Pixel Scroll 5/8/18 Alas, Dear Scrollick, I Knew Him, Horatio. A Fileow Of Tsundoku Unaddressed

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(1) LEVAR BURTON. The “LeVar Burton Reads” Bay Area tour stop features in “LIVE! in San Francisco: ‘As Good as New’ by Charlie Jane Anders”.

 A young woman unexpectedly finds herself with the fate of the world in her hands. Recorded on the LeVar Burton Reads LIVE! tour. With accompaniment by Astronauts, etc. keyboardist Anthony Ferraro, and featuring a conversation with Charlie Jane Anders. This story appears in Anders’ collection SIX MONTHS, THREE DAYS, FIVE OTHERS.

Tor.com also has transcribed some of Burton and Anders’ conversation about his reading.

(2) NOW WITH ADDED PRIX. Here are two more awards that were announced this weekend at Congrès Boréal.

Prix des Horizons imaginaires 2018

A jury of 80 Quebec college students named François Blais as laureate of the Prix des Horizons imaginaires for his novel Les Rivières suivi de Les montagnes, published by éditions de L’instant même . In addition to a trophy designed by the artist Karl Dupéré-Richer, the author will receive a C$300 scholarship from Marianopolis College.

The other finalists were:

  • La chambre verte, de Martine Desjardins (Éditions Alto)
  • Et si le diable le permet, de Cédric Ferrand (Éditions Les moutons électriques)
  • Les Cendres de Sedna, d’Ariane Gélinas (Éditions Alire)
  • Rénovation, de Renaud Jean (Éditions du Boréal)

Prix Solaris 2018

Luc Dagenais’ novel La Déferlante des mères won the Prix Solaris 2018.

(3) MIGHTY MANGA. Let the B&N Sci-FI & Fantasy Blog convince you: “Why Fullmetal Alchemist Is Essential Reading for Every Fantasy Fan”.

With the release of its first hardcover deluxe edition this week, the manga Fullmetal Alchemist has now been blessed with not one, not two, but three English releases, and it’s hard to think of a series more deserving.

Since it began serialization 17 years ago, Hiromu Arakawa’s blockbuster shonen fantasy has inspired not only readers, but also fantasy authors and artists the likes of Brian McClellan and Faith Erin Hicks. On the surface, it sounds like a typical adventure series, following two brothers, skilled young alchemist Edward Elric and his brother Alphonse (reduced to a spirit encased in a hollow suit of armor in the wake of a magical experiment went horribly wrong), seek the Philosopher’s Stone, a fabled object they hope to use to enhance Ed’s power and hopefully restore Al’s humanity. But there’s a lot going on below the surface—fascinating philosophical questions, tricky moral quandaries, and complex character interactions.

(4) BUT WHAT ABOUT MY NEXT JOB. Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon guest “Michael Shannon Is Into Those Internet James Bond Villain Rumors”. Funny stuff, including cat humor – and they did eventually remember to promote HBO’s Fahrenheit 451, his reason for being on the show.

(5) THE PUPPY BUBBLE. John Scalzi, in the middle of Reader Request Week, comments about attacks on his political leanings: “Reader Request Week 2018 #4: Far-Left(?) Scalzi”.

The reason there’s a cottage industry in attacking me as “far left” is rather more simple and rather a bit more sad than that, which is that there was a small(ish) clutch of writers and fans whose politics ranged from stock conservative to reactionary to white nationalist and who, for various reasons, disliked me and the fact I have a successful writing career. So they went out of their way to try to insult and diminish me in ways that carry weight to others of their sort. So along with questioning my masculinity and/or my sexuality and/or my sales and/or the validity of my awards and/or my writing talents and/or blog visits and/or [insert whatever here], they called me “far left” because in their universe being far left is one of the worst things you can possibly be. Me just being moderately left wouldn’t do, mind you. Everything has to be extreme for these boys. So far left I am. It’s me and Stalin, bear hugging.

(6) ALL HAT, NO CATTLE. Airing Wednesday, “Rick Moranis Reviving Spaceballs’ Dark Helmet For The Goldbergs”.

For the first time since way back in 1986, Moranis will once again play Dark Helmet. As reported by USA Today, Moranis will reprise his famed Spaceballs character on this week’s episode of the sitcom The Goldbergs. This marks Moranis’ first on-screen appearance since he retired from movies after 1997’s Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves. As series creator Adam F. Goldberg explained, he hopes Moranis’ unexpected return will kickstart a possible Spaceballs sequel:

(7) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • May 8, 1936 — First Catholic mass in an airship (Hindenburg) over ocean.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY DIRECTOR

  • Born May 8, 1942 — Douglas Trumbull, special effects master

(9) AN ARTICLE THAT MAKES FOLKS IRATE. Lila Shapiro’s article for Vulture, “The Story Behind FanCon’s Controversial Collapse”, quotes one of the con’s organizers —

In recent weeks, the team behind the event has been grappling with how it all fell apart. According to their accounts, they were simply well-intentioned idealists who took on a project that proved too big for them to handle, and failed to call it off until it was too late. “It was hubris,” said Butler, in his only interview discussing the implosion. Hubris — and, as he went on to suggest, a surprising lack of enthusiasm for diversity among fans. If more fans had bought tickets, he said, the whole debacle could have been avoided. “Unfortunately, they just didn’t,” he said. “I should have known better. But I let my belief in this nonexistent community blind me.”

ULTRAGOTHA (signing as “the Indignant”) sent the link with a comment:

Nonexistent community??! The guy raised $52,000 from fans on a Kickstarter and the pop-up con had 1000 attendees and he says the community is nonexistent?  Fuck that noise.

Twitter’s Clarkisha Kent has fundamental objections to Lila Shapiro’s piece itself (jump on the thread at the link), levying criticisms like —

  1. Being not lazy & actually read what me and @jazmine_joyner/@womenoncomics ALREADY wrote about #FanCon so you don’t look like an asswho doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

(10) OVERSERVED. From the BBC: “World of Warcraft attacker jailed in US”. He tried to get an edge by DDoSing servers so competitors couldn’t get in.

A World of Warcraft gamer has been sentenced to jail in the US for carrying out a cyber-attack that interfered with the service in Europe.

Calin Mateias had been accused of flooding Blizzard Entertainment’s computer servers with traffic between February and September 2010.

He was said to have carried out the distributed denial of service (DDoS) assault to prevent rivals logging in.

Thousands of players were caught up in the resulting disruption.

The Romanian citizen – who had been extradited to Los Angeles to face the charges – pleaded guilty in February to one count of causing damage to a protected computer.

He has also paid $29,987 (£22,176) to Blizzard to cover the costs it racked up trying to repel the data deluge.

(11) BOLO. Second variety? “Russia to showcase robot tank in WW2 victory parade”.

Gazeta.ru reports that the Uran-9 can locate a target itself but the decision to fire is taken by a commander sitting in an armoured truck up to 3km (1.8 miles) away.

The Uran-6 robot-sapper was used to clear mines in the Syrian hotspots of Palmyra, Aleppo and Deir al-Zour. Its controller steers it from a distance of up to 1km.

(12) FOUND IN LA MANCHA. “Terry Gilliam’s ‘cursed’ Quixote is finally here”. He’s been trying to make an adaptation of Cervantes’ novel for over 20 years.

…But as beguiling as its combination of showbiz glamour, fairy-tale enchantment and workaday practicalities may be, the most thrilling aspect of this tableau is what’s missing. There are no meteorites, hurricanes or bolts of lighting. There are no ravenous tigers or cholera outbreaks. There isn’t an ambulance or a fire engine in sight. Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a film which is synonymous with sustained and calamitous misfortune, is finally going without a hitch after nearly 30 years of blood, sweat, toil and tears.

(13) CHINA’S SOCIAL CREDIT SYSTEM. Did you know? According to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, “Everyone In China Is Getting A ‘Social Credit Score’.” Didn’t Orville and Black Mirror have episodes with social point systems as a dystopian premise?

(14) CREDIT DENIED. In the May 2 Financial Times, Gabriel Wildau reports that Chinese censors have banned short videos of British animated character Peppa Pig (which have been viewed on the China Central television website 30 billion times since 2015) because users used stills from the show to “create memes with vulgar or sardonic captions” with some netizens referring to Peppa Pig as -shehuiren- or “gangster.”

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Britain’s Hardknott Brewery closed in April, but before they folded they made “intergalactic Space Hopper” on Vimeo, which explains what happens when you make a spacey beer that claims it “set hops to stun.”

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

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62 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 5/8/18 Alas, Dear Scrollick, I Knew Him, Horatio. A Fileow Of Tsundoku Unaddressed”

  1. (12) Whoo! My impossible dream is coming true! By a wild coincidence, I’m just now reading Monty Python: an Autobiography by Monty Python. Anyway, this feels almost like being around for CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT coming out. (Still kinda wishing Gilliam had made WATCHMEN.)

  3. (13) Wanna feel old like me? Bryce Dallas Howard starred in the Black Mirror episode mentioned. I was at her parent’s wedding. Where did I put my walker? 🙂

  8. Carl Slaughter on May 8, 2018 at 8:07 pm said: <video>

    If you’re going to post alt-right video screeds, could you please include warning labels? kthx

  9. Did any of you happen to watch American Horror Story: Hotel? Was there a Watsonian explanation for why so many of the actors looked similar?

  11. Dave Cullen!? Whats next, posting random videos on Pizza Gate? o.O

  13. Read The Collapsing Empire

    Verdict. Scalzi being Scalzi, It hooked me in, the setup worked, the pacing was fine, I liked the story. No regrets.

    This seems to be my reaction to most everything he writes. It was good, I liked it, my socks are still on.

    I’m a quarter of the way through Space Opera

    Is this what taking ecstasy is like?

  15. If your enjoying Space Opera, don’t forget that this year’s contest is on this week.
    Official site

    Other sites and streams are available, and look, there’s an app too.

  16. [Intercom] Next subject: Kowalski, Leon, pixeleer, scroll disposal, filer section, new poster, fifth day.

  17. Ireland into the Eurovision final for the first time since 2013!

    One of the planet’s great annual barking-mad festivals of aesthetic catastrophe – PNH

  18. SFWA has a new Sci Fi StoryBundle out: 20 books by 18 authors for at least $15. (be sure to adjust the slider before clicking “pay”, to designate what percentage will go to the authors, with the option to designate some for their charity.)

  19. @Iphinome

    I’m a quarter of the way through Space Opera

    Is this what taking ecstasy is like?

    Quite possibly. I’m having to read it in small doses for fear of brain collapse and/or embarrassing public guffaws.

  20. I’ve been enjoying Navah Wolfe’s twitter feed, where she has been commenting on this year’s Eurovision contest (and cleverly plugging SPACE OPERA every so often in the thread to tie it all together).

    7) A mass on the Hindenberg? Hunh. A demonic possession story on an airship would make for an interesting steampunk tale…

  21. @JJ, I hesitate to admit it… I’m not acquainted with most of the authors in this bundle. In fact, the only ones I’ve read are Lee & Miller. So. What do filers think of this selection? Are there must-reads? On the one hand, I’m hesitant to drop money on a bundle I might never read. On the other… new authors! New books!

    Advice appreciated.

  22. @9: I’m glad ULTRAGOTHA jumped on that grenade; saves me looking at another steaming heap of self-justification. Apparently the would-have-been founder thinks “Diversity!” is some sort of magic word that replaces competence, groundwork, patience, and possibly hiring honest people.

  23. Cassy B.: What do filers think of this selection?

    I’m on the mailing list for the StoryBundle, and occasionally they give freebies to subscribers when they release a bundle. The freebie with this one is Qualify (book 1 of The Atlantis Grail) by Vera Nazarian (book 2 in the series is part of the bundle). Filers can try signing up for the newsletter here to see if they get offered the freebie.

    Kendall and I are both big fans of Jennifer Foehner-Wells’ Fluency and Remanence, the latter of which was a longlist finalist for the GoodReads Awards in 2016.

    Iphinome comments on the Kris Longknife series here. The Rita Longknife is a 2017 release in a new subseries in the same universe.

  25. The Vulture article completely failed to cover the people who got caught up and lost money in the FanCon mess, fawning over the words of the people responsible for the collapse in the first place. It’s bad hack journalism of the worst kind.

  26. Chip Hitchcock you are entirely welcome. The UFC debacle makes me heartsick for the con it could have been.

  27. Social Credit score: Not to mention whuffie in Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

  29. @JJ: the first video came with its own warning in the form of whomever that smuglord is in the thumbnail.

  31. @Cassy B

    As JJ notied, Rita Longknife is in the same universe. I have not read any of that subseries but I do know it is a prequel to Kris Longknife if that matters to you.

  32. I hate to “well, actually…” on the Longknife books, but I think it’s justified here.

    In the beginning were the Jump Universe books, by Mike Moscoe. There were three of those, dealing with Ray Longknife, Rita Nuu, “Trouble” Tordon, and his wife Ruth. They didn’t sell so well, and the series was dropped.

    A while later, the author released the first Kris Longknife book as Mike Shepherd, featuring the aforementioned characters in the background as grandparents to a young new troublemaker. (At least, Kris thinks of Tordon as a granddad; I don’t recall whether they’re actually related or if it’s an honorary title.) That series took off, and I’m currently a few books behind… even without counting the short fiction. There’s at least one parallel spinoff series set in this era, and we learn in the first couple of Kris books that Ray and Trouble are veterans of the “Iteeche War” – which happened some time after the original three Moscoe books but well before Kris’s time.

    As a result of this commercial success, the author went back and wrote a fourth Jump Universe book, which has been followed by the Rita Longknife novel in the StoryBundle – the first of currently-two books (I think it’s planned as a trilogy) about the Iteeche War.

    So – yes, the book in the bundle should be an accessible starting point. Yes, it’s the beginning of a prequel series to the Kris Longknife books. But no, it’s not the beginning of the saga. That would be The First Casualty, aka Jump Universe #1.

    Clear as mud? 😀 If so, this Goodreads series link incorporates all the works I know of in the set – Jump Universe, Iteeche War, Kris Longknife, spinoffs, and short fiction. The bundled book is #5 on that list.

  33. Lest we forget the Irish tragedy that was Jedward.

    I hope all of you haven’t gone Eurovision mad like Father Dougal. My favorite way to “watch” Eurovision is to read the live commentary The Guardian puts up every year. All of the snark without having to watch or listen to the performers.

    Eurovision did give us Lordi so I shouldn’t complain too much. And it’s always fun to see how close to the bottom the UK can come.

  34. You all might be amused by this thread “Plot Holes in WWII” https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=645923 (inspired by a now-defunct Livejournal post)

    Highlights:
    “What lost it for me was that the most decisive battle of the Pacific naval war was won because the American fighters just happened to attack the Japanese carriers when all their planes were on deck and switching from fighter ammunition to bombs in order to attack Midway. I mean, the timing was just plain unbelievable. ”

    “It was pretty obvious towards the end that they were setting everything up so that they could do a World War III series with Britain and America fighting Russia. But I guess World War II didn’t do well enough and they never made the sequel. ”

    “The whole Italian subplot was also a mess. Why not just keep them part of the Allies and simplify the whole thing the Hitler character being the primary lead with the Hirohito character the secondary lead? The Italian thing was superfluous.”

    “You guys all missed the original series (“The Great War” – later renumbered (Lucas-style) into “WWI”) … If you watch carefully, you’ll see the villain of the sequel has a bit part as a corporal in the prequel. “

  35. @ Jack Lint

    Right there with you on Eurovision. For the most part, I am kitsch-averse and can’t deal with all the goofy pop. Somehow, Valente’s Space Opera is overcoming my usual objections, perhaps because the idea of an alien Eurovision presses my weird buttons.

    P.S. Right now I’m listening to a playlist featuring Chicago footwork. It blows my mind that people dance to this stuff.

  36. Oh, and if you think the Longknife/Jump books are tangled, the Aeon 14 universe (represented in the bundle by Rika Outcast, book one of a subseries to which a “part zero” prequel exists) is considerably more so… to the point that the author has published a Kindle freebie dedicated to What To Read When. There’s even a “revised and expanded” volume in that setting (Destiny Rising) that takes the first two “Intrepid Saga” books, restructures their content, and adds about 100 new pages. You know, just to keep everyone on their toes. 🙄

    Did I mention that the two original books that became Destiny Rising are still on the market – both individually and as two-thirds of an omnibus? Not exactly an encouraging move, IMO… especially when, checking Amazon, the originals are currently free/$2.99 while DR is $6.99.

  39. ps: Adult language. Final scene after credits. At this point in the series, Bird Person and Tammy (a classmate of Summer’s) are an item.

  40. To be fair to Jedward, this is a VERY solid Eurovision effort. Weird silver spacesuits, OTT choreography, fire AND water effects, lyrics that don’t make a lot of sense and the occasional cringey harmony – all things that would save Earth in another timeline.

    (My Eurosong fever burns as hot as Dougal’s all year round…)

  43. All right, all right, I added Space Opera to the TBR pile…

    I feel compelled to point out the existence of the similarly-themed Terrahawks episode “Play It Again, Sram”, featuring songstress and fighter pilot Kate Kestrel in musical competition against the evil Zelda. I’m just pointing out its existence… I don’t recommend that anyone should watch it, much less listen to the “Zelda Rap”. But it’s out there. (It’s way out there, in fact.)

  44. @Cat Rambo

    That’s a very good bundle – although I’m rather sad that 8(!) of them are region-locked for me

  45. @Steve Wright

    All right, all right, I added Space Opera to the TBR pile…

    Bought it last night. The raving of Filers convinced me (Valente’s online persona certainly doesn’t hurt).

    Is that the proper noun for a group of Filers? A raving of Filers?

  46. @Kathodus

    A rec of filers? (possibly to be pronounced as a “wreck”)

  48. @Kathodus —

    Is that the proper noun for a group of Filers? A raving of Filers?

    Aren’t we a hive? as in “that wretched hive of scum and villainy”?

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