(0) What’s Daniel Dern’s title a reference to? Some commercials that aired before many of you were born.
(1) COLONIZE OR QUARANTINE? Pilita Clark, the Financial Times environment correspondent, complains “Elon Musk’s inter-planetary fantasy spells danger for Mars”. (This link goes straight to a paywall, but via Google I found a way around.)
What is troubling is that he (Musk) seems to think of Mars mush as early European explorers viewed Africa and the Americas, as places to be colonised regardless of the consequences.
Mars is in a pristine state and experts say it should stay that way if we are to find proof of past or present life there. Plonking a city of 1m humans on it would wreak havoc with such efforts, according to veteran space scientists such as Andrew Coates of University College London, whois working on the ExoMars rover due to launch in 2020.
Prof Coates says the big global dust storm on Mars could carry specks of terrestrial matter across the planet that scientists could mistake for evidence of Martian life. He also worries about Mr Musk’s breezy attitude to the brutally cold weather on Mars, where temperatures average minus 63C.
(2) THE BREW THAT MADE KENTUCKY FAMOUS. We’ve mentioned Wil Wheaton’s beer before. Here’s this year’s edition of “Drew Curtis / Wil Wheaton / Greg Koch Stone Farking Wheaton w00tstout“.
COLLABORATORS
Drew Curtis, Fark.com Creator & Patent Troll Killer
Wil Wheaton, Actor & Web Celeb
Greg Koch, CEO & Co-founder, Stone Brewing
It’s been four years since this otherworldly stout burst out of our collective proverbial chests. Four years since the primally viscous first release ooze-snaked across the galaxy. This specialty imperial stout draws its huge flavor from wheat (that’s Wil, natch), pecans and bourbon barrels (two homages to Drew’s home of Kentucky) and Greg’s lifelong quest for pushing the limits of “why the hell not?” to make bigger, bolder beers. The result is a mind-blowing amalgamation of intense yet smooth flavors, perfect for a warm summer evening, a cozy winter’s night or the approaching destruction of the entire human race (be it externally or internally inflicted).
For this year’s bottle art, we were thrilled to entrust the task to heralded comic book writer and artist Walt Simonson. He was gracious enough to work with us in exchange for our donation to The Hero Initiative, a charity organization that provides retirement funds for golden-age comic book artists.
(3) MARVEL’S LIVESTREAM FROM SDCC. Marvel Entertainment will air the action from their booth at Comic-Con starting Thursday, July 20.
Hosted by TWHIP! The Big Marvel Show’s Ryan Penagos and Lorraine Cink, and Marvel Gaming host Jessica Brohard, viewers will be able to watch booth events with their favorite Marvel comic, television and movie talent, hear panel recaps from special guests, and learn about all the fun surprises happening on the convention floor, from exclusive merchandise to special signings. Join in on the fun by visiting www.marvel.com/SDCC2017 or Marvel’s YouTube channel.
- Thursday, July 20: 11:00 a.m. PT/1:00 p.m. ET – 5:00 p.m. PT/8:00 p.m. ET
- Friday, July 21: 11:00 a.m. PT/1:00 p.m. ET – 5:00 p.m. PT/8:00 p.m. ET
- Saturday, July 22: 11:00 a.m. PT/1:00 p.m. ET – 5:00 p.m. PT/8:00 p.m. ET
- Sunday, July 23: 11:00 a.m. PT/1:00 p.m. ET – 3:00 p.m. PT/6:00 p.m. ET
(4) FROG FURY. The New York Times covers the brawl: “Kermit the Frog Performer and Disney Spar Over an Ugly ‘Muppet’ Firing”.
“This is my life’s work,” said Mr. Whitmire, 58, who lives in the Atlanta area. “The only thing I’ve done my whole adult life, and it’s just been taken away from me. I just couldn’t understand why we couldn’t resolve this.”
Disney, which acquired the Muppets in 2004 from the Jim Henson Company, painted a wholly different picture, portraying Mr. Whitmire as hostile to co-workers and overly difficult in contract negotiations. Members of the Henson family said they supported the dismissal as well.
… Henson’s family, which still runs the Jim Henson Company, chose Mr. Whitmire to replace Henson as Kermit in 1990 after Henson unexpectedly died of pneumonia at the age of 53. Some of those same family members say they supported the decision to replace Mr. Whitmire, though they are no longer involved with the Muppets.
“He played brinkmanship very aggressively in contract negotiations,” Lisa Henson, president of the Jim Henson Company, and Jim Henson’s daughter, said in a telephone interview.
Ms. Henson said Mr. Whitmire was adamantly opposed to having an understudy for his role, which presented problems when it came to what she called “B-level performances, such as a ribbon-cutting.” She said he was unwilling to appear on some of these occasions but also refused to develop an understudy and that he “blackballed young performers” by refusing to appear on the show with them.
Brian Henson, the company’s chairman and Jim Henson’s son, said that while Mr. Whitmire’s Kermit was “sometimes excellent, and always pretty good,” things changed when he was off set.
“He’d send emails and letters attacking everyone, attacking the writing and attacking the director,” he said.
Whitmire, meanwhile, has continued to characterize himself as indispensable in posts at Muppet Pundit, such as — “The Muppet Performers are not Interchangeable”.
The point is that there is so much vital and significant knowledge that was gained by the dwindling few of us who consistently stood next to Jim. From his characters to his methods and philosophies, it’s stuff you can never fully intuit from watching the Muppets. I know that to be true because I, too, was a completely obsessive Muppet fan with preconceived notions of my own that had to be unlearned when Jim hired me in 1978.
I approach The Muppets as a lineage tradition. For the inside knowledge-base steeped in its origins to survive and be passed down, there has to be a line of transmission, or you had to be there. For the Post-Jim performers to really understand enough about the Muppets to carry on the lineage they need to continue to be around the core performers Jim mentored as long as any of those people are willing and able to share.
None of this is a value judgement of any individual, it is a pointing out of the value of historical perspective so long as that perspective is used progressively. Having had the opportunity to spend the last 27 years cultivating knowledge of Jim along with feeling his presence through Kermit, I find myself at a place where evolving Jim’s vision has begun coming from a deep empathetic connection to him.
So, I see my most important task as providing a taste of the atmosphere created by Jim Henson to those Post-Jim core performers who will never otherwise come by it. My hope was to install it directly into their hearts and minds so that they could, in turn, be inspired to do the same for the next generation of performers instead of the characters becoming stale copies of their former selves. But, as I look around at what is presently transpiring it’s clear to me that the job is far from done.
(5) NO SH*T! Eliot Peper of Harvard Business Review tells “Why Business Leaders Need to Read More Science Fiction”.
At the end of the 19th century, New York City stank. One hundred fifty thousand horses ferried people and goods through the streets of Manhattan, producing 45,000 tons — tons! — of manure a month. It piled up on streets and in vacant lots, and in 1898 urban planners convened from around the world to brainstorm solutions to the impending crisis. They failed to come up with any, unable to imagine horseless transportation.
Fourteen years later, cars outnumbered horses in New York, and visions of manure dystopia were forgotten.
If 19th-century urban planners had had access to big data, machine learning techniques, and modern management theory, these tools would not have helped them. They simply would have confirmed their existing concerns. Extrapolating from past trends is useful but limiting in a world of accelerating technological change.
Science fiction can help. Maybe you associate it with spaceships and aliens, but science fiction offers more than escapism. By presenting plausible alternative realities, science fiction stories empower us to confront not just what we think but also how we think and why we think it. They reveal how fragile the status quo is, and how malleable the future can be…..
Science fiction isn’t useful because it’s predictive. It’s useful because it reframes our perspective on the world. Like international travel or meditation, it creates space for us to question our assumptions. Assumptions locked top 19th-century minds into believing that cities were doomed to drown in horse manure. Assumptions toppled Kodak despite the fact that its engineers built the first digital camera in 1975. Assumptions are a luxury true leaders can’t afford.
(6) FOR SOME VALUES OF OVERDUE. John Ostrander reminisces about a career spent pushing deadlines in “The Digital Dog Ate My Homework. Honest.”
In my earliest days as a pro writer, I did everything on typewriter (first manual and then electric; rumors that I chiseled them on stone tablets are just mean). I didn’t have a computer until later and, even when I did, some companies (including DC) were not equipped to receive them electronically. So that meant printing them up on my dot-matrix printer and then rushing them off to FedEx for overnight delivery.
Unless you called in your package by a certain time, usually much earlier than you had the work done, you had to take the package to the nearest FedEx office. If you didn’t hit the office by closing time (usually around 6 PM), you had to make the Midnight Run to the main FedEx office out by the largest airport around. More than once, Kim was the driver while I finished collating the pages, stuffing them in the envelope, and addressing the delivery slip. Let me tell you, Speed Racer had nothing on Kim. She’d run stoplights and take stop signs as suggestions to be ignored. Often, we’d meet other local freelancers also making the death defying Midnight Run. It almost got to be a club.
(7) TODAY IN HISTORY
- July 18, 1986 – Aliens burst into theaters.
- July 18, 2001 – Jurassic Park III opened.
- July 18, 2008 — The Dark Knight, the fifth film in the big-screen Batman series, opens in theaters around the United States.
(8) EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE. At Fantasy Literature, Bill Capossere and Tadiana Jones each review Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us by Sam Kean. Capossere begins:
Informative, witty, vivid, often compelling, sometimes juvenile, knowledgeable, clear, and written throughout with verve and panache via what feels like a wholly singular voice, Sam Kean’s Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us (2017) is what every non-fiction book should aspire to. It’s been a while since I’ve so enjoyed a work of non-fiction so thoroughly and consistently.
Kean divides his exploration of air into three large sections, the first dealing with the origin of our current atmosphere, one of many our planet (if not humanity) has seen….
Jones is just as enthusiastic:
Kean has a vivid and engaging style of writing, with a wry sense of humor, which elevates Caesar’s Last Breath far above most pop science books. Gas molecules are described as feral, oxygen as a madman, our moon as an albatross (as compared to the gnats that circle most other mooned planets), and gravity as “that eternal meddler” that won’t abide two planets in the same neighborhood. I learned about the Big Thwack (when a hypothetical planet called Theia smashed into our earth, vaporizing itself and eventually reforming into our moon), the Oxygen Catastrophe of 2,000,000,000 BC, and the mushroom cloud-shaped cakes baked during the heady days of the late 1940s when nuclear blasts didn’t really seem all that dangerous.
(9) INSIDE BASEBALL. Jennifer Brozek shared “10 Things I Learned While I Was A Director-At-Large for SFWA” at the SFWA Blog.
6: Authors, even your favorite author, are only human.
Everyone has either heard the story, or experienced it themselves: “I used to love reading AuthorX, but then I met them and discovered they are terrible. I can’t read their work anymore.” Sometimes it is hard to discover your idols are human with human wants, needs, foibles, opinions, habits, and flaws. When you work on SFWA’s Board of Directors, you usually see all the behind-the-scenes stuff.
Sometimes, you work with an author/editor on a SFWA project and it doesn’t go as smoothly as you like. Sometimes, it appears as if an author once admired has nothing but scorn for the work you are doing and no desire to help out—just kvetch and complain. Sometimes, authors come to the Board at their worst—financial or medical difficulties, personal conflicts that threaten to spiral out of control, issues with editors, agents, or publishers. They don’t have their “public face” on. They are human. They make mistakes. They can be hurt. They put their pants on one leg at a time.
This is one of those learning lessons that really surprised me. I’m not sure why. I just know it did.
(10) STARFINDER’S APPENDIX N. Paizo is producing a new science fantasy RPG named Starfinder, and they’ve released an image of the “Inspirational Media” pages from the game. It’s a wide list of old and new SF, not just books but also comics, movies, and games.
In the comment thread one of the developers remarks, “That said, I am excited to see fans talking about the things that moved them that we didn’t include. Those suggestions, and the conversations they start, are to me the greatest legacy of all these inspirational media appendices.”
Few appendices have made as big a splash in gaming history as Gary Gygax’s Appendix N. (I thought Cosmo’s appendix bursting at Gen Con that one year might have it beat, but he reminded me that was technically a gallbladder removal, so it’s OUT OF THE RUNNING!) That formative list of novels hit in 1979, in the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide. In it, Gygax laid out some of the works that had made the largest impact on him in the creation of Dungeons & Dragons, from Leigh Brackett and Robert E. Howard to Jack Vance and Andre Norton. In doing so, he created a reading list for an entire generation of gamers and fantasy fans, and had a tremendous impact on the genre as a whole.
When we created the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook in 2009, we gleefully took the opportunity to publish our own version of Appendix N, keen to introduce fans to our new favorites like Clive Barker and China Miéville, along with grand masters like C. L. Moore. Yet it was ultimately still a fairly small list—just a single column of text—and cribbed heavily from Gygax, focusing solely on novels.
When I first sat down to paginate the Starfinder Core Rulebook, I knew that space was going to be at a premium. I had, by some estimates, 800+ pages of content to cram into something even smaller than Pathfinder’s 576 pages. Yet I also knew that just one page of inspirational media wasn’t going to be enough. In order to make a game like Starfinder, we had to stand on the shoulders of innumerable giants, both childhood heroes and our friends and peers. We couldn’t in good faith restrict ourselves to just literature, either. How could you have Starfinder without Star Wars and Alien? Without Shadowrun and Warhammer 40,000? Without Starcraft and Mass Effect? It just wouldn’t be the same.
(11) BIG EARS. BBC News video: “Telescopes to reach nine billion light years away”.
South Africa has started to set up radio telescopes far more powerful than any current ones in use around the world, in its pioneering search for extra terrestrial activity.
(12) WATER HAZARD. In Washington, D.C. a security robot drowns in a fountain mishap. “We were promised flying cars, instead we got suicidal robots.”
A security robot in Washington DC suffered a watery demise after falling into a fountain by an office building.
The stricken robot, made by Knightscope, was spotted by passers-by whose photos of the aftermath quickly went viral on social media.
(13) RETURN TO TONE. Ian Leslie’s post “Unfight Club” on Medium contends there is a way to have discussions on Twitter without devolving into flame wars, virtue signalling, etc. etc. If only.
- Beware the moral surge. The moral surge is the rush of pleasure you get?—?the dopamine hit?—?when you assert your moral integrity in public. A certain kind of columnist lives for it; much of social media is driven by it. Virtue signalling is its outer manifestation, but I’m talking about an inner mechanism. We’re all subject to it, and that’s not a bad thing in itself?—?it makes sense that we should feel good for ‘doing the right thing’ in the eyes of our group. But when you ingest too much of this drug, or get dependent on it, you end up giving your own bad behaviour a pass. When you’re addicted to the moral surge, personal abuse begins to seem like nothing when measured against high principles. ‘Anything I say to or about that person, however nasty or dehumanising, is justified, because they voted for austerity, which murders people,’ (the more apocalyptic your public language, the purer the hit). Letting your tribe see you condemn others feels good?—?so good that it degrades your own moral machinery. Viciousness becomes a virtue. Don’t let this happen to you: recognise your susceptibility to the moral surge, and be wary of it.
(14) THE EARLY 21ST CENTURY. Martin Wisse calls The New Weird “The last whites only literary movement in science fiction”.
As said, diversity when looked at from that white, middle class male perspective tends to focus on who’s being written about more than on who’s doing the writing. Not that this isn’t important in its own right, but it will still reflect the same limited perspective and no matter how well intentioned, often reducing anybody who isn’t (white, male, middle class) to the exotic. Diversity from this perspective is always from the outside looking in, making it easy to fall into stereotypes, cultural appropriation, orientalism and othering. You get things like making mutants as a metaphor for the Civil Rights struggle and thinking that’s enough, or writing alternate history in which America is conveniently empty when the Europeans land. This sort of diversity is only possible if your audience and peers are the same as you, or you can at least pretend they are.
The New Weird happened at arguably the last time that you could still hold up this pretence without immediadely being contradicted by the very same people you’re denying the existence of. Twitter, Youtube and Facebook didn’t exist yet, blogging was in its infancy and existing fannish and science fiction online spaces were still dominated by, well, white middle class men. What made Racefail not just possible but inevitable was that between the New Weird and Racefail the internet became not just mainstream but ubiquitous as both access and ease of access increased; it’s no coincidence that much of Racefail took place on Livejournal, one of the earliest social media sites and one that had long been home to sf fandom. Tools or sites like Twitter or Tumblr have only made it easier for everybody to let their voice be heard, harder to ignore people when they address you directly. It has its advantages and disadvantages, but the upshot is that science fiction can no longer pretend to be just white, middle class or male.
(15) LICENSE REVOKED. John C. Wright says “Dr. Who Is Not”.
The replacement of male with female is meant to erase femininity. In point of fact, and no matter what anyone thinks or wishes, readers and viewers have a different emotional relationship to female characters as male. This does not mean, obviously, that females cannot be protagonists or cannot be leaders. It means mothers cannot be fathers and queens cannot be kings.
It means if you want a female Norse warrior goddess, go get Lady Sif or Valkyrie, and leave Thor alone. It means if you want female Time Lady from Gallifrey, go make a spin off show starring Romana or Susan or The Rani, and leave The Doctor alone.
I have been a fan of Dr Who since age seven, when Tom Baker was the Doctor. I have tolerated years of public service announcements in favor of sexual deviance that pepper the show. But this is too much to tolerate.
The BBC has finally done what The Master, the Daleks and the Cybermen have failed to do. They killed off the Doctor.
Dr. Who is dead to me.
(16) ON HIS GAME. So can John shout BINGO! yet?
https://twitter.com/SHardingRoberts/status/886648567351447552
(17) PRO TIPS. Now I’m wondering what anyone would be asking David about File 770 at his site. Maybe, “Why doesn’t Mike pay for material”?
The Submission Grinder/Diabolical Plots are not the same thing as File770. Do not send us questions for File770, because we are not them.
— Diabolical Plots: Ignyte Award Winner! (@diabolicalplots) July 18, 2017
The Submission Grinder/Diabolical Plots are ALSO not same thing as Submittable. Do not send us questions for them, because we are not them.
— Diabolical Plots: Ignyte Award Winner! (@diabolicalplots) July 18, 2017
In general, maybe read the name of the site whose contact form you are sending to before hitting Send. This will save everyone time.
— Diabolical Plots: Ignyte Award Winner! (@diabolicalplots) July 18, 2017
This is not a comprehensive list of things Diabolical Plots isn't. A few more: shrubbery, dinosaur, tardigrade, Dr. Who, dentist, pharmacist
— Diabolical Plots: Ignyte Award Winner! (@diabolicalplots) July 18, 2017
(18) TWEETS OF FAME. To satisfy your appetite for something that has nothing whatever to do with science fiction, we present this link to Bored Panda’s “The 10+ Most Hilarious Parenting Tweets Of The Year So Far”. Here’s #2 on their list —
Me: Harry Potter can use magic to fix his glasses.
6-year-old: Why doesn't he use magic to fix his eyes?
Me: *questions everything I know*
— James Breakwell, Exploding Unicorn (@XplodingUnicorn) March 10, 2017
(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “A Single Life” is an animated short nominated for an Oscar in 2014 by Job, Joris, and Marieke which asks what happened if you had a 45 RPM record that enabled you to travel through time?
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Francis Hamit, Chip Hitchcock, and Nancy Sauer for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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First!
With the NEW YORK TIMES piece on Steve Whitmire’s firing, I’d encourage Filers to follow the link to the time Kermit and Miss Piggy showed up on the WWE. That was pretty entertaining.
19) “A Single Life” is wonderful! I loved it when it came out and I love it now!
Pardon what’s probably a silly question from someone who’s never seen a single episode of Dr. Who, but isn’t part of the whole premise that Dr. Who can pretty much change any characteristic when there’s a change? Or have I missed something?
“Oh my stars! Dr. Who’s a girl now? Where’s the smelling salts? I’ll never watch the show again!”-seriously? That’s what you have going on in your life that requires enough of your attention that it’s an issue to you?
Personally, to me, that would be a fascinating plot twist in a science fiction show about an alien..
I have been a fan of Dr Who since age seven, when Tom Baker was the Doctor.
Baker took over the role of the Doctor in 1974. JCW was born in 1961. In 1974, JCW would have been thirteen, not seven.
Either JCW has forgotten how old he is, or he’s just making up shit and hoping no one will notice.
He is, in all modesty, a time-wimey author, one of the timey-wimiest writing today.
@0: and there were the bad jokes it spawned: “Fahrvergnügies (n): rubbing somebody’s head with a VW.”
@9: there should not be anything surprising in this, at least to anyone who’s been involved with a volunteer organization. But it’s probably news to all the people who believe in Secret Masters with Secret Powers, or who have never done a job for love (or at least the knowledge that the job was worth doing) rather than money.
@18: “me” misses a chance for a valuable lesson on how much more complicated life is than a machine — or at least a touch-your-elbow question about “how do you know what eyes should look like when you can’t see inside them?”
[edit] Fifth!
(12) WATER HAZARD.
Marvin, is that you?
(15) LICENSE REVOKED.
I’m sorry he feels that way, though it does not come as a surprise.
The Midnight Run reminded me of the ultimate such that I saw. Back in the mid-80s, for some reason the deadline for paper submissions for the major AI conference was on a Monday, as it happened at UPenn in Philadelphia where I was a grad student in AI. The weekend before, I was up in Boston and stopped by the MIT AI Lab, where I’d previously worked and thus knew people.
At that time, papers were not accepted via email (even though both MIT and UPenn were on the very early Internet), and FedEx and other courier services didn’t accept packages on Sundays.
So I learned that a fair number of paper authors for this conference didn’t want to lose the extra day by having to send their papers out on Saturday (it may even have been Friday; I’m not recalling for sure if FedEx accepted shipments on Saturdays back then). I offered to take them back with me and submit them when I drove back on Sunday, but they’d already decided to push things to the max.
The MIT internal deadline was noon Monday. At which point (and yes, as I was told, a fair number of papers were given to the person in question at 11:59:XX a.m.), a designated grad student took the papers that’d been handed in and put them in a duffel bag. He then took the subway to the airport, got on a plane with the duffel as carry on, landed in Philadelphia, got a taxi to UPenn, and submitted the papers from his suitcase with an hour or two to spare for unforeseen circumstances. He got back in the taxi, went back to the airport, and flew back to Boston on the next flight.
I was later told that enough papers had been submitted in this way that not only did the writers get another 2-3 days to work on them, but it was actually a little cheaper on a per-paper cost once divvied up than it would’ve been if each paper had been individually FedExed.
6) I love Tom Galloway’s story! Though the tight timing would’ve given me pause.
The house I live in now is less than a mile from the latest-closing FedEx office within a hundred miles. I’ve made the trip to that office a lot, from various places.
15) There’s no centuries-old tradition of male Doctors. Some stunt casting does bother me a little, the female Thor being an example, but it wouldn’t have as a kid, and I think the kid me was smarter. They’re just stories and people change them around and retell them differently all the time. Modern myths, ancient myths–they’re all just stories.
It’s much better to be young and naïve about these things.
Frog Fury. Sounds like he should have been fired years ago.
18) great question. Harry might not be able to do it himself, but during one of his trips to the doctor it could have been taken care of.
(15)
Can he even tell the difference between actual Norse myths and the comic-book and movie versions?
@Aaron: Camestros Felapton noted this one on his blog, and people there came up with the likely answer: that he’s thinking of 1978, when PBS started airing the series, and the “teen” dropped off of “seventeen”.
And I’ll say the same thing here I said there: why do we care about John C. Wright’s entirely predictable response to the news? It’s obvious at this point that Wright’s gonna Wright. How does it affect us?
(19) Anyone else notice that “A Single Life” (which I’ve just seen for the first time) bears some relation to Phil Dick’s late-1960s story “The Electric Ant”?
Also, today’s Jeopardy! had a pair of Double Jeopardy categories called “The Name of the Wind” and “The Wise Man’s Fear.” Someone on staff must enjoy SF/F in-jokes.
0)
I’ve never seen this ad before, but then no one has to explain to Germans what “Fahrvergnügen” means.
@Aaron: (timey-wimey age)
Not being interested enough to check the exact dates, it’s barely possible that JCW could have been as young as 12. Even then, that would assume that he saw one of Baker’s very first episodes as it aired… did he even live in the UK at the time? If not, one has to ask how he encountered the show, and how much of a delay there was between the original air date and its arrival in JCW-land. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find that he was closer to seventeen when he encountered the show. (ETA: Which I now see David has mentioned as a theory.)
@Tom: (colleges, email, and the mid-80s)
Man, that brings back memories. I arrived at college in the fall of 1988, and the big development at the time was that AOL and Prodigy were taking steps to connect their services’ email networks to BITNET – and even Fidonet got in on the action. Why, if you chanted the right incantations, a person with access to one of those networks could actually send email to someone on any of the others! Astounding! Amazing! Galaxy! Omni! (Sorry, got carried away there, but some of those SF mags were really superlative.) 🙂
Fun times, though. I spent way too many hours on RELAY chat, when I wasn’t playing Nuclear War in the dorm lobby. I was lucky enough to have my own computer in my dorm room, complete with an illicit modem jack that one of my first campus friends rigged with some wire and a cheap coupler. No printer, though – I had to send the job to the computer lab across campus and pick up the wide-carriage green-and-white fanfold results later. At least my room was just across the street from a convenience store that stayed open late…
I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find that he was closer to seventeen when he encountered the show. (ETA: Which I now see David has mentioned as a theory.)
I think that the equally likely explanation is that JCW is just making the story up so that he can fume about his “betrayed childhood”.
(8) Here’s a link to the Fantasy Literature reviews in case anyone was looking for it.
(12) I thought Knightscope had a fun response to the news of their robot on Twitter.
(17) PRO TIPS. The place I work used to periodically get e-mails from people who thought we (a non-profit) were a certain government agency. Not mean e-mails, just ones asking for help with various things related to what the agency did. I never understood why people didn’t pay attention, instead of just e-mailing webmaster@ (our domain) and presuming who might get the e-mail.
(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. LOL and OMG! Well done. 🙂
(1) Isn’t it already too late? We’ve sent spacecraft that have landed on Mars, and no matter how careful the folks making them were, some “terrestrial matter” must already be there.
(16) Surely someone has already done Mrs. Holmes even if I haven’t heard of it. Have any files seen any? Recommendations?
@Pyre Light: I haven’t seen it, but there’s The Adventures of Shirley Holmes, a Canadian kids’ show from the late ’90s.
(1) Between early space probes that weren’t sterilized, and the possibility of bits of Earth drifting that way, it’s too late. The cold, lack of magnetic field, and no air are much more of a problem.
(3) Do interesting or famous people actually appear at the booth? I mean, obviously you aren’t gonna get RDJ there, but maybe some artists, writers, folks from SHIELD?
(4) Seems a complex issue. But nobody can be irreplaceable, or there wouldn’t still be Muppets after Jim died and Frank Oz left.
(6) Heh. I had to get some corporate papers postmarked once; my business partner had to drive to the downtown post office about 11 PM on Sunday night and get them hand-canceled lest the state come after us.
(11) Marvin the Paranoid Android crossed with an old-school Dalek.
(15) First off, as a ‘Merican, there’s no way he could have seen it till he was 16 or 17 (So he either can’t do math or can’t proofread). Second, the show is NOT called “Dr. Who”. It’s “Doctor Who”. Third, sigh. How tiresome.
Also: Thor has been a frog, your argument is invalid.
(16) How much do you get if you cover the board?
BTW, we’ve had a female Dr. Watson for several years now and she’s quite good.
(17) At least David knows who to reject, and quickly. I do hope he has a pre-programmed response. That he has refrained from it containing the word “dumbass”.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/chicago-library-seeks-help-transcribing-magical-manuscripts-180963911/
This is either “The Framework”, or CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN.
@Pyre Light:
I think they called her “Mrs. Columbo” here in the States, before she went on to captain a starship and Ruin Science Fiction Forever.
Oh, that evil Mulgrew!
Wow. So Femininity has survived suffrage, and women’s liberation, and the rise of women to positions of power as prime ministers and CEOs. But Doctor Who is going to end it. I had no idea the show was so incredibly powerful. Heck, I might have to try watching it again, one of these days. 😀
I think one of the reasons we keep talking about JCW is that he’s a clearly troubled person, and there’s this subconscious belief in many of us that if we somehow manage to say The Right Words, it’ll magically get his head straight.
I’ve been thinking about this (dealing with extremist-mindset people in general, not JCW in particular) because I’ve been dealing with it recently at the workplace. It’s… interesting… to realize you’re one of the villains in the comic book running inside a co-worker’s head, and that there’s literally nothing that can be said or done to change their utter certainty that I and other employees are conspiring against them.
(“Interesting” as in lost sleep, loss of focus, having to take anti-anxiety meds,etc. Particularly distressing is that for the last five years, until this particular employee was hired, it’s been one of the most stress-free jobs I’ve ever had.)
@ Pyre Light
There was a written spoof called “Mrs Herlock Sholmes”, described in The Lady Investigates, but the point was to make fun of Holmes and a woman investigator.
(15) the difference between queens and kings: tell that to Elizabeth I, who described her profession as “prince”.
You mean JCW is younger than I (according to the various estimates above)? Impossible!
13) Virtue signalling, like white knight-ing and reverse racism, is not a thing.
(12) Regarding the suicidal robot, this is the question we all want an answer to:
https://twitter.com/mccv/status/887081025662107649
(15) I didn’t have any problems with Frog Thor or Beta Ray Bill, but I do have a problem with them turning Thor in to a title instead of the name of a person. Cultural appropriation. Grumble grumble. On the other hand, the comic seem to have taken a turn for the better.
@ Bruce Arthurs
I’m very sorry to hear about your work situation. Until last year, I had a smart and talented supervisor who had an absolute need never to be wrong about anything. Very wearing, especially when they re-remembered past events to ensure they had always been right. Ultimately, I got out, but it was useful in the mean time to remind myself that it was not my job (or within my power) to change them, only to deal with them. This worked pretty well.
(15) Given his reaction to the end of The Legend of Korra, I’m pretty surprised that Wright didn’t give up on Doctor Who the instant Captain Jack told Algy he had an excellent bottom back in The Empty Child, let alone that he stuck around through the various LGBT guest characters, Vastra and Jenny, and an entire series of Bill.
Anyway, the Doctor is an alien who routinely changes height, mass, eye colour, hair colour and texture and even accent. Not sure why changing sex and/or gender should be fundamentally more unlikely than any of that …
I won’t be losing any sleep over John C Wrong not watching my favourite show.
And he’s still banging on about gender swapped superheroes, with particular ire for a character that hasn’t existed for about six years. Poor thing.
Who was it who said that Doctor Who was “ruined forever!” the day they brought the time-travelling alien into what had, up till then, been a perfectly acceptable show about a London policeman walking through fog?
Tom Baker was my first Doctor, the One True Doctor as far as I’m concerned. I’m beyond thrilled at the thought of a generation of girls for whom that One True Doctor will be Jodie Whittaker.
(13) RETURN TO TONE
I’m always up for articles on discussing things more… productively? politely? non-confrontationally? This is a decent enough run-down of some of the more major points, although it feels either starry-eyed or else suppressing its own despair — “this, ummm, might infinitesimally improve politics discussions on social media, so the ever-growing spiral of outrage and trolling will be infinitesimally less awful!!!”
Set modest goals, say I. None of us is going to “clean up the internet.” What you can do (if you so choose, if this is an actual goal of yours) is have specific productive, attentive discussions – usually in something of a one-on-one format. And, you can choose to stay out of toxic discussions (and collective bouts of mockery) to begin with. “Pick your battles” would be a good addition to this list.
@Ghostbird: I just stumbled yesterday across “Stop saying ‘virtue signalling’,” which is brief, well-written, and argues well. It’s also from the libertarian/neoliberal Adam Smith Institute, so it’s fairly well-aimed at the actual people who use and abuse the term, approaching them on their own terms. I suspect it’s a link I’ll be pulling out frequently…
So, for all the people who said that if they wanted to do a series led by a female Time Lord, they should’ve made it about the Doctor’s daughter, I offer this bit of news from Big Finish.
[godstalk]
(10) — That is a pretty impressive list, and I’ll need to examine it in more detail as time permits.
@standback it’s fairly well-aimed at the actual people who use and abuse the term, approaching them on their own terms.
I’m kind of torn between “thanks for the link – it looks useful and I’ll definitely keep it to hand” and “‘virtue signalling’ is a weaponised term used to shut down or invalidate certain kinds of speech and it does no good to pretend it’s being used incorrectly or accidentally”.
So, genuinely, thanks for the link – it looks useful and I’ll definitely keep it to hand even if it’s not going to be useful in every context.
18) Well, we do see the hazards of bad healing magic in Chamber of Secrets, when Harry’s arm is turned boneless. I’m not sure I’d trust someone to try and fix my eyes, for fear of screwing them up all the worse.
15) Jadwiga of Poland was crowned as King, not Queen. I had not heard of her or this cross-gender coronation until a casual mention of this title is made by her character in Civ 6. I went a googling and educated myself.
I caught Doctor Who presumably at the same moment Mr. Wright did, when it hit PBS in the late 70’s, early 80’s. My first episode was “Pyramids of Mars”. Robot Mummies, Mars, Alien-Gods. Yeah, I was hooked IMMEDIATELY.
And, lord help me, I read the comments to Wright’s post (yes, I know. Backslid…). It seems the consensus there is the careful line of “oh, we’re not upset that the Doctor is now a woman, but the BBC did it for the wrong reason. “It’s the social engineering we hate! This was done to appease the SJWs and advance an agenda!” (John’s comments downstream in response to other comments make this clear)
But some of them just don’t get it:
I probably can’t comment there anymore and am not going to test whether or not I am in fact, banned. GBut this commenter (M.W. Peak) doesn’t seem to consider the idea that a young woman might not want to imagine herself AS the Doctor, see herself in the Doctor.
Pace Mr. Wright, I am not in mourning. I am in glee. I have a honorary niece, she’s 13 years old. She’s been watching Doctor Who for years, because I introduced it to her. (Her late father laughingly disliked it, her mother is tepid on it). I am delighted that there is now going to be a female Doctor. She can be her Doctor. She can imagine herself as not just a companion going off with the “handsome Doctor”, but representatively see herself AS the Doctor.
@Ghostbird: Yeah, definitely. I’m not going to start pouncing on every instance and prolonging the argument. If somebody’s using “virtue signaling” and I am not interested in having a conversation with them (two events with a startling degree of correlation… 😛 ), I’m not going to pop in with with a link.
If I have decided to talk to somebody (which, well, I do, every now and then), it’s generally because I hope it’s not going to be a pointless, point-scoring argument. And then a link like this can be helpful in smoothing out the discussion, in not getting needled constantly.
I wouldn’t discount the whole swath of people who use the phrase, or a whole bunch of others. It’s not that I don’t think it’s a hurtful, condescending phrase; it’s that if I’m going to talk across dividing lines at all, I’m going in with a thick skin, trying to focus on the most important stuff and ignore inevitable needling. And, well, I haven’t given up talking across dividing lines 😛
Very often in exchanges on Facebook, I often get comments which get personal. I ignore them. I don’t answer them. I drop the name from consideration. No answer I deserved. I’ll answer other people, but the offender gets nothing.
JCW isn’t writing or thinking. He’s typing. His fossilized views are so far right, you can almost predict what his comments will be.
@lurkertype:
See, when I was a kid, that wouldn’t have even been an argument. It’s already a crazy story. What’s a frog Thor in the scheme of things? Cool! That’s what it is.
So when one of the changes seems a little weird to me–and Thor-as-a-woman is weirder to me than Thor-as-a-frog, just like it’s hard to imagine Wonder-Woman-as-a-man (and I can’t come up with an animal)–I’ve decided to ask myself, “What would I have thought about that when I was a kid?”
Kid me would have thought that was Cool! because kid me was smarter than now me.
(Rummages through recent memories…digs out last Christmas’s present.)
Actually, I’d forgotten Thor-as-a-woman in Secret Wars. That was pretty cool! Therefore my argument is even more invalid now. Maybe I’m still kid me when I read.
As far as I know, the earliest recorded instance of people shrieking about how Doctor Who has been ruined forever are from the time those idiots at the BBC replaced the wonderful and beloved William Hartnell with some clownish buffoon in a Beatles hairdo.
If you were so inclined to give JCW the smallest benefit of the doubt, you might be willing to allow that he doesn’t remember exactly how hold he was when he first watched Doctor Who.
I’m 38 now, and in almost every story I tell about my childhood I say that it happened when I was 8 years old. It sounds right. It feels right. It is almost certainly wrong and could be off by as many as five years depending on the story. The only reason the stories aren’t off by more is I moved from Staten Island to small town Minnesota the summer between 7th and 8th grade and that’s a pretty stark dividing line. I can’t imagine how far off I’d be if I had been in one place for my entire childhood.
Google tells me JCW is 55. If I’m often this wrong now about how old I was when certain things happen, I can’t imagine how bad it will be in another 17 years.
The rest of JCW’s opinion about Doctor Who is bunk and I had been hoping for Helen Mirren as the Doctor before Matt Smith took over (which is a separate topic), but let’s maybe keep the focus on the argument, not the easily mistaken detail.
Infamously, the president of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society wrote a review of The Deadly Assassin in 1976 called “What Has Happened to the Magic of Doctor Who?” Now, of course, it’s one of the show’s most popular serials.
The anthology Short Trips: Indefinable Magic has interspersed throughout its pages a series of letters from fans, dated from 1963 to 2063 (but all really written by Gareth Roberts), each titled “What Has Happened to the Magic of Doctor Who?”, where the writer bemoans that some recent change to the program has RUINED DOCTOR WHO FOREVER. It’s very funny.
@Joe: That’s a good point.
Oh! And I did want to say, on the Ian Leslie piece: serious kudos for this one line 😀
JWC is two years younger than I am and I remember every detail of my childhood correctly, including the annoyance of having to brave Montreal snowdrifts clad only in the clothes considered appropriate for young boys in 1960s England. And yes, my mother’s passport clearly says we got there in August but that’s probably a typo.
Interestingly, I have clear memories of buying Mack Reynolds’ Homer Crawford books in the 1970s in Ace editions (specifically, the ones with the little a and not the capital A Baen introduced). I can find no evidence those editions existed.
you might be willing to allow that he doesn’t remember exactly how hold he was when he first watched Doctor Who.
Well, then he shouldn’t have picked a specific age. That’s what most people do when their memories are hazy.
At a basic level, I don’t really find the notion that he meant seventeen but mistakenly put down seven to be really that convincing. Seven is a very particular age, and it evokes an air of youth that seventeen simply does not. If I remember Catholic teachings correctly, seven is just at the border of the “age of reason” where innocence is lost. Saying “I was seven when I started watching this” makes it seem like it was a time of child-like wonder and has a cachet that “I was seventeen when I started watching this” simply does not. He said seven because it fits his faux-outrage story better.
9) I’m going to miss Jenn, but I’m lucky enough to still be working with her on a couple of projects, one SFWA related. FWIW, I have found being on the SFWA board the most challenging, interesting, entertaining, occasionally infuriating, and overall informative/instructive role that I’ve ever filled.
It’s… interesting… to realize you’re one of the villains in the comic book running inside a co-worker’s head, and that there’s literally nothing that can be said or done to change their utter certainty that I and other employees are conspiring against them.
Welcome to my current world. Your honorary Evil Mustache to Twirl(tm) is in the mail.