Pixel Scroll 5/29/16 Hell Is Other Pixels

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(1) HE SIGNS AND WONDERS. From the Baltimore Sun: “’Game of Thrones’ author draws faithful crowd at Balticon 50”

The wildly popular HBO series has gone beyond the plot lines of Martin’s books, though more are in the works. In an afternoon interview with Mark Van Name, Martin said he never anticipated that the unfinished book series would end up as enormous as it has become. When he sold it in 1994 with 100 pages written, he pitched it as a trilogy. That quickly became a “four-book trilogy,” he said, then a five-, six- and seven-book series. The sixth and seventh books have not yet been published.

“It hit 800 pages and I wasn’t close to the end,” he said of writing the first book, “Game of Thrones,” the show’s namesake, which was part of a larger series, “A Song of Ice and Fire.” Then “Thrones” became “1,400 pages and there was no end in sight. At that point I kind of stopped and said, ‘This isn’t going to work.'”

Though Martin didn’t speak in detail about the books, he said the Vietnam War was part of what shaped his writing and the complexity of his characters.

“We have the capacity for great heroism. We have the capacity for great selfishness and cowardice, many horrible acts. And sometimes at the same time. The same people can do something heroic on Tuesday and something horrible on Wednesday,” he said. “Heroes commit atrocities. People who commit atrocities can be capable later of heroism. It’s the human condition, and I wanted to reflect all that in my work.”

Martin Morse Wooster emailed the story along with his own observations:

…Nearly all of the piece is about listening to George R.R. Martin or standing in line to get your Martin books and other stuff signed.  This morning I was standing in line for the elevator and heard that they were admitting the 1,070th person to the autograph line.

(2) TIPTREE AUCTION AT WISCON. I’d like to hear the rest of this story…

And I’d like to hear this, too.

(3) CAPTAIN AMERICA SPOILER WARNING. (In case there’s anybody who doesn’t already know it…)

Ed Green snarked in a Facebook comment:

I rather like the bonus factoid that they released this in time to help celebrate Memorial Day. Because nothing says ‘Thank you for your sacrifice!” like turning a WWII legend into a Nazi.

You rotten bastards.

Jessica Pluumer also criticized the choice in her post “On Steve Rogers #1, Antisemitism, and Publicity Stunts” at Panels.

You probably already knew that, but I’d invite you to think about it for a minute. In early 1941, a significant percentage of the American population was still staunchly isolationist. Yet more Americans were pro-Axis. The Nazi Party was not the unquestionably evil cartoon villains we’re familiar with today; coming out in strong opposition to them was not a given. It was a risky choice.

And Simon and Kirby—born Hymie Simon and Jacob Kurtzberg—were not making it lightly. Like most of the biggest names in the Golden Age of comics, they were Jewish. They had family and friends back in Europe who were losing their homes, their freedom, and eventually their lives to the Holocaust. The creation of Captain America was deeply personal and deeply political.

Ever since, Steve Rogers has stood in opposition to tyranny, prejudice, and genocide. While other characters have their backstories rolled up behind them as the decades march on to keep them young and relevant, Cap is never removed from his original context. He can’t be. To do so would empty the character of all meaning.

But yesterday, that’s what Marvel did.

Look, this isn’t my first rodeo. I know how comics work. He’s a Skrull, or a triple agent, or these are implanted memories, or it’s a time travel switcheroo, or, or, or. There’s a thousand ways Marvel can undo this reveal—and they will, of course, because they’re not about to just throw away a multi-billion dollar piece of IP. Steve Rogers is not going to stay Hydra any more than Superman stayed dead.

But Nazis (yes, yes, I know 616 Hydra doesn’t have the same 1:1 relationship with Nazism that MCU Hydra does) are not a wacky pretend bad guy, something I think geek media and pop culture too often forgets.

(4) BOUND FOR BLETCHLEY. The Guardian reports a discovery made by museum workers — “Device used in Nazi code machine found for sale on eBay”.

It was just such a coincidence that led to the museum getting its hands on their Lorenz teleprinter, after they spotted it for sale. “I think it was described as a telegram machine, but we recognised it as a Lorenz teleprinter,” Whetter said.

They rang the seller and drove to down to Essex to take a look for themselves. “The person took us down the garden to the shed and in the shed was the Lorenz teleprinter in its original carrying case,” Whetter said. They snapped it up for £9.50.

But the true value of their purchase was yet to become clear. It was only after cleaning the machine at Bletchley Park, where the museum is based, that they found it was a genuine military issue teleprinter, complete with swastika detailing and even a special key for the runic Waffen-SS insignia.

Is it a suspicious coincidence that this story came out the same month as Steve Rogers #1? You decide!

(5) WISCON CON SUITE. Tempting as it is, if I left now I still wouldn’t get there in time.

(6) FAREWELL FROM THE MASSES. The G has something to say “About that Castle finale…” at Nerds of a Feather.

I finally got around to watching the series finale of Castle last night, and feel the need to vent a bit.

First, let me admit that I’ve watched a lot of Castle over the years. But I didn’t watch it out of any conviction that it’s good. It wasn’t. Rather, I watched it because it was simple fun. At its best, the show took a familiar formula (the police procedural), approached it with an appealing balance of drama and comedy and then let its charismatic leads (Nathan Fillion and Stana Kati?) carry the show. All in all, that made for an enjoyable, if somewhat forgettable, hour long diversion.

Sure there was the ongoing story about an increasingly convoluted and opaque conspiracy, as well as the love story between Castle and Beckett, but at its heart Castle was an episodic show. And now that it’s gone, I realize how few watchable episodic dramas are left on TV.

Which brings me to the finale…

As soon as it was over, my wife turned to me and said “Poochie died on the way back to his home planet.”

With a hook like that, how could I not read the rest, which is an explanation of the reference?

(7) DESPITE POPULAR DEMAND. There will be a movie based on the Tetris video game, in which massive blocks descend from the sky. Don’t be underneath when they fly by… oh, wait, that’s a different punchline.

Larry Kasanoff, producer of films based on the Mortal Kombat video games and Bruno Wu, CEO of China’s Sun Seven Stars Media Group announced that their new company Threshold Global Studios is set to produce the film Tetris The Movie.

 

(8) RECOMMENDATION: REREAD THE BOOK. Gary Westfahl’s analysis, “Alice the Great and Powerful: A Review of Alice Through the Looking Glass”, is posted at Locus Online.

The visual effects are regularly creative and engaging, and there are lines here and there that might make you laugh, but overall, anyone looking for 153 minutes of entertainment on this Memorial Day weekend would be best advised to read, or reread, Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) instead of watching this film, which borrows its title but none of its unique wit and charm. The work that it most recalls, as my title suggests, is the film Oz the Great and Powerful (2013 – review here), another thumb-fisted effort to “improve” upon a classic children’s book by adding new characters, new back stories for old characters, and an action-packed, melodramatic story line….

(9) MEANWHILE, BACK AT WISCON. Yes, indeed.

(10) CARBONARA COPY. Kurt Busiek commented yesterday about cooking a meal for his future wife using a recipe in a comic book. I thought it might be a pleasant surprise if I could find that American Flagg spaghetti fritatta recipe online. It was there, but I found more than I bargained for in Cleo Coyle’s post at Mystery Lovers Kitchen.

When I first met my husband, he whipped up a fantastic spaghetti carbonara that has since become part of our menu. Because he’s part Italian, and because both his mother and father taught him how to cook, I assumed his recipe came from one of them. Not so. Marc informed me that he found the recipe in a 1980’s comic book.

The comic was Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!, launched in 1983. Fans of this series include Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Chabon, who hailed Flagg as a precursor to the cyberpunk genre of science fiction.

Flagg is not for everyone. It presents a hard-boiled look at life in 2031—after nuclear war and an economic collapse leave things a tad chaotic in the USA. How bad do things get in Chaykin’s 2031? One example: The broken down piano player who inhabits the local lounge is Princess Diana’s oldest son.

As for today’s recipe, spaghetti carbonara happens to be the favorite dish of Rubin Flagg, the comic book’s hero. The recipe was published in the same issue that Rubin cooked it up. (Recipes included in fiction! Is that a good idea or what?)

Coyle says she’s married to somebody named Marc, so presumably this isn’t Kurt’s wife telling her side of the same anecdote. (I’m also sure Kurt knows his fritatta from his carbonara.) Just the same, it’s starting to sound like that American Flagg recipe is quite the love potion!

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

  • Born May 29, 1906 – T. H. White author of The Once and Future King.

(12) SUITS. Mr. Sci-Fi, Marc Scott Zicree, takes you along —

While in London pitching series, Mr. Sci-Fi got a tour of the Propstore’s exclusive amazing collection of spacesuits from such films as Alien, Armageddon and Star Trek – The Motion Picture — plus he shows rare concept designs of Space Command’s spacesuit by Iain McCaig (designer of Darth Maul, Queen Amidala and The Force Awaken’s Rey). Not to be missed!

 

(13) WOLFE TALK. Spacefaring Kitten interviewed Marc Aramini who wrote Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986 (Castalia House).

Is there a “right” answer to questions like “what has really happened between the protagonist and Suzanne Delage in ‘Suzanne Delage’” or “which one is the changeling in ‘The Changeling’”?

I’m asking this because I kind of enjoyed the ambiguous atmosphere and the weight of the unexplained in those stories, and while I was reading them I didn’t necessarily feel that there should be one comprehensive solution to be unearthed.

Yes, but you don’t have to get there to enjoy the story. I honestly believe there is a “right” answer from the author’s point of view, but that there are other authors who do not have this kind of rigid, disciplined mindset and write from a place of the subconscious or unconscious. I really do not feel that this is the case with Wolfe, and I have written about 700,000 words so far between the two volumes which argue that his mysteries have universal solutions. I think one of his tasks is using the tool-box of post-modern subjectivity and uncertainty to imply that there is still a universal structure behind the act of creation.

(14) HARDY. David Hardy has created a video tour of his famous astronomical art —

Voyage to the Outer Planets

To follow up my 50s compilation, ‘How Britain Conquered Space in the Fifties’, here is a video made from art of the outer Solar System which I produced 50 years later , for comparison. I like to think I have progressed a little! This is partly a short excerpt from my DVD ‘Space Music’ (available at www.astroart.org), which in turn was edited from German TV’s ‘Space Night’, shown in the early morning from 1994 (google it). They showed two programmes of my art, but for the DVD I added digital images from my 2004 book with Sir Patrick Moore, ‘Futures: 50 Years in Space’.

 

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Spacefaring Kitten, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Hal Winslow’s Old Buddy.]

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129 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 5/29/16 Hell Is Other Pixels”

  3. 14) That Hardy video clip may have just convinced me to buy the DVD.

  5. The ending to Castle sounds about as bad as the Dallas “All of last year, including Bobby Ewing’s death, was a dream” schtick.

    Makes me glad I never got into it.

    (Of course, many say the ending to Battlestar Galactica [new] was worse. What is the worst SF series finale, anyway?)

    ETA: Good heavens, actual fifth.

  6. “A Man, A Plan, a Scroll: Pixels!”

    Is it a scroll? No, it is a flying pixel!

  7. Staking my conceptual claim now to Pong: The Movie. I see it as a searing psychological profile of the inner lives of the paddles, their motivations, and the ultimate dehumanizing costs of winning…

  8. Look up in the scroll! It’s a bird… It’s a plane… It’s Pixelman.

  10. @Stoic Cynic

    Heh. How about Frogger: The Movie? Which race of frogs will survive, and why do they want to cross the highway in the first place, and which of our intrepid green hopping heroes will escape being smashed flat?

  11. I always thought Joust! would make an awesome cheesy B movie with people hopping on badly done CGI birds and fighting over and around floating rock platforms… Or was that Avatar?

  13. JJ: According to WaPo, while there is a movie in the works, that is a fake trailer.

    I’ve been had!

  15. (1) HE SIGNS AND WONDERS. – Juvenile I know, but I must admit that I giggled at “Mark Van Name”

    (3) CAPTAIN AMERICA SPOILER WARNING. – Right now the common perception is that this is some combination of Red Skull (who, thorugh the magic of comic books, has Professor X’s brain/ powers), and the semi-nuts sentient Cosmic Cube running around. Still stupid, and incredibly poorly timed – Civil War is doing gangbusters, and *this* is the storyline Marvel goes with their renumbered CapAm series?

    (6) FAREWELL FROM THE MASSES. – I think the showrunners did the best they did with the notice they were given. I also think that the show should have ended at least 2 full seasons ago.

  16. (Of course, many say the ending to Battlestar Galactica [new] was worse. What is the worst SF series finale, anyway?)

    My vote would be for ENTERPRISE.

  17. My vote would be for ENTERPRISE.

    I’ve never seen it, but it’d have to be pretty dang bad to top “Turnabout Intruder” from TOS–gah, arglebargle sexist crapola, even for 1969.

  18. @Iphinome

    Hey, I kind of liked Blue Smurfette Pocahontas w/Tiny White Savior! (Michelle Rodriguez and Sigourney Weaver were criminally wasted in that movie.)

  19. @Bonnie McDaniel

    While I can’t speak to the motivation of frogs crossing the road, Hunter S. Thompson spoke eloquently as to the motivation of road running jackrabbits:

    People who claim to know jackrabbits will tell you they are primarily motivated by Fear, Stupidity, and Craziness. But I have spent enough time in jack rabbit country to know that most of them lead pretty dull lives; they are bored with their daily routines: eat, fuck, sleep, hop around a bush now and then….No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while; there has to be a powerful adrenalin rush in crouching by the side of a road, waiting for the next set of headlights to come along, then streaking out of the bushes with split-second timing and making it across to the other side just inches in front of the speeding front wheels.

    File the serial numbers off, insert frog in place of jackrabbit, and there you go.

    Of course you’ll also have to hire Johnny Depp as the lead for Frogger: The Movie to properly capture the character…

  21. @Bonnie McDaniel:

    The ending of the BSG reboot actually redeemed the show a little in my eyes. By that point I hated almost every surviving character and wanted them all to die due to their sheer stupidity.

    I couldn’t stand the ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion. By which I mean the End of Eva movie, rather than the “let’s psychoanalyze the protagonist” end of the series (apparently forced due to budgetary and time restraints). I’ve heard the movie described as a “fuck you” to the fans, and that’s certainly how it felt to me.

    Gosei Sentai Dairanger featured a twist in the final episodes that made no sense to me. It appeared to contradict several things that happened earlier in the series with no real explanation. Which was a shame, because I really dug the show from episodes 5-48.

    Side note: my boyfriend and I refer to a character who was introduced in season 6 of Homicide: Life on the Street as Poochie. Suddenly every episode featured Poochie, who solved every case he got and a cold case besides. Seasons 6 and 7 of Homicide were infuriating.

  22. I’m also sure Kurt knows his fritatta from his carbonara.

    And my Reubens from my Rubins.

    Ann’s the one who makes the carbonara around here, but it’s a favorite family dish, particularly for our youngest, who requests it for her birthday.

    **

    And I think this whole CAPTAIN AMERICA thing is pretty dopey. It’s not as if Cap hasn’t thought himself to be an actual Nazi before (as told by his co-creator Jack Kirby and fellow Jewish comics talent Stan Lee, he was brainwashed, saluted Hitler personally, and was sent off to assassinate Churchill or someone like that, and that wasn’t the last time it happened). “Oh, no! Captain America has become his own worst nightmare! Watch his inner idealism reassert itself so he can fight back and fix the world!” is not exactly a bizarre story structure for comics.

    Heck, I used it myself, but turned Cap into a loyal British guardsman under the thumb of Morgan le Fay rather than a Hydra agent. He still snapped out of it.

    Superman has also become a Nazi a time or two, despite his being created by a couple of Jewish kids from Cleveland. That people are suddenly finding this sort of this an abomination after over 75 years of superhero antics involving Nazis and more, to the point that they’re declaring that their childhood hero is ruined forever, just like the classic male Ghostbusters, strikes me as Slow News Day meets Internet Hysteria writ large.

    But in a few months, when the shape of the story is more clear, we’ll be on to the next outrage and have forgotten that this one didn’t turn out to be anything like what people had feared. But Marvel will have sold a shit-ton of comics…

  23. And just to note: The recipe Cleo Coyle lists there is not Howard’s frittata recipe.

    The real recipe appears in AMERICAN FLAGG #7, and my copy’s deep in the basement somewhere. If someone else has access to it, maybe they can scan it, so people looking for it online won’t be deceived by a carbonara recipe.

  24. The way I plan to remember it, Castle aired a proper wedding after “Veritas” (the second to last episode of season 6) and then got cancelled. It was never high art, but things really went off the rails starting when Castle got kidnapped on his way to the wedding.

  25. I feel compelled to mention my snark was *mostly* over the timing.

    I’ve written for comics, I get that this is likely a gimmick. It’s a bad one, with crap timing.

  26. Hey! I did it. I bought Tingler ribbons. 100 that say “secretly Chuck Tingle” and 100 that say “secretly NOT Chuck Tingle.” The font is Comic Sans, because it’s funny, dammit. Both are on rainbow ribbon stock. I will have them at Worldcon. If you won’t be at Worldcon, and would like a couple (of either variety), I will mail them to you, if you email me your snail mail addy. My email is my lydy at demesne dot com.

    Thank you, Naomi Kritzer, for the idea.

  28. (7) DESPITE POPULAR DEMAND.

    The Tetris movie project was about to be greenlit as all the pieces were falling into place. Then suddenly, as the components finally lined-up, it vanished.

    [I’ll see myself out]

  29. I just finished watching the first episode of “Preacher” on AMC. It’s very dark and pretty gory, and there seems to be a lot of convoluted Catholic/alien/demon mythos that will have to be explained. But I think it has potential, and it has a kickass female POC co-star.

  30. I’m trying to decide between “Secretly Camestros Felapton” and “Secretly NOT Camestros Felapton”.

    I think I’ll wear both.

  32. Recipe was not in my collected edition of American Flagg, but I could see a panel where they were eating ALFA Carbonara.

  33. @JJ

    Yeah, but it does kinda sounds like a random anon name – ie John Doe / Joe Bloggs / area resident*…

    *=keep seeing this in The Onion. Is it a term in common usage by US newspapers?

  34. Hampus Eckerman on May 29, 2016 at 11:07 pm said:
    “I’m trying to decide between ‘Secretly Camestros Felapton’ and ‘Secretly NOT Camestros Felapton’.”
    There may be a Syllogistic Argument that provides an answer to that, but i’m not sure what it is…

    (AEO-2 + EAO-3 = Logical Fifth?)

  35. Got my American Flagg No 7 and there it is, not at the back, right on the inside cover page, spaghetti fritatta. Don’t have a scanner and I’m not typing that lot up, BUT, hey this is the issue where Reuben sleeps with a Nazi! How about that? Nobody tell Cap, it might give him ideas.

  36. snowcrash: area resident… keep seeing this in The Onion. Is it a term in common usage by US newspapers?

    It’s an indication of sarcasm on the part of The Onion about the lame practice newspapers and TV news shows have of getting quotes/soundbites from somebody who lives nearby but has nothing meaningful to add to the story (“I’s standin’ overe there by the tomaters, and here he come, running through the pole beans, through the fruits and vegetables, nekkid as a jay bird. And I hollered over t’ Ethel, I said, “Don’t Look, Ethel!” But it’s too late.”).

  38. Hey, an excellent day so far–contributing editor and GRRM confirms that Oevraar vf qrfpraqrq sebz Fre Qhapna gur Gnyy.

  40. Kinda a ‘thought’ after reading through the scroll and pixels:

    I don’t ever remember getting so invested in characters that I felt a need to protest about it; if the comic I was reading had characters doing stupid (or had stupid done to them), it was ‘meh’, that was a wasted 15 cents and off to the next one.

    Same with TV shows – there’s another episode next week and everything will be different (this was, of course, back when television was all episodic, with the exception of soap operas, and only housewives watched those [that statement implies a whole ‘nother discussion]); film too, there was no such thing as a ‘franchise’ with recurring characters and running themes, with the possible exception of Bond).

    Franchising and serialization seem to be generating the seeds of their own destruction, maybe. Getting folks so invested that they’ll not be able to get out of their own ways, eventually.

    Just a thought. Now you can say “meh” and lament the loss of 15 cents worth of reading time.

  41. I’ve written for comics, I get that this is likely a gimmick. It’s a bad one, with crap timing.

    And abysmal marketing. It’s not the story by itself that’s a slap in the face; it’s a combination of Marvel’s recent (and not so recent) history with core canon changes like this and the way Tom Brevoort has been talking about it. “It’s not a gimmick! This is really real, you guys!”

    Marvel lost a lot of my trust when they let John Byrne wreck the Vision and Scarlet Witch. They lost a lot of other people with One More Day, and even more with Superior Spider-Man. I don’t even read the Spider-Man books — I think my last one was in the late 1970s — and I was looking at those decisions and doing a Jefferson imitation.

    I don’t bother reading the big “universe upheaval” events until they’re over with and I can get reviews. And then I don’t bother reading some of them at all. Just give me a scorecard for the permanent changes, if any, so I’m not too confused during the brief lull between upheavals.

  43. Balticon was fine for the most part. The Heinlein panel was great and included a guest appearance by Connie Willis. The dealer room yielded “new” used paperbacks from Sean Stewart, James Blaylock, and Ian Watson plus an SF Gateway omnibus of Sheri S. Tepper. Autograpghs were successfully sought from Ada Palmer, Donald Kingsbury, Charlie Stross, and GRRM.

  44. @BGHilton:

    If Marvel wants to shock, how about getting their heroes foil a bank robbery? No one will see that one coming.

    Back when superheroes did that, bank robberies were a thing. In the real world. They aren’t so much, these days.

    @Rail: The one flaw in your list is that Superior Spider-Man was brilliant.

  47. #3) Yeah. The two Jewish guys who created Captain America would have really endorsed this development.

    I told my son, faithful Marvel movie attendant and reader, and about an hour later he realized I wasn’t making a joke. It wasn’t the fault of Bizarro World either.

  48. Jim Henley:

    Bank robberies are enough of a thing in this corner of the real world (northeastern United States) for there to be regular news stories about them. I suspect that they’ve mostly stopped being interesting, in the same way as most people are no longer interested in stories about even fatal car crashes unless they know one of the people involved (or the crash blocks a road they want to use).

    snowcrash: “Area resident” is the Onion being sarcastic. The name “John Doe” is a long-time placeholder for “unknown person” and everybody “knows” there isn’t such a person. This caused problems for a Korean immigrant in New York a while ago, after he decided “Doe” was a good transliteration of his family name.

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