217 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 4/9/16 Little Old Lady Got Nominated Late Last Night”

1. @nickpheas Me too, but I read this as a victory for the forces of not-completely-awful.

2. @Laura (et al): the MIT Musical Theater Guild didn’t do lots of awards, but the ones they did were … different. The most enduring was the Eliot(sp?) Moss Memorial Brownie Award, for Technical Sabotage with the Best of Intentions; it was started by a production of Company in which he gimmicked the first-scena brownies so they wouldn’t be noshed to a few by the time they got on stage — but didn’t warn the person who had to eat one in front of an audience. There were always contenders for this award, as producing serious musicals in a non-theater (Kresge “Auditorium”) was a challenge.

3. Mark: I appear to have both started and finished Gentleman Jole and The Red Queen last night, which is a testament to how I’d read LMB’s shopping list if she published it. I’m glad I was very firmly clued in that there was absolutely no action, conspiracy or other external excitement in the plot, otherwise I might have spoiled the enjoyment of pure character by wondering what was coming.

   It’s a lovely, purely enjoyable story and character study, isn’t it?

   I really like the way that, even though they are all set in the same universe, and fit together and mostly tell a sequential story, the Vorkosigan books each explore different plot themes. It takes a rare and special skill to do that.

   Catherine Asaro’s Saga of the Skolian Empire books do that, too.

4. @Ghostbird Seeing your handle inspires me to say I’m halfway through Authority and am hoping the series never ends, as it’s unsettling in the best way.

5. @Will R Oddly, I didn’t really get on with Authority(*) but I found the name resonated with me on some intuitive personal level. So it’s simultaneously a reference and not a reference in a way that seems vaguely appropriate.

   (*) As opposed to not getting on with authority, which no one who knows me would find odd.

   (*) It’s good writing, but not the kind of unsettling I prefer.

6. @ghostbird Yes–that sounds like a completely appropriate use of it! I can see where the books wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea. I’ve just always been fond of unanswerable mysteries a la The Prisoner or Lost or the X-Files (before those latter two gave in and started settling questions). But I also couldn’t handle everything being that way.

7. Re: 12
   I don’t watch Sleepy Hollow, but a number in my circles do, and I didn’t see any of them who weren’t absolutely pissed off by the season finale.

   Re9: If they really are changing the character’s gender identity, eff those people, as Jim said upstream. Devil is in the details, but it sure looks like they are giving into the Gaters

8. (1) Gardening stories – obviously part of TOR’s new plot to turn the Hugos into awards for Better Homes & Gardens. Seriously, though, congrats to our resident Wombat.
   I must also pass on some love from my daughter – We bought her the Hamster Princess books for her 7th birthday and she adores them.

   (4) Leckie should be careful not to begin any of these books in a snowy tavern, lest she confuse a certain reader into thinking it’s a SF novel.

   (9) Initially disappointing, but I’m not about to heap scorn on the developers yet.

9. Speaking of cupcakes vs. muffins, did some of the descriptions in All the Birds in the Sky feel a bit Vancean? Like if you took some of Jack Vance’s descriptions of food/culture and redid them for the modern tech meritocracy. (Used to say Silicon Valley or dot com. Not sure what we say now.) I enjoyed the background descriptions of places like the egg restaurant or the high end coffee shop whose customer base had moved on.

10. lurkertype
    In “Where’s Charley?”, our genius director decided that the slapstick scene in which I am attempting to seduce a man disguised as a woman (which devolves into all-out struggle) should take place upon a pouffe. Not merely a circular couch, but one which, it was revealed, revolved. This lent itself. To say the least. The thing is, though, that it was a homemade piece of furniture, and, much like the disintegrating coffin I remember from a high school show (with the star inside), wasn’t made to OSHA specs. A wheel came off. Comparing the nights before, after, and during the first time it came off, I can state with certainty that the audience found it even funnier in its damaged state, though the actors found it somewhat perilous.

    Laura Resnick
    I enjoyed watching an outdoor performance of “The Physicists” in which a gust of wind blew a flat over. Alone on the stage, Fraulein Doktor moved her shoulders reflexively about three quarters of an inch without spilling her tea, said, “These old villas!” with an unconcerned smile, and that was pretty much the extent of attention given. I hope it didn’t happen at every performance.
    One nice touch bears mentioning: they used Dürrenmatt’s manifesto on farce as part of the program and printed the whole thing on a Möbius band.

11. At a piano recital by Janet Ahlquist in Cambridge, the pedal block cracked right off. The piano was removed and a different one brought onstage. She gamely started playing again. It was an old building and the instrument hadn’t been chocked sufficiently. The piano began slowly rolling away from her.
    At that point she sat on the edge of the stage and swapped jokes with the audience for a while. A THIRD piano was brought in and she finished the program. It wasn’t her best performance and the final instrument was ever so slightly out of tune, but she got rapturous ovations anyway for being such a trooper.

12. John Arkansawyer:

    A collection of Margo Skinner’s poems “As Green as Emeraude” was published in 1990 with an introduction by Fritz Leiber. Amongst other things Skinner was a Fulbright lecturer in the Philippines in 1953 but her grant was revoked because of her political opinions and she became a case for the ACLU. Just to prove this wasn’t a one off she was deported from India in 1961. She later fell into the San Francisco orbit of Donald Sidney-Fryer who contributed to “As Green as Emeraude”. When Leiber first moved to San Francisco after his wife’s death, he lived for some time with Sidney-Fryer (who would be fictionalised in “Our Lady of Darkness). Skinner and Leiber had poems in Sidney-Fryer’s 1971 “Songs and Sonnets Atlantean”

13. Matthew: Good to know! I’ll be looking for that book now. Along with that Fritz Leiber biography the world owes us.

14. @KipW:

    I had a memorable moment on stage with prop functioning. It was my job to pull a ring of keys out of my pocket to open an imaginary jail cell door (as Sam Staples).

    Did you play Sam in The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail?! I played Sam in The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail! It was my first ever theatrical role, in 11th grade.

15. John A Arkansawyer on April 10, 2016 at 7:04 am said:

    Matthew: Good to know! I’ll be looking for that book now. Along with that Fritz Leiber biography the world owes us.

    Currently there are two copies listed on abebooks.com.

    As for a bio of Leiber, there’s this collection of autobiographical writings: “Fafhrd & Me”

    And perhaps the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series from University of Illinois Press might eventually include one.

16. 9) Beamdog ahs stated that they’re getting away from the “poorly written” part by giving the character a much deeper backstory, with a lot more options in the discussion tree. So… really they’re throwing gater criticism back in their face and doubling down on representation. The taking out the anti-gater line is hilarious to me because now it’s an easy thing to point at and show how hypocritical gaters are. Plus they’ve stated that they’ll continue to back their employees.

    As for KJA, I will never be ashamed of my intense love for Star Wars: Darksaber. Bring it.

    In what I’m reading news, I’m enjoying the snot out of Battlemage by Stephen Aryan. It’s got some of the soldier/war stuff I like, it’s got some political intrigue stuff going on, and it’s got great powerful mages battling. It is really working for me. I especially like how it shows mages as a great weapon of war, that’s mostly cancelled out by the enemy having mages as well, making it an effective parallel thinks like ironclads in the civil war, and aircraft carriers in the WWII. It all comes down to the tactics used, rather than who has the biggest gun.

17. I once worked stage crew for a production of 42nd Street. The director had staged the play essentially using two groups of cast members, who would alternate numbers on stage. Several of the numbers took place in front of the curtain, so that behind the curtain the stage crew could set up for the next scene. In practice this meant that we could only work when action was happening on stage, because otherwise moving some of the large and heavy pieces of the set would create enough noise to be heard by the audience.

    During one of the shows, several cameras were set up to record it, with the intent of cutting together a reasonably professional video. One of the cameras was a static camera that recorded everything from a rear angle, to get back shots of some of the numbers. Because this recorded the entire show, it also captured us changing sets behind the curtain. When this was played during the cast party, many of the cast members saw us doing this for the first time, and thought it was hilarious how we looked like we were choreographed to the music, since we would stop what we were doing and stand still when there was no music, and start moving things when it started up again.

18. I was in a production of Blithe Spirit. Right at the end I’m addressing my ghostly wives, and they’re beginning to make their displeasure known, causing one of the pictures to sort of hop on the wall. A 10 or 11 year old girl right at the front let out a huge roar of JESUS CHRIST!

19. ok, on stage faux pas confession time. In college I was tapped to play Harding in a production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. (Some say I was typecast…)
    Anyway, my costume was pajamas and an untied bathrobe.
    On the night of the performance in question, I was, due to this and that, running late and had no chance to hit the dorm room to change…I really needed to as I’d gone commando that day.
    I had two rants to deliver during the show. On this particular performance, I found the audience unusually attentive.
    Stupid PJs!
    All I can really say is that most everyone in the audience that night had no trouble believing that my character belonged in a looney bin…and my character belonged in one as well….

20. (1) Gardening stories – obviously part of TOR’s new plot to turn the Hugos into awards for Better Homes & Gardens.

    Just imagine me sitting in a darkened room, stroking a small pile of mulch…

    (Seriously, though, thank you all!)

21. @Steve Davidson – oooh, that’s a wardrobe malfunction. I would literally have to flee the planet, setting fire to it as I went, just to be sure.

22. Re (8) HAMPUS, IS THAT YOU? CBC reporter phoned the random Swede live on radio. He said the noise in the background was because he was at an ABBA party, but it sounded more like traffic. Asked if he used IKEA furniture, he responded that no, he didn’t, not since his student days.

23. One of my favorite moments in live theater happened at a high-school production (15 to 18 year olds) of a Sherlock Holmes play. The daughter of a friend was playing Moriarty*, so naturally we went. There was a scene where the Evil Minions are onstage (Moriarty hiding onstage as well, behind props, so as to be ready for his, erm, her, appearance after the scenechange). Two of them are talking to each other as the curtain rises, and the third comes out of the wings. “Did you bring the bomb?” the center-stage plotters ask. The plotter from the wings stops, gobsmacked. “No. No, I did not. I’ll be right back.” She hurries offstage to grab the forgotten prop, while the onstage plotters vamp “She’d forget her head if it weren’t nailed on” and suchlike. She returns with the bomb and the play continues. Moriarty, meanwhile, was laughing so hard (silently) that she was afraid she was going to a) be heard by the audience or b) knock over the flat she was hiding behind with her shaking shoulders.

    One of the best recoveries I’ve seen in theater, amateur or professional. It wasn’t entirely clear to the audience that this wasn’t supposed to happen.

    *In high school theater girls typically outnumber boys about five to one.

24. As far as wardrobe malfunctions go, I was playing in La Ronde as the prostitute, lying on the bed, and stretched, popping out of my costume.

    I was a new high school teacher at the time, and several of my students were in the audience.

    I did manage to stay in character.

25. @RedWombat: That was awesome, and your books are all on my When I Get A New Job Celebratory Buying Stuff List.

    In re: 9: I now want to put an “it’s actually about ethics in X” line in everything I write forever.

26. Jim Henley
    Comrade! Yes, I played the character when I was 46; perhaps the only time in my stage career that I played someone who was demonstrably my own age. They were darkening my beard and then streaking it, until I realized they should just darken around the white parts and it would look just right. The actor who had the toughest part was our Bailey, who had to pretend to be asleep most of the time without actually falling asleep.
    Pretty sure I got the part on the basis of a pause and brief searching glance in the audition, when I read, “I can understand how a man could forget—bein’ as busy as you are—out there—uh—writin’ about them birds and talkin’ to the fish and whatever else it is you do out there ( * ) by yourself.”

    Cassy B.
    One time in my younger theatrical days, they gave the cue for my entrance a whole scene early. It was “Lo, here at hand is lawyer Tedious J. Impossible,” so I couldn’t really ignore it. I came on and we did my part, and I left. Then, five minutes later, they said it again, so I came on, made up a scene, and left again. They didn’t cue me a third time.

27. Another one: My husband is the official photographer for three different local community theaters. (He gets paid in tickets; did I mention I see a LOT of plays…?)

    He was slated to take the lobby photo for “True West”. Just a cast photo on the set, to memorialize the play and be hung in the lobby for the next ten years. We got there early, but it turns out one actor doesn’t appear until the second act, and the director forgot to tell the actor that there was a photo call. So we couldn’t take the shot pre-show. “No problem,” my husband said. “We’re staying for the show anyway; we’ll take it afterwards.” “Um, no, you can’t do that,” said the director.

    We found out why.

    During the show, one of the cast members goes berserk on the set, overturning furniture and generally creating a mess. In this case, he overdid it; he actually broke the table, meaning that in the second act the writer was sitting on the floor with his typewriter on a chair seat….

    (We came back the next day to shoot the lobby photo. I sympathize with the crew on that show; that must have taken hours to reset every night, even without broken furniture…)

28. (9) GAME MAKER YIELDS.

    Because when you spit in the coffee right before you hand it to the customer, people generally react with passion.

29. “Waiter! Waiter! What’s this tr*nny doing in my coffee?”

    “Looks like she’s being murdered by transphobic gamers, sir.”

    TO WORLD PEACE!
    (but all I have to drink is Tim Horton’s coffee. Blech.)

30. Because when you spit in the coffee right before you hand it to the customer, people generally react with passion.

    Or because they are spectacularly oversenstive and humourless about things that are gamergatecally incorrect.

31. @Dawn Incognito

    TO WORLD PEACE!

    As the sun is well over the yardarm here, I’m going to drink a negroni to world peace, because it looks and tastes like bitter, bitter tears.

32. So transgender people are the equivalent of phlegm in food to The Phantom?

    …oooookay then. Not actually surprising, given what I’ve seen, but still a pretty creepy attitude to express openly.

33. How would a trans character upset such open-minded people? And why would they take offense at a paraphrase of one of their own popular expressions? That’s joshing, not spitting.
    Now quit your kidding before one of us humorless types takes you seriously.

34. Because when you spit in the coffee right before you hand it to the customer, people generally react with passion.

    You know, it would just be quicker if you told everyone up front that you’re a complete asshole. Thus far, there hasn’t been a comment from you in which you haven’t demonstrated that through your actions and attitudes. So why beat around the bush? Just announce it right from the start. You don’t even need to say anything else.

35. So Phantom, what is the spitting here?

    The joke about Gamergating? The transgender person in the game? Or is it both that is the spit in the coffee as you term it?

    If its the former, then someone needs to get a sense of humor. At this point, “Ethics…” IS a joking meme, mainly because of how ridiculous it sounds. And if its the latter, too bad, transgender people exist. Or is this a case of “We can have dark elves, and tieflings and aasimar and dragonborn, but there is no evidence of transgender people in the Forgotten Realms!” In which case, well, bollocks to that.

36. @Magewolf:

    Much belated thanks here for outlining some of the bugs and other gameplay-related issues with the Baldurs Gate expansion.

    (I have Opinions about games being released with poor play testing or QA because they can just be patched later. Or fixed with mods by the dedicated players.)

    Too bad the Gator noise has drowned that out.

37. I once saw Jerry Lewis in a performance of Damn Yankees. He was supposed to appear in a poof of smoke. Instead, there was a pop and a fizzle and a wee little fire on a railing. Jerry Lewis gazed at it for a moment then reached out with his arm and tapped the fire out. Then he looked to the audience and said, very dryly, “Live theater.”

    I was also lucky enough to see Debbie Reynolds and Harve Presnell in The Unsinkable Molly Brown. In Denver, no less. (It was the performance that led my husband and I to get star power. Debbie Reynolds held that audience in the palm of her hand the entire night). There’s a moment where Johnny Brown sweeps Molly into his arms and spins her around. Very romantic. Except Harve Presnell lost his balance and staggered while still holding her and then set her down hard. Reynolds made a big deal of staggering across the stage and then looked over to him and said, “It gets harder every night, doesn’t it?” The audience roared.

    There’s nothing like live theater. Pure magic.

38. Today I am going to a pirate-themed renfaire.

39. Oh. I forgot to mention…

    I did have a vague sense that something was wrong during the delivery of my first soliloquy (a cast member backstage informed me between acts) but I would like to think that I continued on in the best tradition of ‘the show must go on’. Even if I had temporarily turned Kesey into Chip-n-Dales.

    This performance, btw, also informed me that acting was not for me; I’d wake up in the middle of the night screaming my lines and was told by many that I had definitely gone full Harding even when off stage. Maybe that’s a gift for some actors, but I’m already missing a good handful of screws. They’re a weird hybrid of standard and metric, no longer manufactured and unlikely to ever be found again….

40. It’s censorship to remove something from a game due to social media outcry unless it offends Gamergate. Then it’s just respecting the desire of the customer, because they’re the only customers or something *eyeroll*

    The statement from Beamdog didn’t say they were removing the transgender character only they they felt they could’ve done better with the dialogue options and plan on expanding the character if anything. Along with saying the support their writers and creative team 100%:

    While we appreciate all feedback we receive from our fans, both positive as well as negative, some of the negative feedback has focused not on Siege of Dragonspear but on individual developers at Beamdog — to the point of online threats and harassment.

    I just want to make it crystal clear that Beamdog does not condone this behavior, and moreover that it will not have the desired effect as we stand behind all our developers 100%. We created the game as a group, and moving forward we’ll work on the game’s issues as a group, which I believe is exactly as it should be.

    I don’t see how that’s yielding and thing and I’m glad they’re standing with their team.

41. 9
    This is really, really silly. It’s also really sad. They are so bereft of all the joys and pleasures of the world that a trans character in a game is enough to reduce them to hysterical squealing; that’s pitiful.

    Maybe it would help if they all took up gardening; from RedWombat’s comments thereon it appears that there is a fascinating variety of activities by which things grow, and it would certainly broaden their minds, as well as their shoulders – hefting spades will do that – though there might be problems on the where do butterflies come from front. Baby steps, baby steps…

42. Arkansawyer mentioned the classic meme that you can’t just grow squash, you always grow too much squash.

    Well… perhaps I should forbear mentioning that I can’t grow zucchini to save my life.

    No, really. Every time I’ve tried to grow it in the garden, the zucchini fruit grows to about the length of my little finger, then turns yellow and withers away. I don’t have problems with anything else I’ve tried to grow (tomatoes, eggplants, onions, various greens), but that damn zucchini dies on me every time. This is ZUCCHINI we’re talking about here, folks! I’ve never been able to figure out why it happens.

    Perhaps an enemy has carved a mature zucchini into my likeness, and proceeded to stick pins into it, only to have the curse work its voodoo will on the poor zucchini instead of me.

    (The current iteration of the garden has some patty-pan squash plants, rather than traditional straight zucchini. The developing fruit — the largest is about the width of my thumb right now — has shown no signs of withering yet. Maybe I’ll get some actual edibles off them this time?)

    – – – – –

    Recommended reading/listening: “Among the Living” by John Markley, on Escape Pod. High-intensity thrill ride of a story; a future fireman is trapped in a burning, collapsing megastructure, struggling to bring himself and a young victim to safety.

43. You know, it would just be quicker if you told everyone up front that you’re a complete asshole.

    @Aaron, I think that @Phantom is just displaying his mastery of an old narrative technique: Show, don’t tell.

    @Magewolf, @ Dawn – Worth keeping in mind that similar to to the brigading of Chuck Wendig’s Star Wars novel, the various bugs from BG: Dragonspear are both being blown out of proportion, and being used as a cover by the usual suspects. The game has bugs, but (so far) there doesn’t seem to be any that are game-breaking. Multi player and mod support is affected, but those tend to be quite common.

    Also, re:Opinions – One day when I put together my collection of swear words from across the world, I’ll share my views on Day 1 patches.

44. Sweet
    When we did Damn Yankees around ’76, we were trying to figure out how I was supposed to make flashy lit cigarettes appear. “Flash paper,” somebody said, conveniently ignoring that flash paper needs something to light it (I’d already played with flash paper a lot around that time). Eventually, our Joe had a flash of insight, as it were, and said to jam a kitchen match into the cig so that the head poked out, and just have a striking surface under the lapel of my jacket.
    This worked great, about two thirds of the time. The surface was never very firmly anchored, and sometimes all I came up with was… a cigarette in my hand. Amazing!
    Well, it was amazing to “Joe,” anyway. He always responded as if I’d done a miracle before his eyes. “How do you DO that?” I sometimes try to recall whether the actor played it even harder when the thing didn’t ignite, because he was the sort of trickster who made faces at other actors when his back was to the audience. At those times, I felt like you could have lit a smoke from my face, but it didn’t seem to show.
    Flash paper. Heh. A novelty shop opened up in town, and I bought a box of the stuff. I had an ash tray on the counter at the comic shop I managed, and would sometimes roll up a little ball of it and just leave it there. The first guy to set it off actually seemed to be aiming at it for some reason, but was very surprised. He may have been the fellow who told me about rolling a joint with flash paper for an unsuspecting friend (didn’t put anything good in it, he said).

45. @Matt Y: it’s yielding in the same sense that puppies won the Hugo Awards last year, and the same sense that there’s an all powerful cabal that is making their lives a miserable hell.

    “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it?”

46. “They’re a weird hybrid of standard and metric….”

    Comrade! I learned all my measurements in metric and had to learn imperial later. Then American standard, which id its own thing. Lots of time spent in on-the-fly conversions, and many mishaps–especially while cooking.

47. My favorite improv’d-line-to-deal-with-a-set-disaster was a play I had a part in which used the “high school student throwing a party at his house while his parents are away” plot. In the middle of one scene, an entire wall of the house collapsed with a resounding crash.

    One actor, without missing a beat, turned to the guy throwing the party and said, “Dude. Your parents are going to notice that.”

48. Bruce: if the yellowing starts at the blossom end it’s probably poor pollination. You can help things along by using a small paintbrush to transfer pollen from male to female pollen.
    I also find that my summer squash have an early adolescence period where there are more female flowers interested in pollinating than male flowers.

49. As @Sweet shows, goofs aren’t limited to amateurs — but pros sometimes cover them better. I saw the Karamazovs in The Comedy of Errors (also featuring Avner the Eccentric) on an afternoon when the stage team didn’t quite have it together to open a trapdoor and toss a cane into the hot-tempered Adriana’s waiting hand; she stamped on the door and snarled “It’s about time!” so perfectly in character that I thought the delay was intended.
    Oh, you didn’t think tCoE used canes? It did in this production — and acrobats, and knife-throwing, and….

50. Because when you spit in the coffee right before you hand it to the customer, people generally react with passion.

    Ooo, look! It’s Chief Inarguable, Truth Kicker Extraordinaire, here to inflict his breathless wit upon us once again!

    Tell us, kind sir, what “facts” you have pulled out of your colon for us this time?

    (By the way, in real life I’m a pharmacy technician. I can get you a substantial discount on all the Preparation H you’ll need, seeing as you’re extracting said “facts” from such a delicate orifice.)

Comments are closed.