Pixel Scroll 7/23/19 The Ballad Of Lost C’Redential

(1) PRESENT AT THE CREATION. Craig Miller distributed flyers for his forthcoming Star Wars memoir at San Diego Comic-Con. The four-page fold-over can be seen at his Facebook page. Here’s the placeholder cover:

(2) HOYT ON THE BUBBLE? A call to delete Wikipedia’s entry for Sarah A. Hoyt is also under consideration: “Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sarah Hoyt”. Some of the supporting arguments are:

  • Of eleven sources on the page, all but one source back to either Archive.org remnants of her old personal website or to her husband’s website.
  • The final source on the page is a podcast.
  • Some of the content appears plagiarized from other websites or promotional materials from the publisher such as book jacket author bio text. The text of the Writing section appears copied verbatim from fan site https://www.risingshadow.net/library/author/567-sarah-a-hoyt.

(3) LAUGHTER ON THE RIGHT. Meanwhile, today’s post at According To Hoyt comes from guest blogger Frank J. Fleming who offers “Frank Tips for Writing Satire”.

…Just make sure you’re making fun of someone your audience doesn’t like, because if you make fun of someone they do like, that’s what you call “bad satire.” And then you’re going to get mobbed and probably doxxed. A good strategy for that is to own multiple houses.

Ha, you idiots; I wasn’t even at that house you doxxed! That was a burner home!

(4) THE ROCKET RETURNS. The Mysterious Bookshop is offering a new edition of Anthony Boucher’s legendary 1942 novel Rocket to the Morgue, which features characters based on his science fiction writing contemporaries. New introduction by F. Paul Wilson.

Legendary science fiction author Fowler Faulkes may be dead, but his creation, the iconic Dr. Derringer, lives on in popular culture. Or, at least, the character would live on if not for Faulkes’s predatory and greedy heir Hilary, who, during his time as the inflexible guardian of the estate, has created countless enemies in the relatively small community of writers of the genre. So when he is stabbed nearly to death in a room with only one door, which nobody was seen entering or exiting, Foulkes suspects a writer. Fearing that the assailant will return, he asks for police protection, and when more potentially-fatal encounters follow, it becomes clear to Detective Terry Marshall and his assistant, the inquisitive nun, Sister Ursula, that death awaits Mr. Foulkes around every corner. Now, they’ll have to work overtime to thwart the would-be murderer?a task that requires a deep dive into the strange, idiosyncratic world of science fiction in its early days.

With characters based heavily on Anthony Boucher’s friends at the Manana Literary Society, including Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and Jack Parsons, Rocket to the Morgue is both a classic locked room mystery and an enduring portrait of a real-life writing community. Reprinted for the first time in over thirty years, the book is a must-read for fans of mysteries and science fiction alike.

(5) ALIEN ARRIVAL. “Nnedi Okorafor Tells an Immigrant Story in ‘LaGuardia,’ the Most Subversive Graphic Novel at Comic-Con”The Daily Beast has a Q&A with the author.

“Issues of immigration, issues of identity, all these things, they’re not new, and they’ve been there for a long time,” she says. 

Okorafor talks and writes from experience. The graphic novel introduces Future through an extended scene at LaGuardia, where she queues up for screening along with aliens of all shapes and sizes, as well as a little white girl who yanks on her locks. At the checkpoint, she is pulled aside for a second screening by a security guard who asks invasive questions about whether the baby in her belly is human. The confrontation is ripped straight from an incident in 2009, when a TSA officer at LaGuardia took Okorafor to a private room to squeeze each of her four-and-a-half-foot locks for hidden contraband. Preoccupied with her hair, the officer missed the bottle of pepper spray that Okorafor had forgotten to remove from her bag. In LaGuardia, that misdirection allows the character to carry the alien through, undetected.

As an author, Okorafor travels a lot, and it’s become clear to her that airport and border crossings are more about control than safety. 

“It’s the space between, a place of contention, a place of displacement, a place of fear, a place of identity,” she says. “It’s where you become very aware of all the things that you are and what they mean, in the context of where you are. And depending on who you are, that place can feel very hot or it can feel very chill.”

(6) SPEAKING UP. Terry Brooks breaks his silence on Trump.

As you know, I do not use my connection to you on the web page or Facebook/Twitter to move outside the subjects of books, reading and writing.  I am going to break that rule now.

For three years, I have kept quiet about Donald Trump and his effort to be President of the U.S.  I am not a political activist.  I am a  writer of fantasy adventure books, and while I have opinions about politics and people involved in politics, I pretty much keep them to myself.  My writing speaks for me.  My writing is my voice to the larger world.  But a few weeks back I listened to a young journalist speak about the importance of standing up for what you believe if you love your country.  He said that if you had a platform, you had an obligation to use it.  He said if you have a voice, you needed to use it.  He said, finally, that writers need to write about what matters – in some form, in some way, at some time…

Brooks speaks out at length.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born July 23, 1888 Raymond Chandler. He of the hard boiled detective genre is listed by ISFDB as doing some stories of a genre nature, to be exact ”The Bronze Door”, “The King In Yellow”, “Professor Bingo’s Snuff” and “English Summer: A Gothic Romance”. I’ve neither heard it nor read these. So who here has? “The King In Yellow” is in the Raymond Chandler megapack I just downloaded from iBooks so I will read it soon. (Died 1959.)
  • Born July 23, 1910 Kendell Foster Crossen. He was the creator and writer of stories in the Forties about the Green Lama and the Milo March detective and spy novels. Though the latter is not genre, the former is as the Green Lama had supernatural powers.  In the Fifties he began writing SF for Thrilling Wonder Stories, including the Manning Draco stories about an intergalactic insurance investigator, four of which are collected in Once Upon a Star: A Novel of the Future. None of his SF is on iBooks or Kindle alas. (Died 1981.)
  • Born July 23, 1914 Virgil Finlay. Castle of Frankenstein calls him “part of the pulp magazine history … one of the foremost contributors of original and imaginative art work for the most memorable science fiction and fantasy publications of our time.”  His best-known covers are for Amazing Stories  and Weird Tales. “Roads,” a novella by Seabury Quinn, published in the January 1938 Weird Tales, and featuring a cover and interior illustrations by him, was originally published in a extremely limited numbers by Arkham House in 1948. It’s now available on iBooks though not Kindle. (Died 1971.)
  • Born July 23, 1923 Cyril M. Kornbluth. I certainly read and liked The Space Merchants and The Syndic which are the two I remember reading these years on. Given his very early death, he wrote an impressive amount of fiction, particularly short fiction. Wildside Press has all of his fiction available on iBooks and Kindle in a single publication. (Died 1958.)
  • Born July 23, 1947 Gardner Dozois. He was the founding editor of The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies (and was editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction for twenty years, getting multiple Hugo and Locus Awards for those works. His writing won the Nebula Award for best short story twice, once for “The Peacemaker”, and again for “Morning Child”. Being Gardner Dozois: An Interview by Michael Swanwick covers everything he wrote to that date. (Died 2018.)
  • Born July 23, 1956 Kate Thompson, 63. Author of the New Policeman trilogy which I highly recommend. Though written for children, you’ll find it quite readable. And her Down Among the Gods is a unique take on a Greek myths made intimate. 
  • Born July 23, 1970 Charisma Carpenter, 49. She’s best remembered as Cordelia Chase on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. She was also Kyra on Charmed and Kendall Casablancas on Veronica Mars.  She was Sydney Hart in Mail Order Monster and Beth Sullivan in the direct to video Josh Kirby… Time Warrior! Franchise. 
  • Born July 23, 1982 Tom Mison, 37. Ichabod Crane, the lead on Sleepy Hollow. Ok did anyone here actually watch it?  I had the best of intentions but never caught it. The only time I saw him was he showed up on Bones in a cross-over episode. He’s The Mime in the forthcoming Watchmen series
  • Born July 23, 1989 Daniel Radcliffe, 30. Harry Potter of course. (Loved the films, didn’t read the novels.) Also, Victor Frankenstein’s assistant Igor in Victor Frankenstein, Ignatius Perrish in Horns, a horror film, and Rosencrantz in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the Old Vic in London.  

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Argyle Sweater has a novel idea – at least, Rich Horton says, “I’d read the novel in which the Salem witches did this!”

(9) COVER ARTIST. SYFY Wire says the Cats movie trailer is Taylor-made for this: “The Cats trailer gets a jellicle upgrade when set to RuPaul’s Kitty Girl”.

https://twitter.com/N8W0LF/status/1152009567879852032

(10) GOBLIN UP PUBLICITY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Futurism: “Inventor Set to Fly Across the English Channel on His Hoverboard”.

Exactly 110 years ago this Thursday, French inventor Louis Blériot became the first person to fly an airplane across the English Channel, the body of water separating the United Kingdom and France.

To honor the achievement, another French inventor plans to make his own cross-Channel trip this week — but he’ll attempt to do so while riding a flying hoverboard that looks strangely similar to the one used by Spider-Man villain the Green Goblin.

The trip will require a mid-Channel refueling, though inventor Franky Zapata is said to be considering doing this while hovering above a ship rather than landing on one so he can claim a non-stop flight. In an interview with The Guardian, Zapata (who recently overflew this year’s Bastille Day parade) laid out his plans to make the attempt to cross from Calais to Dover. Contrasting the Bastille Day flight to the Channel crossing, he is quoted as saying, “I used 3% of the machine’s capabilities [on Bastille Day] and I’ll need 99% for the Channel. It won’t be easy at all and I reckon I’ve a 30% chance of succeeding.”

(11) AT LONG LAST. Charon Dunn has a great blog post about “Meeting My Brother For The First Time”. They discovered each other last year after submitting DNA to the 23andMe testing service.

Things I have in common with my biological half-brother Rick that I don’t share with my adopted family:

Candy. We stopped by the store and I grabbed an Almond Joy, because I like to keep an emergency snack around my hotel room in case of sudden hunger. Apparently this is also Rick’s preferred candy bar.

Tattoos. My adopted family did not approve of them. Everyone in my biological family has them; I personally have six. At one point Rick and I were cruising around Hollywood looking for a tattoo parlor to give us matching brother-sister ink, but we couldn’t find anybody good so abandoned that idea for now.

Fearlessness. I flew down on one of those small commuter jets, and Katrina asked if it was scary, and I didn’t know what to say. I have a twisted scariness threshold and so does Rick. We both enjoy terrifying experiences like horror films and we both confessed we’d love to see a ghost or monster or alien or sasquatch or chupacabra or other similar frightening thing. He’s more outdoorsy and used to do crazy things involving motorcycles and championship fights. I’m the inside type and get my kicks from litigation deadlines and murdering my fellow video game players (and writing action-adventure stories, that too). We are a clan of warriors and although we occasionally ripple with anxiety, we also tend to have rock steady nerves….

(12) BUT FRESH IS BEST. Science says “Canned laughter ‘makes jokes funnier'”.

Adding canned laughter to the punchline of jokes – even “dad jokes” – makes them funnier, according to a study.

The effect was even bigger if real, spontaneous giggles accompanied a gag, the University College London scientists said.

They tried out 40 different jokes, ranging from the groan-worthy to the hilarious, on 72 volunteers.

The findings, in Current Biology, suggest laughter might be contagious or give others permission to also laugh.

Jokes from the study included:

…Why can’t you give Elsa a balloon? Because she will “Let It Go”.

(13) DEVELOPING ARTEMIS. “Nasa Moon lander vision takes shape” – BBC has the story.

Nasa has outlined more details of its plans for a landing craft that will take humans to the lunar surface.

The plans call for an initial version of the lander to be built for landing on the Moon by 2024; it would then be followed by an enhanced version.

The news comes as work was completed on the Orion spacecraft that will fly around the Moon in 2021.

This mission, called Artemis-1, will pave the way for the first attempt to land since 1972.

The presolicitation notice to industry calls for proposals on an initial lander design capable of carrying two people down to the Moon’s South Pole in 2024.

Companies will then be given the option to develop an enhanced lander capable of carrying four astronauts to the lunar surface. It would also be able to stay for longer, including through the two-week lunar night.

This lander would support Nasa’s plans for a “sustainable” return to the Moon that would eventually involve the construction of an outpost on the surface.

(14) WITHDRAWING THE DEPOSITS. BBC reports “‘Important’ Iron Age settlement found at Warboys dig”.

Iron Age roundhouses, Roman burials and Saxon pottery have been discovered in a “hugely important and hitherto unknown settlement”.

The seven month-long dig in Warboys in Cambridgeshire also uncovered “a rare example” of “early Saxon occupation mingled with the latest Roman remains”.

Archaeologist Stephen Macaulay said: “We almost never find actual physical evidence of this.”

The settlement reverted to agricultural use after the 7th Century.

(15) SUPERMAN’S BREAKFAST. Here’s a 3-minute video with “uncut footage of George Reeves directing test of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes commercial at his home”

(16) MORE SPIES. It’s not our Tor — “Russian intelligence ‘targets Tor anonymous browser'”.

Hackers who breached a Russian intelligence contractor found that it had been trying to crack the Tor browser and been working on other secret projects, the BBC has learned.

Tor is an anonymous web browser, used by those wishing to access the dark web and avoid government surveillance.

It is very popular in Russia.

The hackers stole some 7.5 terabytes of data from SyTech, a contractor for Russia’s Federal Security Service FSB, and included details of its projects.

It is not clear how successful the attempt to crack the anonymous browser was, as the method relied heavily on luck to match Tor users to their activity.

Hackers from a group known as 0v1ru$ gained access to the company on 13 July, and replaced its internet homepage with a smug smiley face often used by internet trolls.

(17) HISTORIC AIRCRAFT. The Space Review remembers “The big white bird: the flights of Helo 66”.

…On the Midway’s deck sits a white Sea King helicopter painted with the famous 66 squadron number and painted on the nose of the helicopter are the silhouettes of five Apollo capsules. But walk around to the other side of the helicopter and you’ll see the number “68” painted on the other side.

If you head about 800 kilometers to the northwest, to Pier Three at the former Alameda Naval Air Station and go aboard the USS Hornet Museum, on her aft flight deck you will see another Sea King, also painted with a large “66” on the side of her fuselage. The Sea King on display on the Hornet was used in the movie Apollo 13, which is why it retains its markings from the helicopter carrier Iwo Jima, which was the recovery ship for that mission. The helicopter was obtained from the Navy and restored off-site before being hoisted aboard the Hornet. The museum has several other helicopters that are painted like the recovery aircraft for the American space program, including a Piesecki HUP-25 Retriever of the type used to ferry John Glenn from the USS Noa to the carrier USS Randolph following his Friendship 7 orbital flight in 1962, and a UH-34 Seahorse of the type used for the Gemini and Apollo recoveries.

The real Helo 66, the one in the Apollo 11 documentary and all of those famous Apollo era photographs, crashed into the ocean off the coast of San Diego in 1975. That helicopter, BuNo 152711, was lost in a tragic accident during training to hunt Soviet submarines.

(18) A LITTLE MISTAKE. I have Irish ancestors – can you tell? “Irish moon landing stamp spells ‘moon’ wrong” reports the BBC.

The Republic of Ireland’s postal service has apologised for spelling “the moon” wrong in Irish on its new commemorative stamps celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo landing.

The postal service, known as An Post, launched the stamps last week.

Four astronauts are featured on the stamps with Irish ancestry.

The Irish word for moon is “gealach”. But the stamp accidently spelled it “gaelach”, which means being Gaelic, Irish or relating to the Scottish Highlands.

Instead of reading “The 50th Anniversary of the First Moon Landing”, it now reads “50th Anniversary of the First Landing on the Irish”.

[Thanks to JJ, Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Martin Morse Wooster, rcade, Mike Kennedy, Rich Horton, Carl Slaughter, Contrarius, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]


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40 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 7/23/19 The Ballad Of Lost C’Redential

  1. 4
    I have an ancient pb edition of this. It’s still worth reading, at least if you’re a fan, for all the stuff mundanes will miss.

  2. 2) HOYT ON THE BUBBLE?

    Actually she’s hardly on the bubble as the discussion makes abundantly clear. Her page will not be deleted and will be a much better page for the attempt to delete being made.

  3. The first season of Sleepy Hollow was awesome. The leads had great chemistry together, the story worked, the “dealing with the future” parts successfully avoided the cringeworthy trap. It had a few flaws, but what doesn’t? And then the showrunners took every single thing about it that worked and changed it, and took every one of the flaws and emphasized them.

  4. 6) to paraphrase Howard:
    After the Big Drop, the ‘pocalypse, the North American tribes sat around their campfires to tell tales. Often, they will tell about the old, Rich Americans. One tale tells of the Americans electing their last President, Dumpy the Menace, and their memory became a bitter tree.

  5. @6: and now the collection of mini-Trumps is increased by one. A layered article on the BBC quoted Boris Johnson’s Eton housemaster to the effect that the teenage Johnson gave the impression that it was churlish of the rest of the school to expect him to be bound by the same standards of behavior as they were.

    @7: Note that The Space Merchants is one of several collaborations; Kornbluth did relatively little solo work at novel length. (My favorite of the collaborations is Gladiator-at-Law, but it’s not to everyone’s taste; The Syndic is fun as it leaves us asking whether we’d be better off if we’d been taken over by overt criminals rather than covert, but it has usual attitudes leading up to at least one potential trigger.) Also, it is unclear from what I can find on their site that Wildside has all of his fiction; NESFA’s complete-short-work doorstop is about 60 items, where Wildside’s “34th Megapack” says it’s the most complete e-book but lists only ~20 titles.

    @7bis: AFAICT, An Interview with Gardner Dozois is all non-fiction; Strange Days has some non-fiction but is majority fiction. (hardcopy from NESFA, ebook from Baen.)

    @P J Evans (re @4): IME, one has to be not (just?) a fan but someone specifically versed in the writers’ scene of the time, to get the references, which lean on personalities with disguised names more than recognizable work.

  6. (12) They needed to do a study to figure this out? TV and radio producers have known this for about 70 years.

  7. (18) M-O-O-N, that spells Moon. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

    (11) Thanks for the encouragement over an extremely interesting experience. My brother is both my polar opposite and my twin, and we were born only four days apart, because dad was a busy guy. I’m in touch with a few more bio-kin but this is the first time I’ve met one in person. Now you know why I like to write about the subtle differences between clone personalities.

  8. 8) That Argyle Sweater is spreading a bit of historical non-fact: it has a fellow with a torch, and a woman bound to a stake. In fact not a single victim of the Salem Witch Trials was burned. Yes, it’s convenient shorthand, but would it have been so hard to draw a gallows instead?

  9. I always get Kornbluth mixed up with Kuttner. Both funny, both collaborated a lot, both had last names that started with K….

    Like Chip Hitchcock, I also thought Gladiator-at-Law was excellent, though I haven’t read it recently enough to know whether the suck fairy has visited. But Space Merchants is a genuine masterpiece, IMO, despite its pulpy outer coating. And that I have re-read somewhat recently.

  10. Joe H. — I align with you again in really enjoying Virgil Finlay’s work. Thanks for linking to these, which I was unfamiliar with.

  11. David Goldfarb says That Argyle Sweater is spreading a bit of historical non-fact: it has a fellow with a torch, and a woman bound to a stake. In fact not a single victim of the Salem Witch Trials was burned. Yes, it’s convenient shorthand, but would it have been so hard to draw a gallows instead?

    It’s seriously doubtful the creator of the Argyle Sweater has a clue about what really happened at the Salem Witch Craft trials as nearly no one else now does. Everyone now just assumes, as that’s the popular belief, that burnings took place. So it’s not a matter of artistic ineptness at all, but cultural assumptions writ large.

  12. You can go to Salem; all the museums and re-enactments will be happy to inform you that folks were hung or pressed, but not burnt.

    (Although I don’t recommend doing so more than once as the amateur theatre and amateur display work is really amateur. Better yet, don’t live somewhere that compels you to accompany visitors who insist on spending good money to attend events celebrating the financial exploitation of college students. Even better yet, just go to the House of Seven Gables and learn all about the prevalence of green interior paint. Me – I’ll be waiting in the car.)

  13. Regarding the Salem witch trials, may I recommend a non-genre, non-fiction, heavily researched… or at least heavily footnoted… book:

    Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials by Marilynne K. Roach

    I found it a fascinating read, and it does a good job of putting the witch hysteria into the cultural context of the time. There is a certain amount of light fictionalization in the form of first-person narration, but it is supported by journal entries by the women involved. This is not a dry historical work.

  14. I always get Kornbluth mixed up with Kuttner. Both funny, both collaborated a lot, both had last names that started with K….

    Both died young in the winter of 1958.

  15. Raymond Chandler’s ”The Bronze Door” and “Professor Bingo’s Snuff” are fantasy stories which ran in Unknown. Both are unmemorable, save for being written by Chandler. They’re not bad, just unremarkable.

    “The King In Yellow,” on the other hand, is pure hardboiled, with no fantasy elements. It’s about a hotel detective encountering a trumpeter nicknamed “The King in Yellow,” and the story makes passing reference to the story of the same name by Robert W. Chambers, but there’s no relation save that Chandler clearly admired the previous tale.

    It always reminds me of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op reading M.P.Shiel’s “The Lord of the Sea” in his classic story, “The Gutting of Couffignal.” I always enjoy writers giving a bravo to other writers in their own work.

  16. (2) What seems to have happened is that someone (maybe at Baen) gave a whole bunch of writers advice on how to use Wikipedia to help promote their work. Someone at Wikipedia noticed that blatant self-promotion was a criterion for “speedy deletion” (delete first and ask questions later) and simply speed-deleted the lot of them. (Even though the criteria go on to say that for notable subjects, it’s much better to just fix the site.) People are now going through and fixing them up–minus the promotional text and links.

    As always, the authors in question are using this to attract attention to themselves and their books. And note that their “friends” speaking up on their behalf don’t miss the opportunity to promote their own works.

    This is the dark underside of self-publishing: the unending need to promote yourself in order to get enough sales to stay alive. Couple that with the need to publish at least four novels a year (claimed by someone on SFWA), and being a self-published author starts to look like the worst job ever.

  17. About #1: When I received publicity stills for Star Wars back in the mid-1970s when I was Production Manager on the trade magazine Toy & Hobby World, they came without the special effects. So to create blaster beams, I added two white lines of LetraTape.

    Another author worthy of being listed in your birthdays: A. Hyatt Verrill, 7/23/1871.

  18. @bill re @12: producers have believed this; there is a difference, although believers often deny it. And the infectiveness of laughter was not believed just by media producers; when I took the standard tour of the National Theatre (London), the guide told us that directors believed packed audiences were desirable for comedy.

  19. Russell Letson on July 24, 2019 at 7:57 am said:

    Maybe the c’redential is hiding behind the c’redenza.

    See my title from last Aug 31

  20. (14) The only “war boys” I ever encountered were in Mad Max, so “Warboys dig” had me anticipating a gaggle of spray paint huffing archeologists frantically attacking the ground with any sharp implements at their disposal.

  21. David Gustafson says “The King In Yellow,” on the other hand, is pure hardboiled, with no fantasy elements. It’s about a hotel detective encountering a trumpeter nicknamed “The King in Yellow,” and the story makes passing reference to the story of the same name by Robert W. Chambers, but there’s no relation save that Chandler clearly admired the previous tale.

    This confirms a feeling I’ve I had for sometime that that ISFDB has an overly expansive definition of genre. I’ve works there that I’ve read which clearly were not Genre being listed as such. Anyone here know how they decided on what gets listed?

  22. Very sad to hear about Rutger! I always had a very soft spot in my heart for him.

    🙁

    Born July 23, 1888 — Raymond Chandler. He of the hard boiled deceive genre

    This typo made me smile, because the sentence actually works pretty well either way. But surely that’s meant to say “hard-boiled detective genre”?

  23. 18) “We didn’t land on the moon. The moon landed on us.”
    — if Malcolm X worked for the Irish post office

  24. Or

    “I’ve scrolled pixels you people wouldn’t believe.”

    “Credentials asleep on the shoulder of John Scalzi.”

    The monologue has its own entry in wikipedia.

  25. Following up on my previous comment on the topic, posts on the facebook page of Zanda Myrande (Zander Nyrond) are now reporting that she has been taken off the ventilator and pronounced dead. (If you missed my previous post, head trauma from an accidental fall resulting in intracranial bleeding.) She was a prominent and beloved UK filker and I am inadequate to the task of providing an obituary for this site. A two-time Pegasus award winner and an inspiring force in some of the more interesting crowd-sourced multi-contributor British filk…projects?…movements? Here are links at Fancyclopedia and the Pegasus Award website. Note that these entries are not up to date with regard to Zanda’s gender. (My incomplete and possibly-mistaken understanding is that Zanda’s transition has only been public in certain online spaces and in certain social circles. So I apologize for any errors or misinformation included here. This is why I’m the wrong person to be writing this.)

  26. @Cat Eldridge: This confirms a feeling I’ve I had for sometime that that ISFDB has an overly expansive definition of genre. I’ve works there that I’ve read which clearly were not Genre being listed as such. Anyone here know how they decided on what gets listed?

    I’d be inclined to put that down to simple mistakes (e.g. possibly just confusing this story with the other “The King in Yellow”), and/or someone making a bad submission that just escaped notice. Other Chandler entries mentioned in the quote, like “Professor Bingo’s Snuff”, are more clearly within their (not all that expansive, IMO) genre guidelines.

  27. Contrarius asks This typo made me smile, because the sentence actually works pretty well either way. But surely that’s meant to say “hard-boiled detective genre”?

    As I’ve got a brain that sometimes overlooks obvious goofs, I plead guilty to not noticing that mistake. Mind you I oft times write these when I can’t sleep, so full alertness may not be really there…

  28. It’s been a strange few days. I’m now missing a small piece of my ear, snipped off by a dermatologist. She said she’ll send it for testing, but it’s unlikely to be cancer.

    (4) Needs an ebook edition. Seriously.

  29. @Greg Hullender: interesting but not conclusive; bot only does “science fiction” have a minimal definition and “fantasy” none at all, but it’s not clear how many entries ever actually get read by someone with the power to send them off, or even the interest to protest to the referees. How many entries are there in total, and how many people who are willing to dig through ancient (and often hard-to-find) text to determine whether it’s genre, rather than just saying “The entry’s editor sounds sane; imprimatur“? It looks like a moderator has to bless each entry (I think), but there are also lines favoring inclusiveness (except for technothriller-type works — sounds like somebody wanted to exclude The Hunt for Red October, but I see it’s in).

    @Heather Rose Jones (wrt gender). the Bandcamp page you pointed to has a sidebar “Zanda Myrande is still recovering from the trauma of being Zander Nyrond for several decades. She has only come out online at this point” — I’m not sure why someone thought that online was somehow less than public, but I’ve seen bits and pieces of enough transitions that I don’t try to make them fit any pattern. I hadn’t heard of her work and was baffled by “Sam’s Song” (I suspect it refers to media I haven’t followed), but she sounded like a capable musician.

    @Lis Carey: in your ear?!? Here’s hoping it turns out to be nothing — but I’m curious (if you’re willing to talk) about what/how they thought it was.

  30. @Chip–Yeah, my ear. I had a something on it that hurt whenever touched, and in a spot where I couldn’t quite manage to get a good look at it. After several weeks was clearly not healing, which pretty much ruled out my small store of theories. I had to see the nurse practitioner anyway, so I asked her, and she said, let’s treat it like an infected cut and see if that works. If not, we’ll send you to a dermatologist. Well, it didn’t work, and when next in the doctor looked at it and said, “That could be early skin cancer. Go see this dermatologist.”

    When the dermatologist look at it, and removed it, she said probably not cancer. Inflamed cartilage, and probably that’s all. But she definitely wanted to send it for test, to be sure, and I await the final verdict.

    Not really worried, because the dermatologist isn’t, but I’ll know for sure pretty soon.

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