Pixel Scroll 7/19

(1) Jim Davis, who was on the set while they shot the second episode of Star Trek:The Next Generation, recalls “Patrick Stewart’s trailer still had a handwritten sign on it (by him) that said ‘Unknown British Shakespearean Actor’).”

(2) The Catcher In The Rye bar in LA is gives its drinks literary names. Here is a sample of what the menu has to offer.

THE RAVEN

Absinthe, Benedictine, Dry Vermouth, Orange

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary…”  -Edgar Allen Poe

CLOCKWORK ORANGE

Templeton Rye, Sweet Vermouth, Aperol, Burnt Orange, Orange Bitters

“But what I do, I do because I like to do.” -Anthony Burgess

SLEEPY HOLLOW

Mount Gay Rum, Bitters, Simple Syrup, Pressed Apple Juice

“Don’t you ever go laughing at the Headless Horseman” -Washington Irving

But no Bradbury reference? That seems out of character for a book-themed enterprise based in his home town.

Compare this to the Literati Cafe which made the papers a few years ago by serving a cocktail named the Fahrenheit 451.

(3) Nicholas Whyte has updated his survey 2015 Hugo Awards: how some more bloggers are voting.

(4) Patrick May tested EPH with the 1984 Hugo data (scroll down to comment #299). I still got two Hugo nominations. What more do I need to know?

(5) I may have forgotten to mention that Sarah A. Hoyt and the Mad Genius club don’t write about Puppies most of the time. Dare I say that I usually enjoy the expositions about professional writing?

Consider Hoyt’s “Selling Books To Real People”:

This post has been prompted by my friend Amanda Green’s post on Amazon.  To whit, by the implication that Amazon killed Borders that others have flung up.

This is a touchy subject, because although I was informed that nice ladies don’t discuss politics, religion or coitus in public, I’ve found that the touchier subject is money: making it, keeping it, wanting it….

Did Amazon kill Borders?  Well, only if you look at it as assisted suicide.

Borders grew and became very big by having a system.  The system was ordering to the net.  They ordered only proven sellers.  The way they did this was by looking in the computer at the author’s name, and seeing how many of his hers or its (must be post binary) book they had sold.  Then they ordered just that number.

This system worked magnificently while Borders was a small bookstore, in a small town, and before the publishers tumbled onto it.  Two things Borders didn’t take into account: the variety of regional tastes and the corruption inherently possible in the system….

And this Mad Genius Club report “How to work with artists” based on the advice given by Sam Flegal, Libertycon artist GoH to self-publishers.

Just as we frequently say here that “It’s all in the contract!” and “You are not selling your book, you are licensing intellectual property!” Guess what? When dealing with artists, it’s all in the contract. And when you talk to them about using an image for a book cover, you’re not buying the work, you’re licensing intellectual property. Yep, that’s right: they’re just as concerned about licensing and IP rights when they talk to you as when you talk to a publisher… because in this case, they’re the IP creator, and you’re the publisher!

The shoe is now on the other foot. So, what terms should you offer the artist?

(6) Can it be that the makers of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, pioneers of the “digital backlot” that became the model for producing superhero summer blockbusters, lost so much money they never got to reap the benefits of their own system?

But a few great reviews don’t make a difference if your numbers are bad, and Sky Captain’s were very bad. Cinemagoers, perhaps put off by its black and white visuals or comic-strip tone, stayed away: the film made just $15.5 million on its opening weekend. This would have been fantastic if the film had used the tiny budget for which the brothers had originally asked, but the reported cost of $70 million made its eventual worldwide takings of $58 million a catastrophe…..

Kevin Conran has worked in the art department on films including Bee Movie and Monsters Vs. Aliens, and as a production designer on Dreamworks’ Dragons, a TV spin-off of the hit movie How To Train Your Dragon. As he muses on where the Sky Captain experience has led him, he says. “I think sometimes that there’s a world where we might have made this thing for $3-4 million and there would be a whole different story to tell.“

Kevin would never say this himself, but the Conrans’s contribution to cinema is huge. “You can absolutely draw a line from Sky Captain to the look and feel of many of the big blockbusters we see today,” says Ian Freer. “Its use of a digital backlot is now the dominant M.O. for production design. Films like 300, Sin City, Avatar and Alice In Wonderland have all created worlds built on the ideas put down by Conran.”

As much as the big budget movies have taken the techniques the Conrans developed, still very few people have really done what they set out to do: eradicate the need for giant budgets on fantasy films. Their plan was not to make things better for James Cameron or George Lucas, it was to give opportunity to the guys nobody had heard of – guys like them – and to have moviemaking be restricted only by your imagination not your bank balance.

“Conran crystallised the idea of the one man film studio, taken up by the likes of Robert Rodriguez and Gareth Edwards (director of Monsters and later Godzilla),” continues Freer. “But there are other ways in which Conran was ahead of his time. Sky Captain is a film built entirely on nerd love by a nerd director. With its in-jokes, old school visuals and pastiche of old genres, Sky Captain is the ultimate ‘geekgasm’ years before the word was invented.”

(7) Prediction: the Scooby-Doo & KISS: Rock & Roll Mystery will never be on Kyra’s bracket.

scooby doo and KISS COMP

116 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 7/19

  1. Speaking of anthologies, I just finished The Space Opera Renaissance, which was generally quite good (and enormous; I’m really glad I was reading it on Kindle). My biggest takeaway: I really, really need to read the Vorkosigan books.

  2. Thanks guys! Going to purchase the second tier while I ponder over whether to get the third tier or not. These great bundles seem to come along whenever I’m travelling, which is handy. Still not through all of the Subterranean bundle from my Malaysia trip though, actually…

  3. Still not through all of the Subterranean bundle from my Malaysia trip though, actually…

    Eh?

  4. ?

    There was a humble subterranean press bundle back in Feb which dovetailed nicely with my holiday to Kuala Lumpur in March. Haven’t quite finished all of it yet; more books keep getting added to the tbr pile.

    This current one has arrived right before I head to Japan 🙂

  5. I watched Sky Captain in the theaters and honestly, I was disappointed. I loved the aesthetic, loved the look, thought it was beautiful. But it just felt sterile. That despite all the robots, explosions, planes, plane/subs (which were massively cool), etc., the movie just didn’t have a heart. I’m glad it was made, but it just didn’t work for me.

    As for 2.) how hard/easy is it to make a cocktail with dandelion wine?

  6. Jack Lint on July 20, 2015 at 5:47 am said:
    I’m not quite in the Sky Captain camp. I liked elements of it, but somehow the whole didn’t quite work for me. Perhaps I’d have been more forgiving if it really had been made in the 30s.

    Jason on July 20, 2015 at 7:09 am said:
    I watched Sky Captain in the theaters and honestly, I was disappointed. I loved the aesthetic, loved the look, thought it was beautiful. But it just felt sterile. That despite all the robots, explosions, planes, plane/subs (which were massively cool), etc., the movie just didn’t have a heart. I’m glad it was made, but it just didn’t work for me.

    I’m going to stand with the Sky Captain concern trolls. I saw what the director was going for but I’d have rather spent two hours watching Barbara Stanwyck play with Henry Fonda’s hair.

  7. Brian Z: What is this with forcing people to go to Making Light?

    That’s where all the discussion is, including the technical stuff that you’ve chosen to not understand.

  8. Dandelion wine if it’s not too sweet could be used to make what’s called a kir, which is white wine mixed with crème de cassis a.k.a. black currant liqueur.

  9. Brian Z,

    Patrick May was rerunning what others had already done, and for me the new piece of information – if I understand what was said – is that he had mistakenly counted one ballot three times. That was enough to change the results, with two with 17 nominations beating one with 18 nominations.

    Finally those Google alerts I set up on my name paid off.

    The duplicate ballots I found in the 1984 data file had no impact on the Campbell Award category and did not change the nominee list in any other category. Under EPH, the only difference from the actual 1984 nominee list is that Sherri Tepper would have been eliminated. Every other category came out with exactly the same set of nominees.

    As an aside, I’ve developed a lot of respect for the amount of effort the organizers go through to clean up the data. Implementing EPH was pretty easy, just three or four hours on my morning commute. Cleaning up the data to consolidate different spellings (particularly of names), move nominations to the correct categories, find duplicate ballots and duplicate entries on the same ballot, etc., etc. — that took longer than the coding.

  10. Brian Z,

    Let me look at that and see how it could result in Tepper being eliminated even though she had more nominations.

    From my comment at Making Light, the final points and ballot counts for the Campbell Award category were:
    R. A. Macavoy: 113 2/3 points, 124 ballots
    Joel Rosenberg: 19 points, 19 ballots
    Warren Norwood: 11 5/6 points, 17 ballots
    Lisa Goldstein: 10 5/6 points, 17 ballots
    Joseph Delaney: 10 2/3 points, 19 ballots

    In the previous round, Sherri S. Tepper had 6 19/20 points and was on 18 ballots. The reason for the low point total is that she was on ballots that also included other authors still in contention.

    In the final selection phase, Tepper and Delaney had the fewest points, so they were selected. Tepper had one less nomination than Delaney, so she was eliminated by the EPH algorithm.

  11. Sarah Hoyt at MadGenius about the crash of Borders:

    My obvious bias is that I’m an Ann Arbor resident, and we still feel like the crash of Borders ripped out a piece of the town’s heart. I never had that feeling of “I went to Borders and there was nothing to buy” which Sarah Hoyt describes, so the store was catering to my tastes even in its final weeks. Very little in her piece matches with my experience.

    Causes for Borders’ demise:
    The immediate cause was getting caught with a lot of short term debt when the 2008 financial meltdown happened. Borders financed its expansion through borrowing. The painful refinancing after 2008 was reflected in cutbacks in stock, which made Amazon shopping more appealing, which led to more cutbacks in stock.

    Subsidiary cause: Borders went heavily into music CD sales in 1995, on a scale to compete with Tower Records. This meant that Borders was still a CD chain as CD sales went into steep decline after 2000, and as pretty much all deep-stock CD retail folded after 2005-ish. Even as Borders kept shrinking the CD section, the chain still had to pay for the square footage which had previously housed CDs. At Borders #1 in downtown Ann Arbor, there were empty spaces you could park cars in.

    Probable ultimate cause: Borders started picking its executives from other retail industries like groceries and drug stores, and so the chain’s top management expunged all knowledge of cultural retailing. Putting 5 tubes of toothpaste in every grocery store might be a defensible strategy. Putting 5 copies of a classical music CD in every store, whether it is located in Manhattan or Oklahoma, isn’t going to come out well. (Harmonia Mundi label reported that’s what happened with them & Borders.)

    It might be that Amazon would have killed Borders eventually. Borders’ outsourcing of its online orders to Amazon was another bad idea.

    Sarah Hoyt mentioned Borders’ stocking system. From a book biz blog, I have read that Borders relied too long on its stock management system, which was cutting edge in the 1970s, but hopelessly outclassed by the late 1990s. But I have no direct knowledge on that.

  12. Ray,

    Comment 299 on the thread says Joseph Delaney would have been on the Campbell award shortlist instead of Tepper if EPH had been in place.

    I evidently need to work on my clarity.

    In 1984, both Delaney and Tepper were on the list, as were Norwood and Goldstein because they tied on number of ballots. There were six nominees that year.

    Under EPH Tepper wouldn’t have been on the list but all the others would have been.

    Where does anyone say the Fan Writer or Novella list would be different?

    Neither my results nor the others I’ve seen show any differences in any other categories.

  13. That’s where all the discussion is, including the technical stuff that you’ve chosen to not understand.

    P J Evans, I almost hate to break it to you, but people are free to discuss your proposed amendment anywhere they want. Including at blogs which link to an announcement of a test run of it.

    But if you don’t want to answer my question about whether there were any similarities between any of the 1984 Campbell ballots, that’s fine too.

  14. Part of the the trouble with Sky Captain was that some of the actors didn’t seem quite sure what to do with the lack of things to interact with. IIRC one review said the ones who handled it best had more stage experience, where pretending there was something there was more common.

    “his hers or its (must be post binary)”

    So many dog whistles. The parenthetical screams “look at how I’m pandering towards what ‘they’ say they want”, but she isn’t even doing that – she uses “its”, and this isn’t Beta Colony – and I’m sure that’s intentional.

  15. Brian Z:

    “But if you don’t want to answer my question about whether there were any similarities between any of the 1984 Campbell ballots, that’s fine too.”

    If you want answers to your questions, the questions should be placed at the Making Light blog. That is where the people involved in testing of the 1984 data are.

  16. but people are free to discuss your proposed amendment anywhere they want.

    Sure, but if you want people to answer your questions, then referring you to where the people who know the answers hang out is a reasonable response. But I see little reason to think you do want answers.

  17. Patrick May,

    “Where does anyone say the Fan Writer or Novella list would be different?”

    Neither my results nor the others I’ve seen show any differences in any other categories.

    http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016283.html#4180519

    I had followed Whyte’s link to a reference to Fan Writer and Novella changing here on the earlier thread. Without reading every comment in chronological order, it looks like as they continued to interpret the ballots and combine variant names/titles, they brought the results closer to the actual 1984 results, except for the Campbell, as you noted.

  18. P J Evans, I almost hate to break it to you, but people are free to discuss your proposed amendment anywhere they want. Including at blogs which link to an announcement of a test run of it.

    I hate to break it to you, but trying to have a conversation with people who did not do the testing when you have questions about the testing demonstrates yet again that you are not acting in good faith. In short, your continued objection to going over to Making Light and dealing with these supposed “issues” of yours regarding EPH is simply evidence of your dishonesty.

    The real problem is that you have no real objections to how EPH works other than it isn’t the exact same system as “first past the post”. Every objection you’ve raised is spurious, and it seems clear that the reason is because those aren’t your actual objections. Your actual objection is that EPH is a different way of dealing with votes than the one used for Hugo nominations in the past. But amidst all of your dim-witted meanderings, you have at least realized that raising that as an objection will not get you anywhere, because the point of EPH is that it isn’t the same.

    So instead you flop about trying to come up with something that you can paint as objectionable about EPH while not actually understanding it at all. That is why you object to going over to Making Light: The commenters there who actually do understand EPH very well would expose your ignorance right away, stripping away your clownish “objections” and exposing you immediately as the petty little uneducated lying troll that you are. And that terrifies you.

  19. Re the Borders bankruptcy — I still mourn Borders, too. But, purely as a consumer with no inside information whatsoever, I had an inkling that the writing was on the wall when I bought a Sony Reader, back in 2009. I bought the reader at Borders. When I emailed Borders, in 2009 and again in 2010, asking if they sold ebooks, I got a boilerplate reply referring me to the Sony store. This struck me as an ENORMOUS mistake, given that Amazon was, even then, making huge inroads into the ebook market.

    I understand that there were a lot of reasons why Borders failed. But ignoring a vast and growing market share surely didn’t help them any. They finally started selling ebooks (I don’t remember the year) but by that time it was too little, too late.

  20. Re: The bundle: Imagined realms is a collection of Julie Dillon artwork. I have it and it’s lovely, but I’m not sure it’s an ideal pick for an ebook bundle. If your computer and e-reader are better than mine, maybe.

  21. Brian Z,

    http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016283.html#4180519

    I had followed Whyte’s link to a reference to Fan Writer and Novella changing here on the earlier thread. Without reading every comment in chronological order, it looks like as they continued to interpret the ballots and combine variant names/titles, they brought the results closer to the actual 1984 results, except for the Campbell, as you noted.

    It looks less like interpretation and more like standard data cleanup. I recommend looking at the actual data yourself to see how messy it can be when there are variant spellings and miscategorized entries. Jameson Quinn made it available here. If you find any other discrepancies, I’ll be happy to regenerate the results.

    When the data is relatively clean, the results are identical to the current voting algorithm, with the exception of Tepper not being on the Campbell list.

  22. Brian
    You were commenting in the thread at the time. You can pretend to be a fool but we can see you’re a liar.

  23. @Cassy B @8:57:

    Not getting better involved with e-books might have been a mistake for Borders. But, on the other hand, getting involved with e-books has been a financial disaster for Barnes & Noble. Without looking it up: I think the losses on the Nook are approaching a billion-with-a-B dollars.

    Just as the Nook was getting established, the rise of the generic 7-inch Android tablet crushed B&N’s hardware sales. Then, Amazon’s predatory pricing gave them a $3-$5 cost advantage over B&N on almost every e-book. (Note: Amazon’s pricing advantage on e-books is mostly gone now. I can’t retrace all the legal and contractual maneuvers.)

    From another book biz discussion at MadGenius, and I forget the author: one author wrote that eventually it made sense to pull their books from the Nook store and go with an Amazon exclusive program, because the Nook sales were amounting to something like 20 bucks.

    I don’t know how the rest of the book business competes with a retailer who can absorb apparently infinite losses.

    (I’m in the Nook ecosystem wherever possible; I just prefer the Nook app to the Kindle app. Weirdo. 🙂 )

  24. Actually, Borders had greater regional variation in its stocking practices for most of its life.

    Borders died due to overexpansion and direct competition with B&N (literally opening within walking distance of B&Ns) which increased its debtload, an outmoded inventory system (check your old Borders titles; they put their own barcodes over the book’s barcodes), being late to the Web, and spending too much money on CD inventory even after iPod and iTunes came out.

  25. I’ve liked my own Nook HD tablet/reader very much, and you can still buy the 8GB model new for as low as $69, but given that they’ve been sitting around for over a year since Barnes and Noble stopped selling them, there may be battery life issues.

  26. Oh for god’s sake.

    Brian loves EPH because it makes people talk to him when he pretends not to understand it. We are a culture of earnest geeks who really really want to explain things and he’s milking that personality quirk for all it’s worth.

    I doubt he’s capable of the long-term planning in thinking that if EPH passes, there’ll be less Puppy drama for him to flail around in, but I suppose that’s an outside chance. Far more likely, though, this is just If I say a thing people talk to me!

    It’s not even trolling, it’s a puppy who learns that if it whines, people come and play with it. My beagle learned a few years back that if he screams like he’s dying, we’ll drop everything and come running, and it took six months of pointedly ignoring him to break him of the habit.

    We are well past any point of any lurkers being unconvinced, but if somebody wants to compose a post of Brian Z’s greatest hits so we can just all post the link when he starts up, I’d be grateful. Then whoever still wants to engage can have fun with that (I know some of you think the pinata’s got candy in it) and the rest of us can get back to talking about books, or dinosaurs, or Pluto.

  27. Nick, this is just a note to say, not that I ate any fruit you might have been saving, but that I’ve been going through Paula Guran anthologies of late and really enjoyed “The Man Who Collected Lovecraft”. I immediately thought of several people I’ve known in person or interacted with online who would try that if they thought it might work.

  28. Question for all you sophisticated consumers: In the next six months or so, I am hoping to get ereader/tablet machines for my kids (not just for reading ebooks, but also for audiobooks, email, and Google Docs). What do people think of Kindle vs. Nook (vs. more obscure competitors)? I’m not eager to chain myself even more closely to the Bezos empire, but I’m also not eager to throw my money at a platform that’s on the skids.

  29. “The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft” is a favorite of mine as well. It was fun to work with Tim, and at first we just sort of puttered around uselessly and gave up after eight months, and then Tim saw something about a giant Ikea opening up in Brooklyn and was inspired to create the middle part of the story. It’s been widely reprinted as well, which always increases an author’s affection for a story.

  30. I may not qualify as a “sophisticated” consumer, but I see no reason to shop for electronics by tying myself to a content provider. It never occurred to me to buy a Kindle or a Nook. I would suggest getting a generic Android tablet from a reputable manufacturer.
    Go to a big box electronics/discount/computer store, and see what they have. I’ve been happy with my 7″ Asus “MemoPAD”, which came preloaded with apps that can handle all of the formats provided in the Hugo voters’ packet (.epub, .mobi, .pdf). I have no idea which of those formats/extensions corresponds to which e-reader.

    ETA: or if you’re in the Apple ecosystem, you can probably get free or inexpensive iPad apps for all of the popular ebook formats.

  31. It looks less like interpretation and more like standard data cleanup. I recommend looking at the actual data yourself to see how messy it can be when there are variant spellings and miscategorized entries.

    Patrick May, thank you.

    “Interpretation” didn’t suggest any nefarious intent. After standardizing variant names, I gather, they eventually found more commonality with the actual result. Other than Tepper.

    I’ll have a look at the data you posted, answer my own question about the Tepper ballots, and report back.

    Cheers.

  32. I am happy with my Kobo. Ebooks only, though; I listen to audio on my BlackBerry Passport. And god help you if you try to read PDFs on a Kobo: I read PDFs on my PC, laptop or phone but not, not, not the Kobo.

  33. I have a Kindle, but I also have Amazon Prime (for the movies). It came in handy as it arrived the very day I had to have emergency eye surgery, and I was able to listen to movies while lying face down for three weeks. I’ve had the Kindle app on my iPod touch, along with the Nook app, and other apps for books (yes, I’m a bookaholic). It’s just one platform I use; i find the Kindle to be very portable and useful at times when I’m stuck in a boring place (like face down for three weeks). I also use the iPhone or iPod, and see no problems with the app on those platforms.

  34. Seth Gordon on July 20, 2015 at 10:12 am said:

    Question for all you sophisticated consumers: In the next six months or so, I am hoping to get ereader/tablet machines for my kids (not just for reading ebooks, but also for audiobooks, email, and Google Docs). What do people think of Kindle vs. Nook (vs. more obscure competitors)? I’m not eager to chain myself even more closely to the Bezos empire, but I’m also not eager to throw my money at a platform that’s on the skids.

    Well, for a device used strictly to read text on an e-ink display, I do love my Kindle. And yes, the Bezos tentacles are stuck deep, but I also have plenty of content that I’ve side-loaded via USB. With judicious use of Calibre and various plug-ins, you can read just about any text file on just about any reading device; it’s just a question of how much trouble you’re willing to go to. (For example, I’ve never actually purchased an eBook from the Nook store, but I did purchase some Pathfinder novels that were only available in .epub, then use Calibre to convert them to a .mobi file my Kindle could read.)

    Having said that, it sounds like you’re interested in something closer to a full-on tablet rather than a strict reading device? In that case, you might be better served by an iPad Mini or some Android-based equivalent; you could then just download the relevant Kindle and Nook apps and buy from whichever store suits your needs.

    (And to echo what James Davis Nicoll said, a Kindle or other plain eBook reader will be garbage for trying to read PDFs or spreadsheets or anything outside of vanilla text.)

  35. I’m by no means a good example to follow on this but I use a Google Nexus 7 as my ereader. It’s useful as it supports a whole bunch of different readers (though I try to keep it to just Play Books which will support most formats for most books and Moon+ for large [100mb+] comic book files), you can definitely use Docs and gmail (and quite possibly other emails but I’ve never had to set that up). Plus it can do a whole bunch of other stuff – mine doubles as a Japanese study aid, and a fun way to watch the occasional anime series.

    If you’re worried about their access to certain apps (like say the Play Store) you can set up a profile just for them that will only have access to the apps you explicitly give them access to.

  36. Thanks for the feedback, everyone.

    Yeah, getting an actual tablet and installing Nook/Kindle apps might be a better course of action than getting a high-end Nook or Kindle and then trying to install Google Docs on it.

  37. I have been using the kindle app on my phone and tablet for quite a while. I’ve just invested in a new Kindle Paperwhite, and it’s really really good for that very narrow task of putting ebooks on a screen. Most specifically, the screen-size:weight ratio is much better than you get out of either phone or tablet. The ability to swap between kindle devices and apps etc is also really handy.
    That said, if you only want one device, then it’s a tablet hands down. The 7-8 inch market has got spectacularly cheap. Just don’t go to the very bottom, because there lurks the deeply generic android tablet with an outdated OS and insufficient memory to handle any upgrades.

  38. @ Seth – I gotta say, I am a long-term iPad user and I’m surprised at how much I use my Kindle to read anyway.

    It’s a combination of factors, I think–if I drop my Kindle in the bathtub, I am very sad, but it’s not nearly the cash investment of a tablet. And it worked really really well for travel recently–the battery life is a lot longer, and I was out in the bush and had no chargers for days and it held up like a champ.

    Finally, for me, if I’ve got a tablet I get major distractions. I’m always stopping the book to go check twitter or…uh…here…or play Puzzle Quest or whatever. Whereas if I have my Kindle out, I am Reading A Book Right Now, and that is the thing that I do and I do not constantly drop in and out of Twitter and whatnot. So I actually read a lot more, more dedicatedly, with the Kindle.

  39. @Seth Gordon,

    Both my girls have their own Kindle tablet. As other people mentioned you are not necessarily tied to Amazon for apps and books. You can side load apps that aren’t available through the Amazon store. For instance I side loaded Dropbox and a comics reader on both their tablets. The other thing I like about the Amazon tablet is through Free Time you can monitor and limit the amount of time they spend on the tablet. These guys have a nice summary http://www.howtogeek.com/178303/how-to-turn-your-kindle-fire-into-a-totally-kid-friendly-tablet-with-freetime/

  40. The difference between Scooby-Doo and KISS is that one of them is a cartoonish act that has outworn its welcome several decades ago… and the other one is a Great Dane.

  41. I have a Kindle paperweight on which I do most of my reading. I have a big phone and read some things on the Kindle app on that if I want color or want to dip-in-and-out. Read the Hugo packet on my trusty Mac laptop.

  42. +1 to everything RedWombat said about the Kindle. Well, okay, I’m an iPad mini user, but everything else.

  43. If you’re in the habit of reading before going to sleep, I highly recommend an e-ink reader over a tablet. The light from the tablet screen will interfere with your sleep patterns by tricking your brain into thinking it’s still daytime.

    I recently got a Kindle for this very reason. I really do find it easier to go to sleep after reading it. I actually splurged and got a Kindle Voyage because it has a haptic button on the left for all us lefties who hate stretching our thumb to flip pages one-handed. Totally worth it.

  44. @RedWombat,
    A handy link to Brian’s greatest hits would be a good form response. I try not to respond myself but the lure of xkcd386 is strong.

    On editors:
    My automatic buy is Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best SF for providing a good sense of the state of the genre. The other editor very high on my radar is Jonathan Strahan. I’m likely to buy anthologies with his name on, especially if it’s on an interesting theme. His Eclipse anthologies made me a fan.

  45. @Dave

    If you’re in the habit of reading before going to sleep, I highly recommend an e-ink reader over a tablet. The light from the tablet screen will interfere with your sleep patterns by tricking your brain into thinking it’s still daytime.

    I read on my Android phone using the FBReader app which allows you to change colours and had two colour profiles: day and night. For night I have it set to red text on a black background with the brightness turned low. That seems to help with the sleeping.

  46. @tonieee

    I wasn’t aware of a red shifted reader app. Interesting, but red text on a black background sounds like a recipe for eye strain for me.

  47. Paperweight? I thought Kindles were supposed to be lighter…

    (Paperwhite messed up again by spell correct.)

Comments are closed.