(1) WORLDCON PHOTOS. Simon Bubb, part of Dublin 2019’s staff photography team, has posted albums of his photos from the Worldcon at Facebook. Beautiful photos. So many good memories for those who participated.
Worldcon Dublin 2019 – Wednesday 14th August
Worldcon 2019 – Thursday
Worldcon 2019 – Day 2 (Friday)
Worldcon – Saturday
Worldcon 2019 – Sunday
Worldcon 2019 – Hugos
Worldcon 2019 – Monday & Closing
(2) DINO SQUIRREL REVIVAL. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s episode of Stranger than Sci-Fi on Beeb Beeb Ceeb Radio 4 was the penultimate episode. Next week is the final in the series and is on telekinesis.
The latest episode, “Jurassic Park” (available for a month), looked at de-extinction. Crichton not only read up on the science, he was so taken with one paper that hypothesized possibly near-future DNA technology that he went to visit the researchers. And the rest is history.
The programme pointed to the limits of de-extinction but did say that we could digitize DNA of current endangered species and bring them back if we had to.
Astro-physicist Jen Gupta and comedian Alice Fraser travel the parallel worlds of science and sci-fi.
Starting with the latest books and films, they discover real life science that sounds too strange to be true – from babies grown in bags, via black hole Jacuzzis, to flowers that behave like our ears.
In this episode, they tackle the question everyone wants to know the answer to – can we bring the dinosaurs back to life? They talk to the journalist Britt Wray about the surprising origin story for the book Jurassic Park. Then they dive into the world of de-extinction research and find out why there is a group of scientists who focus all their time on reviving extinct species.
They ask if we might soon see woolly mammoths roaming the Siberian steppe once again. What are the potential pitfalls of resurrecting the dead?
(3) UPDATED 2018 BESTS. Eric Wong of Rocket Stack Rank sends the link to RSR’s 2018 Best SF/F list with the scores updated and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 stories highlighted (all 20 in TOC + 33 notable stories that scored 2 or more) with links to stories that are free online.
(4) AN AUTHOR’S PICK. Silvia Moreno-Garcia tells NPR that “In ‘Automatic Eve,’ Steampunk Meets ‘Blade Runner’ — In Japan”. A publisher’s last gasp is a winner.
I’m going to give you the Hollywood elevator pitch in order to secure your attention: This is a Japanese steampunk novel for fans of Blade Runner. Do I have your attention now? Good. Because we’re going to flash back in time to 2009, when Haikasoru popped into the world.
…Unfortunately, Haikasoru didn’t quite catch the imagination of the public in the United States. Its biggest hit was probably All You Need is Kill, adapted into the Tom Cruise vehicle Edge of Tomorrow, but otherwise it sadly went on being ignored by most of the speculative fiction fans, while ironically producing the stuff fans say they hunger for.
…But the first incarnation of the imprint has one last, lyrical swan song before it drifts to sleep: Automatic Eve, a mosaic novel.
I like mosaic novels thanks to having read Clifford D. Simak’s City as a teenager. Some people despise them, the break with non-linearity, the short episodes building up to something more, frustrate certain readers. But even if you don’t exactly fancy that format, Rokuro Inui’s Automatic Eve, translated by Matt Treyvaud, works well. Characters, situations and plot points reoccur during the course of the book, so that you are left with a feeling of coherence rather than of stories thinly strung together, which can be the issue that turns readers away from mosaic novels in the first place – and sometimes earns them the pejorative term of “fix-ups.”
Much of the wonder of the book derives from its setting and mechanics. In a steampunk Japan where artisans can produce automatons that perfectly mimic humans and animals, an intricate web of deceit and secrets has been laid down. At the center of this web sits the beautiful, mysterious Eve and her father, an inventor with ties to both the shogunate and the ruling imperial house, which are locked in a battle for power.
(5) CORRECTION. The participants James Davis Nicoll is recruiting participants for the next phase of Young People Read Old SFF must have been born after 1990. The post still says “1980,” however, he later corrected this in the comments. Uh, never mind!
(6) WHAT A FAN DOES TO A $40K CAR. [Item by Dale Arnold.] Baltimore area fan Miriam Winder Kelly recently bought a brand new Tesla Model 3 for over $40,000.00 and immediately put bumper stickers for her favorite causes on it. The Baltimore Science Fiction Society, The Red Cross and Middle Earth? The BSFS bumper sticker is quite old and apparently she saved several from 20 years ago so she could always have one on her car.
By the way the bumper sticker was designed by a committee chaired by the late costuming fan Bobby Gear. (wife of the late multiple Worldcon Masquerade MC Marty Gear) Bobby said when she delivered the design, “I am never helping design anything with a committee again!”
(7) LOOMIS OBIT. Game publisher Rick Loomis of Flying Buffalo Incorporated died August 24, his birthday, after battling cancer. He was 73. A “Help Gaming Legend Rick Loomis” for his medical expenses had been started just recently.
Rick was one of the founding members of the Game Manufacturing Association and served as its President several times when they needed him. He started Flying Buffalo Games back in 1970 and was one of the first people to ever run a Play-by Mail game on a dedicated computer. He has traveled the world to promote role-playing and card games and over the years Rick has befriended hundreds (thousands!) of people at conventions from his Flying Buffalo Games booth and company. He published Tunnels & Trolls, the Nuclear War Card Game, Grimtooth’s Traps and so much more…
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- August 25, 1851 — George Parsons Lathrop. Noted for co-authoring In the Deep of Time novella with Thomas A. Edison which ran in English Illustrated Magazine on the third of March 1897. (Died 1898.)
- August 25, 1909 — Michael Rennie. Definitely best remembered as Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still. He would show up a few years later on The Lost World as Lord John Roxton, and he’s got an extensive genre series resume which counts Lost in Space as The Keeper in two episodes, The Batman as The Sandman, The Time Tunnel, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Invaders. (Died 1971.)
- August 25, 1913 — Walt Kelly. If you can get them, Fantagraphics has released Pogo in six stunning hardcover editions covering up to 1960. They’re planning to do all of his strips eventually. Did you know Kelly began his career as animator at Walt Disney Studios, working on Dumbo, Pinocchio and Fantasia? (Died 1973.)
- August 25, 1930 — Sean Connery, 89. Worst film? Zardoz. Best film? From Russia with Love. Best SF film? Outland. Or Time Bandits you want go for silly.
- August 25, 1940 — Marilyn Niven, 79. She was a Boston-area fan who lives in LA and is married to writer Larry Niven. She has worked on a variety of conventions, both regionals and Worldcons. In college, she was a member of the MITSFS and was one of the founding members of NESFA. She’s also a member of Almack’s Society for Heyer Criticism.
- August 25, 1947 — Michael Kaluta, 72. He’s best known for his 1970s take on The Shadow with writer Dennis O’Neil for DC in 1973–1974. He’d reprise his work on The Shadow for Dark Horse a generation later. And Kaluta and O’Neil reunited on The Shadow: 1941 – Hitler’s Astrologer graphic novel published in 1988.
- August 25, 1955 — Simon R. Green, 64. I’ll confess that I’ve read pretty much everything he’s written. Favorite series? The Nightside, Hawk & Fisher and Secret History are my favorite ones with Drinking Midnight Wine the novel I’ve re-read the most.
- August 25, 1958 — Tim Burton, 61. Beetlejuice is by far my favorite film by him. His Batman is interesting. Read that comment as you will. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is definitely more Dahlish than the first take was, and Sleepy Hollow is just damn weird.
- August 25, 1970 — Chris Roberson, 49. Brilliant writer. I strongly recommend his Recondito series, Firewalk and Firewalkers. The Spencer Finch series is also worth reading.
(9) COMICS SECTION.
- Lio mourns the loss of a favorite magazine.
(10) HE GAVE US SUPE’S DIGITS. CBR.com wants to know “When Did We Learn the Address of Clark Kent’s Apartment?” Hint: Bill Finger thought it up.
In “When We First Met,” we spotlight the various characters, phrases, objects or events that eventually became notable parts of comic lore, like the first time someone said, “Avengers Assemble!” or the first appearance of Batman’s giant penny or the first appearance of Alfred Pennyworth or the first time Spider-Man’s face was shown half-Spidey/half-Peter. Stuff like that.
Today, based on a suggestion from reader Riccardo N., we look into the first time that Clark Kent’s apartment was given the address of 344 Clinton Street, Apartment 3-D.
Obviously, in the early days, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were not really all that considered about world-building. No one in comics really was. Batman’s set-up was different from issue to issue early on (my favorite is where Bruce Wayne just kept his Batman costume in a chest at the foot of his bed). So when they say Superman is in his apartment, there really was no thought into it beyond “Superman is in his apartment”…
(11) WEBS ON THE WAY. SYFY Wire got this straight from the spider’s mouth: “Tom Holland says his third Spider-Man film has already been pitched, describes it as ‘something very different'”.
During his first-ever visit to Philadelphia at Keystone Comic Con, Tom Holland teased his third live-action Spider-Man film, teasing that it’s already been pitched and will be “something very special and something very different” from what we saw in Homecoming and Far From Home, while having a deep personal connection to the actor’s own life. Moreover, he gave an enthusiastic “of course!” when asked if Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) has a long-term romantic shot with Aunt May (Marisa Tomei).
Holland also took a moment to tackle the headline-making split between Disney and Sony, which many see as Peter Parker’s removal from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“Uh, it’s been a crazy week,” he said, echoing his statement at D23 Expo yesterday. “The news came as a bit of a shock, but we’ve made five great movies … you guys have made it so special for me and it’s not the end of me playing Spider-Man. There’s definitely more to come … I’m just really excited for everything … It’s only gonna get bigger and better … It’s pretty crazy.”
(12) COINING A WORD. John M. Jordan, in “The Czech Play That Gave Us the Word ‘Robot’” on the MIT Press website reminds us that, although we might know that Karel Capek coined the term “robot” most people don’t know the plot of Capek’s play R.U.R. or know that robota is Czech for “forced labor.” The post is an excerpt from Jordan’s MIT Press book Robots.
The contrast between robots as mechanical slaves and potentially rebellious destroyers of their human makers echoes Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and helps set the tone for later Western characterizations of robots as slaves straining against their lot, ready to burst out of control. The duality echoes throughout the twentieth century: Terminator, HAL 9000, Blade Runner’s replicants.
The character Helena in “R.U.R.” is sympathetic, wanting the robots to have freedom. Radius is the robot that understands his station and chafes at the idiocy of his makers, having acted out his frustrations by smashing statues.
(13) CASTALIA’S BUSINESS PLAN. Vox Day addresses the retrenchment at Castalia House in “A change to the Caligan campaign” [Internet Archive link.]
In light of the changes in the ebook market and our retreat from the Kindle Unlimited space, we’ve been making some strategic changes at Arkhaven and Castalia House. Now that we’ve successfully entered the video space, we’re concentrating our efforts on our strongest fiction and non-fiction properties, primarily because we don’t have the bandwidth to devote to everything.
This is why we’ve returned the publishing rights to their books to a number of our authors, although we continue to support them and their self-publishing efforts, and why we have methodically reduced the number of books that we are publishing. Our sales remain strong, which tends to indicate that our revised approach is a viable one.
Day responded to a complaint in comments:
It’s not a democracy. And given some of the lessons we’ve learned, we are no longer going to push IP that we do not control into other media.
Publishers are in a trap of sorts. If a book doesn’t sell well, the author thinks he should have self-published. If the book sells really well, the author thinks he should have self-published.
And in another comment he said:
I was told a lot of things that didn’t come to pass too. So I am not going to accept being held accountable for things that were entirely contingent upon other’s responsibilities.
If you want a refund, we’ll give you one. You have that option. But I’m not going to waste my time or the backers’ resources on projects that should not have been done in the first place. We all meant well, but the foundation was not solid.
We are going to be in the red on this no matter what due to the need to produce 18 comics. So I want to make sure at least some of them will sell well enough to give us a shot at breaking even on it.
(14) WHO STAYS, WHO GOES. Camestros Felapton identifies the affected creators in “Day confirms the Castalia retreat”.
…So what does Day mean be ‘our strongest fiction and non-fiction properties’. There are some clues.
- We know John C Wright has at least partially been dropped or moved on.
- We know that the core of this announcement was shifting what comic would be provided to people who had pledged to a crowd funding campaign. Day is shifting from a story by Rolf Nelson to an adaptation of one of his own books.
- In a comment Day says: “And given some of the lessons we’ve learned, we are no longer going to push IP that we do not control into other media.” What IP does Day control? What he writes himself.
The problem with being a publishing house is you have to deal with two groups of people best avoided in business: writers and readers. Castalia’s business model also includes a third: Amazon. It sounds like Day has problems with all three….
(15) YES BUGS M’LADY. NPR’s “Nailed It: Bringing Science Into Nail Art” shows photos of parasites and other things you never expected to find on fingernails.
Of all the things I love about being a girl, I love doing nail art the most. But I’m also a scientist, and scientists aren’t usually associated with perfectly manicured nails. Nail art became my way of debunking some common stereotypes, including those that associate scientists with being cold or unapproachable.
I got into nail art four years ago after a friend of mine bought a beginner nail art kit. It contained one metal plate with various nail-sized designs etched on the surface – animals, flowers, food – along with nail polish, a scraper and a silicone stamper.
…At the time, I was working as a research scientist studying Alzheimer’s disease at Cornell University, where I was looking for ways to get lay people interested in science. On Instagram, I found some science communicators using drawings or video to explain concepts like how stem cells help heal wounds.
Then I had an epiphany! None of these science communicators were using nail art as a platform. And none of the nail artists I followed were doing scientific designs.
I had been blogging about science for a while, but I wanted to try something new. So on October 10, 2018, I started an Instagram account (@nailsciart) where I’d use nail art to reach a very specific demographic: teenage girls. I wanted to show them the fun side of science through an art form many of them could find appealing — and that it’s possible to have polished nails and work on cool science.
[Thanks to Simon Bubb, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, Dale Arnold, Eric Wong, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, BravoLimaPoppa, Danny SIchel, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Xtifr.]
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(6) Adding the proper bumberstickers is a crucial step in preparing a new car for use (PS: is there a privacy concern about the license plate number?).
Andrew: I don’t know. Maybe. I’ll blot it out.
I meant 1980. 1990 is a typo.
@8: Edison wrote an SF? kewl!
also @8: Marilyn Niven also at least used to be known as Fuzzy Pink, for complex reasons involving sweaters.
also also @8: I remember thinking very highly of Burton’s Batman; he cast someone utterly unlikely who gave us a sense of the kind of person Bruce Wayne would have to be to put on the cape. IMO, the sequel spent more time being a second-rate Burton movie.
@14: fascinating that Wright, who was good enough for a while to have a real publisher, somehow doesn’t fit Castalia. OTOH, from what I’ve heard elsewhere I suspect that the problem with the Day-Amazon relationship is not entirely Day’s problem.
Finally saw the PBS (redacted, said Filers?) version of the Le Guin documentary — was waiting until partner got disentangled from major huhus. Very impressive, although if there’s more I want to see it. I especially liked the fact that they didn’t expect us to remember all the talking heads — but they provided a different authorial credit each time the head was captioned, making clear that these were also people to be reckoned with.
edit: sacrificial pre-fifth! (And yesterday’s drink went very well with today’s spaghetti sauce (put down last New Year’s Night), on the first cool day in about two months. I just hope the tons of unripe blackberries don’t get discouraged.)
Thanks Mike.
“I’ve got 99 Pixels but the Scroll ain’t Fifth.”
Recently I have acquired a replacement car and am considering bumper stickers. Outside the mandatory WFMU sticker, I’m probably going with Make Orwell Fiction Again.
Uh, never mind!
I have a bazillion political bumper stickers for my white van — but I put them all on magnets, so I can remove or reposition them at will. 🙂
A maybe-OT topic for the hive mind:
the question of “where did Trump get the nuking hurricanes idea” came up elsewhere and I somewhat snarkily said “from reading an Analog editorial.”
And now I seriously have to ask this:
Did John Campbell ever write an editorial about nuking hurricanes?
Just curious 🙂
There have been several stories I think about nuking tornados.
(13). “Publishers are in a trap of sorts. If a book doesn’t sell well, the author thinks he should have self-published. If the book sells really well, the author thinks he should have self-published”
Wasn’t VD one of those people pushing the ‘gatekeepers are evil and we will crush them because self-pub is the wave of the future” thing?
Clickity
@Chip
I thought it was because of slippers, not sweaters. (AFAIK, Jerry Pournelle was the only person who called her Marilyn. Everyone else uses Fuzzy.)
Pogo was a huge part of my childhood, and was definitely one of the things which contributed to my extreme oddness!
How odd am I? Odd enough that I actually thought Zardoz wasn’t that bad! :p 😉
(For Connery’s worst film, I’d probably go with Highlander 2.)
Great Minds: Oxford Astrophysicist and science popularizer Rebecca Smethurst has also been doing science-related nail art on her YouTube channel, in a series she calls “Nailing Science“.
(8) here I am being the contrarian again … but I legitimately think the movie Zardoz is a brilliant, unique movie. One of the most underrated classics of the genre.
W Michael Kaluta also produced some excellent artwork for game companies. I have a personally hand-colored plate from the Mage portfolio he produced for the White Wolf game company, and he also did the color cover and interior artwork for the Continuum time traveling RPG.
(6) She spelled her name “Bobby.” And she was a gifted costumer in her own right.
8) Michael Rennie was ill the day the Earth stood still, but he told us where we stand.
8bis) Zardoz has tons of problems… and its own charm. And it’s a surprisingly early appearance of a lot of transhumanist themes.
I did read that article by Larurie Penny that was linked in a scroll some days back. I thought it was extremely interesting, her way of talking about fan writing as influencing new writing. I can’t remember if she mentioned Ghostbusters II in connection to this, but after having read the piece, it seems kind of obvious that gender switching of characters all over the place (Bond, Ghostbusters, Iron Man, Thor) must have been influenced by fan writing where thousands of women were writing the characters and stories they thought were missing. This made me very happy.
(1) Any idea if the photos are available somewhere that doesn’t require a Facebook account? Searching for photos on the con website produced no useful results.
Jon Meltzer:
I remember it being discussed and dismissed about 20 years ago in some article. The first problem being the energy in a nuclear weapon being trivial compared to that of a hurricane. More recent articles have pointed out the problem with the fallout being carried asking the path of the hurricane. In short, it’s an incredibly stupid idea.
A minor tangent on this talk about nuking hurricanes is that now I realise where Doc Smith got the idea for The Vortex Blaster. Which I should probably have spotted sooner, since this isn’t the first time I’ve come across it.
(I don’t actually recommend reading The Vortex Blaster, by the way. I was suckered by an edition that claimed it was the last book in the Lensman series, but it’s really just some rather minor stories notionally set in the same universe.)
I’m not sure about Zardoz as Connery’s worst film, either – it was self-consciously weird, but it had ambition, I think; it was trying to present some big ideas in an arrestingly novel way. OK, it failed horribly, but I have to respect it for trying….
But Connery was also in Meteor, which has to be one of my least favourite films of all time… I think I did manage to watch it all the way through, on my third attempt, when there was nothing else on late-night TV and I happened to be very drunk. Nobody could accuse that movie of ambition. Or arresting novelty. Or, well, any redeeming quality at all.
Luckily “There can be only one” or that would be Sean Connery’s worst film ever…
(12) RUR was a significant influence on the video game Deux Ex: Mankind Divided, which is about the sociological impact and psychological effect of “upgrading” people through cybernetic implants and the issue of whether or not they are really people any more (amongst many other things.)
There’s a whole sidequest/subplot that features extracts from the play and an actor who is hiding behind her robot character, ironically to try and retain her humanity.
(I rate that game very highly in terms of the issues it is trying to deal with, although it caused some fuss at the time because it coincided with the rise of Black Lives Matter and was perceived as being merely white liberal identity politics by some of the alt-right crowd. Which it is, of course, there’s no getting away from that. But perhaps that’s why it unsettled those particular critics.)
In passing, the link only seems to go to the main page.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/origin-word-robot-rur/
appears to be the article itself.
Rose Embolism:
That’s the old nuking Cthulhu joke: “He reforms. And now he’s radioactive.”
Yes, not a good idea at all.
Nukiing hurricanes is a sufficiently bad idea, that comes up sufficiently often, that it’s in the National Hurricane Center FAQ.
Not that I expect Trump to read the FAQ–and that’s not even a slam on him (I have plenty), it’s that most other people don’t either, especially when they think they have a new idea.
(13) CASTALIA’S BUSINESS PLAN.
That commitment to grind Tor into the dust or whatever it was has certainly worked out successfully.
Replying to Terro’s question earlier, the photos are not yet elsewhere online, but might (eventually) make it to my Flickr page at https://www.flickr.com/photos/slb_000
Even though the photography team took thousands, there has been little information provided to us as to what the con will do with them now.
Anthological Meredith Moments:
The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2018 (edited by N.K. Jemisin) is $2.99.
And The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (a 2012 collection edited by David Hartwell) is $1.99.
@Joe —
Purchased — thanks!
This one shows up as $8.79 here. Sigh!
Connery’s worst film, for me, is The Avengers. I saw it in the theater and was hugely disappointed- what a premise! Connery as a mad scientist (August de Wynter) bent on blackmailing the world by controlling the weather! “Now is the winter of your discontent!” “Rain or shine, all is mine!”
As for Zardoz, rumor has it that if you so much as mention it in an interview, Connery just stands up and walks out without a word.
@Contrarius —
Weird — It looks like that book has two listings, or there are two different editions of it, or something. Here’s the link for the sale version:
https://www.amazon.com/Sword-Sorcery-Anthology-Robert-Howard-ebook/dp/B0087GZ5Y0/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=sword+and+sorcery+anthology&qid=1566832632&s=digital-text&sr=1-3
@Joe —
Eureka! Thanks!
I’m not sure what Sean Connery’s worst movie was, but certainly League of Extraordinary Gentlemen made him quit the business. The lawsuit over plagiarism also made Alan Moore’s view of comics (and comic publishers) somewhat more dire. Plus took a good property and turned it into dreck. And they insisted on calling it LXG in some of the publicity and advertisements. So a bad movie with fallout.
(And I never saw Meteor, but its licensed pinball machine wasn’t bad.)
Hot Kablooie, bless my soul. I really love that Pixel Scroll.
The Interwebs says that trump got the idea of nuking tornados from Sharknado.
@ rob_matic
That commitment to grind Tor into the dust or whatever it was has certainly worked out successfully.
[snort] Here, have an internet on me!
@lisa Supposedly, it was a tossup for him whether to play the president in Sharknado 3(?) or actually run for president. Sadly, we all lost.
xtifr said:
Me, too. I grew up in a small town, and when I discovered comic books and graphic novels in the Dewey Decimal numbering (741.5, BTW), I read everything the library had. Which was a bunch of old Marvel & DC compilations and a sizable amount of Pogo.
When we moved to the Seattle area, the library had a much larger selection, including … quite a bit more Pogo. I’ve been buying the Fantagraphics books as they come out. I’m trying to get my wife to read them, but she has different comics taste than I do (with some overlap).
Here we are, sixty hears later, and Walt Kelly is still relevant (and on-target) even with his most sharply-pointed satire.
(7) Loomis’ work on both the RPG end and the boardgame end of the hobby game community was significant.
Beyond that, however, he was a supremely nice person. I had several discussions with him at several conventions over the years. He was very encouraging to new designers, and he will be very much missed in that space.
@Joe:
Thanks so much for the notice re The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2018! I snagged it at Kobo for the same price.
I’m going in for carpal tunnel surgery tomorrow morning, and I need to have ebooks waiting for me. I have zero idea how long it will take to recover, and how much pain I’ll be in for how long.
I grew up in a family with Pogo as a constant – to the point where we slide into “Pogo” talking easily, one of our turtles was named “Churchy LaFemme” (and turned out to be female), and one of my aunts wore an “I Go Pogo” button around Europe in 1952.
Will he surpass marvel before or after he breaks even?
League of extraordinary Gentlemen certainly had a great promise and obvious planned a sequel, but if you hav such a great premise and then just let them fight themselves, and not let Connery do anything relevant, well you deserve all the scorn you get.
RIP Loomis, Who was uite ahead of his time in many ways. FlYing Buffalo was the first American company I directly mail-ordered games from – via post.
I also read a fair bit of Pogo when I was growing up — some newer compilations that I bought at Waldenbooks, and some from before my time. Somewhere I think I still have a Ziploc bag that has a stack of loose pages that once constituted one of Dad’s old Pogo collections before the glue on the binding failed or something.
These days I’ve been picking up the Fantagraphics collections as the come out. (Along with the Carl Barks collections; and I already have the full run of Peanuts. 10 year old me is insanely jealous.)
As for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I liked the idea, but thought the movie left much to be desired; and it REALLY lost me when it misspelled Allan Quatermain’s name on his tombstone (as “Quartermain”).
Joe H. says As for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I liked the idea, but thought the movie left much to be desired; and it REALLY lost me when it misspelled Allan Quatermain’s name on his tombstone (as “Quartermain”).
To borrow a phrase from The Grinch, that film, “Stink, stank, stunk.” It was If they decided to see if they could make the worse film possible and by The Queen of Air and Darkness they did.
Goodness gracious, great scrolls of file…
We didn’t start the File, it was always Scrolling since the Fans’ been squeeing.
Only the Files Die Scrolled.
Uptown Scroll.
I File You Just the Way You Scroll.
File Me a Scroll, You’re the Pixel Man.
The Ballad of Pixel the Scroll.
Yes, I’m oooooooold. 😉
Fighting pixels from the sky
Fearless scrolls who jump and file
Pixel scroll take me home, to the files I belong
Or maybe
Come a little bit closer, you’re my kind of pixel, and the scroll is so long