(1) COMPLETE WEAPONS BAN AT SUPERCON. Florida Supercon (July 1-4) will not permit any real or replica weapons to be brought into the con. Includes blades, blunt weapons, whips, tasers, or even things that “cause excessive noise levels like vuvuzelas.”
In light of recent events, we have chosen to tighten security around the event and have recently updated many of the rules. This is done to protect our attendees and make sure that everyone may enjoy the convention without concern.
Florida Supercon is dedicated to the safety and security of ALL attendees.
Use common sense and remember what seems harmless to you may appear like a threat to someone else. All attendees must adhere to Florida State Law at all times during the weekend of Florida Supercon, including laws regarding firearms and weapons. If it is illegal outside of the convention, it is illegal inside the convention.
Please read this entire policy before attending Florida Supercon. Failure to follow this policy may result in your removal from the convention without refund. We have a ZERO TOLERANCE FOR WEAPONS.
(2) FAN OF THE SUPREMES. Michael Z. Williamson had this out earlier in the week: “Orlando: The AAR and BFTNP”.
This is going to be part pep talk and part “There there, here’s a foot in your ass.”
The Orlando shooting was not your fault. You bear no guilt and no shame. By embracing guilt and shame you give the terrorists what they want. Stop it. That way lies madness….
MAKING YOURSELF MORE HELPLESS HELPS NO ONE. “I don’t need guns,” you say. I know more about guns than you, and you’re wrong. You may not want any, and that’s fine, that’s your decision to make, FOR YOU, not for me, nor anyone else. “I couldn’t have done anything.” You’re right. So stop trying to Monday Morning Quarterback the whole thing. “Nobody needs an AR15.” Again, you’re wrong, and at this point you should be reminded of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
See this article here: http://www.michaelzwilliamson.com/blog/index.php?itemid=219
Get that? Access to firearms is a constitutionally protected right, and SCOTUS says so, the end.
(3) FINDING DORY FILLS TREASURE CHEST. Yahoo! Movies confirms the latest Pixar film, Finding Dory, set a record for an animated movie, earning many dollars in its worldwide debut.
Some 13 years after Finding Nemo first hit theaters, Pixar and Disney’s sequel Finding Dory made a huge splash, landing the biggest domestic opening of all time for an animated title with $136.2 million from 4,305 theaters….
The previous crown holder for top animated launch was DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek the Third, which debuted to $121.6 million in 2007. Until now, Pixar’s best was Toy Story 3 (2010) with $110.3 million.
(4) MASSIVE SPOILERS. ScreenRant spills all the beans in “The Alternate History of Independence Day Explained”.
Picking up in real-time, ID:R portrays a much different recent history than our own alien invasion-free world. The alternate events that occur following the War of 1996 in Independence Day definitely depict a darker timeline.
Thanks to a big viral marketing campaign, a prequel comic, a prequel novel – Independence Day: Crucible – and various Independence Day: Resurgence clips and trailers released during marketing, this dark timeline has become a little more clear.
Forget the history you thought you knew, and prepare yourself for some spoilers. Here is the full alternate timeline leading to Independence Day: Resurgence.
(5) JEMISIN IN NYT. N.K. Jemisin’s latest “Otherworldly” column for the New York Times Book Review covers new works by Claire North, Jonathan Strahan, Mira Grant, and Malka Older.
The easiest comparison that comes to mind when reading Malka Older’s INFOMOCRACY (Tor/Tom Doherty, $24.99) is to its cyberpunk forebears. There’s an obvious line of inheritance here from William Gibson and Neal Stephenson to Older’s futuristic world of global information networks and cool, noirish operatives vying for power and survival. Yet there’s also an inescapable “West Wing” vibe to the book. This probably owes to the fact that Older is herself a global player, with impressive bona fides in the field of international affairs. This lends the story a political authenticity that’s unusual in the field of cyberpunk, and very welcome.
(6) PULP FIRST CONTACT. James Davis Nicoll explains why he started Young People Review Old Science Fiction.
Young People Read Old SF was inspired by something award-winning author Adam-Troy Castro said on Facebook.
nobody discovers a lifelong love of science fiction through Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein anymore, and directing newbies toward the work of those masters is a destructive thing, because the spark won’t happen. You might as well advise them to seek out Cordwainer Smith or Alan E. Nourse—fine tertiary avenues of investigation, even now, but not anything that’s going to set anybody’s heart afire, not from the standing start. Won’t happen.
This is a testable hypothesis! I’ve rounded up a pool of younger people who have agreed to let me expose them to classic works of science fiction1 and assembled a list of older works I think still have merit. Each month my subjects will read and react to those stories; I will then post the results to this site. Hilarity will doubtless ensue!
First in the barrel is “Who Goes There?” by Don A. Stuart (John W. Campbell). The responses are quite articulate and the young readers weren’t too rough on old John.
This reminds me of a “teens react” YouTube series – James may be missing out on millions of views by doing this in text!
(7) YELCHIN OBIT. Anton Yelchin, Star Trek’s Chekov, was crushed to death by his own car this morning.
Anton Yelchin, the Russian-born actor who played Chekov in the new Star Trek films, has been killed by his own car at his home in Los Angeles, police say.
It struck him after rolling backwards down the steep drive at his Studio City home, pinning him against a brick postbox pillar and a security fence.
He died shortly after 01:00 (08:00 GMT) on Sunday.
Yelchin, 27, also appeared in such films as Like Crazy (2011) and Green Room (2015).
The third movie in the rebooted series, Star Trek Beyond, comes out in July.
(8) DECORATE OR EDUCATE? The University of Glasgow’s Robert MacLean ponders the question, “How can we be sure old books were ever read?”
Owning a book isn’t the same as reading it; we need only look at our own bloated bookshelves for confirmation. You may remember this great cartoon by Tom Gauld doing the rounds on social media a year or two ago. We love it because, in it, we can clearly see our own bookshelves and our own absurd relationship with books: unread, partially read and never-to-be-read books battling it out for space with those we’ve successfully tackled. With our busy lives and competing demands on our leisure time, the ever-growing pile of unread books can even sometimes feel like a monument to our failure as readers! Although this is surely a more common anxiety in a time of relatively cheap books and one-click online shopping we should be reassured that it’s nothing new: Seneca was vocal in criticising those using “books not as tools for study but as decorations for the dining-room”, and in his early 16th century sermons Johannes Geiler (reflecting on Sebastian Brant’s ‘book fool’) identified a range of different types of folly connected with book ownership that included collecting books for the sake of glory, as if they were costly items of furniture1. When we look at our own bookshelves we can fairly easily divide the contents into those we’ve read and those we haven’t. But when it comes to very old books which have survived for hundreds of years how easy is it to know whether a book was actually read by its past owners? ….
Dog-ears
Different readers have different methods of physically marking their reading progress in a book. Once upon a time (I confess!) I was a dog-earer, who turned over the top corner of the page to mark my place; now – evidence of where I do much of my reading – I tend to use a train ticket as a bookmark. In this fascinating blogpost Cornelis J. Schilt, editor of the Newton Project, describes how one famous reader of the past, Isaac Newton, used large and often multiple dog-ears to act as mnemonic aides reminding him of specific words and references in books he was reading.
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY
- June 19, 1958 — Wham-O filed to register Hula Hoop trademark.
(10) LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED. Word of the Hugo Voter Packet finally reached readers of Sad Puppies 4: The Embiggening on Facebook.
The voter packet is out! Remember, ?#?Wrongfans read before they cast their votes, ?#?trufen just vote how they’re told to NoAward.
(11) ALPENNIA ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED. Heather Rose Jones bids you “Welcome to the New Improved Expanded Alpennia Website!”
Quite some time ago (nearly two years, I think), I decided I needed a more professional looking website for my writing activities. And it could have all sorts of bells and whistles! Book reviews! Forthcoming publications! Future convention schedules! I could not only move the Lesbian Historic Motif Project to the new site, but I could make it the primary home of my blog. And then it could push content automatically to LiveJournal and Twitter and Facebook. And the LHMP could have improved functionality, with better tagging, and a dynamic index page, and…and everything
(12) KEEP ‘EM CLICKING. “If Amazing Stories Were A Hugo Finalist, My Love: The Top 25 Posts of All Time” – Steve Davidson counts off his site’s biggest traffic magnets.
At the top of the list:
(13) SDCC LIVE. Syfy is starting to beat the drum for its upcoming Syfy Presents Live From Comic-Con broadcast.
Syfy will invade the world’s largest pop culture convention this summer with a three-night telecast directly from the heart of San Diego Comic-Con. The special – Syfy’s first-ever live broadcast from Comic-Con – will air on the network Thursday, July 21 through Saturday, July 23 at 8/7c.
Each night, SYFY PRESENTS LIVE FROM COMIC-CON will bring the Con’s non-stop action directly to viewers across the country, featuring celebrity interviews, breaking news and behind-the-scenes reports. The hosted live broadcast will highlight the biggest stars, top franchise reveals, panel news, exclusive sneak peeks of the hottest films, as well as audience interaction, games, party coverage and much more.
(14) ACKERMAN CENTENARY PROJECT. There’s a Kickstarter appeal for a 4E Ackerman tribute: “Famous Monsters is making a star-studded comic book anthology of weird & Terrifying tales in honor of Forry Ackerman’s 100th Birthday” has raised $3,875 of its $10,000 goal with 42 days remaining.
The year 2016 marks what would have been the late Forrest J Ackerman’s 100th Birthday. Famous Monsters and its comic book publishing imprint, American Gothic Press (AGP), are celebrating Forry’s centennial with an original hardcover anthology called TALES FROM THE ACKER-MANSION, to be released in October at our ALIEN CON event in Silicon Valley, CA!
Famous Monsters is a big name, but we are a small company. Despite our well-known magazine and iconic logo, we are a boutique operation. Still, we manage to make an enduring magazine, cool comic books, neat merchandise, run film festivals, and now are producing a major convention in October. As we spin several creative plates in the air at the same time, we are always mindful of “Uncle Forry” and the imaginative endeavors he championed. For Forry’s centennial celebration, we thought TALES FROM THE ACKER-MANSION would be a super-cool tribute, but in order to pull it off, we need help! That’s why we are doing FM’s first-ever Kickstarter/crowdfunding effort to cushion the incredible launch costs of such a project (more details at the end under RISKS & CHALLENGES)….
The magical thing about Forry is that he connected people from all fields and industries — be it film, music, comics, or literature. In the spirit of that connection, we have sought to make TALES FROM THE ACKER-MANSION a truly eclectic offering.
John Carpenter: “For TALES FROM THE ACKER-MANSION, John Carpenter channels O. Henry in an original short horror folk-tale, “The Traveler’s Tale”. It tells the story of an old British traveler who steals a cursed bejeweled box from a Middle Eastern bazaar. Written by the Horror Master himself!”
William F. Nolan: “His contribution for TALES FROM THE ACKER-MANSION is ‘the story of how Forrest J Ackerman and the robot from Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS became acquainted.’”
John 5: “He currently plays for Rob Zombie on tour and in the studio. John has also produced numerous solo records — one of which, ‘Careful with that Axe’, shares the title of his story for TALES FROM THE ACKER-MANSION, a surreal rockstar fable about a Telecaster guitar that seems to give a young boy special powers.”
Richard Christian Matheson: “His short story ‘Barking Sands’ is appearing in TALES FROM THE ACKER-MANSION as illustrated prose”.
Joe R. Lansdale: “His short story ‘The Dump’ is being adapted for the anthology by MARK ALAN MILLER.”
Also included:
- An apocalyptic monster truck comic from creator Cullen Bunn (HARROW COUNTY) and artist Drew Moss (TERRIBLE LIZARD)
- A painted robot tale from comics writer and artist Ray Fawkes (CONSTANTINE)
- A cannibal story in the style of old Creepy and Eerie from HELLRAISER: BESTIARY’s Ben Meares and Christian Francis
- Stories by FM Editor David Weiner and AGP Editor Holly Interlandi
- An unconventional coming-of-age story by reknowned fantasy author Nancy Kilpatrick, illustrated by Drew Rausch (EDWARD SCISSORHANDS)
- A Golden Age noir-style romp from Victor Gischler (X-MEN)
- A Sci-Fi alien saga by Trevor Goring (WATERLOO SUNSET)
- A legend about lethal knitting needles from Travis Williams and Jonathan La Mantia
- Art pinups by many Famous Monsters cover artists
(15) SMASHUPS. ScreenRant believes these are the “13 Best Comic Book Crossovers of All Time”.
More often than not, this means comic creators throw together as many popular characters as they can get their hands on. It’s good business to throw characters together that no one expects to see sharing a page; companies as adversarial as DC and Marvel have been known to join forces for a good, crazy story. This has led to more than a few fantastic crossover stories over the course of comic book history….
- JLA/Avengers
…Arguably the most famous of all crossover comics, JLA/Avengers was actually the result of over thirty years of negotiations between the two companies, as the initial plans had been made in 1979 before plans were put on hold due to editorial differences between Marvel and DC’s higher ups. For a time it seemed as if JLA/Avengers was the sign of more cooperation between the two comics publishers, but there hasn’t been any further successful attempts to unite the two brands since.
(16) COMIC SECTION. Tom Gauld has been cracking them up on Twitter
A recent cartoon featuring @MarsCuriosity for @newscientist pic.twitter.com/BSkA9CqX7n
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) April 10, 2016
'James Bond is driving in his underwater car…' (My cartoon for today's @guardianreview) – pic.twitter.com/JGOUE89yLm
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) June 18, 2016
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, James Davis Nicoll, Cat Eldridge, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Heather Rose Jones.]
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Visiting used bookstores all over the world, there are two authors whose books are absolutely everywhere: Anne Rice and Pierce Anthony.
Make of that what you want.
@Bonnie McDaniel: same here, but I’m running out of places to put bookcases. And I know (from having helped move it) of at least one fannish couple whose collection is a lot bigger than mine even though they never struck me as bookish types. (We suspect they have at least once gotten rid of a title; there were two copies of Bored of the Rings in the giveaway pile after they merged collections.)
@Stoic Cynic: not just historic; I’ve been told local swap stores won’t accept romances in trade for SF, as the former are much less in demand than the latter.
@Hampus Eckerman Hey I enjoyed some… er one Pierce Anthony book.
V.C. Andrews is also all over used bookstores.
It saddens me to think that one day our descendants will go into thrift shops and be unable to find Vaughn Meader’s “FIrst Family” LP.
(Hey, that was so pithy and self-standing I went and tweeted it too.)
Many years back, Flann O’Brien wrote a short column about people who had libraries and paid people to make it look like the books had been read. Published around WW2 period. I guess the idea may date back a bit further.
So, there’s a situation on Reddit that’s eerily similar to the Sad Puppies and EPH: Washington Post link.
Basically, a pro-Donald Trump sub-board of Reddit gamed the system, demonstrating how an organized minority can flood /r/all, Reddit’s aggregator of all subreddits’ popular posts, with low-quality trolling and meme posts by being disproportionally active in upvoting their content and frequently rotating their subreddit’s ‘sticky’ posts to direct user activity onto more posts. This clogged up the /r/all page with their stuff, and eventually triggered a backlash from the rest of Reddit’s users to downvote them, but it wasn’t effective enough to get rid of an organized effort to upvote.
Then Reddit’s administrators restricted the sticky-post feature that was abused and changed the algorithm of /r/all to prevent any single subreddit from dominating. It cut down the Trump posts to one or two in the top 100, though it would also prevent, say, a whole bunch of NFL posts reaching the top on Super Bowl Sunday. The Trump supporters claimed they were being censored for being conservative. Others countered that the content they submitted was garbage and they were not voting sincerely but to make their content hit the top and troll everyone else. Hmm…
The outcome probably doesn’t have any direct value to the Hugos since Reddit has more control over its algorithms and doesn’t require perfect fairness and transparency in its voting system, but I found the parallels interesting to observe.
@Kip W: The night of the Kennedy assassination, Lenny Bruce had a big show in New York City. People wondered how he was going to open it. I mean, that’s a hard mark to hit. Lenny walked out, looked around, paused, then exhaled and said, “Poor Vaughn Meader.”
And what happens when a different SCOTUS changes that ruling?
As for crossovers, I think Superman vs Muhammad Ali deserves an honourable mention.
Vaughn Meader’s LPs about the Kennedys were turned in a single CD some years ago. Afterward he steered his life around a bottle. He did recover and wrote country and western songs.
Books seen in thrift shops today seem to be TWILIGHT novels, 50 SHADES OF GREY, the Left Behind sequence, Bill Cosby books and Lance Armstrong tomes.
Oh well.
(6) PULP FIRST CONTACT.:
You should never, ever, ever frame anything in absolutes!
(8) DECORATE OR EDUCATE?
I once wanted a copy of Darwin’s book on carnivorous plants. I had a choice between paying somewhere around $50 for a recent edition or somewhere around $50 for a copy more than 100 years old (but not a first edition.) I decided to buy the old copy just because it had some history behind it. The pages were uncut. More than 100 years old, and it hadn’t been read once. (The pages were also extremely brittle–it wasn’t a good choice.)
(2) FAN OF THE SUPREMES.
Since the gun scroll items are carrying over, an anecdote: I live in a rural area, individual houses, typical lot sizes maybe a quarter acre to a half acre with some smaller and some in the dozens of acres. You can’t go too far in any direction without running into patches of forest. It is utterly normal here to hear gunfire from various directions on the weekends and often during the week (maybe some hunting, but probably mostly target shooting.) It is so common that you don’t notice it unless you have reason to. With all the gun debate lately, I thought to paid attention to what I was hearing on Sunday. There were some shots that came in only 2s or 3s with a couple of seconds between shots, but more typical were bursts of maybe 6 to 10 shots at rates of 2 or 3 shots per second. Some of them were closer to 3 or 4 shots per second, and some bursts were in the 10 to 15 shot range. Throughout the afternoon, I’d estimate I heard between 100 and 200 shots. This is so unremarkable that I doubt anyone within earshot even paused to consider calling the police, either out of concern or annoyance.
If you’re talking crossovers, I would like to mention the DC/Marvel mashup Amalgam Comics. It’s hard to beat one-shots like “Bruce Wayne, Agent of SHIELD,” “Speed Demon,” “Dr. Strangefate,” “Magneto and the Magnetic Men,” and “Lobo the Duck.”
Now and then the political classes can surprise you
You know how publishers sometimes produce several cover variants of books/magazines/whatever, hoping that collectors will feel compelled to buy a copy of each? This Dawkins reprint could be a bit of a budget-buster.
6) I have written of this before, perhaps here, so mild apologies for repeating myself.
A substantial part of my early reading experience came from a big box of books that one of my father’s older cousins had passed along to him sometime around 1930. It was a very mixed collection of fiction aimed at younger readers, everything from Bobbsey Twins to Stratmeyer Syndicate boys’-adventure stuff (two Ted Scott Flying Stories) and animal stories–Albert Payson Terhune books, The Call of the Wild, and Peter B. Kyne’s They Also Serve, in which WW1 is recalled from the viewpoint of a horse. There were also a couple of pre-1920 books about cycling chums in which bicycles were called “wheels.”
The point of this wallow along memory lane is that none of these books reflected anything of the world I actually inhabited, circa 1953-55, nor did the books I went on to borrow from my aunts’ shelves (book-club bestsellers from the late 1940s onward–Frank Yerby, Thomas B. Costain, early Ellery Queen) or various libraries (classical mythology, Arthurian material, Trixie Belden mysteries, and eventually SF). I wasn’t reading for social relevance or to see myself reflected or even to confront whatever childhood issues might have been surfacing in my life*. I was reading to go somewhere, see something, be someone else (a horse, a dog, a pilot, a teenage girl, a couple pairs of twins, a chum, with or without a wheel).
So when I encounter the reactions of younger readers to older SF (or older anything), I wonder how different might be the demands they make on art/entertainment**, and how they imagine the world before their own existences. That said, the young persons Nicholl has found are sharp, observant, articulate and would, I suspect, be welcome in any of my wife’s undergrad lit classes.
* Someone will doubtless advise that I check my privilege. Well, maybe. And maybe that is not the sole force operating in the social/psychological universe.
** I make very small distinctions between these pseudo-categories, though there are certainly noteworthy differences between a sonnet and a roller-coaster ride.
re (2)
First, its curious how being a “good guy” gets you un-personed by the right these days: the one handgun armed good guy in Orland (like the one in Oregon) wasn’t able to slay a heavily armed man the way it happens in Williamson’s fantasies or last play of Call of Duty, and thus they must vanish from the record. As they could not do this, they are obviously not a Real Manly Man, who would have had no being the Hero, as all the ammosexuals know themselves to be.
Second, from the photos I’ve seen of Williamson, if I say him open carrying, I’d call the cops in a second. Crazy-eyed guy with an assault rifle? Yeah, until I get the phone app that differentiates the psychotic man-children from the “good guys” (what’s that you say, there’s some overlap?), I’m not sure I feel like being trusting just ’cause.
TYP: Insulting MZW’s looks adds nothing to this discussion.
@TYP:
Yeah, it’s a very short walk from “If only there were (more) people armed there” to “Everyone really needs to be armed” to “It’s their fault for not being armed.”
Williamson has explicitly hit the second step. The momentum alone makes it hard not to topple into the final one even if you’re not trying.
@Joe H.: “Earth-H — the parallel world inhabited by crooks who could always be distracted by a thrown handful of Hostess fruit pies.”
…which actually got a mention in Marvel’s relatively recent Spider-Verse event. The setup was a family of universe-hopping villains, and one of the “anthology” issues had a one-page story where they reached that universe and killed its Spider-Man. (Also seen during the arc: Spider-Ham, with a rather significant role, the newspaper-strip universe, and the first-animated-series universe… complete with simplistic art.)
@Darren: “Throughout the afternoon, I’d estimate I heard between 100 and 200 shots.”
I’m in my forties, and I think the only time that’s been true for me was when the local armory was having a special event where regular people got to see what it was like to fire a couple of (carefully supervised) rounds from automatic weapons. Aside from that kind of thing, I don’t think I’ve heard a hundred rounds fired in my lifetime.
Re: houses
Feh on all of you. Around here, we’ve got the Spaceship House.
Yay, The World is safe now.
On an unrelated note, this may be of interest and/or someone here might be able to point to an answer?
http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/who-drew-this-futuristic-space-picture-from-the-1960s-1782245989
@Peer
The fact that Heller is 5-4 is why part of being a good constitutional conservative now is electing Donald Trump. After all, if five justices could discover this absolute right in the Constitution two centuries after the founding, five justices could discover that the previous centuries of jurisprudence were more relevant.
@OGH
Nothing to do with his looks. There’s something to a certain kind of confidence that open carry advocates have that generally has me thinking I’d call the police if I saw them in the flesh. They may know they are the good guy, I have no such assurances. And the people who decide they need to “make a point” about their open carry rights tend to have an undefinable something about them that I feel would have set off the alarms even if they hadn’t had a AR on city street.
I’m surprised by this. I know you live in Georgia, by your descriptions, I had imagined at least semi-rural Georgia. I would have expected it to be as common for your area as it is for mine. (I live in the upper-left corner of South Carolina.) If you are in more urban Georgia, drive out a few miles in the country on the weekend. You’ll hear plenty.
@TYP If Im not mistaken you Americans were able to change the constitution to get rid of slavery. It should be possible -one day – to change it to get rid of guns. Hopefully without a civil war this time.
As a European Im wondering about the “Good guy with a gun theory” – I mean you have so much more good guys with guns then we (we have less guns, I dont make a comment about the ratio of good guys), and still you have much more shootings. Shootings were nobody with a gun stops the shooter safe the police. Why does people still belive this theory?
TYP: Thanks for doubling down instead of taking the hint.
I have because I fired off thousands of rounds target shooting as a teen. That and a gleeful 1970s indifference to basic protective measures are why I am deaf in my left ear.
@steve davidson
I also have a bunch of “that discounted book about a subject I’d normally ignore looks interesting.” Many are unread.
@Various – “Ruth and Martin’s Album Club”
Uh-oh. I don’t have time for this.
I like the idea of young folk reviewing old stories. I’ll try to follow along – I’m not so young, but I haven’t read a lot of those old stories, I’m sure.
@howloon
Reactionary conservatives often seem to have no idea how humor works. Maaaaybe they’re joking about being censored and that’s all part of the troll, but from what I’ve seen, they really get huffy when their trolling isn’t accepted as legitimate. See last year’s puppers, getting upset about their obvious troll material (JCW’s Parliament of Beasts and Birds, MZW, a fan writer packet full of anti-SJW rants and little SFF content) being voted below No Award.
Current Reading
I’ve taken a break from Seveneves, about 27% of the way through, and have taken up Simak’s Way Station as a palate cleanser. I’m about 26% of the way through (yay, a book of less than 100 pages!). I’m enjoying it. There’s a very laid back feeling to the story-telling, and a melancholy tone that I enjoy.
OGH:
After re-reading what I wrote, I think I’ll take the hint. Saying that I think most people have concerns about meeting open carry people in the real-world could have been expressed without references to Mr. Williamson’s appearance.
My point is that, regardless of what they look like, when a person feels the need to rub in my face that they can walk down the street with the means of killing several dozen people on proud display will have me making some inferences from that observed data. As I have zero way of knowing whether or not they’re playing a stunt, or about to lose it, yeah, I’m calling the police.
@Peer
There’s a range of theories. Either the place of the tale of the frontier in our culture, the fact that a lot of the US was poorly policed for awhile are ones you will hear often. The fact that our current gun-culture, of fetishistic self-defense and not sporting, largely took off after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act is less often mentioned, but a pretty clear historical reality.
For those outside this country, that’s the act that outlawed legal segregation based on skin color. The year it was passed, the NRA is a sportsman’s organization. Inside of two decades, it’s talking about the need of everyone being armed to avert the fall of civilization.
@Hampus
The NYT is not exactly a reliable resource for interpreting the U.S. Constitution, IMHO. At least IME, they tend to like the Constitution when it provides things they like and ignore the Constitution when it provides things they dislike.
Also….”Pierce Anthony”? Piers Anthony instead? Sorry to nit-pick. I like a lot of Piers’ work…some quite a bit, and some not so much. **chuckle**
(I did check Goodreads and found Pierce Anthony that wrote two books.)
@Darren
RE: gunfire on a Sunday afternoon.
Me, too!
—
Regards,
Dann
@Darren: “I’m surprised by this. I know you live in Georgia, by your descriptions, I had imagined at least semi-rural Georgia.”
Close, but no cigar… as the link to the space house might illustrate. “Ruralish suburbs” is about the best description I can give of my normal housing choices. My current apartment is in a wooded area, but I’m still only a mile from decent shopping, five minutes from a significant highway, and twenty minutes from downtown. Before that, I lived in a duplex that was more out-of-the-way, being at least fifteen minutes from “civilization” and more than half an hour from downtown. Before that… hm. I think that was the old homestead, which was somewhere between those two in terms of access to shopping malls. That’s where I was living when Hussein invaded Kuwait – memorable to me because I worked at a convenience store at the time, and the Sunday paper’s jarring headline was about a big chain store signing up with the fancy new shopping mall.
In short, this is an area where woods are plentiful, but actual rural room is much less so. In my mother’s day, the old homestead was rural, but by the time I lived there, the city had expanded considerably so that it no longer really qualified. There’s hunting and fishing around, but not within earshot.
I like my current balance, overall. The trees give me the illusion that I’m more secluded than I really am, but shopping, fast food, and entertainment are very convenient. Best of both worlds, really.
Current reading, since kathodus posted: Started Ancillary Mercy over the weekend, but haven’t made much progress. It’s not the book’s fault; this weekend was made for sleeping. I didn’t even get out to do my shopping, which may prove inconvenient in a couple of days. I may try to stretch my provisions until Thursday, in hopes of combining the shopping trip with an early showing of Independence Day: Resurgence. (Being close to things does not mean I enjoy the hassle of leaving the house.)
@Hampus
As someone who had to take a little test on the subject to get my professional license, I can tell you the NYT is one of the better media outlets to read up on developments in Constitutional Law, if we are referring to “Constitutional Law” as the law litigated before Federal justices, used by these justices to write their opinions, studied by the finest legal scholars in this country, and as this law is considered by many people who make the law, its effects, its history, and its precedents their lives works.
What is often missed by some is that this law is not graven into a stone tablet, but is refined in a continual process of precedent and decision that stretches back over seven hundred years. This ambiguity provided by the fact that the world changes is confusing to some.
The New York Times is however not the best place to read up on Constitutional Law if by “Constitutional Law” we mean various amateur Constitutional theories that say “as a certain type of person, I may do whatever the h*ll I want.” The New York Times also often doesn’t pass muster among those who have elaborate constitutional theories as to who owns federal grazing lands, whether there can be a fringe on the flag and it not be admiralty law, or whether misspelling one’s name allows you to access your secret Federal trust fund (not making the that last one up).
To counterbalance all the unhappy news of late, here is a portrait of an astronaut made with traditional British foods.
Ack, link didn’t work. Here’s the portrait.
7) – Oh Anton, my heart just hurts. I LOOOOOVED the first Star Trek Reboot movie, saw it like twelve times in theatres and I was part of a fandom that was all excitement and memes and animated gifs and ridiculous jokes, that time holds a special place in my heart and Anton was part of that and his camaderie with his castmates was an even bigger part of that and I just hurt for them and his family and other fans. He was so so young and talented and cute as heck, with so many things still left to do, to go in a freak accident alone in the middle of the night, in pain like that. I hope he didn’t suffer for too long. Oh my heart 🙁
The extent to which the second amendment is an actual impediment to gun control is exaggerated by those who fantasize about it. Even taking it as a specifically individual right to bear arms in the manner that the late Judge Antonin Scalia did, it is not unqualified – i.e. it does not assert that a US citizen of any kind can bear any kind of arms they are capable of carrying. Not only that but not even the NRA, who seem to regard the text as written by a diety, actually believe that. The US already limits kinds of weapons and nobody claims that prisoners who are US citizens have a right to bear arms nor does the NRA (currently) assert that children have a right to bear arms. So the US federal government and the states really do have broad powers to limit gun ownership within the same kinds of bounds that other constitutional rights (such as free speech or due process) have practical limitations.
Now I can see how the Scalia interpretation of the second amendment prevents UK style gun laws in which the it is assumed that most people are not entitled to own a gun and that the onus is on the individual to demonstrate why their circumstance is special and that they should be exempt from some restrictions, but the space of level of gun control between the British level* and the US level is vast.
An individual right to bear arms** only establishes that in general a US citizen should be able to own a useful weapon. It does not establish that the government can’t register those weapons or register ownership or track sales. It does not establish that the government can’t regulate interstate trade in guns, it does not establish that the government can’t outlaw certain types of weapons or regulate types of ammunition. It certainly doesn’t establish that gun manufacturers should be immune from legal responsibility.
Really the second amendment offers an advantage to the pro-gun control side. Not all slippery slope arguments are valid but there is validity to claims from anti-gun control advocates that one level of gun control can pave the way for further levels of gun control. However, the existence of the 2nd amendment does circumscribe the capacity for the US government to enact gun control measures – but those limits aren’t even close to where the US currently is. It isn’t the second amendment that is the problem – except as a shibboleth.
*[which I support and which works – despite recent appalling events]
**[and others dispute that is what the second amendment establishes – but for arguments sake, lets assume the most favorable reading for the NRA]
I believe Lenny Bruce, as was his wont, used a stronger expression for his dismay at the turn Meader’s career was about to take than “poor Vaughn Meader.” He is reported to have sighed and said “Boy, Vaughn Meader sure is f—ed”
@Johan P:
I’d love to know where that’s from; it sounds fascinating. It also sounds a little less nerve-wracking than Wilhelm’s observation (ca. 1979) that Knight edited everything:
I had a friend who was book manager for a local used bookstore chain. If a store has a lot of a specific title or series on the shelf, they likely have more in the back and won’t take them for trade anymore. When she took the job, she discovered some titles they had boxes full of in their back room. They also occasionally donate excess books to the local jail, which usually had a few copies of some of Sheriff Joe Arpiao’s books, which they tend to get a lot of.
howloon:
But they learned not to mess with the swedes. I give you: The Borkening. *borkborkbork*
CNN has this news item today about the Supreme Court denying certiorari in a gun law case: Supreme Court lets stand law banning some semi-automatic assault weapons:
@Rev. Bob
Every Christmas, Eric and I come home to Chattanooga for the holidays, and we stay at my mother’s place up on Signal Mountain, so we drive past that spaceship house all the time. It seemed a lot cooler to me when I was a kid (1970s), but it sure does look tacky now. (Chattanooga itself, on the other hand, is enormously improved.)
@Mike Glyer
I wondered when someone would bring that up.
I have a friend from my Microsoft days who’s a huge gun aficionado, and although he opposes most forms of gun control, he thinks the Left does itself a disservice by failing to get organized around rules to simply define what sort of weapons are covered by the Second Amendment. If the law said you needed a (hard-to-get) Federal license for any firearm except 1) a revolver 2) a pump shotgun 3) a bolt-action rifle, that would make an end of the mass shootings, it would make life a lot easier for the police, and yet it would arguably stay well clear of violating the Second Amendment. Today’s ruling suggests that the Court might buy that argument. Note that Connecticut not only banned the sale of assault rifles: it made mere possession a crime.
Dann:
And I quote from the article about its author:
But my point is, if you have ever actually read District of Columbia v. Heller, you know that what Williamson writes is not true. Assault rifles have been banned in eight states and it is not a problem. Concealed weapons have been banned at several places and it is not a problem. District of Columbia v. Heller is a very, very limited judgement about handguns.
Mike Glyer:
Yes, read that earlier today (William Gibsons twitter account is on fire regarding tweets on gun regulation). Also this one on banning concealed weapons:
On gun regulation in US, this infographic is a few years old now, but very interesting.
@Greg: “Every Christmas, Eric and I come home to Chattanooga for the holidays, and we stay at my mother’s place up on Signal Mountain”
Well, speak up when you’re in town this year! We could do lunch or something.
Chip Hitchcock:
It’s from The Christmas Oratorio by Swedish novelist Gõran Tunström. That is, it’s been so long since I read it that I am only about 99% sure it’s a Tunström book and 90% sure it’s The Christmas Oratorio.
***
In other book-related news – not SF, but science – the new covers for reissues of Richard Dawkins’ early books might interest some. Penguin have taken a computer program originally written by Dawkins to demonstrate evolution, and used it to automatically generate a unique cover for each individual book.
@Johan P
A program to demonstrate evolution reminds me of Conway’s Game of Life:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
An on-line version here:
http://pmav.eu/stuff/javascript-game-of-life-v3.1.1/
Or for an easter egg try searching Conway’s Game of Life in Google and watch the screen.
It can be a time sink if you really start playing with it as a puzzle… (or a total bore to a lot of folks. YMMV)
Update: the Google easter egg only appears to work if you type the phrase in. Copy and paste doesn’t seem to trigger it. Go figure.
What about pencils and old-lady canes?