(1) 2020 WORLDCON & 2019 NASFiC SITE SELECTION VOTING. Paper ballots started going out a couple of weeks ago with Worldcon 76’s Progress Report 3, and PDF ballot forms were posted to the Worldcon 76 web site yesterday.
The 2020 Worldcon and 2019 NASFiC Site Selection Ballots are now available here. Members of Worldcon 76 can vote to select the site of the 2020 Worldcon and the 2019 North American Science Fiction Convention (NASFiC). You can vote in advance by mail or e-mail, or in person at Worldcon 76.
In addition to being member of Worldcon 76, to vote on site selection, you must pay an additional Advance Supporting Membership (Voting) fee of $30 for NASFiC and $50 for Worldcon….
Kevin Standlee sent the link with an explanation:
Note that we’re going to try and do a form of electronic voting: members can buy a “voting token” from the Worldcon 76 web site through the membership maintenance section, as instructed on the ballot. You can then either print-complete-sign-scan your ballot or complete the PDF and electronically sign it, including the token (number) from Worldcon 76, then e-mail that back to site selection. All of the bidders agreed to this process.
Chair Kevin Roche responded in a comment here with more information after someone raised an issue:
Tokens may be purchased by logging back into RegOnline with the email address you used to register in the first place. The page after the personal information form now offers the tokens for sale. Tick the box for each you want, then click through to the checkout page (you can use the tabs at the top to jump ahead to it) and pay the balance due. You should get your tokens from my regbot software within 10 minutes, if everything is behaving.
(2) SEE LE GUIN TRIBUTE JUNE 13. There will be a “Simulcast of the sold-out Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin event”
Literary Arts and the Portland Art Museum will host a simulcast of the SOLD OUT Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin event on June 13. Seating is free and open to all.
Tickets to the live event are no longer available, but we invite the public to attend the live simulcast at the Portland Art Museum. The simulcast is free and open to all, offering a space for us to gather together as we celebrate the life and legacy of Ursula K. Le Guin.
This event will be livestreamed on Youtube Live. Click here to visit the livestream page.
The sold-out event features tributes from writers and friends who represent the wide-ranging influence Le Guin has had on international literature for more than 50 years, including Margaret Atwood (by video), Molly Gloss, Walidah Imarisha, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, China Miéville, and Daniel José Older. Andrea Schulz, Le Guin’s editor at Viking Books, and Julie Phillips, Le Guin’s biographer, will also speak at the tribute. The event will include rare documentary footage of Le Guin, along with photos and images from her life and work.
(3) SFF POETRY CLASS. Rachel Swirsky announces details about her class “Verses of Sky & Stars: How to Write the Poetry of Science Fiction & Fantasy” and reprints one of her poems in “How Long Does It Take To Write a Poem? Also, “Inside Her Heart,” and a class!”
I’m teaching an online class on writing science fiction and fantasy poetry on June 30 at 9:30-11:30 PDT. It’s a fun class because it draws people from many different backgrounds with many different goals. Some are dedicated poets, looking to sharpen their edge or find inspiration. Others are prose writers who’ve barely touched poetry before, trying something new, or hoping to pick up a trick or two to bring back to their novels and short stories.
As I prepare for the class, I’ve been going over some of my own poetry, thinking about how I wrote it, and what inspired it, and that kind of thing.
Full information is posted here: “Writing Speculative Poetry”.
Poetry requires intense linguistic control. Every word matters. Whether you’re a poet who wants to create fantastical verses, or a prose writer who wants to learn the finely tuned narrative power that poetry can teach, you’ll find something in this class.
Over the course of a few brief lectures, peppered with plenty of writing exercises, we’ll discuss some common forms of speculative poetry, and the challenges they represent. I’ll also send you home with market listings, and lists great authors, poems, and books to pick up to continue your journey.
(4) MEOW. And for those of you who have gone too long without a cat photo, Rachel Swirsky says help is on the way: “That’s a mixing bowl”.
(5) MATHEMATICAL CATS. Adweek covers a public service ad campaign: “Cats Are Great at Multiplying but Terrible at Math, Says This PSA That Urges Neutering”.
Here are some staggering feline facts: A female cat at 4 months old can start having kittens, producing as many as four litters a year for as long as a decade. The result in even a few years is hundreds of furry (often homeless or feral) offspring.
In short, kitties can sure multiply. But they’re actually terrible at math, if their time in a classroom for a new PSA campaign for the Ten Movement is any indication. They’d rather fly paper airplanes, pretend to study (with an upside-down book) and generally confound their arithmetic teacher with nonsensical answers on a pop quiz.
The setup of “Cat Math,” which spans outdoor, digital, social and TV, puts a group of Siamese, calico and other adorable kitties in the fictional Purrington Middle School (“Home of the Fighting Tabbies!”) for a lesson they can’t possibly learn on their own. Or they just refuse to because it wasn’t their idea and they’d rather be napping. In their defense, the figures are pretty crazy: 1+1 = 14? (That’s two adult cats capable of spawning 14 kittens in less than a year).
The campaign comes from Northlich, Cincinnati, the folks who in 2014 birthed “Scooter the Neutered Cat” starring a badass ginger with “hip spectacles, no testicles.” As with the previous PSA, the indie agency continues its spay-and-neuter message on behalf of the Ohio-based nonprofit, with the goal of creating a “100 percent no-kill nation.”
(6) TRAN RETREATS FROM SOCIAL MEDIA. The Guardian’s Luke Holland poses the challenging question, “Why are (some) Star Wars fans so toxic?”.
With at least one new film every year, you’d think it would be easy being a Star Wars fan in 2018, but it isn’t.
That’s not because JJ Abrams killed off Han Solo in Episode VII, or The Last Jedi snuffed out Luke Skywalker. It isn’t because we never got to see Luke, Han and Leia fighting side-by-side, which would have been cool. It isn’t porgs, or that superfluous giraffe-horse bit in Episode VIII. And it most certainly isn’t due to the introduction of a character called Rose. None of these things make being a Star Wars fan remotely difficult. They’re just some things some film-makers put into a family film. No, there’s only one thing that makes Star Wars fandom a drag in 2018, and that is other Star Wars fans. Or, more specifically, that small yet splenetic subsection of so-called “fans” who take to the internet like the Wicked Witch from the West’s flying monkeys to troll the actors, directors and producers with bizarre, pathetic, racist, sexist and homophobic whingebaggery about the “injustices” that have been inflicted upon them. Truly, it’s embarrassing to share a passion with these people.
It’s a poisonous tributary of fanboyism that appears again and again. Earlier this week, Kelly Marie Tran, the Vietnamese-American actor who plays Rose (and the first WoC in a lead role in the saga) deleted all her Instagram posts. While Tran hasn’t specifically stated that online trolling is the reason she left social media, since the release of The Last Jedi in December she’s been on the receiving end of a torrent of online abuse.
(7) FROM DABNEY OBIT. Chris Garcia was quoted in the Washington Post’s obituary for Ted Dabney, who co-founded Atari and was one of the developers of Pong — “Ted Dabney, Atari co-founder whose engineering paved the way for Pong, dies at 81”.
“He devised the form that the arcade game would take when he did Computer Space,” said Chris Garcia, curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
Mr. Dabney, he said in a phone interview, built a standing cabinet to house the game’s circuit board, power supply and television monitor, and “his engineering methodology became a major influence on [Allan] Alcorn,” the engineer hired by Bushnell and Mr. Dabney to create Pong.
(8) TRIVIAL TRIVIA
Unlike a palindrome, which reads the same backward and forward, a semordnilap reads one way forward and a different way backward. Examples of “stressed” and “desserts,” “dog” and “god,” and “diaper” and “repaid.”
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
- Born June 7 – Liam Neeson, 66: Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and Star Wars: The Clone Wars (TV Series), voice of Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and Ra’s Al Ghul in The Dark Knight Rises
- Born June 7 – Karl Urban, 46: Bones in the new Star Trek movies
(10) COMICS SECTION.
- Mike Kennedy encountered Han Solo controversy even in this Bloom County strip.
(11) TO THE MOON. ScienceFiction.com says “First Photos Reveal Ryan Gosling-Starring ‘First Man’ Is More Than A Neil Armstrong Biopic”.
…So don’t expect a dry, clinical look at the early days of the space program, but something more akin to ‘Apollo 13’, but perhaps even more exciting.
“This is 100 percent a mission movie. It’s about going to the moon as seen through the eyes of the guy who got there. We have at least five major set pieces that are action, and if your heart rate doesn’t go through the roof, if you’re not gripping the edge of your seat the entire times, I’ll be shocked.”
The trailer has been out for awhile –
(12) CONCAROLINAS. At iPetitions signers are supporting the “Removal of Jada and Luis Diaz from ConCarolinas Committee”. However, most of the signers are anonymous, and some of the comments left by signers are critical of the effort.
Please sign below if you have been a part of ConCarolinas but have decided not to return if Jada and Luis do not step down. Feel free to remain anonymous. This is NOT a forum to discuss issues, this is a platform to show the current impact to the continued survival of the Convention.
(13) PACKING CHEAT. Apartment Therapy recommends this four-point evaluation process in “Moving? This Book Purging Method Is Bibliophile-Approved”.
Below is my checklist for conducting a book purge that won’t leave you huddled in the floor, clutching books close to your chest and mourning their disappearance. Use it and you, too, will have room for new ones!
- Do I remember at least 50% of what this book was about?
There were many books that I certainly enjoyed, but couldn’t quite recount the plot past what you’d find on the back cover. If a book means something to you, then you will remember not only what happened, but you’ll have a special, emotional connection with how it made you feel….
(14) DON’T LOOK. Everybody’s busy staring at their phones anyway, right? “Emirates looks to windowless planes” — screens on walls give as good a view (they say), and not having windows would require less weight for the same strength.
Emirates Airline has unveiled a new first class suite on board its latest aircraft that features virtual windows.
Instead of being able to see directly outside, passengers view images projected in from outside the aircraft using fibre-optic cameras.
The airline says it paves the way for removing all windows from future planes, making them lighter and faster.
Emirates president Sir Tim Clark said the images were “so good, it’s better than with the natural eye”.
(15) SUNK COST. Expendable? “Microsoft sinks data centre off Orkney” — lots of wind power on hand, sealed no-oxygen environment may reduce failures and water provides free cooling, but no repairs for failed CPUs.
The theory is that the cost of cooling the computers will be cut by placing them underwater.
“We think we actually get much better cooling underwater than on land,” says Ben Cutler, who is in charge of what Microsoft has dubbed Project Natick.
“Additionally because there are no people, we can take all the oxygen and most of the water vapour out of the atmosphere which reduces corrosion, which is a significant problem in data centres.”
(16) LISTEN IN. PRI has released Eric Molinsky’s radio documentary “American Icons: ‘Fahrenheit 451’”.
As part of our continuing series on American Icons, a close look at how the novel came to be, and how it had held up, with the novelists Neil Gaiman, Alice Hoffman and more.
(17) A MARTIAN CHRONICLE John King Tarpinian declares “Bradbury was right all along!” The Christian Science Monitor has this take on the news — “Organic matter found on Mars, opening new chapter in search for life”.
…Today, four decades later, NASA scientists announced that Curiosity has found what Viking didn’t: organic molecules. This is not a certain detection of life. Organic molecules make up all known life, but they can also form in abiotic chemical reactions. Still, the discovery of any organics on Mars is an astrobiological breakthrough. Together with the other habitability clues scientists have amassed over the years, this opens up a new phase in astrobiology on Mars. “The next step,” says Jennifer Eigenbrode, a NASA astrobiologist on the Curiosity mission, “is to search for signs of life” again.
(18) LOOK UP. See the schedule for Pasadena’s AstroFest at the link on City of Astronomy — “About AstroFest 2018”.
Join lovers of astronomy from across the city for a week of FREE and family friendly space-themed events. On July 14 from 2-8pm, AstroFest kicks off the week with a festival of hands-on activities, robotics demos, creative art displays, planetarium shows, star gazing, and more near the Pasadena Convention Center.
Together with scientists from all over the world who will be gathering during the same week for the 42nd COSPAR Assembly, we invite you to take part and explore our place in the Universe.
The blog also points to this ongoing exhibit at the Huntington Library:
Radiant Beauty: Rare 19th Century Astronomical Prints (April 28 – July 30)
10:00am-5:00pm (Wednesday through Monday) | Huntington Library, West Hall
(19) LOOK OUT. Steam has changed its policy: “Steam games store to ‘allow everything'”.
The Steam video game store has changed its content policy to “allow everything”, unless it is illegal or “straight up trolling”.
The shift comes after controversy surrounding games which many people considered were offensive.
A school shooting simulation game was removed from the store last month.
But now games publisher Valve, which owns Steam, said it was not up to the company to decide what should or should not be on sale.
The new policy paves the way for pornographic games to be made available on the platform, including in virtual reality. It would make the Steam store the first major VR platform to offer adult content.
(20) CALORIE HUNTERS. NPR relates a theory about “Why Grandmothers May Hold The Key To Human Evolution”.
…Kristen Hawkes is an anthropologist at the University of Utah. She tries to figure out our past by studying modern hunter-gatherers like the Hadza, who likely have lived in the area that is now northern Tanzania for thousands of years. Groups like this are about as close as we can get to seeing how our early human ancestors might have lived.
Over many extended field visits, Hawkes and her colleagues kept track of how much food a wide sample of Hadza community members were bringing home. She says that when they tracked the success rates of individual men, “they almost always failed to get a big animal.” They found that the average hunter went out pretty much every day and was successful on exactly 3.4 percent of those excursions. That meant that, in this society at least, the hunting hypothesis seemed way off the mark. If people here were depending on wild meat to survive, they would starve.
So if dad wasn’t bringing home the bacon, who was? After spending a lot of time with the women on their daily foraging trips, the researchers were surprised to discover that the women, both young and old, were providing the majority of calories to their families and group-mates.
Mostly, they were digging tubers, which are deeply buried and hard to extract. The success of a mother at gathering these tubers correlated with the growth of her child. But something else surprising happened once mom had a second baby: That original relationship went away and a new correlation emerged with the amount of food their grandmother was gathering.
(21) TOO CONVENIENT. Welcome to the future: “Ship hack ‘risks chaos in English Channel'”.
A commonly used ship-tracking technology can be hacked to spoof the size and location of boats in order to trigger other vessels’ collision alarms, a researcher has discovered.
Ken Munro has suggested that the vulnerability could be exploited to block the English Channel.
Other experts suggest the consequences would be less serious.
But they have backed a call for ship owners to protect their vessels against the threat.
(22) DRAGON TRAIN. Here’s the trailer for How To Train Your Dragon 3. “Coming Soon.”
(23) ANIME PILGRIMAGE SITE. This British B&B is replicated in amazing detail in a Japanese anime, to the amusement of the B&B’s owner who is also replicated (somewhat less faithfully, with the addition of a daughter). A popular place to stay for fans of the show.
Hotel owner Caron Cooper has become a celebrity in Japan after manga-style series Kinmoza was created about her B&B. Japanese tourists are now flocking to stay at her hotel in the Cotswolds following its new found fame.
[Thanks to Laura Haywood-Cory, John King Tarpinian, Francis Hamit, Mike Kennedy, Chip Hitchcock, Rachel Swirsky, Martin Morse Wooster, Harold Osler, Kendall, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day ULTRAGOTHA.]
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In a bit of serendipity with the Valerie Valdes Twitter thread, last night I had a conversation with our daughter where she was complaining that she doesn’t feel as skilled on the trumpet any more. I laughed sadly and said, “Honey, that just means you’ve gotten good enough to recognize what you’re doing wrong.” The curse of the competent…
Karl Urban was also Lord Vakko in Chronicles of Riddick thereby earning the rare and coveted title of Character Who Lived Through Two Riddick Movies Without Being Vin Diesel.
Shut up, I love those movies.
(22) Much as I’m looking forward to more adventures with Toothless and Hiccup, my reaction to the new dragon is more “aww, come on!” The other dragons have the males and females looking alike. And anyone who watches raptors like bald eagles know that the only visible difference between the sexes is that the females are larger than the males. Maybe Astrid is indeed calling her (as per the caption) a “light fury” but I have a feeling I’m going to be muttering a lot in the theater. This artist’s post sums up a lot of my problems with this.
@RedWombat: My rule is that any movie with Vin or Ving (Rhames) is worth seeing just for them.
The retired US Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer lived in an old restored farmhouse in New England. After a few years his architect told him that if he kept adding to his library he would put the structural soundness of the building at risk.
So he moved.
OK, purchased!
@4: that’s impressive compression.
re @13: still over 5000 (estimate vs index #’s in a >20yo hand-sold library database) — and gradually working downwards (now buying only a couple of books a year, relying heavily on a good local/statewide library system) as I’ll have to move to smaller quarters within the next few years. Not only does 250 not sound like a bookworm; I estimate over 300 just in the leading picture. “Remembering >50%” is unsound — sometimes there will be one key scene getting something nobody else has gotten — but points 3 and 4 are plausible (and I’ve already applied them a few times). OTOH, our combined unreads are maybe 15% of our collection. And “there are always libraries” doesn’t always work; I routinely put books recommended here on Boston’s suggest-to-buy list, and have seen several turned down (and not findable anywhere in the state network). As for point 2, that’s why we have a shelf unit of second copies from when we merged our collections (and a few pickups since then); don’t know what we’ll do with those.
@Msb: The Ivar looks nice, but Ikea’s page says they’re 20″, which I’d have a problem with for books. A pity, as the pine sounds better than the chipboard in our 20yo Billys, whose shelves have sagged under mere single rows of hardbacks. (Flipping isn’t desirable because the shelves are carved on one side to hide the support pins.) I’ll have to see what else is available — maybe just order semi-custom, since the colleges around here support a number of unfinished-shelving stores.
@Lurkertype: And she only moved 20 blocks and still had to get rid of some? C’mon! We moved ours without help several miles! I’ve also done several long moves, including helping one that took several of those dropoff-pack-pickup Dumpster-size objects. (I’m blanking on the name — but remember the subject found out in advance that the units really did have a weight limit: don’t fill them more than half-full with books.) But I suspect moving in NYC is especially difficult, starting with how to park a rental truck within reach.
Chip Hitchcock, I believe that the pickup-dropoff cargo boxes you’re thinking of are called PODS. I know of at least two science fiction conventions which use them for storage of things like grids and consuite supplies between conventions.
Andy and I have managed a bit of book collection pruning with “does either of us think we want to keep it?” The meta-rule was that “I want it” was sufficient reason, and neither of us had to justify our choices (to ourselves or each other), because we can come back and weed again in a year or three. There were a few cases of “do you care if I get rid of all this author’s stuff?” for writers one of us had decided they wouldn’t reread, and the other never cared for, but mostly it was individual books.
We wound up owning fewer books a year after moving into a significantly larger apartment, where we finally had enough room to shelf and alphabetize everything. I’m not sure how much of the reason is that, when we could see what we had; things like “I liked the first few books of this series, and then it went downhill” became clearer.
We also got rid of some books I likely will want to reread, but for which Project Gutenberg will do as well as the Penguin Classics edition or the massive one-volume collection of all of Saki’s short stories.
I have no idea of how many books I have, except “more than there’s room for on our shelves right now,” but that’s because we then moved into a much smaller space, with a cramped kitchen such that at least half a bookcase is being used for things like baking dishes, extra rice bowls, and small kitchen appliances.
I’m pixeling a scroll where the files are in,
that helps my mind in wanderin’,
where it will gooo-oooo….
HEy, that’s me!
I also got interviewed by the Beeb on Ted – https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b493vr
Thanks
Chris
My wife and I become allergic to older books not published on acid free paper. As a result, we have purged physical books systematically for years.
She asked me to not replace any physical book if I could purchase an electronic replacement. Some books I had purchased three times as the paperback paper deteriorated over the decades. As a result, our physical book collection has been shrinking over the last fifteen years. We are collectively down about 40%.
Yesterday I mailed a box of World War 1 history books to a wargamer buddy in a different State. I’m taking physical books to Origins to give to other buddies. Sadly, I’m having to discard all of my gaming books and modules purchased from the 1970s to the 1990s. I’m selling some but giving away a lot.
But this is yet another thing to count my blessings for. Game modules are now inexpensively available in pdf. Almost all of my favorite old paperbacks are available in pdf. And traveling is no longer a horrifying tradeoff between running out of something to read and carrying a huge weight of books around.
Some of you may be interested in the $1.99 deal on Amazon for the Book of Jherg by Steven Brust which collects the first three books in the Vlad Taltos saga. Yet another set of paperback books replaced by electronic.
And I’m off to two gaming conventions in different States over the next 10 days.
I’m not impressed with anonymous petitions. I’m writing the board of directors of Origins after my return on the general incompetence of the Origins convention leadership. Horribly failed computer registration for multiple years in a row. Inviting/disinviting Larry Correia with meely-mouthed reasons. And just failing to even do a minimal review of their guests before setting up the schedule.
David Weber has a counter petition to support the ConCarolina concom. It has 12x the petitions that the one mentioned here does. David Weber has a link to it on his facebook page.
The petition does not attack anyone. It just shows support for the concom.
These are not cheap, but I can see several ways someone handy could make their own version. I love how stable the displays in the store are. (I have multiple feet of built-ins in the bonus room, courtesy of a woodworking husband, but if I were in a position to need to move frequently, I’d have something like these.)
13: Hee. Before we moved to Houston I had well over 600 books, 800+ counting game books. Now it’s smaller – we have a rule – it must fit on the Billy Bookcase, or it must go. Mine is stuffed full.
My rule for a purge? Am I deeply emotionally attached? If yes, hang on to it. Otherwise, off it goes.
And even that rule sometimes has to go because when needs must, the devil drives. I still miss my Star Wars D6 books and Adventure Journals.
And then Harvey purged my daughter’s books…
@Bob: It probably won’t matter. Reports of the hotel’s reactions to things said over the past couple of days make it a strong possibility that the current concomm won’t be able to get hotel space again, there or anywhere.
It’s a cost of insurance thing.
Disclave famously lost their venue and couldn’t find another even though the disaster wasn’t their fault.
It got those signatures in a very short amount of time, given the attendance numbers of ConCarolinas most of those are statistically unlikely to be members.
Rob Thornton: There is a place named Squamish in British Columbia. So that’s where all the shoggoths come from.
It’s a beautiful town, on the way to Whistler from Vancouver. Being touristy, the eldritch horror is all in the prices.
@Chip Hitchcock — The IVAR units are available in either 12″ or 20″ widths. I have almost literally every wall of my condo lined with 12″ units filled with books.
For example:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10153341591357714&l=8752ccf51e
The one real drawback I find, especially for shelving paperbacks, is the open back & open sides.
(4) MEOW. Meow? More like Meowtch, amIright? ::bows::
(13) PACKING CHEAT. Not a bad way to look at downsizing too-many-book syndrome, though I’d phrase #2 as “would I” instead of “do I,” and I wouldn’t worry about whether I actually let someone touch my books or not. I may or may not admit to this too-many-books syndrome. 😉 How fondly I remember a book is probably more important than how well I remember the plot, though this could lead to keeping a lot of marginal books. “I remember I liked this one a lot!” – me, talking about too many books.
But basically, till I get around to doing another book-downsize (which we haven’t done seriously since moving in 2004), I don’t know what criteria I’ll use.
(14) DON’T LOOK. Bizarre, but maybe safer? Didn’t I read something in recent months about a plane having a problem with a window? Still, I’d rather be able to look out directly, even though I usually take an aisle seat (I look over people to see out).
(15) SUNK COST. Cute title, @Mike Glyer. 🙂
(22) DRAGON TRAIN. Whoops, I never saw the second one, methinks. The scenes of the hidden Dragon world reminded me of the world from “Avatar” at night, with everything glowing neon.
@rob_matic: Don’t forget there are two sequels to the Troy book! 🙂
@Johan P: “So my best advice for moving books? Use small boxes.”
It sounds like “. . . and buy/create smaller books” would help, too. 😉
@Mike Glyer: I read the first page of comments, clicked next, and discovered two comments from the end of the first page were now at the top of page two. Um. That’ll learn me not to subscribe before reading, I guess; I presume two were liberated from jail, pushing everything after them down.
@Various: We have around 3200 fiction books, but that includes ebooks and audiobooks; I can’t figure out how to properly search my mobile list to exclude those and I’m too lazy to go to the basement to get the correct numbers. If I add in RPG, cookbooks, and other miscellaneous non-fiction, it’s close to 4000, methinks (not all non-fiction’s recorded). But here in 5684, I’m probably ready for another book-downsize.
Humble Bundle has put out a new manga bundle that is a very good deal if you like that sort of thing.
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/manga-to-anime-kodansha-books?hmb_source=humble_home&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=mosaic_section_1_layout_index_2_layout_type_threes_tile_index_3
1 dollar tier
Ajin vol 1-11 A little bleak for me.
8 dollar tier
Inuyashiki Vol. 1 – 10 Tries to do something different but does not really stick the ending. However it is still a good story with a much older protagonist then you usually see in manga.
The Seven Deadly Sins Vol. 1 – 10 Superior Shounen
15 dollar tier
The Seven Deadly Sins Vol. 11 – 22 And now you get the end of the first major arc.
The Ghost In The Shell Vol. 1 – 2 The first vol, from before Shirow’s house was destroyed and he lost his will to live, is a classic
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Vol. 1 – 5 Based on the anime based on the original Ghost In The Shell, turned out decent.
18 dollar tier (And the real reason to buy the bundle)
Battle Angel Alita Vol. 1 – 9
Battle Angel Alita: Last Order Omnibus Vol. 1 – 5
Battle Angel Alita: Last Order Vol. 16 – 19
Battle Angel Alita: Mars Chronicle Vol. 1 – 2
Battle Angel Alita,known as Gunmu in Japan, is my favorite manga ever. It starts with a cyborg thrown out in the trash with no memory of how she ended up there and then takes her on a tour of the often crap-sack world she was reborn in as she grows and changes. Yukito Kishiro had problems with his publisher on the original run and stopped the story early with a truncated ending. Later he had the chance to continue the story on his own terms so he reworked the ending of Battle Angel Alita and started writing Last Order. To be honest Last Order turned into more of a fighting tournament then I had hoped but it is still a very good tournament. Mars Chronicle is mostly back story on Alita from way before the start of the original story.
This is a great deal, I have spent hundreds of dollars on these manga and with this you get them for 18 dollars.
@PhilRM:
I love this story SO MUCH!
Chef Anthony Bourdain has died. Bourdain wrote the comic “Get Jiro!“. We will not see his like again.
Bourdain also wrote a sympathetic biography of Typhoid Mary, and a couple of mysteries before he hit it big with Kitchen Confidential.
RIP anthony bourdain.
Re: Bourdain – I was very surprised, (but should not have been) to see just how many people were saying that they wanted his job when they grow up, (including me!). I have no doubt that from the inside it wasn’t nearly as idyllic as it seemed.
I’m clearly an outlier here, I have less than a 100 physical books (personally mine.) And about 200 on my kindle. I’ve purchased a couple of thousand ebooks but I delete most after reading.
I assume this is mostly a difference in attitude formed by experience. I know that if I change my mind about an ebook I can always redownload it without charge. So why not be super selective about what to keep? A decade ago you would need to be sure you didn’t want a book before getting rid of it – if you changed your mind you would have to hope it was still in print and pay again.
Kindle says I have over 9,000 items – books, magazines, comics. It made leaving some 10,000 physical books behind in the divorce easier. The first year while most of the physical books I had were in boxes was weird. I’ve always had books. Probably 250+ since I was a pre-teen. Small boxes is critical when moving books.
I’m a reader, not a collector. The only books I keep are those I’m fairly sure I’ll want to re-read. As a result, my book collection is fairly manageable–only a couple thousand physical books. 😀
Johan P on June 8, 2018 at 1:40 am said:
As long as the window area shows an accurate representation of what’s outside, I don’t see why it matters whether its done via actual transparent materials or via camera-and-screen.
Seeing outside via camera-and-screen is a stock SF trope–the dangers of putting actual, physical windows in your spaceship are fairly obvious, and the solution is equally obvious. On Star Trek, they (almost?) always use the display screen to see what’s in front of them, instead of looking out the window.
(I’m pretty sure the windows on the Enterprise are purely for cosmetic purposes–to make it look like something with people inside. I don’t think anyone in the show has ever used one. But I could be wrong.)
I’m actually a bit surprised it took the real world so long to adopt and adapt this idea. We’ve known that windows are the weak spots on aircraft for a long time.
4) If it fits, I sits!
13) Not bad advice for beginner-level bibliophiles, especially rule #4. For people on our level, not so much. If I have to clear space on my shelves but don’t want to get rid of the books I’m pulling out, I make an archive box — lined with a plastic bag to protect the contents against silverfish, etc. and then sealed.
LT says I have 2,073 books. I know there are enough sitting around unentered to push that over 3,000. And a lot of the items in my “reference” tag are things I haven’t read, but want to have available for Reasons.
@ BravoLimaPoppa: You’re in Houston? Have we met? (Most likely vector of contact would be ApolloCon, or other regional cons where you might have seen me and my partner in the dealer room.)
Regarding Site Selection Voting:
I recommend downloading the ballots and opening them in Adobe Reader/Acrobat rather than simple clicking on them, which generally opens them in your browser’s PDF reader. The PDFs are “fillable,” meaning that they have fields in which you can type your information and at least on my computer/browser, the browser’s reader doesn’t support such fields.
The PDFs also have the field that allows you to electronically “sign” your ballot, so you don’t need to print it, fill out the fields, then scan it back into a PDF, but can instead complete it entirely within Reader/Acrobat, save the result, and return that as your vote.
Lee,
No we haven’t. I keep looking longingly at Apollocon and Comicpalooza. Maybe I ought to make some greater effort.
I hadn’t thought about our comics (13,000+ of them–I only finally quit collecting them when DC reset their entire universe about 10 years ago), or our thousands of magazines (I’ve been a subscriber to F&SF alone for more than 50 years)–in addition to our 5000+ books.
But this does remind me of a conversation we were having with a friend last night. He has a collection of (literally) hundreds of thousands of records (LPs, 45s and 78s), and since he’s in his late 70s and has no children, he’s trying to decide what to do with them. Does anyone have a suggestion of an entity that might want to take on such a donated collection?
@ John Lorenz
There are libraries that look for additions to their collections, depending on genre, when the records were released, and rarity. Also, some collectors are willing to buy entire collections (again depending on the above factors). Your friend should probably find someone who can tell them how valuable the collection is then they can figure it all out.
@PhilRM:
The retired US Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer lived in an old restored farmhouse in New England. After a few years his architect told him that if he kept adding to his library he would put the structural soundness of the building at risk.
So he moved.
It’s a neat story, but it’s not Breyer; he’s still on the Court. I think it was actually David Souter.
I can’t really count our books, but I can start to estimate running feet of shelves. My office, for example has something north of 83 feet (all four walls have shelves reaching higher than my head). The basement is lined with a couple hundred more, mostly SF and mysteries–I haven’t counted lately. And the TBR stacks in the bedroom run to 100-150 volumes. That’s just my stuff–my wife’s home office has her reference material, and her campus office is has two walls covered with her teaching-relevant books.
But then, this represents the collective collecting of a pair bookworms over fifty-plus years (forty of them in the same house) of grad school, teaching, and research & writing. We may not be typical. (And retirement-and-possible-relocation is a looming nightmare.)
14) Didn’t I read something in recent months about a plane having a problem with a window?
Planes having a problem with a window happens all the time. They are designed so that the common problems (once per however many thousands/millions of flight hours) create a ‘land as soon as possible’ situation, rather than actual depressurisation/injury. The recent death (1st one in US scheduled airline services for well over a year) came from an un-contained engine failure (engine broke, and the broken bits didn’t exit via the rear of the engine). The bits broke the window, and the entire window failed. If the window wasn’t there, then the bit might have been stopped by the aircraft structure, or might have injured/killed one or more people (most of the shell of an airliner is really thin aluminium). Even when the window failed, the aircraft lost pressurisation, but remained sound enough to land without further damage.
That level of safety takes weight. If you have no windows you will have the same level of safety, but an aircraft that uses less energy per passenger-mile.
Note that the most modern airliners with carbon-fibre bodies (rather than aluminium) have bigger windows, as it is lighter to have a bigger hole in that material. The aircraft can still reach a breathable altitude in the required time if a window fails – it is an event that designers have to plan for.
@Errolwi
But does it lighten it? If the plan is to add monitor “windows” I’m doubting it. People forget electronics are very heavy for their size. There’s a reason for any given size of car they weigh more than the same size car a generation or two ago and a lot of that is the electronics.
@bookworm1398: “I know that if I change my mind about an ebook I can always redownload it without charge.”
So you still have those ebooks. They’re just in storage.
@ Joe H and Chip
Yep, 12” for me, too. On the ends of the rows, I use old library bookends to keep paperbacks from cascading out. One of my SJW credentials likes to slink in behind the books and lie in wait. Always knocks over the same 5 mysteries when exiting.
@ Rail
Those shelves are gorgeous, for sure.
@ BravoLimaPoppa3 (and sorry I missed your numeral in the earlier comment): Well, ApolloCon is no more, and you’ve just missed ComicPalooza for this year. What part of Houston are you in? Perhaps we could get together for a chat over bubble tea, which might let me make some further recommendations.
Southwest Houston – east of the Meyerland area. I work in the medical center.
@Xtifr: two episodes at least of the original series included people looking out of observation windows on the Enterprise (“The Conscience of the King” and “The Mark of Gideon” – OK, strictly speaking, that one involved an exact duplicate of the Enterprise, but Jim Kirk wasn’t surprised to find that window there.)
And practically the first shot in TNG had Patrick Stewart gazing moodily out of the window in the room behind the bridge. So I don’t think they’re wholly cosmetic, no.
That’s not going to be a problem–he’s an expert in the field of music and recordings*. He’s not really interested in the money as much as finding a good home for the collection.
(*Especially novelty music, which he’s been playing–first on the radio, now on the Internet–for nearly 50 years.)
@Jim Parish: It’s a neat story, but it’s not Breyer; he’s still on the Court. I think it was actually David Souter.
Ack! You’re absolutely right; not enough caffeine when I posted. (That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.)
@robinareid: my main criterion for ‘house after retirement’ is ‘more bookshelves’.
The Thing in the Walls Wants Your Small Change just made my Hugo nominations longlist for 2019. Content warning: the plot revolves around an abusive family relationship, but it has a happy ending, and the cutest li’l baby dragon you’re ever likely to encounter.
@ BravoLimaPoppa3: Well, there’s a Teahouse Tapioca and Tea on Beechnut not far from 610. I haven’t been to that one, but it’s a local chain and I can recommend it (and they have more than just bubble tea, coffee and tea and juice drinks and some snacks). If you’d like to get together after work, drop me a line at [email protected] (ROT13) and we can schedule something. My partner will probably come along as well, since my car is currently out of commission.
@ Steve W: Not canonical (except in my head-canon), but in Diane Duane’s ST novels there’s a large lounge room with a glass-and-forcefield window somewhere in the bow area; it’s a popular place for off-duty crew to hang out.
@Steve Wright: In Requiem for Methuselah someone looks in through the windows of the (shrunken) Enterprise.
P.S. I just got my Hugo voting email from Worldcon.
@ John Lorentz
Your friend’s MO sounds very familiar. If I am right, I think many universities would take his recordings right off for obvious reasons.
Compared to the film’s version of Theoden and Faramir, Mr. Urban has nothing to feel ashamed of.
You’re right! It was actually Faramir I was thinking of!! So bad!