(1) KEENE HEALTH UPDATE. Brian Keene’s fan newsletter carries the latest details.
Last Tuesday, June 5th, I was clearing flood debris from my ex-wife’s yard. The property is prone to flooding. If you’ve ever read SCRATCH, that novella was inspired by a previous flood we experienced on the property. Thw weekend prior, she’d experienced not one but two flash floods, and they’d left behind dumptruck loads of debris, as well as a good half foot of standing water across much of the yard. She and her boyfriend tried to clean up, but both of them were exhausted and have normal day jobs, and since I’d just finished writing the season finale to SILVERWOOD: THE DOOR, I had some time to help. So, I went over Tuesday at 8am and started clearing the debris — dumping logs and branches and cut up wood into the fire pit, Hauling away rolls of carpet, car parts, hypodermic needles, broken glass and all the other shit the flood had deposited. My son was determined to help, on what was his first day of summer vacation.
By the end of his first day of summer vacation, he’d watched his father get loaded into an amublance.
The brush pile was about 8ft tall. Earlier in the day, I’d used some gasoline as an accelerant to get it going, because most of the wood was wet. Around 2pm, I sent my son into the house to get us both a drink of water, while I stirred up the fire to get it going again. I poked the coals with a stick, and the flames swelled up. Then the wind shifted, suddenlyu blowing the fire toward me. I threw my arm up releflexively. I guess maybe I had some residue gas left on it, because suddenly my arm was on fire. I stared at it, and thought, “Fuck” and then realized my head was on fire, too.
… I’ve been told by several in the medical field that I can expect my bills to be north of $300,000. Probably more. I made $60,000 last year as a freelance writer.
The GoFundMe has raised a little over $50,000 as of this moment.
(2) SAVING THROW. Deadline got the inside story (well, as inside as execs ever let you see) — “Amazon Studios Boss On How ‘The Expanse’ Was Saved & Would Amazon Also Rescue ‘Lucifer’”.
The Expanse pickup announcement followed an elaborate fan campaign that included renting a plane to fly a #Save The Expanse banner over the Amazon headquarters. It was made in a dramatic fashion by Amazon’s chairman himself, Jeff Bezos, at National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference in Los Angeles where he was an honoree an hour or so afterThe Expanse cast and showrunner had done a panel at the same event.
“There were airplanes circling us, I was having cakes delivered, there was a whole thing happening,” Salke said of The Expense campaign. “And then really smart people, whose opinions I really value creatively, started reaching out to me, saying, “have you seen this show, The Expanse, it’s actually great”. I hadn’t so I spent some time, I watched the show and I was like, this show is actually really well done, why is nobody watching it? At the same time, Jeff Bezos was getting emails from everyone from George R.R. Martin to every captain of industry, like the founder of Craigslist, and they were all writing, saying, there’s this show, it’s so great, you have to see it, you have to buy it or save it.
(3) SHARK ATTRACTANT. Lynn Maudlin recently stayed at The Headington Shark in Oxford. She successfully warded off shark attacks with a copy of Diana Glyer’s Inklings book, Bandersnatch. A word to the wise!
(4) DARLINGS PROTECTION SERVICE. Yesterday’s Scroll reference to Delilah S. Dawson’s Twitter thread about the traditional writing advice “kill your darlings” prompted an uproar in comments. And inspired a couple of Filers to list other writers’ threads with a range of reactions to that phrase.
Tasha Turner said —
A lot of great discussions on Twitter about “kill your darlings”. I’m lucky to follow a diverse group of authors from around the world. Below are a few different perspectives:
Standback noted additional offshoot threads:
- Ann Leckie (Ed. note: I think this is not a duplicate)
- Alex Acks
- Max Gladstone
- Tim Clare
- Arkady Martine
- Chuck Wendig
And this morning Ann Leckie joined the discussion here, closing with these thoughts:
Which brings me to the idea that a writer ought not write to please themselves. I am so not on board with this idea I can’t even begin to express it. One of the ways you know your writing is working–to the extent you know that, which is its own issue–is that it’s working for you. Now, it’s possible to go off track into pleasing your id in a way that just looks unseemly and strange to anyone else, but once again, it’s a case-by-case thing. And there, it’s often not a question of cutting the thing, removing it, so much as turning it around and refining it so that all those other folks out there with similar grooves and folds in their ids can enjoy that feeling of it fitting into place. So, again, it’s a matter of asking why do I want this in the story so much? and not automatically cutting it because it’s self-indulgent. Hell, even long political screeds can please some readers. If that’s what does it for you, and you have readers who respond to it, well, go to. Indulge yourself!
And I’m about done with people telling me I don’t understand what kill your darlings means, thank you.
(5) TALKIN’ ABOUT MY REGENERATION. Could copies be in private hands? According to ScreenRant, “Archivist Says 97 Lost Doctor Who Episodes Could Be Recovered”.
Although many episodes have since been recovered, there are still 97 old episodes missing from the William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton era. Speaking to the Daily Mirror, Doctor Who archivist Paul Vanezis has suggested they’re still out there. “There are missing Doctor Whos with private collectors,” he explained. “They may be interested in handing them over.”
The quest for the missing Doctor Who episodes is a fascinating one, and a labor of love for the fans. Some lost episodes were found in Ethiopia back in 2013, and were released by the BBC in time for the show’s 50th anniversary. More recently, the BBC has begun using audio recordings, surviving photographs and brief film clips to create animated versions of some of the missing stories, such as 1966’s “The Power of the Daleks”. But the real hope is clearly that black-and-white video recordings could yet be recovered, and the BBC is sure to offer a premium price in order to purchase the copies.
The Holy Grail of Doctor Who is the episode “The Tenth Planet”, which includes the Doctor’s first onscreen regeneration. This saw William Hartnell’s First Doctor transform into Patrick Troughton’s Second, an unprecedented change of direction for the science-fiction TV series….
(6) VICK OBIT. Shelby Vick (1928-2018) died June 9. His daughter Cheryl told Facebook friends:
It is with a sad heart that I tell you that my dad passed away early Saturday morning. He said his goodbyes to us and even laughed earlier Friday. He passed away peacefully in his sleep.
He was married to Suzanne Vick, who predeceased him. His Fancyclopedia entry recalls he famously introduced Lee Hoffman to Bob Tucker at a time when she was known only through fanzines and everyone had assumed LeeH was a man. Vick also started the successful WAW with the Crew in ’52 fan fund to bring Walt Willis to the US in 1952.
Vick became the leading figure in the Fan Federation for Sound Productions, also known as Wirez, a national effort to make wire recordings and circulate them in the same way fans produced typescript round-robins.
He organized Corflu Sunsplash in Panama City, Fl in 1999, and was named Past President of fwa there. He was honored with the Southern Fandom Confederation’s Rebel Award in 2012.
(7) TODAY IN HISTORY
- June 11, 1982 — E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial was released
- June 11, 1993 — Jurassic Park premiered
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
- Born June 11 – Peter Dinklage, 49. The obvious role, but also Eltri in Avengers: Infinity War, Dr. Bolivar Trask in X-Men: Days of Future Past, and Trumpkin in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.
- Born June 11 – Shia LaBoeuf, 32. Mutt in the Indiana Jones film that Shall Not Be Named, Sam Witwicky in Transformers and Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and Farber in I, Robot. Somebody needs a better agent.
(9) COMICS SECTION.
- Cat Eldridge has seen the light in xkcd’s “Attention Span”.
- Mike Kennedy learned how Brewster Rockit decides which movie to see:
(10) SFWA BULLETIN INDEX. New online is “The SFWA Bulletin Index, 1965-2018” compiled by Michael Capobianco, Erin M. Hartshorn, and Sean Wallace. It went live just before Nebula Weekend. Try it out, see how you like it —
Table of Contents
- Magazines:
- Stories, etc.:
- Appendices:
(11) UNBEEVABLE. Surely this has never happened before.
https://twitter.com/StewartFHoffman/status/1006262327568527360
(12) FAREWELL PROJECT WONDERFUL. The internet advertising service Project Wonderful, which has funded a great many webcomics and online narrative projects, will shut down August 1.
For over a decade, we’ve been so happy to be your choice for getting the word out about your comic, music, or anything else you come up with. And we’ve been so proud to represent our publishers, who have been creating some of the most interesting, exciting, and worthwhile things online.
But all good things must come to an end. When we started working on Project Wonderful in early 2006, it was with the hope that online advertising could be something good, something that you’d want to see. We were always the odd company out: we didn’t track readers, we didn’t sell out our publishers, and we never had issues with popups, popunders, or other bad ads the plague the internet – because our technology simply wasn’t built to allow for that. We let you place an image and link on a website, and that was it. And we filtered the ads that could run on our network, so our publishers knew they could trust us.
(13) TOXIC FANDOM. Salon blames the internet. And everything that came before the internet… “After years of stewing, “Star Wars” fandom goes to the dark side”.
So how did a franchise of adventure movies for children create this noxious tribe of entitled haters? The short answer is that it was a long time coming.
The first hints of this seismic shift in the Star Wars fandom occurred when the prequel trilogy came out, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. There had been decades of novels and fanfiction speculating how little Anakin Skywalker became evil Darth Vader; the new addition to the canon didn’t sit well with some. Tin ear dialogue, Jar Jar Binks’ perceived minstrelsy, and mediocre acting led to fan furor. Feverous claims of director George Lucas “raping” childhoods were common in pop culture reflections on the prequel trilogy. Both of the actors who played Anakin Skywalker — Hayden Christensen and, at the time, 10-year-old Jake Lloyd who played young Anakin — were more or less harassed out of the spotlight. Lloyd retired from acting two years later after “The Phantom Menace” premiered, after winning Razzie Awards and being relentlessly bullied by classmates and fans alike. Lucas, after “Revenge of the Sith” premiered, swore off making Star Wars movies forever.
(14) MORE PETAFLOPS THAN EVER. From the BBC: “US debuts world’s fastest supercomputer”. More than doubles Chinese record, and powerful enough that pieces of it were working on real problems while the final computer was still being assembled.
Summit, the US’s new supercomputer, is more than twice as powerful as the current world leader.
The machine can process 200,000 trillion calculations per second – or 200 petaflops.
China’s Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, until now the world’s most powerful machine, has a processing power of 93 petaflops.
Summit’s initial uses will include areas of astrophysics, cancer research and systems biology.
It is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, where it was developed in partnership with IBM and NVidia.
(15) LET SLIP THE DOGS OF VENUS. A NASA group at Langley Research Center is studying the High-Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC) to float a manned airship high in the Venusian atmosphere as a way for astronauts to visit and study our sister planet.
NBC News reports “NASA has a plan to let humans soar above the clouds on Venus”.
Mars and the moon are already at the top of NASA’s prospect list for future human exploration and possibly colonies, but another planet has recently been getting some unexpected attention.
What a group of NASA scientists have proposed is a steampunk-like spacecraft that weighs nearly nothing and would float in the Venusian atmosphere. This High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC) would allow astronauts to study the planet at an unprecedented level, in less time than it would take to complete a crewed mission to Mars.
…Some technological advancement needs to happen before we get to Venus. Among the tech aspects of this mission that still need to be figured out are how to keep the spacecraft and its solar panels from corroding in that atmospheric sulfuric acid, never mind successfully inserting and inflating the airship on arrival at Venus and performing aerocapture maneuvers on Venus and Earth.
“It opens up a strange, exciting, and even slightly terrifying way to live,” said [HAVOC team leader Chris] Jones. “It would be a challenging environment, but one that would bring opportunities we can’t even imagine.”
(16) A CAT’S BREAKFAST. Not entirely sure why I was sent a link to this “Review of Audrey Hepburn – Breakfast at Tiffany’s Deluxe Sixth Scale Action Figure” — except that one of the extras you can get is her cat, so there’s the SJW credential collectible aspect to be considered….
Very few companies – companies that actually play by the rules and get licenses, anyway – are willing to play with the lesser known properties. Star Wars? Marvel? DC? Sure, there are plenty of options, and the big boys like Hot Toys are all over them. Other second tier licenses like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Walking Dead, and Game of Thrones are getting covered by smaller companies, but you can’t really claim that those properties aren’t popular with a large number of collectors.
Star Ace is looking at some of the much smaller properties, particularly those that involve female characters. They haven’t been hitting on every release, however, and they need a win right now. Their next upcoming release is Audrey Hepburn from the classic film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, where she portrayed Holly Golightly. This is a slightly early review – she should be shipping any day now.
She comes in two versions. There’s a regular release that runs around $220, and a deluxe version that sells for $237 or so, depending on the retailer. I’m looking at the deluxe tonight, but I’ll point out the difference in the Accessories section.
[Thanks to Tasha Turner, Standback, John King Tarpinian, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Dann, Carl Slaughter, Danny Sichel, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip W.]
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@Bruncvik: 8) Peter Dinklage. Don’t forget the TV show Threshold, which sadly lasted only one season. It showed so much promise…
It lasted one full season in the UK. In the US, CBS never aired the final 4 episodes. The series was co-produced by CBS and Sky.
There was a sentence in a book by Cherryh that I lost valuable time puzzling over
The one I remember is “proscribed distance” where it should be “prescribed distance”, though I’m not sure where I saw it. Ouch. (I see the pairs discrete/discreet and principle/principal confused so often that the mental correction is nearly automatic by now.)
@Rob Thornton: “Those wants sound suspiciously familiar, eh?”
Very much so. That class of fandom reminds me of a teenaged boy who’s just discovered masturbation. He knows that if he does this particular thing, it feels really good, and his reflexive urge is “I want more of that!” The divide is between, well, the adventurous and the cowardly. When faced with a new option, the adventurous one tries it and possibly finds a new way to feel good… but the coward shies away, rejecting the unknown for the known-good. Never mind that the new choice might be even better; what he knows feels plenty good, and he sees no point in taking risks.
The Star Wars franchise started with a ragtag group against a galaxy, and man, did those fans love it. So for twenty years, they got more of exactly that. The same group, in whole or in part, going up against powerful new threats and saving the day over and over. They got older, married, and had kids, and a few new characters were admitted into the elite club of Our Heroes, but you pretty much knew what to expect from a Star Wars story. In that respect (and in pretty much only that respect), the Expanded Universe became “Star Wars of Gor.” Same couple of stories, change the planet or main character, but you know what you’re getting.
Then came the switch from Ballantine to Del Rey in the late 1990s, and in 1999, two disasters (from the toxic fan’s perspective) happened. The Phantom Menace had Kid Vader going “yippee,” and Star Wars: Vector Prime, the first Del Rey Star Wars novel and the kickoff of their epic-length “New Jedi Order” saga, dropped a moon on Chewbacca.
Nobody was safe. Heroes could die, and fearsome villains could be grown-up versions of cute kids who had done cute kid things. Oh, and Jar-Jar. Can’t forget him. Lucas had betrayed them, and it was time to break out the sackcloth and ashes.
The toxic fans cast themselves in the role of their heroes, as a ragtag group facing off against the Evil Lucas Empire that threatened what they loved.
And then, fifteen years later, it happened again, with the the relegation of the Expanded Universe to non-canon Legends status and the release of The Force Awakens. Never mind that keeping the old EU and making new movies that included the old gang would’ve been a financial disaster* – that’s what they wanted, and damn that Evil Mouse for not doing it! And, wait, what’s this? A girl in the starring role? The bad guy is Han and Leia’s son, but his name is Ben instead of Jacen and he doesn’t call himself Darth Caedus? Why, don’t they know Ben was Luke and Mara Jade’s kid?
The Legends stories are still in print. If you love them, read them. Nobody’s stopping you; I’ve got the big Crimson Empire omnibus on my iPad right now. But that detailed future history had to be swept aside for there to be any new movies. Those books left no room for a main-characters storyline that was accessible without them. Your choice was between no new movies, movies without the old gang, or ignoring the old novels… and hey! You got Chewie back! Isn’t that a plus?
If you (generic toxic fan) don’t like them, don’t buy tickets. I like them, and I don’t appreciate you harassing the actors. You’re being Vader, and not in the kick-ass cool way.
* “Hey, boss, let’s make a movie so steeped in the backstory established by this big wall of books (which we only sold a few thousand sets of) that they won’t make any sense to anybody else. And let’s spend tens, even hundreds, of millions of dollars to make it. We’ll make billions!”
I understand not liking where the creator is going with a series. It happens to me A LOT.
That’s when I stop watching/reading. I might leave a negative review on Amazon.
But I can’t imagine writing to the creator to yell at them. And yelling at an actor who didn’t make any of the decisions about how the story was going to go – where is the sense in that?
Move on people, no matter how much you liked that story, there is something out there you will like even more.
@Rob Thornton
Which I find odd because of all the movies so far, Solo was the one that came closest to capturing the feel of the EU era books. It broke outside of the standard SW tropes, and while using some familiar elements, was not structured as part of the great Jedi/Sith conflict or within the structure of a larger story. While they were vastly different storylines, the themes of Solo and Crispin’s Han Solo origin books are basically the same.
Solo gives me a certain amount of hope for the wider franchise that they might be looking at things with a similar way that Marvel has that different properties need a different tone to work. Solo is a heist movie in the SW universe. Personally, I thought it worked great as that. Is it a good representation of a Star Wars film (plucky resistance, teenager of destiny, evil empire)? No. Not at all. I think that’s its strength.
@Rev. Bob – Just to clarify, seeing as I wrote a big long rant about the subject up-thread, and I don’t want to seem to come out on the side of the Internet Knights of the Incel, I don’t condone huge social media (or otherwise) eruptions of outrage about even eg. Jar Jar Binks. Expressions of outrage, in my mind, are person-to-person grumbling and friends-only FB rants*, etc.. And certainly there should be no attacking the people who made the movie(s).
*And even those get tiresome when you see the same curmudgeonly friend once again angrily ranting about some silly blockbuster.
================
Hugo reading-wise… I’ve finished my voting in Novelette and Novella. Nothing under Noah, yay! This year’s group has been, overall, the strongest of any of the years I’ve been a WSFS member. Just finished Down Among the Sticks and Bones. I was not all that fond of the first novella in the series. After reading this year’s, I have now gained retroactive fondness for the first one. Excellent read, and I’ll be picking up the next one without any assistance from the Hugo packets.
Currently reading, novel-wise, Scalzi’s space opera. Finding it fun and enjoyable, but it also seems a little light for a Hugo (so far).
I gave up on the Star Wars franchise after the second prequel, which made me feel like a kid again when during the love scene I wanted to fwow up. Dumbest dialog ever. Only Christopher Lee knew what to do with a crappy script, from his B-movie days. That said, I did watch TLJ and… it was entertaining enough. I haven’t seen Solo yet, but I’m sure I’ll get around to it.
It isn’t just Star Wars that gets fanboi disdain of course. I’ve lately been watching Channel 4’s Electric Dreams and it’s sometimes been excellent, even if the reviews of the series have been mixed.
And having read Revenant Gun – it may take another reading or two to get all the bits lined up, but it does tie up the looser ends of the earlier books. Maybe not the way people want, though….
(5) Most of the mainstream meda crowing about this are failing to credit the actual source: an interview that fancast Radio Free Skaro did with Paul Vanezis.
http://www.radiofreeskaro.com/2018/06/03/radio-free-skaro-638-london-1965/
1) Re Peter Dinklage, let’s not forget his first credited role, Tito the dwarf in the dream sequence in Living in Oblivion. He gets pissed off at how cliche this is:
The link goes to a fuller and NSFW version of the quote.
2) As a short-time participant and long-time lurker, I’m impressed that the quality of the puns and song parodies remains so high after all these years. Some of the recent pixel scroll titles and suggestions have been among the best ever. Truly you are an inspired group.
Alas, Paul Vanezis has form for actually lying about the state of play with regard to lost episodes, so I wouldn’t place too much trust in this latest interview.
kathodus: I just finally read Every Heart a Doorway, and so far it’s my favourite of the (all of 3) things by McGuire I’ve read. What it also did though was make me wonder why Down Among the Sticks and Bones needed to be written. They probably had the most fleshed out backstory of everyone except Nancy herself.
(Of course, I keep seeing reviews who loved it, including from people who did not feel that about Every Heart a Doorway, so I am optimistic even as I am dubious about the choice.)
(The other two McGuire things I’ve read were the second October Daye novel and the first InCryptid book. Both enjoyable, neither exciting — the latter was better, mainly because of mice. Am hoping the rest of InCryptid picks up as people say they do.)
In other news: Stan Lee’s manager has been arrested for filing a false police report.
@Lenora Rose – I’m interested in your take on Down Among the Sticks and Bones once you’ve read it, as I had the same reaction upon hearing about its release. I was not expecting much from it. I figured it would not be a slog, given the author, but I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did.
ETA: Just thought of this – I read Every Heart a Doorway almost a year ago, so I’d forgotten some of the specifics about the characters in the new one, which made the plot more uncertain for me. That temporal distance from the first story may have helped it out.
Which I find odd because of all the movies so far, Solo was the one that came closest to capturing the feel of the EU era books. It broke outside of the standard SW tropes, and while using some familiar elements, was not structured as part of the great Jedi/Sith conflict or within the structure of a larger story. While they were vastly different storylines, the themes of Solo and Crispin’s Han Solo origin books are basically the same.
See this is how I felt. I really liked Solo, in part because it wasn’t the same old thing. I liked everybody who was in it. I thought that Alden Ehrenreich did a pretty nice job channeling Harrison Ford. In fact, they catch him in one profile shot where he looks strikingly similar. I thought Donald Glover was a fantastic Lando. I /loved/ that there wasn’t a Death Star in sight.
All in all, this might be my favorite of the new gen movies. It’s a tossup with Rogue One.
@ Bruncvik: The so-called “failure” of Solo is only that it didn’t set records. It’s doing just fine by the standards of movies in general. But the same “tiny minority” of people who drove Kelly Marie Tran off Instagram are pushing a “total flop” narrative for Solo, and you’ve bought it.
Possibly more to the point, the long-term online advice to “don’t feed the trolls” is a major contributor to this phenomenon. Any person who was bullied in school knows perfectly well that ignoring the bullies doesn’t make them go away, it encourages them. As a society, we’ve spent 30 years NORMALIZING ONLINE ABUSE, and now we’re paying the price.
With a budget of around $250 million and a world-wide gross of around $315 million, that–is not great. Still way below break-even for the studio’s take on the BO.
@rochrist
Starkiller Base remains my absolute least favourite reveal of all time. Ugh.
But yeah, I think the blowback is more poor timing of the release, some serious marketing missteps and a group of amplified critics who were polarized by opinions over TLJ. It also didn’t help that the production was a public trainwreck as well.
But I seriously doubt Disney will lose any money. They make it back in on-demand and media sales, not to mention tie-ins and all the other rigmarole. At worst, Solo is a cautionary tale that you can’t suffer all kinds of hits and still expect to make your schedules for your quarterly projections successfully.
kathodus
I read the two closer in temporal proximity and I still loved Down Among the Sticks and Bones. A lot of prequels feel like an extended tour with characters who aren’t much different from the material we’ve already seen them leading to nothing happening that really affects the character. That is not what you get from Sticks and Bones and I enjoyed it much more than Every Heart A Doorway. So much so that I think while I enjoyed Beneath The Sugar Sky it still paled for me after Sticks and Bones.
And the whole stagnant character in a prequel stuff is why though I’m very much have not soured on Star Wars (if anything the opposite, the prequels soured me and the recent films brought my joy of it back) I still don’t feel the urge to see Solo. It’s not an event like Infinity War or Deadpool 2 where people wanted to be the first to see it and feared spoilers, it looks like something I’ll comfortably enjoy on Netflix or Redbox.
Also recently read The Power and that was something else.
I used to be a Filer like you; then I took a pixel in the knee….
@kathodus
I enthusiastically agree.
I disagree with that description of Mr. O’Keefe. He’s done any number of things worthy of criticism…along with any number of things worthy of praise. But he isn’t…that.
Otherwise, I appreciate your point.
——
FWIW, I bumped The Flipside by Jake Bible to the top of my TBR pile. The book was discussed a few days back and I needed a “book” to read when I couldn’t be working on the graphic novel nominees.
If you like military-ish stuff, time travel, and dinosaurs, then you will probably enjoy this fun little romp with some modest editing/proofing issues. It kept me engaged the entire time. Given the proofing issues that kept cropping up, maintaining my engagement was an accomplishment worth noting.
Regards,
Dann
Freedom works…each and every time it is tried.
@15: I know there’s been at least one piece of fiction about Bespin-style “cloud cities” on Venus semi-recently, but I’m blanking on who/what. Any pointers?
@kathodus: with you on the writer missing the general toxicity of the net (and failing to see the difference between movies where the handwaving couldn’t hide the basic implausibilities, and the latest pair), and on child acting; among others, Peter Ostrum (the original Charlie in Wonka’s chocolate factory) never did another film
@johnstick: I won’t call that obscure after getting told my last call was off — but that’s definitely out of the way, even if the poem was revived by music. Well done!
@Lenora Rose: I have some sympathy for IX’s possible troubles; they lost their remaining original star and are probably under too much pressure to get it out on time rather than coming up with a script that works with all of the trio gone.
@11 followups: ISTM that crude typos are becoming more common, even outside of Baen’s infamously unedited books. OTOH, the lack of serious review avoids messes like the copyedit that merged two people >1000 miles apart into one in The Shockwave Rider.
@Lee (followup to @Darren) Solo could have been a lot less than a recordbreaker (Wikipedia points to worldwide ticket sales of $2.7 billion for Avatar as the current record) and still made money; instead it looks like being $150 million short of breakeven (guessing from various reports that Disney’s distribution management means they only need to gross 2x the cost instead of 3x). I suppose you could argue that movies in general lose money (in real terms, not in “Hollywood accounting”), but in general they have rather less to lose.
@rochrist: how much do DVD/merchandise sales fall off when a film has so much less enthusiasm?
@Dennis Howard: It lasted one full season in the UK. In the US, CBS never aired the final 4 episodes. The series was co-produced by CBS and Sky.
Ah! Sometimes I forget our American brethren doesn’t get programming of the quality we get in Europe 😉
@Lee: The so-called “failure” of Solo is only that it didn’t set records.
I was basing the “failure” statement on a widely circulated Wall Street report (I’ve seen it via Bloomberg) that the estimated loss will be around $50 million; first loss for a movie in the SW franchise. It’s not about not setting records, but anout pure loss.
The rest is my personal opinion: I don’t buy the theory that it didn’t gain traction because it was a spin-off. Rogue One was also a spin-off, and it was an amazing movie that was also very successful. I personally rank that movie as the second best SW movie after Empire. However, I and many of my friends went to see it after we really liked The Force Awakens. And after RO, we all went to see TLJ. It was hugely disappointing. For me personally, it felt like three unfinished movies squished into one. Don’t know why the others didn’t like it, but none of us had any inclination to see the next SW movie anymore. Some other people claim that if TLJ had been really so bad, it would have performed worse. But people in franchise series go see a movie based on the quality of the previous installment, not the quality of the current movie. So I believe Solo is suffering because of TLJ, and not because of its own perceived quality (which I know nothing about because I haven’t really paid attention to the reviews).
Then came the switch from Ballantine to Del Rey in the late 1990s,
I am unclear what you mean by this.
@Bruncvik
I’m sure there’s some effect where the last movie bleeds into the popularity of the next one, but a more obvious place to look for a supposed failure for TLJ would be in the DVD sales. After all, if no-one liked it at the cinema, why would they buy it to watch again, and similarly those waiting for DVD would have heard the word of mouth. Unfortunately for your theory, TLJ is actually the top seller for the year to date, ahead of comparators like Thor and Justice League.
I’m sure you have valid reasons for disliking TLJ, but you’re in a minority.
(1) KEENE HEALTH UPDATE
This shouldn’t happen in a country as rich as the USA – universal healthcare it’s past time for this
(4) DARLINGS PROTECTION SERVICE
My 2nd mention in a Pixel ever woo hoo. Great things said in the tweets & Ann Leckie’s comment in yesterday’s Pixel was fantastic.
(11) UNBEEVABLE
Typos in trad published books is NOT new. It’s getting worse IMHO. eBooks put out by the top 5 are really bad when it comes to typos and other formatting errors. I don’t understand why people complain about indies so much as trad books are pretty bad given the percentages they take – although Baen wins for consistently bad at editing for typos.
Scan/OCR software makes too many mistakes. One of the trad published books I read this week had a bunch of pages in the middle obviously creased when scanning so part of 20 pages were cut off on right or left & could see the crease mark causing the problem. Please use proofreaders for scanned books. For new books use the electronic text you have from the authors and the fancy software you can afford as many of the hybrid and top indie authors I buy have fewer typos and better formatting. Open Road does a decent job with backlist contents but not covers too much of the time IMHO
It is foolish to extrapolate too much from personal experience but:
1. Every Star Wars movie since (& including) The Phantom Menance, I made a special effort to go and see.
2. Rogue One, TFA & TLJ I went to see as soon as I could.
3. I really had no interest in seeing Solo. I didn’t see the point of it.
4. I really loved TLJ and I’m excited about what happens next. I’m really enjoying the new trilogy.
5. When I had a recent opportunity to see Solo, I went to see Deadpool 2 instead.
6. I went to see Solo on Monday because I literally had nothing better to do that afternoon.
7. I really, really enjoyed it. It’s a pretty good Star Wars film – and perhaps more akin to what peoiple disappointed in TLJ were looking for in a Star Wars film.
I think 3. Is the relevant point here. I can see that people who didn’t like TLJ would have that effect magnified but I suspect the key element was in itself the idea of a non-Harrison Ford Han Solo spin off sounds like a weak idea and something that would be disappointing.
Do previous movies impact future movies? Sure but my first thought with Solo was Shia LeBouef in Indianan Jones & the Last Crusade as a potential new heir to the franchise rather than TLJ. Luckily Solo wasn’t that at all.
@JDN:
My error; “Ballantine” should read “Bantam Spectra” there. I refer to the switch in publisher and approach that took place when the Star Wars novels went from being published as randomly-placed books dotted all along the timeline (under Bantam) to when Del Rey acquired the license and began publishing The New Jedi Order, which was an extended series of events. The first DR/NJO book, Vector Prime, came out in late 1999 and got a lot of flak for killing Chewbacca.
(13) TOXIC FANDOM
Umm because fans didn’t send letters before the internet and actors didn’t quit the biz or commit suicide? I’m sorry but this retconning of everything is really getting on my nerves lately. Fandom has been toxic from the beginning as entitled people (mostly cis white men if we are talking the USA) have always found ways to reach out in groups and as individuals to make themselves heard and make sure people knew when they were “failing” them. Write to the studio or to the actor via the studio – this wasn’t hard to do ever if one had money for stamps. We know fandom was getting together at cons and writing fanzines long before Star Wars. We know fandom (#NotAll) from the start and still today is toxic to women, minorities, LGBT+ and even tolerant of one pedophile. We are having problems with codes of conduct because this is an ongoing problem.
It’s like the current “bubble” stuff I hear. People have managed to live in bubbles for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Social media gives us new and better ways to measure the bubbles and to talk or scream about them but it’s NOT the cause of “living in a bubble”. When I was a kid 50 years ago living in a bubble was done by choosing which newspapers to read, congregating in different places, going to different churches or religious places, different restaurants. It’s not hard in offline life to live in a bubble and never has been unless you are the other.
@Tasha Turner: “eBooks put out by the top 5 are really bad when it comes to typos and other formatting errors. I don’t understand why people complain about indies so much as trad books are pretty bad given the percentages they take – although Baen wins for consistently bad at editing for typos.”
Speaking for myself: Because, as bad as Big Five books can be in that respect, indies are far worse on average. There are individual exceptions in both directions, but that’s the baseline.
I completely agree, and I usually point to Stephen King’s backlist as my examples. (I spent about a month hand-correcting Skeleton Crew with the help of a paperback copy.) When an A-list writer gets such shoddy treatment, midlisters have no chance.
The indie average is still well below the Big Five average.
I’m currently ticked at Open Road for the way they’ve republished what appears to be their entire catalog at Amazon. I bought a lot of their books during their holiday free-for-all a couple of years ago, and now they all show up as unpurchased if I look up a title through the main Amazon interface. I now have to check my Goodreads logs to be sure whether I own a low-profile ORM book. Bad move, ORM.
Pretty much every time I saw a conversation about Solo from the time it was announced there was at best a lukewarm reception from a majority of the participants. There just wasn’t much of an audience for ‘young Han Solo’ compared to the other Star Wars films, and then there were all the production difficulties, which didn’t exactly inspire confidence that it would rise above.
(I haven’t seen it yet but I can’t quite see how they’ll pull it off without undermining his story arc in the original trilogy. I’m happy to be wrong and certainly it doesn’t sound any worse than the other new films but going to the cinema is Difficult and I’m not motivated to do so for this film, so I’ll have to wait to find out.)
The Last Jedi was fine. It seemed about the same as The Force Awakens to me. Neither of them held up to much thinking after watching but they were both fun. Rogue One is my favourite of the new ones so far (the popular tags on Ao3 are exactly as predictable as you might imagine).
@Jon F. Zeigler on (16):
Audrey Hepburn was specifically noted as one of the inspirations for Darwyn Cooke’s 2002 design of Catwoman and Selina Kyle.
(13) TOXIC FANDOM
Star Wars in particular. Kids grow up with a nostalgic view of a movie(s) they saw as kids. They grow up expecting to get the same joy out of future movies made for current kids. This is a recipe for disaster. It’s pretty impossible for a movie franchise to hold up to nostalgia & meet an adult as a KID. Any change made is going to be met with resistance yet not changing it will likely bore the kids of “today” and/or be seen as “outdated”. Cis white males are used to entertainment being centered on them so UNCONSCIOUSLY they expect it and many of their brains and emotions have a hard time when something isn’t. All sorts of justified reasons for not liking the newer versions as it’s hard to recognize they aren’t kids anymore and they are seeing the previous through nostalgia which isn’t fair to the current movie.
I’ve enjoyed all the Star Wars movies I’ve seen. The very first Star Wars movie was one of my first major movie experiences. It was a defining moment for me. Women could be badass, powerful, pretty, all at the same time. It didn’t make us less of a woman to DO things. I haven’t rewatched it since an adult as I know the sexist suck fairy will ruin it for me. I want to hold on to my nostalgia.
Toxic people are toxic and as I said in my previous comment they’ll use the tools available to them. They always have.
@Rev Bob
Ugh. Books you’d bought on Amazon or directly through them? I hate when publishers republish and it no longer shows I’ve bought books. I track authors and books for sales using ereaderiq and it’s been happening more often lately – get notified of a sale only to discover I already own the book.
First off, I have finished “Revenant Gun” and YAY! I was mildly confused in the pleasant way all these books have done, but not as much as with the first and it was all good and the rest of you need to hurry up so I can talk about it. Also I got no sleep.
(1) Ouch ouch. No good deed goes unpunished.
(2) Yaaay! (Kermit flail) That’s a dramatic story in itself.
(11) All the time. Some publishers more than others. *coughBaencough*
(15) Is that… a Benevolent Airship? Our steampunk future?
@kathodus: Yeah, the intarwebs were just becoming A Big Thing when TPM came out, and weren’t completely toxic all over. Social media was very small. It was just a shitty movie. Waiting all those years and then we got… that. Everyone liked the first batch; my mom was in her 50s when SW-TESB-ROTJ came out and she was as enthusiastic about them as a lot of kids. She had a Yoda in her kitchen, FFS.
So the current abuse is definitely internet and entitled SWM, but the deal with the prequels and Han didn’t shoot first and the completely unprepared little kid Jake Lloyd… that’s all on Lucas. You changed, man. 😉
Pretty sure people sent hate mail going back to… I dunno, hundreds of years? Willy Shakes probably got vile things written with quill pens sent to the Globe. Euripides probably got ostrakon with curses on it for writing about feels and girls. People have sent hate and threat letters regularly and consistently to stars (and other fans) since movies and TV existed, sometimes requiring the mofo FBI to look into things.
It’s just easier to whip up a mob of assholes nowadays.
I have a limited movie budget and there are a lot of things this summer that I wanna see, so I may or may not get to “Solo”. If I didn’t wanna see both Edna Mode expounding and dinosaurs eating people this month, I’d have gone. But I’ll watch it on BluRay. Glover looks marvelous from what I’ve seen, and I like heist flicks.
Ep. IX has a HELL of a problem in that they can’t use the character who was going to be the main one in the movie. I do not envy the rewriting there, and I’m annoyed at the universe for depriving me of what it should have been.
@Johan: Yes. That story is us, 100% I love it.
Buckell’s Sly Mongoose is set in the clouds of a Venus-like world.
@Tasha: “Ugh. Books you’d bought on Amazon or directly through them?”
Since we’re talking about ebooks, there’s no difference.
Huh. I done something wrong in my last comment and it’s in moderation. Keep an eye out, @Kathodus.
@Rev. Bob: I’ve noticed Open Road just doesn’t work right with Amazon. I can hear about a for-sure sale on one or more of their books and I’ll have to do at least two searches to find their version (public domain or copyrighted) and then find the version that’s sale/free. It’s a big pain. Sometimes even direct links will go to the money version and I have to search for a free one. I don’t know what they’re doing wrong, but they need to stop it.
@Johan: That story is 100% us. Filers would buy those in bulk.
The ebook conversion of the first Stormlight Archive book is terrible, at least the one I bought a few years ago is. The line breaks are all over the place and it muddles up the dialogue; I suspect it was set up for one font size and wasn’t properly adjustable. It made it enormously irritating and rather tiring to read and I had to take a few days break after reading it. The copy of Words of Radiance (the second book) that was in the packet doesn’t seem to share those problems so far.
World of Warcraft: Legion is, objectively and in many ways, a better game* than World of Warcraft Vanilla (original) was, or for that matter, The Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King (expansions 1 and 2). And yet, because it cannot match how vanilla/tbc/wotlk made any of us old-school players feel, that particular cocktail of discovery/honing skills/new friends, it is very easy to find people insisting that everything about those older games was better. You can’t beat nostalgia. Modern Star Wars is never going to make any adult feel like a kid watching whatever their first Star Wars film was.
*Which is not to say Legion is perfect – it isn’t and I have a number of grievances – but I have seen people sincerely argue that class balance and quest design were better in Vanilla, which, no. Just no. Not even remotely. I have seen people argue that the servers were more stable in Vanilla.
@Rev. Bob
Many of the indies I read use alpha, beta, and 1-2 editors. A number of those also have proofreaders or a second set of betas to read after all the others have gone through the books a couple times.
I also give a bit more slack to indies as my trad books have gotten to have more typos. The amount of slack I give does depend on whether it’s the first 1-3 books an indie has put out with their own money, if they’ve crowdfunded, if they’ve put out a bunch of books. First couple on their own money I give more slack on. If the big 5 and other trad publishers can’t properly edit and proofread a book while taking a big chunk of the sales I’m going to give a newbie charging me wayyyy less some slack. If the indie crowdfunded $50k or has put out a dozen books not so much slack. At that point I expect editing at a trad level – 3-4 mistake at most. I gave up on flawless ebooks right from the start of reading trad published ones.
… I want a dragoncatbook (dratbook?)
Lurkertype: Don’t forget that I (at least) had been set up for disappointment when Lucas started recutting all his existing Star Wars movies. Never mind Greedo shooting first: I was plenty annoyed enough with the pointless parade of background CGI characters and other “because I can” switches. I could barely sit through it. Kept looking at my watch.
I had a baaaad feeling about it, and boy, did they deliver. Meesa so sick of it. I think I grudgingly went to the second one, but it’s kind of a blur.
I do have to say, though, that their Happy Meal* Toy department outdid themselves. Not only was the battery-powered lightsaber spoon that came in several cereals (Post, I think) absolutely cool, and way more expensive than your average cereal prize, especially by that time… but the ship model that I picked up as a kid meal prize, which hovers over its base through the miracle of magnetism is one of the two best burger joint prizes I ever scored. **
* Term used generically: Suck on it, Ronald.
** The other is my plastic statue of Feathers McGraw, the evil penguin. When you push down on him, he blinks. That is, his eyes rotate from being shiny black to being matte black. AND THAT’S ALL HE DOES. How freaking great is that??
One of the first ebooks I bought was riddled with typos, apparently due to poor OCR – complete with a typo in a chapter title (the table of contents had the correct title, but the chapter head was different!), and (most egregiously) in several places the scan of the word “arms” (as in “he took her in his arms”) apparently mistook the “rm” as “nu” (resulting in an unfortunate image. This was fixed at some point, since when I upgraded my ereader and redownloaded some works, the typos had disappeared (which was a relief).
The type of error I’ve been noticing more and more of late has been the situation where you have a word there, spelled correctly and all, but it’s obviously the wrong word (i.e., “they” when the context clearly indicates the word used should be “the”. The kind of thing no spell-check will ever catch).
There are quite a few words where just one letter added, omitted or changed results in another word which is glaringly wrong. Thing and think, for example.
That kind of thing has always been around, but it’s getting worse.
As to ORM, at this point, I pretty much run a title search on my Kindle For PC before I buy anything just in case I own it already. *SIGH*
“There are quite a few words where just one letter added, omitted or changed results in another word which is glaringly wrong. Thing and think, for example.”
Absolutely. The most memorable one of those I’ve come across in a trad book was when “immortality” got typoed into “immorality”
@Ky
That would throw me out of the book every time I read it. Give me a basic typo everyday instead of that. I’d have to take a reading break to get back into the book or make up a game to play each time I came across it – eat a piece of chocolate maybe…
The Last Jedi was fine. It seemed about the same as The Force Awakens to me. Neither of them held up to much thinking after watching but they were both fun. Rogue One is my favourite of the new ones so far (the popular tags on Ao3 are exactly as predictable as you might imagine).
TLJ was fine, but that the entire thing hinged on that slow motion space chase really left a bad taste in my mouth. I understand they wanted to set up a ticking clock, but there /had/ to be a less stupid way of doing it. Other than that, I was fine with it.
@Tasha: “Many of the indies I read use alpha, beta, and 1-2 editors. A number of those also have proofreaders or a second set of betas to read after all the others have gone through the books a couple times.”
Then they are the commendable exceptions. Far too many indie ebooks look like what I’d expect from a just-finished first draft manuscript, with no discernable editing at all. Two examples, from different books: (1) constant case-switching in referring to fantasy races, such as Orc/orc and Elf/elf, and (2) the secondary character in a superhero book with three different names – not aliases or nicknames, but different first names that were obviously intended to be the same but were not. (Imagine referring to Spider-Man’s wife as Mary Jane, Marie Jane, and Maria Jane.) And don’t even get me started on punctuation…
I definitely expect higher quality from Big Five publishers – if they’re charging retail prices, they’d better be delivering a professional product. I hope for, but do not expect, medium-to-high quality from indies, and I am frequently disappointed. I am far more rarely surprised in a positive way.
There’s a reason I mention mechanical competence in many of my reviews.