Pixel Scroll 5/28/21 The Battle Of Scrollerloo Was Fifth On The Pixeling Collections Of Eaton

(1) DANCING TO BRADBURY. Tonight, tonight, won’t be just any night:“Dance Troupe Reimagines Sci-Fi Story as Lesson in Human Hope As Pandemic Fades” reports Pasadena Now Weekender.

Pasadena’s Lineage Performing Arts Center shares its take on Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day” in a free online presentation Friday, May 28, starting at 7 p.m.

This community-created dance and theatre piece reimagines Bradbury’s sci-fi short story through the lens of Pasadena’s experience through the pandemic. “All Summer in a Day” director, Lineage’s founder Hilary Thomas, conducted virtual workshops and classes over the last year, where she collected writings from PUSD students, Pasadena community members, and contributors from across the country, on their experience during the pandemic.

The show weaves together live actors performing the community’s text, accompanied by dancers from the Lineage Dance Company.

In a parallel to the trying times of the past year, “All Summer in a Day” tells the story of Margot, a young girl living on Venus, where it’s been raining for seven years straight. Margot alone holds out hope for a break in the clouds. Lineage’s community members have reimagined the story’s ending, drawing on the hope they feel as Pasadena slowly begins to heal from the pandemic.

(2) BUILDING BEYOND. K. O’Keefe Thomas and Rem Wigmore join Sarah Gailey’s “Building Beyond: Invasive Economics” to play with the writing prompt: “The ecosystem that is the global economy has fallen victim to an incredibly invasive species.” Gailey sums up their three attempts —

All of these possibilities are just beginnings. Rem’s weasels are the start of an incredibly creative and fun linguistic romp. K’s lichenous growth is the entry point for a story about how people might be compelled to build a utopia. My parasitoid wasps are the beginning of a tale of forgetting; if the wasps begin to mutate, what else might they devour?

(3) SUITED FOR THE PURPOSE. “In 1949, the British Interplanetary Society designed a far-out spacesuit. Recently, a museum had it made for real.” – David Pescovitz has photos and lots of information at Boing Boing.

In the 1940s, the British Interplanetary Society—a fantastic club of space geeks that included Arthur C. Clarke—drafted up detailed plans for space missions of all kinds, including a trip to the moon. After World War II ended, BIS member Harry Ross pushed ahead on a lunar spacesuit design and drafted artist Ralph Smith to create fantastic illustrations of concept. Sixty years later, the UK’s National Space Centre museum commissioned historical costume and model maker Stephen Wisdom to bring the spacesuit into the real world… using only materials that were available in the 1940s….

(4) PRO TIP. Akua Lezli Hope tells Dream Foundry readers the importance of “Preparedness, the Archive, Your Bio and Blurb”.

…Every writer should have at hand a bio, short for biography. This biography can take many forms depending on where you are in your journey.  Most often requested in the third person, it includes your name, perhaps where you’re from or where you currently live, perhaps your degrees, your awards, and your publications. I strongly suggest that you write a long one, maybe two pages, and then a one-page one, and then 100 word  and a 50-word one. The publication will specify the kind they want and the length of bio they want. More and more request them upon submitting. I’ve been asked for 50-word bios, 100-word bios, and, more rarely, 150-word bios. You must think of this well before the time of request or submittal, and have it at the ready because the moment that it is required is rarely a moment that you want to think of the cleverest and most authentic way to present yourself. I recommend that you review this annually and that you update it. Read it aloud, get a friend to vet it….

(5) TRUE WRIT. [Item by Lise Andreasen.] Hejsa! Podcast time! Episode 88 of the Literature and History podcast is about “Ancient Greek Sci-fi”. In roughly the 160s CE, the Greek satirist Lucian of Samosata wrote A True History, one of history’s earliest surviving novels, with strong tinges of what we’d call science fiction.

…The novel that we’re about to read in this episode is a wild and entertaining chunk of prose, and an exuberant mockery of what Lucian holds to be poor history writing. And so before we open Lucian’s novel, we should get a couple of things related to works of ancient history fresh in our minds. Because while the novel we’re about to read together is a zany and fun adventure story, it also has a serious agenda. At the heart of this agenda is criticizing history as it existed in the second century. History, in the mid-100s CE, when Lucian was hunched over his desk, writing his works, was not like modern, academically peer-reviewed history. The historians who come up in Lucian’s works – ancient Greek figures like Thucydides and Xenophon and especially Herodotus – these writers, to varying extents, took artistic license when they wrote their books, leavening the facts available to them with fiction to alternately fill in gaps and to make things more engrossing and exciting for their readers. To put it simply, Lucian’s problem with history as a discipline was that it erred too far on the side of exaggerations and outright fabrications…. 

The direct link to the audio is here. I am a faithful subscriber to the podcast, and I highly recommend it. 

Illustration by William Strang

(6) EYE-OPENERS. “Bo-Young Kim on Finding Unlikely Sci-Fi Influences” at Literary Hub.

…It has thus been only for two or three decades that South Korea has had a thriving science fiction and fantasy cultural scene, which first began to develop on the internet. Without a full appreciation of this history, critics inside and outside South Korea often wonder at the little exposure that the country has had to Western science fiction culture.

All this meant that, during my formative years, the inspiration for my writing came from mainstream literature on the one hand and from the fantastic and speculative world of manhwa on the other. I like to think that I learned from Herman Hesse how to express a literary vision and from manhwa artist Kim Jin how to appropriate Korean history and myths for my own storytelling. Plus, I have always been a big fan of Agatha Christie’s detective fiction.

With the exception of Hesse, the below list includes my favorite works of science fiction…

(7) TRAILING LIVES. Infinite with Mark Wahlberg will be streaming June 10 on Paramount+.

For Evan McCauley (Mark Wahlberg), skills he has never learned and memories of places he has never visited haunt his daily life. Self-medicated and on the brink of a mental breakdown, Evan is sought by a secret group that call themselves “Infinites,” revealing to him that his memories may be real—but they are from multiple past lives.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

  • 2001 —  Twenty years ago at the Millennium Philcon, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire wins the Hugo for Best Novel. Other nominated works were A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin, Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer, The Sky Road by Ken MacLeod and Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson. 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born May 28, 1847 – Bithia Croker.  Irish horsewoman who hunted with the Kildare; married, moved to British India, wrote for a distraction during the hot season.  Forty-two novels (17 set in India, 1 Burma, 7 Ireland); we can claim Beyond the Pale and her seven collections of shorter stories.  (Died 1920) [JH]
  • Born May 28, 1908 — Ian Fleming. Author of the James Bond series which is at least genre adjacent if not actually genre in some cases such as Moonraker. The film series was much more genre than the source material. Then there’s the delightful Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car. The film version was produced by Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, who had already made five James Bond films. (Died 1964.) (CE) 
  • Born May 28, 1919 – Don Day.  Editor of The Fanscient (and of its parody, Fan-Scent; you can see both here).  Perhaps the greatest early bibliographer of SF, in The Fanscient and also his Index to the Science Fiction Magazines 1926-1950 (hardbound, sold thousands of copies).  Chaired NorWesCon the 8th Worldcon.  (Died 1979) [JH]
  • Born May 28, 1930 – Frank Drake, age 91.  Astronomer and astrophysicist.  Nat’l Academy of Sciences, American Acad. of Arts & Sciences.  Co-designed the Pioneer Plaques; supervised the Voyager Golden Records; thus our neighbor.  Lapidarist.  Raises orchids.  [JH]
  • Born May 28, 1951 — Sherwood Smith, 70. YA writer best known for her Wren  series. She’s also co-authored The Change Series with Rachel Manija Brown. She also co-authored two novels with Andre Norton, Derelict for Trade and A Mind for Trade. (CE)
  • Born May 28, 1954 – Kees van Toorn, age 67.  Chaired ConFiction the 48th Worldcon, at the Hague.  Served on con committees in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the U.K., the U.S.  Perry Rhodan translator.  Semiprozine Orbit for a dozen years.  Contributed to APA-L from overseas.  Two European SF Awards.  Guest of Honor at Beneluxcon 7 & 17.  Here is a Website about his Worldcon and now-canceled reunion plans.  [JH]
  • Born May 28, 1954 – Betsy Mitchell, age 67.  Long fruitful career at Baen, Bantam, Warner, Del Rey, editing 150 titles, several becoming NY Times Best Sellers; now, Betsy Mitchell Editorial Services.  Guest of Honor at Archon 14, 4th Street Fantasy Con (1992), Armadillocon 22, Boskone 41, Ad Astra 25, Loscon 40.  [JH]
  • Born May 28, 1977 — Ursula Vernon, 44. She is best known for her Hugo Award-winning graphic novel Digger which was a webcomic from 2003 to 2011. Vernon is also the creator of The Biting Pear of Salamanca, a digital work of art which became an internet meme in the form of the LOL WUT pear. 
  • Born May 28, 1984 — Max Gladstone, 37. His debut novel, Three Parts Dead, is part of the Craft Sequence series, and his shared Bookburners serial is most excellent. This Is How You Lose the Time War (co-written with Amal El-Mohtar) won a Hugo Award for Best Novella at CoNZealand. (CE) 
  • Born May 28, 1985 — Carey Mulligan, 36. She’s here because she shows up in a very scary Tenth Doctor story, “Blink”, in which she plays Sally Sparrow. Genre adjacent, she was in Agatha Christie’s Marple: The Sittaford Mystery as Violet Willett. (Christie gets a shout-out in another Tenth Doctor story, “The Unicorn and the Wasp”.) (CE) 
  • Born May 28, 1986 – Laura Dockrill, age 35.  Author, illustrator, poet (performance name “Dockers MC”).  Two novels, a short story, a collection of retold fairy (I confess mistyping it “fiery”) tales for us; a dozen other books.  When The Guardian asked her about the dress she was photographed in, she said “I call it Fantastic Disgusting Amazing Dress because it is fantastic, disgusting and amazing.”  [JH]

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) THE BEFORE PICTURE. Who the heck is that bald guy wearing a tie? “Stan Lee Looked Very Different in These ’60s TV Appearances” – and Yahoo! connects to two videos that show how different.

Now, thanks to SMUJones Video Collection (via Boing Boing), one of the earliest Stan Lee on-camera appearances has resurfaced. And it’s amazing how different 1966 Stan Lee looked from how we all think of him today. Also amazing is how prescient he was about Marvel’s potential in other media. You can watch the two-part video in full right here…

(12) SUPER-EIGHTIES. “The SUPER POWERS Era Was DC Comics at Its Most Iconic” – Eric Dias tells why at Yahoo! Life.

DC Comics

From 1984 to roughly 1987, the Super Powers Collection was a DC Comics line of action figures from Kenner Toys, home of Star Wars. It featured the DC heroes in their most iconic incarnations, with classic villains getting cool new modern upgrades. Aside from the figures, there was also a metric ton of merchandise. And the long-running Super Friends cartoon also got Super Powers makeover. While the stories for Super Powers were simplistic by modern standards, their colorful aesthetic and emphasis on fun adventure and pure heroism feel exactly like what the DCEU needs today. But before we get into how Super Powers can inspire the future, let’s take a deep dive into its history….

(13) DON’T HOLD YOUR BREATH. Galactic Journey’s Dana Pellebon reviews the latest 1966 film in “[May 28, 1966] Destination The Movies (Destination Inner Space)”:

…While I have never been to an underwater base, what little I do know about oceans and pressure suggests that several things in the movie don’t add up scientifically. Deep sea diving with minimal gear and body protection seems needlessly dangerous. Similarly, open holes to the water that serve as entrances into both the lab and the unidentified object don’t make sense. There’s an open water propelled human exploration ship that at one point is slower than a diver just swimming alongside it, which led me to question: why have the ship in the first place? And there are moments of beautiful cinematography in the water with the fish and the ocean floor, which made me wish that they had been featured more prominently….

(14) MONSTER KID MEMOIR. Steve Vertlieb tells what “A Monster Kid Remembers” at The Thunder Child.

Cosmic dreams (and provocative nightmares) of tantalizing journeys through time and space … infinite, conceptual exploration of the stars … alien creatures … Hammer Films … Universal Pictures … “King Kong” … Ray Harryhausen … Ray Bradbury … George Pal … Robert Bloch … Peter Cushing … Veronica Carlson … Buster Crabbe … John Agar … Frank Capra … John Williams … Miklos Rozsa … Forrest J Ackerman … and Famous “Monsters” of all shapes, sizes, and creeds, both conceived and lovingly chronicled in books, magazines, journals, tabloids, and on line for over half a century, inspired this affectionate, deeply personal, if slightly Monstrous, remembrance of a life in “horror” by a gray haired, unabashedly child like, Monster “Kid.”

(15) AH, IT WAS A DIFFERENT LAW THEY WERE BREAKING. “London Cops Raid Illegal Crypto-Mining Farm Hilariously Mistaking It For A Weed Grow House”HotHardware has the story.

Though cryptocurrency mining is becoming less profitable by the day, those who still have the hardware may as well use it. However, it sucks up a lot of energy and dumps a lot of heat, which suspiciously looks like a marijuana grow house, as it turns out.

Earlier this month, police in London were tipped off to a building within the Great Bridge Industrial Estate, Sandwell. Using drone surveillance, police saw a characteristic heat signature and people regularly going in and out. Therefore, when the police raided the location on May 18th, they were expecting a cannabis farm, but that is not what they found.

Upon entry, they saw shelves full of up to 100 application-specific integrated circuit (ASICcryptocurrency miners rigged with exhaust pipes and a daisy-chained power system. As it turns out, the only illegal part about this is that the computers were spliced into the power network, which had “effectively stolen thousands of pounds of electricity,” as the BBC reports….

(16) BREATHLESS MISDEMEANORS. And this article is about attending the movies as a Covid-vaccination outlaw. “Now Playing at Theaters: Anxiety, Paranoia and Sometimes Elation” in the New York Times.

…Only the fully vaccinated should be witnessing this. That’s certainly not the case. After waiting the suggested two weeks from my second Moderna shot in late March (a sluggish day that felt like a system reboot), I rejoined the company of filmgoers. It felt vaguely like getting away with something you knew you shouldn’t be doing.

No apologies. The excitement of being back, however tinged by free-floating nervousness, can’t be downplayed. I drank in Andrei Tarkovsky’s elliptical 1975 art film “Mirror” like so many vodka flights, every mysterious windswept field and liquid interlude frizzing my synapses. Amazingly, my tiny Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center audience greeted the end credits with a robust chorus of woos (possibly a first for Tarkovsky). Maybe we were cheering the mere idea of surviving a film together. A theater worker dismissed us row by row; we obeyed like good little schoolchildren.

There’s something performative about returning to the movies right now. The laughing is louder. Perhaps it’s compensation for all the taped-off rows, all the dead space. We’ve become the film ourselves, telegraphing our emotions in ways that only 14 months of mouth-obscured masking can spur. Case in point: Orson Welles’s chatty 1973 documentary “F for Fake” is amusing in a purring, intellectual way, but it’s not the riot that a few superfans at the Paris Theater in Midtown were clearly having.

It helps to bring your own enthusiasm. Otherwise, a mind can wander to the whooshing air-conditioning units, freshly refitted with the required MERV 13 filters and somehow louder than memory serves. Is the ceiling too low? Was that a cough or a chuckle? Don’t let yourself get too distracted, or you’ll be demoted from paying customer to cop.

(17) OUT WITH THE BOYS.  “The Boys’ Planet Vought experience created by Amazon in Los Angeles” reports SYFY Wire, andtells where reservations for the pop-up are available.

Remember in Season 2 of The Boys, when Homelander (Antony Starr) took his son, Ryan (Cameron Crovetti), to the supe-themed restaurant Planet Vought? The pair were still getting adjusted to their father-son dynamic, so at Stormfront’s (Aya Cash) prompting, Homelander takes his son out to the restaurant for some bonding. Of course, Homelander fans ended up making it more traumatic than intended for the poor kid, but weirdly enough, if you are in the Los Angeles area June 4 – 6, you could be one of those fans. 

Amazon Studios announced today that they’re unveiling a huge, free The Boys-themed three-day pop-up at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles. It’s being billed as a “one-of-a-kind, immersive drive-thru restaurant” celebrating Planet Vought’s (think of it as a super knock-off of Planet Hollywood restaurants) “grand opening” event. Each car-load will get an exclusive 40-minute experience with themed food and a drive-thru environment filled with characters, visuals, and elements from The Boys universe.

“We here at The Boys are thrilled to launch our latest cash-grab, I mean, brand extension: Planet Vought Hollywood,” showrunner Eric Kripke says in a tonally spot-on press release statement. “Guests will experience the thrills of being a real superhero, all while consuming 2000 calories or more. Okay not really, but still, this experience is SO COOL, and will immerse viewers (and frankly, Emmy voters) into the humor and intrigue of the show’s world. And keep an eye out — Butcher and the Boys might swing by.”

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. New developments in animation will be presented at the 2021 SIGGRAPH conference: Technical Papers Preview Trailer.

[Thanks to JJ, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, Cath, Will R., Daniel Dern, Lise Andreasen, Andrew Porter, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

28 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 5/28/21 The Battle Of Scrollerloo Was Fifth On The Pixeling Collections Of Eaton

  1. First!

    (8) MEMORY LANE. I’ll confess that I read maybe a hundred pages of that work before I DNFed and never went back. I was her writing style that got me, not the content. It was, errr, pedestrian. And I don’t do that well. .

  2. 9) It’s also Stephanie Burgis’ birthday! And Julia Rios as well!

    (such a great day for birthdays)

  3. Cat Eldridge: If you can’t stand it, why in hell are we running your item about it?

  4. Mike Glyer asks me: If you can’t stand it, why in hell are we running your item about it?

    Simple: it’s an incredibly popular piece of genre fiction that deserved its Hugo. I don’t like every novel that gets a Hugo. Do you? And I’d loved the films, each and every one of them.

  5. Independence Day. Sure, that sarcasm trumps everything.

    Let’s all show our asses here, by all means.

    The point — if only in my mind — of running birthdays and anniversary notices is to call back to positive things fans might enjoy remembering. Or finding out about. I often have to edit what Cat submits to sustain that focus. There’s not much I can do when Cat submits an item then delivers the negativity in the first comment.

  6. Sorry, I’ll bow out of this now.

    My humour is not translating at all well, and I am emotionally ill-equipped to continue this thread.

  7. And I’m bowing out as well. The comment wasn’t meant to negative and I will note how often Filers have stated that they’ve DNFed a work and no one took any of those to be a negative comment. Just a reality that not all works suit all readers.

  8. Independence Day? That was only 25 years ago. (Really? Time it do fly.) Somewhere I still have an Independence Day alien toy that was motion activated and used to scare me whenever I accidentally set it off. I’d like to hope its battery had worn out by now in case I uncover it.

  9. Don Day

    I have an entire run of The Fanscient, that I bought about 40 years ago. It was a really good fanzine.

  10. Jack Lint says Independence Day? That was only 25 years ago. (Really? Time it do fly.) Somewhere I still have an Independence Day alien toy that was motion activated and used to scare me whenever I accidentally set it off. I’d like to hope its battery had worn out by now in case I uncover it.

    Can’t be. Surely it dates back a lot further than that! (Ahhh the vagaries of memory.) I saw it in a theatre here in Portland. Still one of the best genre films I’ve ever seen.

  11. 9) Frank Drake was also responsible for the “Drake Equation” which makes estimates of how many civilizations currently exist in our galaxy – very ‘us’ I think.

  12. 15) Hothardware has it slightly wrong – Sandwell is in Tipton, northwest of Birmingham, so it was the West Midlands force, not the Metropolitan Police, who cover London. About 130 miles away /pedantry.

  13. oilcan
    Did you say something?
    oilcan
    He said, “Pixel Scroll!”
    Pixel Scroll what?

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