Pixel Scroll 6/20/16 The Knights Who Say “Pi(xel)”

(1) SPOILERIFFIC GAME OF THRONES RECAP. Lots of GoT recaps online and I tend to read them at random. I found much to recommend Ben Van Iten’s “The Game of Throne Awards, Season 6, Episode 9: Two Battles for the Price of One!” at B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog which ends with a holiday-appropriate joke —

The “GIRL POWER WHOO!” award goes to the newfound alliance between Dany and Yara. They bonded over a number of subjects, but mostly how terrible their dads were. Happy Father’s Day?

(2) CILIP KATE GREENAWAY MEDAL. Chris Riddle has won the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for his illustrations of Neil Gaiman’s retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, The Sleeper and the Spindle. Riddell is the award’s first three-time winner, and also the first reigning  Children’s Laureate to win.

(3) PEAKE RETURN. Chip Hitchcock recommends a BBC post, “Watching Tim Peake return to Earth”: “Describing Tim Peake’s landing — much more rugged than most authors talked about: The nearest to this I can remember is the arrival on Earth of Manny and the Professor in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress — but they were definitely traveling in economy class….”

Next to emerge was Tim Peake. Pale-faced from six months without sun, he was grinning and relaxed and apparently well.

But the sudden exposure to the baking summer heat obviously left him uncomfortable, medics offering him sips of water and mopping his brow.

Having met him a number of times over the past seven years, I felt moved to welcome him back to Earth. He smiled and said he’d been so well trained that the descent was fine and he was loving the fresh air.

You would never have known he’d just spent a few hours crammed into an agonisingly small spaceship and endured the perils of descent with scorching temperatures and violent swings.

(4) TED WHITE PULPFEST GOH. PulpFest today reminded everyone Amazing Stories editor Ted White will be its 2016 Guest of Honor. (A full profile appeared in January).

PulpFest is very pleased to welcome as its 2016 Guest of Honor, author, editor, musician, and science-fiction and pulp fan Ted White. Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 1968 and nominated as Best Professional Editor or for Best Professional Magazine throughout most of the seventies, Mr. White will speak about his career, AMAZING STORIES, science fiction fandom, the pulps, and much, much more on Saturday evening, July 23, from 7:30 to 8:15 in the Union Rooms on the second floor of the Hyatt Regency.

We look forward to seeing you at “Summer’s AMAZING Pulp Con” from July 21 through July 24 at the beautiful Hyatt Regency and the city’s spacious convention center in the exciting Arena District of Columbus, Ohio. Please join us as editor emeritus Ted White helps PulpFest celebrate ninety years of AMAZING STORIES!

(Our guest of honor continues to publish professionally after more than sixty years of practicing his craft. His short story, “The Uncertain Past,” appeared in the March & April 2014 number of THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION — featuring front cover art by Kent Bash — while “The Philistine” can be found in the October 2015 issue of ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION AND FACT.

(5) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • June 20, 1975 Jaws was released.

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS

  • June 20, 1928 — Martin Landau
  • June 20, 1952 — John Goodman

(7) FORECAST DENIED. Henry Farrell tells Crooked Timber readers “The Age of Em Won’t Happen” and advises author Hanson to read Hannu Rajaniemi and Ken McLeod.

Tyler Cowen says that the predicted future of Robin Hanson’s Age of Em – a world in which most cognitive and much physical labor will be done by emulations of brain-scanned human beings – won’t happen. I agree. I enjoyed the book, and feel a bit guilty about criticizing it, since Hanson asked me for comments on an early draft, which I never got around to giving him (the last eighteen months have been unusually busy for a variety of reasons). So the below are the criticisms which I should have given him, and which might or might not have led him to change the book to respond to them (he might have been convinced by them; he might have thought they were completely wrong; he might have found them plausible but not wanted to respond to them – every good book consists not only of the good counter-arguments it answers, but the good counter-arguments that it brackets off).

(8) HOW GREAT IS THE SLATE? Lisa Goldstein has launched her 2016 Hugo nominee review series with “And So It Begins: Short Story: ‘Asymmetrical Warfare’”.

In “Asymmetrical Warfare” by S. R. Algernon, Earth is attacked by starfish-shaped aliens, who then wonder why the Earth warriors they killed aren’t regenerating.…

(9) BIG GUEST LIST AT GALLIFREY 2017. Shaun Lyon alerted the media today – here are the big names coming to the next Gallifrey One convention:

It’s time for our first guest block announcement for 2017! First, Gallifrey One is delighted to welcome back to Los Angeles our confirmed guests Paul McGann (the Eighth Doctor), Louise Jameson (Leela), William Russell (Ian Chesterton), Katy Manning (Jo Grant), Peter Purves (Steven Taylor), Anneke Wills (Polly), Frazer Hines (Jamie), Daphne Ashbrook (Grace) and 1970s producer Philip Hinchcliffe, as well as guest actors Simon Fisher-Becker (Dorium Maldovar), Prentis Hancock (“The Ribos Operation,” “Planet of the Daleks”) and Michael Troughton (“Last Christmas”), costume designer June Hudson, the voice of the Daleks and Big Finish producer Nicholas Briggs, Dalek operators and writers/actors Nicholas Pegg and Barnaby Edwards, composer Dominic Glynn, Big Finish managing producer Jason Haigh-Ellery, and writers Paul Cornell, Gary Russell, Richard Dinnick, Scott Handcock, David J. Howe, Sam Stone and Tony Lee.

Next, we have a special treat for British TV fans, as we welcome actress Hattie Hayridge — known best as the female Holly in the long-running sci-fi comedy “Red Dwarf” — for her first appearance in L.A.

And that’s not all. It is with great pleasure that we are finally able to welcome one of the last few principal cast members of the classic Doctor Who series we haven’t had before… Lalla Ward (Romana II) joins us for her first and only North American event in 21 years! In conjunction with Ms. Ward’s appearance, we are happy to announce that the beneficiary of Gallifrey One’s 2017 charity auction will be Denville Hall, the UK-based actors’ retirement home for which Ms. Ward is the trustees’ chairperson. We’re thrilled to once again bring our attendees this unique guest experience courtesy our friends at Showmasters Events, who are sponsoring both Ms. Ward and several of our guests listed above.

(10) ENJOY LIFE TO THE HILT. This design-your-own lightsaber system, funded by $1.2M raised on Indiegogo, can now be ordered online. They have shipped over 4,000 to Indiegogo and Kickstarter supporters.

Adaptive Saber Parts are an easy to use modular system that lets anyone construct their very own movie quality custom saber. we have lowered the barrier to entry, now you don’t need expensive machinery, soldering equipment, or years of prop building experience to make your very own custom saber, all you need is your imagination, and Adaptive Saber Parts.

To go along with our ground breaking ASP system, we designed a three dimensional virtual saber builder that allows you to create and modify your custom saber in a digital saber workshop.

 

(11) FIGHTING ‘BOTS. At Future War Stories, “FWS Topics: Miliart Robots and Robotic Soldiers”.

The Near Future of Military Robots

One element of military robots that P.W. Singer raised in his 2009 TED talk was that while America is one of the first to put armed UAVs into the modern battlefield, we do not dominate the field of military robotics. Islamic extremist groups have been using drones, remote controlled explosives with grim effective in Iraq and with off-of-the-shelf hobby drones, more military robots will be accessible to all, even those who want to do harm to the US and her allies. We will see more nations, PMCs, and groups using military robotic systems for surveillance and combat within the next few decades. Nations like the United States, will create more advanced military robots that will be tasked support and combat, unmanning more of modern warfare, downsizing the scale of military organizations. Some warfighters, as with UAV drone pilots today, will never get their boots dusty on foreign soil, but will be engaged in actual warfare. These remote control operators will command battlefield units, in the air, ground, and even sea from thousands of miles away….

(12) LO-TECH FX. The “Melting Toht Candle” is not on my wish list….

melting-toht-candle_2378

If you’ve seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, there’s probably one scene that really sticks in the memory. No not that gigantic boulder tumbling after Indy, nor when he shoots that sword-twirling nutter in the market square, nor even when he has that uncomfortable staring contest with a cobra…

No, we’re talking about when ruthless Gestapo agent Toht gets his gory comeuppance at the end of the film…

  • Celebrate the greatest special-effects death in movie history
  • Wax replica of sadistic Gestapo agent Toht – specs, fedora n’ all
  • Thankfully it melts a lot slower than his face does in the film
  • Doesn’t emit a blood-curdling screech as it burns

(13) POMPEII AND CIRCUMSTANCES. Nicole Hill at B&N Sci-Fit & Fantasy Blog declares “New Pompeii Is a Popcorn-Worthy Summer Thriller”.

Refreshing in its straightforward appeal, Godfrey’s plot rests largely upon the shoulder of Nick Houghton, a down-on-his-luck history scholar who, through mysterious machinations, is offered the job of a lifetime. Novus Particles, one of those monolithic corporations that seem to exist solely to manufacture ethical quandaries, has long mucked about with controversial technology able to transport matter from the past to the present. To varying degrees of success, Novus has brought forward things and people from events at least 30 years in the past. (Time travel, in this world, has its limitations, chiefly in the form of tinkering with the recent past.)

Now, the company has covertly created its crown jewel: a replica Pompeii, populated by residents transported in time moments before their preordained deaths at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. Hapless, brainy Nick has been tagged to take over as the company’s historical adviser, a position designed both to study the displaced culture of Pompeii and to subdue the natives’ unease by maintaining the pitch-perfect authenticity of their surroundings.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Stephen Burridge, Chip Hitchcock, Lisa Goldstein, and Hampus Eckerman for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day ULTRAGOTHA.]

85 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 6/20/16 The Knights Who Say “Pi(xel)”

  1. ::ticky::

    ETA:
    (4) TED WHITE PULPFEST GOH.
    [joke]Even the GOH is white! What happened to diversity! [/joke]

    (7) FORECAST DENIED.
    “…and advises author Hanson to read Hannu Rajshiemi…”
    Psst, it’s Hannu Rajaniemi…

  2. (8) Asymmetrical Warfare — given the (re)publisher of the story and the title being a frequently used slogan in that crowd, I was fully prepared to dislike this story, and was pleasantly surprised. For it to win its category, it seems too slight a story, but I was mildly amused reading it.

  3. FREE SF short stories, available on ALL PLATFORMS:

    STAR REBELS, by indie writers who can spell and punctuate, mostly women.

    Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01H7J5Z38
    Nook: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/star-rebels-c-go…/1123933877
    iBooks: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/star-rebels/id1124640944
    Kobo: https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/star-rebels
    GooglePlay: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Audrey_Faye_Star_Rebels?id=YXpjDAAAQBAJ

    Possibly US only, not sure?

  4. @ Lurkertype: Possibly US only, not sure?

    The Google Play store let me have one and I am in Australia where geoblocking is a way of life.

  5. microtherion on June 20, 2016 at 7:52 pm said
    It’s one of the few stories from last year’s Analogs that I remember reading. It wasn’t bad.

  6. @Camestros Felpaton:

    Asymmetrical Warfare is more entertaining if you imagine the narrator is Patrick from SpongeBob Squarepants.

    To be fair, every story is more entertaining that way.

  7. Ray Radlein on June 21, 2016 at 12:32 am said:

    @Camestros Felpaton:

    Asymmetrical Warfare is more entertaining if you imagine the narrator is Patrick from SpongeBob Squarepants.

    To be fair, every story is more entertaining that way.

    Not entirely true – but the exceptions prove the rule. For example Stranger in a Strange Land is much better with central character’s dialogue spoken in SpongeBob’s voice rather than Patrick’s.

  8. @Camestros Felpaton:

    For example Stranger in a Strange Land is much better with central character’s dialogue spoken in SpongeBob’s voice rather than Patrick’s.

    Hey, I never said that every story was best with Patrick’s voice, only that every story was better.

    Lots of different voices can improve any story: Bernie Sanders’ ALL CAPS rasp, for instance; or Morgan Freeman’s sonorous tones (especially if the story includes phrases like “titty sprinkles,” which achieve true transcendence when voiced by Morgan Freeman).

  9. @RedWombat

    If you are about, I managed top find your bug pics on Twitter and they are great. Tip of the hat from a fellow Pentaxian. I just bought that same macro lens and while I’m managing flowers alright, I’m not doing so well with the insects so far.

    Were those hand held, or do you use a tripod?

  10. @Ray, Camestros: actually, I prefer my narrations performed by THE IMPRESSIVE CLERGYMAN from Princess Bride:

    (I don’t like “listening” to books and that particular narrator discourages any attempts I might mistakenly make)

  11. Re: 13)
    Futuristic Rome or Rome and SF seems to be a trend this summer. Claudia Christian (yes, THAT Claudia Christian) and Morgan Buchanan have a Space Opera/Rome cross out next week called WOLF’S EMPIRE: GLADIATOR.

  12. Re 12) Yeah, that is not a candle going on any wishlist of mine anytime soon.

  13. @lurkertype: US only on Amazon 🙁 but I got around that pesky restriction by simply downloading it on the Kobo site instead. Google Play looks like it should also work for some (most? All?) internationals.

  14. Apologies for digressing a bit, but regarding book covers and art, Penguin Books are doing something a bit different with their reprints of a few books by Richard Dawkins (so science, but not fiction) – individual covers, computer-generated using algorithms that Dawkins described and used to explore evolution:

    Every one unique – how Penguin blended coding and design to revisit Richard Dawkins’ classic texts”

    Play with the code and generate your own creatures

    Buy the books (showing many different examples of the covers)

  15. Seeing as it was the shortest night yesterday, I did another timelapse from the roof, sunset to sunrise.

  16. “It’s time for our first guest block announcement for 2017! First, Gallifrey One is delighted to welcome back to Los Angeles our confirmed guests Paul McGann (the Eighth Doctor), Louise Jameson (Leela), William Russell (Ian Chesterton), Katy Manning (Jo Grant), Peter Purves (Steven Taylor), Anneke Wills (Polly), Frazer Hines (Jamie), Daphne Ashbrook (Grace) and 1970s producer Philip Hinchcliffe, as well as guest actors Simon Fisher-Becker (Dorium Maldovar), Prentis Hancock (“The Ribos Operation,” “Planet of the Daleks”) and Michael Troughton (“Last Christmas”), costume designer June Hudson, the voice of the Daleks and Big Finish producer Nicholas Briggs, Dalek operators and writers/actors Nicholas Pegg and Barnaby Edwards, composer Dominic Glynn, Big Finish managing producer Jason Haigh-Ellery, and writers Paul Cornell, Gary Russell, Richard Dinnick, Scott Handcock, David J. Howe, Sam Stone and Tony Lee.”

    All writers must ride at the back of the paragraph.

  17. @Paul — Congrats on the Tor article!

    And I just got an email from Amazon — I’m getting Kindle store credit as part of the Apple lawsuit settlement. That’ll be gone in 5…4…3…2…

  18. @ Joe H. – I also received an email from Amazon about the credit a few minutes ago and they gave me a pretty good-sized amount for Kindle books. Filers should definitely check their email.

  19. @IanP – I am about! My bug photos are handheld at the moment–I take about a dozen per bug and then pick the one in focus. *grin* Thinking of looking into a monopod–tripod is too slow for my purposes with the bugs, but a monopod I can plant might help a lot.

  20. @RedWombat

    Yeah, you get a lot of missed focus with macro it seems. With flowers I’ve been trying setting the focus manually then moving the camera to try and get the stamens at peak focus. My hands are reasonably steady but there is a limit.

    Of course then a bee comes into view and I’m in totally the wrong setup.

  21. @Ianp @redwombat

    The shallowness of Depth of Field in a macro lens is taking a lot of getting used to, for me, too.

  22. (7)

    I too will generally advise people to read Rajaniemi’s books as well; I thought his whole Sobornost cycle was criminally under-read and under-rated. That any electronic intelligences will be difficult to predict and not nearly as neat and orderly as we think would appear to be a given.

    (8)

    I’m going to have to get nearly as drunk as did last year to push through the Puppy chow, aren’t I?

  23. Something I do when I’m taking photos and steadiness is of the essence (usually in association with a tripod) is use the two-second delay shutter. That way, I’m not moving the camera when the picture is snapped. When I was photographing LP covers that way, the results were dramatic.

    -ly good, that is.

  24. @SRA — Huh, that link does answer most of the questions I had about “Asymmetrical Warfare.” I’d have liked the answers somewhere in the story, though.

  25. Add Kobo to the “sudden credit” list. I don’t see an email from ’em, but I’ve got store credit today that I didn’t have last week…

  26. @Lisa Goldstein

    @SRA — Huh, that link does answer most of the questions I had about “Asymmetrical Warfare.” I’d have liked the answers somewhere in the story, though.

    It seemed to me that those answers were already implicitly there in the narrator’s remarks about “slave races”.

  27. I’ve been setting to maximum manual and then wiggling about for the very smallest bugs–flower flies and the like–but I have to dial the focus back substantially for the bigger ones. Otherwise I’d get like one of the robberfly’s eyeballs in focus and the rest fading out.

    I fear the day I get a mantis–I’m gonna have to practically stand on the roof to get it all in focus.

    Bees are surprisingly hard. I’ve got tons of bees in the garden but they move so fast that getting a good shot has eluded me–I’ve actually done better with my cell phone camera, god help me! Most bugs, once landed, stay put a bit but the bees are working the flowers and constantly in motion. (Ladybugs, same problem.)

  28. @IanP – that is one sweet bee! I’ve found it hard to capture bees as they tend to be “busy as a” and do not want to hold still for my photos!

    @Kip W – I do the same thing regarding the two second delay, also I have to remember that when you click the button, the shutter itself takes another second so don’t click and move before the camera actually takes the picture!

    I am off to find Red Wombat’s bug photos! I do love macro photography even if I am not that great at it heh heh 🙂

  29. And there goes the credit — I filled out my Bison Press collection of Harold Lamb’s adventure stories.

  30. (not that I’ll be getting to them any time soon when my Kindle tells me I have 11+ hours remaining in Seveneves …)

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