(1) CASE DISMISSED. In May 2018, Fur Affinity, winner of the 2012 and 2013 Ursa Major Awards for Best Anthropomorphic Website, banned several dozen accounts for Code of Conduct violations — Section 2.7 “Do not identify with or promote real hate or terrorist organizations and their ideologies.”
Furry artist Scott Malcolmson (whose fursona is Roy Calbeck), filed suit in Arizona against IMVU, Fur Affinity’s parent company, on grounds of breach of contract and defamation of character.
The suit was dismissed on August 27. Boozy Badger analyzed the result in a Twitter thread which starts here.
https://twitter.com/BoozyBadger/status/1034904635398610944
IMVU is a Delaware corporation. The court did not find its connections to Arizona legally sufficient for IMVU to be sued there. The court further said:
Plaintiff objects that he is a per se litigant filing in forma pauperis. That may be so. However, in our legal system, there is but one law and it applies to rich and poor alike. That Mr. Malcomson is too impecunious to litigate in IMVU’s home state of Delaware cannot detract from IMVU’s constitutional right not to be sued in an improper forum.
Boozy Badger noted:
Jurisdiction, Forum, and Venue are literally most of a semester of Civil Procedure in law school. There are options OTHER than Delaware, but you can’t sue just anywhere.
Wikifur’s article on “History of Fur Affinity” has more background:
COC 2.7 bans (May 2018)[edit]
On May 15, 2018, several dozens FA accounts were banned from the site for presumed violations of the site’s updated Code of Conduct, Section 2.7 (“Do not identify with or promote real hate or terrorist organizations and their ideologies”).[68] This included personal and group accounts related to AltFurry (FurRight), Furry Raiders and other perceived Alt-Right connected accounts.
Complaints came in swift, from people claiming to be false positives[69][70] to banned and not banned users that argued that biased staff had failed to also struck down left-leaning “hate/terrorist” individuals and groups (e.g. Deo Tas Devil, Antifa, “Far-Left”/”Alt-left” accounts and Communist Furs).[71][72] Instructions were passed among the affected and sympathizers to vacate to other sites, specifically, InkBunny,[73][74][75] and discussions were started to pin down who was to blame for the bans (from Antifa-cowered FA staff to outright ban demands/orders from the online news site Dogpatch Press).[76][77]
It would be three days later (May 18), when legal proceedings initiated by Roy Calbeck were to take the form of a lawsuit against FA’s parent company, IMVU, for:
Defamation/Breach of Contract against IMVU for actions taken by their wholly-owned subsidiary, @FurAffinity…
(2) GONDOLIN FALLS TOMORROW. Smithsonian says after two lifetimes of work this probably is it: “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Final Posthumous Book Is Published”.
Though J.R.R. Tolkien passed away in 1973, he has never really stopped publishing. For decades his son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien has painstakingly catalogued and edited his father’s papers, creating new books out of unfinished and unpublished manuscripts. Most of those tales delve deep into the history of Middle-earth, the fantasy realm where Tolkien’s best known works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings series take place. Now, it’s likely that work will come to an end with one last Tolkien book. Critic Andrew Ervin at The Washington Post reports that The Fall of Gondolin, which will be released tomorrow, is likely J.R.R. and Christopher Tolkien’s swan song.
(3) SFF MARKETING. Cat Rambo appeared on the Science Fiction & Fantasy Marketing podcast: “Writing Tips, Selling Short Fiction, and What SFWA Can Do for You with Cat Rambo”. Here are a few of the many topics touched on during the conversation:
- How Cat ended up publishing her first two Tabat novels through Kevin J. Anderson’s Wordfire Press (which he talked about when he was on Episode 194 and Episode 138) and how marketing goes when working with a small press.
- Some tips from her recent non-fiction publication Moving from Idea to Finished Draft.
- What’s been going on at SFWA since we had MCA Hogarth on the show back on Episode 20 (more than three years ago!) and why both trad and self-published may find a membership useful.
- What it takes to qualify for SFWA membership.
- Benefits that come with SFWA membership and how the Nebula convention has changed over the years to have helpful panels for all.
(4) FUTURE TENSE. This month’s entry in the Future Tense Fiction series: “When We Were Patched” by Deji Bryce Olukotun.
The last time we ever spoke, my partner Malik asked me whether I believed speed or power made for the best athlete. I was puzzled, of course, feeling that neither could explain why some athletes excelled more than others, even in straightforward competitions like sprinting or the javelin. “There are enough variables to make it unclear,” I observed, “whether speed or power offers a better advantage in competition, or whether some other factor confers the greatest advantage.” It seemed to me an unanswerable question….
It was published along with a response essay by algorithmic bias expert Jeanna Matthews, “Algorithms Could Create an Even Playing Field—if We Insist on It”.
Big decisions about our lives are increasingly made jointly by humans and computer systems. Do we get a loan? Are we invited for an interview? Who should we date? Which news stories should we read? Who won the tennis match? This is our reality today. In “When We were Patched,” Deji Olukotun explores what the boundaries of these human and machine partnerships will be. Could we get the best of both, or will we end up with the worst of both? …
Each month in 2018, Future Tense Fiction—a series of short stories from Future Tense and ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives—is publishing a story on a theme.
(5) FOLLOWING ARMSTRONG’S FOOTSTEPS. Slate compiles the early reviews: “Here’s What Critics Are Saying About First Man“.
Space! Now that I’ve got your attention, the reviews of Damien Chazelle’s First Man, which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, today are in—and fortunately, like the film itself, there’s really no way for them to spoil the ending. The space drama follows Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) in his literal and metaphorical journey to become the first man on the moon.
It’s a story and a genre we know all too well, but this doesn’t hold the film back—it even improves upon its galactic forbearers. Critics agree that the story is masterfully handled by Chazelle, who mixes realism with reverence, without overblowing the drama.
And of course, it’s simply an irresistible opportunity to employ space metaphors, whether that’s about “soaring,” “sky-high expectations,” “slip[ping] the surly bonds of earth or “shoot[ing] the moon.” (Michael Nordine at IndieWire wins this space race: “Chazelle is an adept flight commander, guiding the action with the elegance of a space dance in one scene and the intensity of a rocket launch in the next … It may not be a giant leap for filmmaking, but it’s another small step for this filmmaker.”)
(6) A WRITER’S DAY. John Scalzi’s to-do list for Wednesday.
Things to do today:
1. Go to the elections board to sign up for an absentee ballot
2. Pick up a new beard trimmer because I lost my previous one somewhere on the road
3. Go to Taco Bell and yell JESUS YOU CALL THAT A BURRITO until they kick me out AGAIN
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 29, 2018
(7) NEW HORIZONS SPOTS TARGET. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft — which performed a Pluto flyby about three years ago — has officially spotted its next target (“Ultima in View: NASA’s New Horizons Makes First Detection of Kuiper Belt Flyby Target”). The craft took a series of long-duration images from which the star field was subtracted to pick out the Kuiper Belt object (nicknamed Ultima Thule) New Horizons is headed toward. The closest encounter with Ultima Thule is expected to be early (EST) New Year’s Day 2019.
Mission team members were thrilled – if not a little surprised – that New Horizons’ telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) was able to see the small, dim object while still more than 100 million miles away, and against a dense background of stars. Taken Aug. 16 and transmitted home through NASA’s Deep Space Network over the following days, the set of 48 images marked the team’s first attempt to find Ultima with the spacecraft’s own cameras.
“The image field is extremely rich with background stars, which makes it difficult to detect faint objects,” said Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist and LORRI principal investigator from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “It really is like finding a needle in a haystack. In these first images, Ultima appears only as a bump on the side of a background star that’s roughly 17 times brighter, but Ultima will be getting brighter – and easier to see – as the spacecraft gets closer.”
This first detection is important because the observations New Horizons makes of Ultima over the next four months will help the mission team refine the spacecraft’s course toward a closest approach to Ultima, at 12:33 a.m. EST on Jan. 1, 2019. That Ultima was where mission scientists expected it to be – in precisely the spot they predicted, using data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope – indicates the team already has a good idea of Ultima’s orbit.
(8) REMEMBERING WILLY LEY. Steven Levy’s WIRED article “385 Feet of Crazy: The Most Audacious Flying Machine Ever” is about Paul Allen’s effort to build a giant airplane called a Stratolaunch which he wants to use to carry rockets to the edge of space and then launch from the stratosphere. It includes this sentimental memory about a writer who was important to a lot of fans back in the day.
As a teenager, Paul Allen was a sci-fi and rocketry nerd. He dreamed of becoming an astronaut, but that ambition was scuttled by nearsightedness. His childhood bedroom was filled with science fiction and space books. Bill Gates remembers Allen’s obsession. “Even when I first met him—he was in tenth grade and I was in eighth—he had read way more science fiction than anyone else,” says Gates, who later founded Microsoft with Allen. “Way more.” One of Allen’s favorites was a popular science classic called Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel, by Willy Ley, first published in 1944. As Allen tells it in his memoir, he was crushed when he visited his parents as an adult and went to his old room to reference a book. He discovered that his mother had sold his collection. (The sale price: $75.) Using a blowup of an old photo of the room, Allen dispatched scouts to painstakingly re-create his boyhood library.
(9) OPTIMUS SOLUTION. Daniel Cohen’s Financial Times article “Tales from the storage unit: inside a booming industry”, in a survey of storage spaces, recommends Inner Space Stations in York:
A large model of the Optimus Prime character from TRANSFORMERS stands beide the entrance of its main store, on a busy road. A Dalek is visible through a window; a model of a STAR WARS stormtrooper guards the reception. The sizes of the units correspond to planet s in the solar system; the smallest lockers have an image of Mercury on the door, while the biggest show Jupiter. ‘It’s just making fun,’ says Graham Kennedy, the owner. ‘Quite often there’s a stressful reason for going into storage. So I’ve decided to lighten it.’
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge]
- Born August 29, 1898 – C.S. Lewis. Author of the Narnia books and The Space Trilogy, also The Screwtape Letters which I got assigned in University a very long time ago. Ardent Christian, he wrote three dense book on that religion, Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain. There’s a Doctor Who episode with Matt Smith that riffs off the Narnia book entry way if memory serves me right.
- Born August 29 — Nancy Holder, 65. Perhaps best known for her myriad work, fiction and non-fiction, based off the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. However I’ll single her out as a four-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award including Best Novel for Dead in the Water.
- Born August 29 – Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 64. Extensive writing in the Star Wars genre but also has written such novels as The Quiet Pools which was a Hugo Award nominee and Emprise which was a Philip K. Dick nominee. Several of his short stories were adapted into episodes of theTales from the Darkside series.
- Born August 29 — Lenny Henry, 60. Co-creator with Neil Gaiman and producer of the 1996 BBC drama serial Neverwhere. Narrator of Anansi Boys. Appeared, well appeared isn’t quite proper, in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban as the voice of the Shrunken Head.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
- John King Tarpinian likes to think this is how it looked on the plane home from Worldcon 76 – Off the Mark.
- Jungle cruise: Rhymes with Orange.
(12) HISTORY REVEALED. Michael Cassutt will be signing The Astronaut Maker at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, CA on September 6. (More details at “Michael Cassutt discusses and signs The Astronaut Maker”).
One of the most elusive and controversial figures in NASA’s history, George W. S. Abbey was called “the Dark Lord,” “the Godfather,” and “UNO”–short for unidentified NASA official. He was said to be secretive, despotic, a Space Age Machiavelli. Yet Abbey had more influence on human spaceflight than almost anyone in history. His story has never been told–until now. The Astronaut Maker takes readers inside NASA to learn the real story of how Abbey rose to power, from young pilot and wannabe astronaut to engineer, bureaucrat, and finally director of the Johnson Space Center. During a thirty-seven-year career, mostly out of the spotlight, he oversaw the selection of every astronaut class from 1978 to 1987, deciding who got to fly and when. He was with the Apollo 1 astronauts the night before the fatal fire in January 1967. He was in mission control the night of the Apollo 13 accident and organized the recovery effort. Abbey also led NASA’s recruitment of women and minorities as space shuttle astronauts and was responsible for hiring Sally Ride. Written by Michael Cassutt, the coauthor of the acclaimed astronaut memoirs DEKE! and We Have Capture, and informed by countless hours of interviews with Abbey and his family, friends, adversaries, and former colleagues, The Astronaut Maker is the ultimate insider’s account of ambition and power politics at NASA. (Chicago Review Press)
(13) JUST DRAWN THAT WAY. Need a goat? Remember to smile: “Goats ‘drawn to happy human faces'”.
Scientists have found that goats are drawn to humans with happy facial expressions.
The result suggests a wider range of animals can read people’s moods than was previously thought.
The researchers showed goats pairs of photos of the same person, one of them featuring an angry expression, and the other a happy demeanour.
The goats made a beeline for the happy faces, the team reports in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
(14) THE ACME OF SOMETHING OR OTHER. Maybe this will be your cup of tea but I confess: I plan to be somewhere (anywhere) else when this picture is in theaters: “The ‘Wile E. Coyote’ Movie Has Ordered A Pair Of Writers Who Aren’t From ACME!”
The Roadrunner had better watch out as there is a new ‘Wile E. Coyote’ movie in the works and Warner Bros. has just tapped The Silberman Brothers (‘Living Biblically,’ ‘It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’) to write it! Jon and Josh are going to have a lot of work ahead of them to bring this iconic character to the big screen for an audience base that had significantly changed from when the toon was originally popular.
While this “Super Genius” will always be known for creative inventions that pave the way for perfect slapstick humor, the lack of dialogue for a feature film might mean that we’re getting some massive changes to the Wiley cartoon. While there is no mention of his arch nemesis and his uncatchable meal of The Roadrunner being part of the film, it would be hard to imagine a story that doesn’t include him.
(15) DIAL EIGHT. Another thing I didn’t get done at Worldcon 76 – meeting Galactic Journey’s Gideon Marcus. By now he’s back in 1963 keeping track of the myriad developments in outer space: “[August 29, 1963] Why we fly (August Space Round-up)”.
Bridging the Continents
Communication satellites continue to make our world a smaller place. Syncom, built by Hughes and launched by NASA late last month, is the first comsat to have a 24-hour orbit. From our perspective on the Earth’s surface, it appears to do figure eights around one spot in the sky rather than circling the Earth. This means Syncom can be a permanent relay station between the hemispheres.
It’s already being used. On August 4 the satellite allowed Nigerian journalists and folks from two U.S. services to exchange news stories as well as pictures of President Kennedy and Nigerian Governor General Dr. Nnamdi Zikiwe. Five days later, voice and teletype was exchanged between Paso Robles, California and Lagos, Nigeria. This 7,7700 mile conversation represents the longest range real-time communication ever made.
I think he means 7,700 miles – but of course I would!
(16) GAMING, IT’S NOT JUST FOR BREAKFAST ANYMORE. The BBC reports on the finding of an ancient gaming board and how it may be the clue to the location of an important lost monastery (“Medieval gaming board clue to lost monastery”).
The discovery of a medieval gaming board may have helped bring archaeologists closer to confirming the site of a lost early monastery.
Archaeologists have been actively seeking the Monastery of Deer in Aberdeenshire since about 2008.
Monks at the monastery wrote the important 10th Century illuminated manuscript, the Book of Deer.
Layers beneath the disc-shaped stone gaming board have been carbon dated to the 7th and 8th centuries.
Charcoal also found at the remains of a building uncovered by archaeologists during the latest dig at the site, near Mintlaw, has been dated to the same time, between 669 and 777AD.
Smithsonian follows up with more about the game board itself and its monastic connections (“Archaeologists Unearth Medieval Game Board During Search for Lost Monastery”).
According to The Scotsman’s Alison Campsie, monks likely used the board to play Hnefatafl, a Norse strategy game that pits a king and his defenders against two dozen taflmen, or attackers. As the king’s men attempt to herd him to safety in one of the four burgs, or refuges, located in the corners of the game board, taflmen work to thwart the escape. To end the game, the king must reach sanctuary or yield to captivity.
The board “is a very rare object,” archaeologist Ali Cameron of The Book of Deer Project, who is in charge of excavations, tells Campsie. “Only a few have been found in Scotland, mainly on monastic or at least religious sites. These gaming boards are not something everyone would have had access to.”
…The game board’s discovery and dating to the 7th and 8th centuries offer tantalizing indication that the dig site was, in fact, home to the medieval monastery, but as Mark Hall, a medieval games specialist at the Perth Museum and Art Gallery, cautions, “This temptation remains just that until further evidence presents itself to make a valid link between the disc and the date.”
(17) MORE COMICS CROSSOVERS. Daniel Dern is keeping an eye open for these: “Sometime within the last year we got a great bunch, notably the Batman/Elmer Fudd (including the narrated-by-Denny-ONeil video). A bunch just came out today, including Lex Luthor/Porky Pig, Joker/Daffy Duck, and Catwoman/Sylvester.”
And io9’s James Whitbrook looks ahead to when “All the Incredible New Comic Series to Cozy Up With This Fall”.
DC/Hanna-Barbera Crossovers—DC’s bizarro mashups between its comics universe and the animated antics of Hanna-Barbera’s most beloved creations continues with another wave of weird and wonderful adventures.
Deathstroke/Yogi Bear #1—Frank Tieri, Mark Texeira
Green Lantern/Huckleberry Hound #1—Mark Russell, Rick Leonardi
Nightwing/Magilla Gorilla #1—Heath Corson, Tom Grummett
Superman/Top Cat #1—Dan DiDio, Shane Davis
(18) GAME OVER. Camestros Felapton discovered spammers have taken over the abandoned Sad Puppies IV website but kept most of the content to make it look like Kate Paulk is selling slot machines in Italian –
[Thanks to ULTRAGOTHA, John King Tarpinian, Cat Rambo, Mike Kennedy, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Joey Eschrich, mlex, Daniel Dern, Michael Toman, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew.]
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I hope “First Man” the film is better done than “First Man” the book, which I thought was badly flawed by the author’s lack of aviation and aerospace knowledge.
14) the lack of dialogue for a feature film might mean that we’re getting some massive changes to the Wiley cartoon.
IIRC, there was a Coyote/Bugs Bunny cartoon where Wile E. spoke.
“Wile E. Coyote–SUPER GENIUS”.
They might be better off doing a ‘how did he get to be this way” story.
Now if they’d just bring back Witch Hazel.
[click]
Thanks for the title credit.
(4) I read this story and enjoyed it.
(16) The claim that hnefatafl boards are mainly associated with Christian religious sites is new to me. Some are, but many are not (and, indeed, predate widespread Christianity in the area they were found.)
(6) According to the webcomic Dumbing of Age, Scalzi probably just waited too long to eat that burrito.
(2) (Quoting the article:) “Critic Andrew Ervin at The Washington Post reports that The Fall of Gondolin, which will be released tomorrow, is likely J.R.R. and Christopher Tolkien’s swan song.” And that, friends, was when endlessly prolific author L. Ron Hubbard stepped in to take over writing.
(16) I guess they haven’t found the Hnefatafl boards’ D20 polyhedral dice, yet.
Think good thoughts for me tomorrow. After a day spent safely inside in the AC, I need to go out too to see my therapist, and to go to the post office.
Friday is the potentially dread ultrasound follow-up to my mammogram. They found something they want to take a closer look at. This is not necessarily serious, but on the other hand, not necessarily not.
In 2429, we should have better solutions.
Speaking of Wile E. Coyote:
“Beep beep!”
(Monroe County, NY Sheriff Department evidently got tired of people calling the 911 emergency number merely because they saw a coyote. So, they’ve provided a helpful guide to when coyote behaviour justifies dialling 911. Acme Products featured.)
Anecdata: Early ’60s, my father, then co-pilot at Pan American World Airways, had a layover in Tokyo right when Road Runner / Wile E. Coyote cartoons first played there — which fact he could determine from a frequent aftermath to accidental sidewalk jostlings: One party would say ‘Beep-beep!’, and both would laugh uproariously. Perfect trans-cultural appeal.
Follow-on: The comment thread on the Monroe County NY story says the coyote-sightings poster gag has been recycled and claimed to have been from diverse (probably rural) law-enforcement agencies over some number of months. In at least one case (Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office), the commenter says, at least a sheriff’s department actually re-published the gag. In others, including Monroe County, it’s been just an Internet faked-up poster. (And thus are Internet urban legends propagated.)
(2) And now I’m earwormed:
“Gondolin has fallen, fallen, fallen!
Gondolin has fallen, to rise no more!”
(11) COMICS SECTION. 😀
(14) THE ACME OF SOMETHING OR OTHER. I doubt I’m the target audience for this, but who knows. (The Shadow knows! But he’s not telling.)
(15) DIAL EIGHT. Hey, just use the File 770 time machine to get to him! Why, here in . . . aw, darn, 2018?!
(16) GAMING, IT’S NOT JUST FOR BREAKFAST ANYMORE. No doubt it was a precursor to a game we like: Mystery of the Abbey. 😉
– – – – –
@Lis Carey: Hoping for good things for you and thinking healthful thoughts!
(1) CASE DISMISSED.
Hey, isn’t “Roy Calbeck” that sad puppy supporter, who turned up at MGC etc? The one who’d tried a dumb lawsuit against Battletech a few years earlier? Small world.
I may have missed it, but I didn’t see it here yet:
The Guardian published an interesting article, Is the future female? Fixing sci-fi’s women problem, that discusses one author’s experience writing a short story for an anthology, Women Invent the Future that is available for just postage&packing in paperback, or as a free download in ePup format.
Four of them. And another one which plays more like a standard Coyote/Road Runner cartoon (it starts with a running Bugs saying he’s standing in for the Road Runner).
16) Hnefatafl is a fun game… I used to have a set myself, a reproduction thing from the British Museum gift shop (lost it in a move). I don’t think there’s anything specifically Christian about it, though. Or anything that would limit its accessibility – you could scratch out a game grid on a patch of bare earth with a stick, and all you need for pieces are some visually distinct dark and light, well, things, with one larger thing to represent the king.
Of course, more sophisticated gaming boards were luxury items – things like the Lewis chessmen come to mind – and monasteries were places where you might find people with money to pay for them, and spare time to play with them, I guess.
(6) following up on Scalzi’s number 1, have all USian Filers registered to vote in November? It’s important.
For overseas Americans, time to register is running out, as absentee ballots go out 45 days before the election. If they have not registered, they should go to the Federal Voter Assistance Program (flap.gov) and register/request a ballot ASAP!
Gosh, editor of the day? Egoboo!
Had over 2,000 unread e-mails waiting for me to ploy through when I got back Saturday night from San Jose, on the train. I hope two weeks without any stuff from me didn’t cause our universe to implode!
@Christian Brunschen
Thanks for this. But psst – it’s called ePub. Okay, maybe when it’s puppy fiction it’s ePup.
3)
Oh great, I must listen to that. I’m quite fond of the SFF Marketing Podcast and listen regularly.
@Lis: Thinking of you. Today is supposed to be significantly cooler than Tuesday or Wednesday (though it never got cool last night), and Friday downright pleasant. (I’m in Somerville, which runs hotter than the official temperatures at Logan this time of year.)
@Cora Buhlert,
I noticed my typo after the edit window had closed, of course. Though perhaps if the contents and cover art hark back to a particular era in publishing, it might be ‘ePulp’?
@Lis Carey
Look at it this way: you might be able to see the screen with the mammo images. In color! And it really doesn’t hurt.
(The worst part, for me, was the goop they use on you to get better readings.)
[Been there, done that, and they tell me that the last mammo, a year after it all started, is normal.]
Why is the epub of Women Invent the Future 20 MB?
P J Evans: I have heard widely varying reports how painful mammograms are, depending on the breast tissue in question and the perversity of the technician in how flat they crank the thing. Here’s hoping Lis has an experience like yours, both non-painful and with good results.
ePup is the worst. It claims to be the most popular and accessible format that the silent majority use but actually it only works with old Sony ereaders. If you try to convert it to a more modern format it just errors and throws up a bunch of word salad that can’t be parsed.
(18) Someone is finally using that site for a useful purpose.
14) No, just NO! I’m part of their target audience and the Roadrunner/ Wile E. Coyote schtick works (sometimes just barely) in six minutes or so. A feature length release would be a very bad idea.
I’ll reread Coyote v. Acme by Ian Frazier instead, thank you very much, then watch the shorts.
@Lenora Rose
Ultrasound mammos don’t work that way. It’s a handheld device.
(I had them trying to get the IV port in one mammo. That…was not fun; it’s next to my shoulder. But most of the ones in the last year haven’t been painful; the newer digital mammo machines have plastic flatteners and can be rotated to different angles. Larger boobs will still have problems, though.)
@Oneiros: LOL re. your ePup comments. 😉
He also threatened a lawsuit against us (the Sasquan Hugo administrators) over the wooden “asterisks” that were handed out to the Hugo nominees that year (despite the fact that the Hugo administrators knew nothing about them until after the fact).
Yet another reason why I’ve retired as a Hugo administrator, after taking on the job for four times. It just wasn’t fun anymore.
Spoiler alert: It turns out that a gondola/mandolin combo is tremendously impractical, and the entire business model collapses.
@Cora: “But psst – it’s called ePub.”
Actually, it’s called EPUB – the trademark is registered in all caps, and it’s uniformly rendered in all caps wherever the format name comes up in the defining specs. We’re not talking about an electronic tavern…
Since Roy’s Arizona filing asked for fee waivers because of indigence, I guess that means a person can go broke without being woke…
@Mike
Zing!
Thank you for all the kind words!
This is not the mammogram, which was Monday. It’s the “oops, we found something we want to take a closer look at” followup ultrasound. Pain should not be an issue!
Unless they decide they need to do a needle biopsy right then and there, in which case….
I’m worried, but not panicked. There is, as P J indicates, a lot of room for them to find nothing worrying at all, nothing requiring any further action.
Today, 86 degrees, feels like 88. So, cooler, but not actually wonderful. Better, though.
Staying in, now that I’m back home from the therapist, the post office, and the store. Well, the shopping had to get done sometime!
Okay, maybe I did something wrong, in my excitement.
I havve just loaded an eARC of The Accidental War, by Walter Jon Williams, onto my ereader, after finally looking at an email I had been ignoring for at least an entire hour.
Dancing happily….
Lis, good luck!
I had my echocardiogram today, though I don’t know results yet. Much goop was deployed. I came home for a washup and a change of underpinnings.
I’ve had a pull in my neck or something since Monday. Tilting my head even slightly right hurts badly, and I’m having trouble finding a comfortable position for sleep. Any ideas? I can’t take NSAIDs now that I’m on a blood thinner. Acetaminophen/paracetamol is it.
Lenore Jones — Sorry to hear that; would maybe a travel pillow help to keep your head from tilting?
@ Lenore. Memory foam contour pillows (available at Costco) keep your head from moving while you sleep. I personally find the restricted movement uncomfortable, but it might be just what you need this week.
Hope it feels better soon.
1)
Huh, he was a Burned Fur too? So not only is he a litigious schmuck, but he was involved in a group that almost ruined the first Furry Con I’ve ever attended as well. How nice. I recall him trying to give legal advice to someone on Furaffinity and really should have brought the Battletech/Sasquan stuff as a warning that this person has approximately zero idea what he is talking about.
I’m enjoying my employer’s ER right now. Injected steroids and a breathing treatment later and I’m feeling better. I’m no longer coughing violently and can think so that’s a huge improvement.
Suspect I’m about to go be admitted to the hospital and get the diagnostic collection from hell, but if it gets to the bottom of this and a treatment regime, I’ll do it.
Lis, do I take it that email was bringing good news?
(I had an all clear last week as well, after two weeks of joking that if they had to remove my boobs at least I would be able to button shirts again, and if I died young at least I didn’t have to worry about dementia…)
(1) …and Communist Furs.
I have questions.
BravoLimaPapa, best wishes for a good diagnosis and effective treatment.
I’m trying to figure out how a legal system, founded on British and French law, somehow managed to avoid making it possible to sue someone for being an idiotic asshole.
“Yes sir, It’s true. This man has no dick” worked in Ghost Busters (getting the EPA guy escorted out of the Mayor’s office), but that’s bureaucratic BS.
In all seriousness, it should NOT be that hard to make a serial legal harasser STFU, yet it is.
(5) Not planning to watch First Man, but I’m hoping it will be a huge success so Chazelle will stop ruining Jazz with his idiotic takes.
On a positive note, auto-fill of user names is back. Yay!
@BravoLimaPoppa3–I hope you are breathing better, and that the testing finds nothing scary wrong with you.
@Anna–Good news, but not medically. Any medical all clear will have to wait at least until after tomorrow’s ultrasound. No, the good news was more purely fun–a widget to download an eARC of Walter Jon Williams’ new Praxis novel, The Accidental War.
@Adam Rakunas
It was only a matter of time until the Pawletariat would rise up, slip the leash of the oppressors, and seize the means of kibble production.
(9) Inner Space Stations:
I was just driving past this this morning wondering if it was generally known. (OGH, if you’d like some photos not stuck behind a paywall, then just say and I’ll be out with a camera next sunny day).
The storeage centre is a bit of a johnny come lately to the guy’s empire. I first noticed a petrol station on the north of York with a model X-Wing parked on the forecourt about twenty years ago.
It’s gone now, but he has another station with a whole array of models: Two transformers (Optimus Prime and Bumblebee I think, though I’m not that tuned into Transformers fandom), several Cybermen and a Dalek on the roof (which are wrapped up in Christmas lights each year) and Boba Fett and Han Solo in Carbonite guarding the entrance to the door.
@microtherion: [snortle]