Pixel Scroll 5/11/18 The Seventh Sealion

(1) SHELDON AND AMY. Some say it’s a bigger wedding than the one coming up across the pond: Yahoo! Entertainment has video — “‘The Big Bang Theory’ wedding gives Mark Hamill the feels”.

Wil Wheaton was originally going to officiate the wedding. But after Howard called in a favor, Mark Hamill replaced him. It was the least Mark could do after Howard found his dog, Bark Hamill.

…Mark Hamill was so taken aback by the touching vows that he was almost too emotional to continue, but he did. Choking back tears, he said, “Then by the power vested in me by evenyoucanperformweddings.com, I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

(2) EXPANSE GETS AXED. Syfy has cancelled The Expanse, however, it may be picked up by another network: “‘The Expanse’ To End On Syfy With Season 3, Will Be Shopped Elsewhere By Alcon”.

The current third season of The Expanse will be the space drama’s last one on Syfy. The cable network has decided not to renew the show for a fourth season, with the last episode slated to air in early July. Alcon Television Group, which fully finances and produces the critically praised series, plans to shop it to other buyers.

The Expanse transported us across the solar system for three brilliant seasons of television,” said Chris McCumber, President, Entertainment Networks for NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment. “Everyone at Syfy is a massive fan of the series, and this was an incredibly difficult decision. We want to sincerely thank The Expanse’s amazing cast, crew and all the dedicated creatives who helped bring James S.A. Corey’s story to life. And to the series’ loyal fans, we thank you most of all.”

(3) DINO DAZE. Universal’s “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom ‘A Look Inside’ Featurette” explains the new movie’s connection to the series.

It’s been four years since theme park and luxury resort Jurassic World was destroyed by dinosaurs out of containment. Isla Nublar now sits abandoned by humans while the surviving dinosaurs fend for themselves in the jungles. When the island’s dormant volcano begins roaring to life, Owen (Chris Pratt) and Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) mount a campaign to rescue the remaining dinosaurs from this extinction-level event. Owen is driven to find Blue, his lead raptor who’s still missing in the wild, and Claire has grown a respect for these creatures she now makes her mission. Arriving on the unstable island as lava begins raining down, their expedition uncovers a conspiracy that could return our entire planet to a perilous order not seen since prehistoric times.

 

(4) THIS POISON COMES RECOMMENDED. NPR’s Glen Weldon says: “New ‘Rocky And Bullwinkle’ Is Something We Hope You’ll Really Like”.

Nostalgia is a paralytic toxin.

It’s killing us slowly, steadily: Every time an old, smarmy sitcom, or a pallid network drama, or a toy ad that masqueraded as a cringeworthy children’s cartoon gets dredged from the feculent muck of history’s lake bed and rebooted for a contemporary audience, our cultural blood pressure incrementally drops, our collective pulse grows that much threadier, our soft tissues go just a scosh more necrotic. That’s because these properties exude nostalgia’s deadly poison — they’re sticky with it — and there is no antidote….

Nostalgia is no longer a part of our culture. It has become our culture. And the toxin it carries has leached into the groundwater. It riddles the food chain. It’s airborne. We are lost.

Now: All of the above is true. (Resolutely so. Fundamentally so. Incontrovertibly so.)

And here is another thing that is equally true: This new Rocky and Bullwinkle is pretty good!

(5) SOLO EARLY REACTIONS. The BBC says “Solo: A Star Wars Story praised by first to see it”.

The first reactions to the new Star Wars film Solo have come out, after its premiere in the US.

And the verdict? While some said it was clunky in parts, most loved it – describing the movie as fun, epic and “a blast”.

There was particular praise for Fleabag star Phoebe Waller-Bridge, in her role as droid L3-37.

(6) TRIVIAL TRIVIA. The first time a hologram was filmed in a movie was in the 1976 theatrical release of Logan’s Run.  Because of this achievement it won a Special Achievement Academy Award Oscar.

Wikipedia:  “For the scene where Logan is interrogated by the Deep Sleep central computer, it was decided genuine holograms would be most convincing, with Saul David advocating a new hologram effect be created.”

 

For more history, see the American Cinematographer article “The Use of Holograms in ‘Logan’s Run’”.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

  • Lise Andreasen learned from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal that Smaug isn’t very smart.

(8) A HEAP OF WATER. Hilbert Schenck should have seen this, says Chip Hitchcock: “Massive wave is southern hemisphere record, scientists believe”.

Scientists in New Zealand have documented what they believe is the largest wave ever recorded in the southern hemisphere.

The 23.8m (78ft) wave was measured by a buoy on New Zealand’s Campbell Island in the Southern Ocean on Tuesday, the country’s weather authority said.

It eclipses a 22.03m wave that was identified south of the Australian state of Tasmania in 2012.

Larger waves have been recorded in the northern hemisphere.

The Meteorological Service of New Zealand (MetService) installed its solar-powered buoy in March. The area is known for big storm activity, but waves had been previously difficult to measure.

(9) PROGRESS REPORT. The Ray Bradbury Experience Museum in Waukegan has a website. They plan to open in 2020.

(10) JDA AND FOGCON. Jon Del Arroz’ version of his experience attending Bay Area convention FogCon (see March 13 Pixel Scroll (item #8)) did not suggest the impression he made would lead to this —

JDA responded in a new blog post [Internet Archive link] by reminding everyone he is already suing the Worldcon:

“It can’t happen to our team, we control the cons,” they might think. Or perhaps they may not think at all. But this is what happens when the path of silencing dissenting ideas is taken. In California, I’ll remind, that there are civil rights laws to address this kind of behavior by organizations. It’s called the Unruh Act, and FogCon, in their attempt to appease a few bullies trying to hate popular conservatives out of fandom, would be good to remember that not applying standards equally to all is very illegal in this state.

(11) GAS LIGHT. Science headline: “Trump White House quietly cancels NASA research verifying greenhouse gas cuts”.

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. The adage is especially relevant for climate-warming greenhouse gases, which are crucial to manage—and challenging to measure. In recent years, though, satellite and aircraft instruments have begun monitoring carbon dioxide and methane remotely, and NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System (CMS), a $10-million-a-year research line, has helped stitch together observations of sources and sinks into high-resolution models of the planet’s flows of carbon. Now, President Donald Trump’s administration has quietly killed the CMS, Science has learned.

…The agency declined to provide a reason for the cancellation beyond “budget constraints and higher priorities within the science budget.” But the CMS is an obvious target for the Trump administration because of its association with climate treaties and its work to help foreign nations understand their emissions, says Phil Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts. And, unlike the satellites that provide the data, the research line had no private contractor to lobby for it.

The cancelation saves only $10 million/year; which seems well below the rounding error; NASA’s budget is about $20 billion/year.

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, Lise Andreasen, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Tintinaus.]

76 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 5/11/18 The Seventh Sealion

  1. A number of months back one of my neighbors (a few hundred feet away) got a flock of 8 or 9 free-range chickens, and they seem to spend more time in my yard than the neighbor’s. Two large roosters, one adolescent rooster, the rest hens. Sometimes I have to fight a rooster to get on my porch. Been flogged from behind 2 or 3 times.

  2. @Ctein
    Ive read Lucifers producer was hoping to avoid canceling by ending with a cliffhanger. Which is very naive if true. But it will prevent me from watching third season…
    I also agree that they should have stopped this starcrossed lovers stuff, because its getting tedious and more and more illogical.

  3. @RedWombat: My feed is similar in themes, but less interesting than yours: bits about flowers mixed with politics, mostly retweets and mostly depressing. *sigh* On the other hand, nobody wants to read the details of my PT/exercise program. I manage to stay interested enough to keep doing the exercises, but posting about it would be like grabbing people to give them details of my dreams, featuring exciting episodes like “I dreamed I had broken my teacup lid.”

    One difference is that you’re a better writer than I am.

  4. “not applying standards equally to all”

    Oh, someone else has done the stuff he’s done? Do tell.

  5. I work at home on a pixel farm, far west of NYC
    There weren’t nothing to see but a silent TV
    And ten million pixels and me
    One fine day I said, “Whoops! Oh, hey!” and then I knocked over that LED
    I kicked the cord and broke the board and set my pixels free

    There were pixels in the wainscot, pixels on my chair,
    Pixels in the kitten case, pixels in the air,
    Pixels filin’ daily scrolls at seven seven-tee
    When I set my pixels free!

  6. I watched the Timeless season finale earlier tonight. I was miffed that its start was delayed by fifteen minutes by a game show, but I will be Quite Wroth if this turns out to be the series finale. Particularly since they could’ve literally cut only the last scene to make it work better as a series finale.

    I’m not thrilled about Designated Survivor getting the axe, but the writing’s kinda been on the wall with it. I’d like to see both Lucifer and The Expanse get adopted rather than canceled, though – Lucifer would probably benefit from a move to The CW, possibly as a double bill with iZombie.

    EDIT: Oh, I should probably comment on item 10. That comment is “I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.”

  7. re Timeless … the ending wasn’t an awful cliffhanger. If the show doesn’t return I won’t be wailing and rending any clothing. I do hope it returns, it was a reasonably decent show.

    As for Designated Survivor … apparently the number of show runners over the two seasons didn’t help having a consistent story line, and that led to to a drop in viewership, couple that with a Kiefer Sutherland contractually obligated move from Canada to Los Angles didn’t help the bottom line of the show. So it goes.

  8. There’s a scroll in the pixel, dear Liza, dear Liza,
    There’s a scroll in the pixel, dear Liza, a scroll.

  9. Then file it, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry;
    Then file it, dear Henry, dear Henry, file it.

  10. With what shall I ticky it, dear Liza, dear Liza?
    With what shall I ticky it, dear Liza, with what?

  11. With a book rec, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry
    With a book rec, dear Henry, dear Henry, a rec.

  12. The book rec wasn’t my thing, dear Liza, dear Liza.
    The book rec wasn’t my thing, dear Liza, ‘fraid not.

    Try God Stalk, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry
    Try God Stalk, dear Henry, dear Henry, God Stalk.

  13. 10) You all are giving JDA a tiny one every time you spell our or abbreviate his name – He has a notification for when it’s used and quickly jumps to it and posts screencaps to his feeds. Now, if you don’t use his name, he’ll still spend all day, every day, combing known sites for any mention/whisp of attention, but you could at least not make it so easy for him. He gets way too much out of being mentioned. Let him spend even more time looking for it, doing all the work to find his victim-material. I have several choice names I refer to him instead, but keeping it diverse will go over better 😉 Clearly throwing tantrums is the only way he’s found to be relevant, let’s not continue handing attention to him.

  14. So what should we call him, dear Kelli, dear Kelli?
    So what should we call him, dear Kelli, call him what?

  15. Kelli Stasi: This is a news site. I’m not here to play games. If I write news about JDA, I will identify him.

  16. Kelli Stasi: Furthermore, you have written numerous tweets addressed to him today and earlier this week. Excuse me if I don’t take your complaint seriously.

  17. Kelli Stasi: You all are giving JDA a tiny one every time you spell our or abbreviate his name – He has a notification for when it’s used and quickly jumps to it and posts screencaps to his feeds.

    This is just stating the obvious; I’m not sure why you thought no one here was aware of this.

    Despite Mike’s coverage of some of his harassing and abusive behavior during 2017, when SFWA announced that his membership application had been refused, and Worldcon 76 announced that he had been banned, there were still a number of people who were surprised and didn’t know anything about it, and who doubted that these decisions were warranted. JDA capitalized on people being uninformed.

    The best thing that File 770 can do, which is what Mike has been doing, is to make wider fandom aware of his activities and behavior, so that 1) they understand why organizations are making these decisions, and 2) they have this information in advance and can be prepared when he tries to cause trouble for their own organization.

  18. Darren Garrison wrote: A number of months back one of my neighbors (a few hundred feet away) got a flock of 8 or 9 free-range chickens, and they seem to spend more time in my yard than the neighbor’s. Two large roosters, one adolescent rooster, the rest hens. Sometimes I have to fight a rooster to get on my porch. Been flogged from behind 2 or 3 times.

    Back where I’m from (small town Iowa) that would lead to “free-range’ being translated into “free dinner”.

  19. There’s a troll in our comments, Mark-kitteh, Mark-kitteh,
    There’s a troll in our comments, Mark-kitteh, how droll.

  20. Mike – Wasn’t a complaint. Apologies on confusing you somehow. And yes, I like pointing out his double standards to him. If that makes you not take the lack-of-complaint seriously, I apologize that you wasted time addressing that.

    JJ – That makes perfect sense. Thank you for pointing that out. It was just an idea of mine. Too many people (myself included) have made it too easy for him to play his victim games (for not liking games).

  21. Let me rephrase – I didn’t mean that as a complaint. And maybe what I said is common knowledge. I haven’t been in File770 a lot, thank you JJ for the elaboration. I would replace my original comment with a standard “Trolls are still being trolls? Crazy”

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