do reshoots to make the film more like the trailer.
And yeah, Ken is doing the Lord’s work there.
(8) I’m liking his/her/their repeated “former disco musician” description. Hee.
Re: the Burnside comment:
I may be missing something, but it seems to me that what Burnside is saying is that one of the problems with getting men involved in helping stop this asinine crap is that most men don’t have a frame of reference which enables them to even understand the problem. Men don’t see the threat because they don’t have a way to understand the problem.
That’s why he walks you through the whole thing again and again in the article-he’s trying to give his intended audience an explanation of the problem that they’ll maybe understand. He then runs through the tl;dr version of it in the last four lines of the comment in question.
I suspect the “failure modes of feminism” part has clouded his overall comment.
@JJ – “Did he just say that women are at fault for the failure by good men to speak up, because of the way women have reacted to harassment?”
While what Burnside was saying in that comment is wrong, that’s (IMO) an unfair assessment.
I read it as “if you set it up in a framework where people are voicing out concerns over something that no one else can see, then the “male response” is logical.”
The mistake is in him saying that there has been a failure in fiminism by a lack of “enlisting men”. It’s a similar mistake to when people throw around the whole “hey where is the Muslim condemnation of terrorism” argle-bargle.
It happens, and it happens often. It’s just that you (meaning the person saying these things) don’t see it.
ETA: Ninja’d, and in a much better way that I put forth, by @Robert Reynolds
@JJ
That’s how I read the comment. Thanks for copying it all over.
@Robert Reynolds I suspect the “failure modes of feminism” part has clouded his overall comment.
Yep. This.
@Snowcrash
Your response makes sense to me. Thanks.
Clicky.
Tired, foggy-brained, but possibly sixth fifth.
Nope, one shy of it.
@Jim Henley
The word on the street is that the first full Suicide Squad trailer, the one everyone loved, contained literally every joke in the film. All of them. Basically, the trailer team has a much better handle on the current mood (Deadpool and colorful Marvel style) and cut a trailer to match, and damn the source material they actually had to work with.
Hence the current massive and expensive re-shoots which are currently going on. People who know better than me think that much of the material used in the above trailer was shot in just the last few weeks in response to Deadpool (and the first ‘fun’ trailer) doing so well and BvS doing so poorly.
KANSAS This was a really interesting article and I like their plan for resolving the unintended consequences of how their program has been put to use.
BURNSIDE Good on him! Never understood why some men just don’t want to believe.
ETA Currently reading Lovecraft Country and enjoying it very much.
(5) I really don’t think it makes sense to call fanfic new, nor its communities. There’s no reasonably worthwhile definition of fanfic that can include a large majority of current fanfic and exclude the Aeneid, just for starters. Both biblical testaments and the apocrypha around them include fairly strong doses of the same. And on and on. Wherever you’ve got accounts, you’ve got people filling in the gaps, retelling them to suit themselves…oh, heck, I’m gonna go get the Clive Barker quote again. The opening of Weaveworld:
And some of what comes out of that perpetual evolution is worth thinking about as fanfic, whatever age it’s from.
World Weary: Never understood why some men just don’t want to believe.
Because 1) they never see it happen, so how can it possibly be happening? and 2) it’s he said/she said, so believing it means being a Traitor to their fellow menz.
Clive Barker: Nothing ever begins…
Did anyone else read this and think, “The Wheel of Time turns, and ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legends fade to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the third age by some, an Age yet to come, an age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings or endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.”
No? I’ll see myself out.
It’s out just me, or is the Burnside thing about 80% quoted from the Emily Garland article? I suppose he’s writing for puppies who’ll have vented spleen without reading the thing they hate…
I saw @11/Kansas on the BBC site; my first question was whether the municipality, county, and/or state are going to sue for the costs of turning aside all those angry people who’ve been misdirected to these coordinates. Of course MaxMind (et al, IIRC) most owe the people whose home was mistargeted, but I doubt those people have the resources; help from a larger group is probably their best chance to get some compensation for what they’ve been through. OTOH, from what I hear there may not be enough spare money at any level of Kansas government to pursue this thanks to their belief on the fairy tale of the Laffer curve….
3) That’s really not an article I expected to be written by a puppy. In fact, I would imagine that he’s going to get some definite flack from that. Interesting.
I’d like to wish a happy book birthday to Delilah Dawson for Strike, and Stephen Aryan for Battlemage, both sequels. I have reviews of the first Aryan novel, which I finished a couple of days ago Battle Mage review
It’s also been denied (by Jai Courtney and, I think, the director), saying that the reshoots are about adding more action. Two of the main sources for rumours about problems with Batman v Superman have gone different ways on which version to believe.
Yay Burnside! And it’s a bloody good list too. This post makes me so happy.
Cautiously optimistic for Suicide Squad, even though the new Joker seems to be craptastic. I really, really want this to be good. It can’t possibly be any worse than Snyder’s films. Can it?
Good on Ken Burnside. However, something I see women complain about, that complaints and issues by women only really get taken seriously when a man speaks up about them. That’s a problem with our culture, too.
Today it’s April 12th, which means its Gagarin Day, marking Man’s first entry into outer space. Hurrah!
Re: Suicide Squad. My pessimism about genre movies seems to be justified. Again. I am rapidly tempering my expectations for Civil War, in the hopes it overachieves. Getting my hopes up even modestly seems to be a recipe for continuous agita.
More pieces like Burnside’s would go a long way in this mess.
Today it’s April 12th, which means its Oliver Postgate’s birthday.
I shall have to watch some Clangers in celebration.
An acquaintance I recommended Slow River to is raving about it today, so I feel I have done my SFF good deed for the day.
Today’s read — Everything Leads to You, by Nina LaCour (not SFF).
A YA-ish f/f love story set in contemporary Los Angeles, about recent high school grads breaking into the film business. Largely about the fantasy of falling in love vs. the reality of falling in love, which is a nice approach. Not the Best Novel Ever, but a pretty good book and an enjoyable read.
It’s BS that men don’t see sexism, sexual assault, predators, groping etc.
Men un-see these things. It’s like the seeing/un-seeing trick from China Mieville’s The City & The City. These things happen directly in front of you, but you train yourself to un-see them, and society gives you bonus points for doing so, and lightly penalizes you (in comparison to what the actual victims suffer) for speaking up. We also downplay them, put them in “context” or refuse to address them even when presented with evidence.
The frame of reference we men don’t have? It’s called feminism, and we’re given the same weak incentive/penalty structure for not investigating it.
“Monsters only they can see?” No. It’s not They Live. There are no special sunglasses. It’s pure and simple unwillingness to look, and we have got to stop letting ourselves off the hook for it. It’s hilariously sad that the “big tough guy” myth believers are cowardly in the face of minor discomfort. So much so that they make up fake enemies like “The PC Police” to blame for fake rape allegations, conveniently freeing them from believing anyone who makes an allegation. Because it’s too scary for them to go against the culture they love and stand on the outside, protecting one person against the group.
I’m more optimistic of Suicide Squad than I was of BvS:DoJ. Pirmarily because I liked the source material.
A small change and we get closer to the truth:
“It’s true that men don’t see things as sexism, sexual assault, predators, groping etc.”
Which is another thing than not seeing them. There have been things that happened when I was younger that I clearly did see, but never thought of harassment. Then. I can only say that I was more stupid when I was younger.
@GSLamb
I’d be happier if they based it of the Task Force X episode of Justice League Unlimited.
It’s been a frickin’ decade since JLU, and it’s still heads and shoulders above almost every live-action DC adaptation since.
@ World Weary – I enjoyed Lovecraft Country.
I can’t remember if I said so on yesterday’s Scroll, but I finished Seanan McGuire’s Indexing yesterday, and promptly ordered the sequel. Has it been optioned for TV yet? Because it should be — if it can be done without making a white guy the lead.
Also, is her first name pronounced “shaw-nan”? We were discussing that at dinner last night.