Pixel Scroll 8/1/16 If You Like It, Put A Ringworld On It

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(1) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOOK. George R.R. Martin looks back on “The Long Game… of Thrones”, which came out 20 years ago today.

…Reviews were generally good, sales were… well, okay. Solid. But nothing spectacular. No bestseller lists, certainly. I went on a book tour around that same time, signing copies in Houston, Austin, and Denton, Texas; in St. Louis, Missouri; in Chicago and Minneapolis; and up the west coast to San Diego, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Portland, and Seattle. Turnouts were modest in most places. The crowds didn’t reach one hundred anywhere, and at one stop (St. Louis, if you must know), not only was attendance zero but I actually drove four patrons out of the bookshop, allowing me to set my all time “bad signing” record at minus four (on the plus side, I had the time for long friendly talks with the readers who did show up).

But my oh my, things have changed a bit in these last twenty years….

(2) OBAMA ON BEING A NERD. “President Barack Obama on How To Win The Future” at Popular Science.

PS: Do you consider yourself a nerd and, if so, what’s your nerdiest pastime?

BO: Well, my administration did write a pretty detailed response to a petition, explaining why we wouldn’t build a real-life Death Star, so I’d like to think I have at least a little nerd credibility built up.

What’s remarkable is the way “nerd” is such a badge of honor now. Growing up, I’m sure I wasn’t the only kid who read Spider-Man comics and learned how to do the Vulcan salute, but it wasn’t like it is today. I get the sense that today’s young people are proud to be smart and curious, to design new things, and tackle big problems in unexpected ways. I think America’s a nerdier country than it was when I was a kid—and that’s a good thing!

(3) SWAP HIS SCARF FOR THE GARTER. John Harvey has started a petition at Change.org calling for Tom Baker to receive a knighthood.

After reading a recent edition of Doctor Who Magazine, the stark realisation set in that after a life time in entertainment and tireless charity work, visits to hospitals and hospices, the living legend that is Tom Baker has not been officially recognised in any way shape or form.

Tom Baker’s commitment to the role of the 4th doctor and his many charitable acts since and brightened the lives of children and adult’s everywhere.

In an age where the like’s of James Corden can receive honours so early in their career, I think it’s a travesty. I’d like to try to change that and right this wrong.

(4) LOCUS POLL. The July issue of Locus published the survey rankings – Black Gate posted the top 10 in the magazine category.

  1. Asimov’s SF
  2. Tor.com
  3. Fantasy & Science Fiction
  4. Clarkesworld
  5. File 770
  6. Lightspeed
  7. Analog
  8. Black Gate
  9. Uncanny
  10. Strange Horizons

(4) MORE ON JOYCE KATZ. As big a loss as it is to fanzine fandom, there are gaming journalists who felt Joyce Katz’ death just as keenly. Chris Kohler of WIRED paid tribute: “Joyce Worley Katz, Pioneering Videogame Critic, Has Passed Away”.

Joyce Katz, who along with her husband Arnie Katz and friend Bill Kunkel founded the first magazine devoted to videogames, has passed away at the age of 77.

Katz, who wrote professionally under her maiden name Joyce Worley, was senior editor of the magazine Electronic Games from its founding in 1981 until just prior to its shuttering in 1985. She went on to take senior editorial roles at gaming publications throughout the 1990s, including Video Games & Computer Entertainment and the relaunched Electronic Games…..

Joyce had continued to write about games regularly until the closing of the second run of Electronic Games in the mid-90s. In the August 1994 issue of that publication, Katz made note of the industry’s worrying shift away from “games for everyone” to a hyper-violent boys’ club: “Tetris and Shanghai charmed women, Mortal Kombat did not.”

It was a prescient column in more ways than one. Katz looked forward to a future in which online gaming would make women “feel less threatened by on-lookers who might tease or criticize their performance in a game.” Sadly, it did not turn out to be that simple. But she also predicted that easier-to-use hardware coupled with better software design would keep girls gaming their whole lives, a future she did live to see.

“Somewhere between age 9 and 12, we lose the ladies,” Worley wrote. “We may never get back the teenaged girls, but hopefully we can arrange gaming so that we won’t lose them in the first place.”

(5) JUST. ONE. BOOK. Margaret Elysia Garcia and friends are still processing the avalanche of donations that came in response to their appeal for people to send books to a rural California school library.

I am bone tired and weary. I have biceps I haven’t had since my kids were toddlers. I am happy to say we have only 20 more boxes to open at the library–and hopefully none will come tomorrow. We are few people and we need to catch up. The generosity is overwhelming.  Thank you. Thank you cards have begun and imagine they will take the better part of the fall semester to complete. I hope a thank you here is also enough as some boxes came in damaged in parts and addresses were not always readable. Please be patient. I’ve had a few emails from people thinking perhaps that we have 200 people and a sophisticated technology set up to respond. Alas we have a couple dozen people who donate time when they can. And we have one very exhausted me who has some reinforcements coming this week thank goodness.

(6) SPACEDOCK. See how the original model Enterprise was restored.

This is a short film showing the process of the detail paint work on the restoration of original U.S.S. Enterprise miniature. The work was done between the 11th and the 23rd of April 2016 at the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy facility. The model is now on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.

 

(7) IT’S TOO LATE, BABY, IT’S TOO LATE. Yesterday, when it wasn’t, Timothy the Talking Cat posted, “Timothy says: Hugos! Vote! Vote now! Before it is TOO LATE!”

So I say to you all: Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government! You have nothing to fear but the lurking horror in your basement! We shall fight them on the bleachers! Countrymen lend me your ears! But above all in the immortal words of Theodore Cruz: Vote yourself conscious!

(8) THE HORROR. Jason P. Hunt did a roundup of all the horror genre news that came out of San Diego Comic-Con at SciFi4Me.

“Want to see something really scary?”

Remember that line from The Twilight Zone? Well, we have a scary big pile of news on the horror side of things from Comic-Con International in San Diego.

(9) TITLES TO BE UNLOCKED. Thanks to Petréa Mitchell we know the list of achievement trophies in No Man’s Sky:

No spoilers, other than the names of the trophies themselves. They’re all named after sf works. There’s a mixture of old and new, classic and obscure, Puppy-approved and degenerate SJW… even one (out of 23) written by a woman.

For example,

Babel-17

Attain ‘Confused’ status in Words Collected

The Star Beast

Attain ‘Archivist’ status in Uploaded Discoveries

(10) WHALE OF A TAIL. This will unquestionably float somebody’s boat — “Channing Tatum to Play Mermaid in ‘Splash’ Remake for Disney”.

Disney is moving forward on a remake of the 1984 film Splash with an interesting twist: Channing Tatum will star as the mermaid character that was played by Daryl Hannah while Jillian Bell will play the character originally played by Tom Hanks.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

  • August 1, 1819 – Herman Melville. It took John Huston to get Ray Bradbury to read the book.

(12) SFWA GRANTS. Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is taking applications for grants for worthy projects until October 1.

Last year the Givers Fund received enough donations to provide grants to projects such as the LaunchPad astronomy program, the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers, the Clarion West Writers Workshop, and the SFWA Star Project, among others, in the program’s first year.

The Grants Committee evaluated the multiple proposals on a number of criteria, the most important of which was how well they served the genre community and its writers. For example, the SFWA Star Project looks for a crowdfunded initiative each month to support by spreading the word as well as with a small donation. The innovative effort underscores SFWA’s leadership in new publishing models, including being the first writing organization to take crowdfunding as professional credentials.

This year we are continuing to provide grants to worthy projects. If you have a nonprofit project that you think would benefit the writing community, please submit it to [email protected].

Apply Here

Application forms must be submitted by October 1st. Decisions on recipients will be finalized in November of this year and applicants notified by year’s end.

(13) CHEER YOURSELF DOWN.

https://twitter.com/KameronHurley/status/760247774633918464

(14) TOR EBOOK. The Tor.com Free eBook Club Pick for August is The Just City by Jo Walton.

Sign up for the Book Club, or sign in if you’re already registered, to download the book (available only from August 1 through 7).

(15) WHAT IS PLANNING. Nigel Quinlan’s “Outline Planning Permission Part 2” went up on Writing.ie today.

…I challenged myself to PLAN. I wrestled with the big issues. What was planning? Was coffee planning fuel? What did it mean to plan? When was I getting another cup of coffee? Wasn’t planning just writing, only without the fun? (No, that’s making radical revisions because you wrote without a proper plan, Nigel.) I drank coffee. I read up on planning. Some was useful, some wasn’t. It became apparent that I was going to have to devise a method that worked for me.

This is where I’m at, by the way. I’m, er, making up my planning as I go along.

I got loads of notebooks and spread them around my desk in a very satisfactory manner.

Then I wasted time on the internet. Then I stopped because procrastination gets depressing after a while.

I wrote out the story so far.

I filled a big page with the names of all the characters so far and indicated roughly their relationships.

I made a tentative list of characters who have yet to appear and gave some indication of their roles and relationships.

I made a list of settings and gave rough ideas of how the story moves from place to place and what occurs there. I gave detail where I had them and left things vague where I didn’t, and decided not to worry about the vague bits – that’s rather the point of planning: find the vague bits and fill ‘em in.

I made a list of words I associated with the story as a whole. Random words, some reflecting theme, some mood, some character, some representing nothing yet.

I wrote out my ideas for the rest of the story, asking questions, posing alternatives, highlighting some of the stuff that needed work and trying to remain calm at the vast spaces that remained vague and undefined.

I sat and surveyed what I had done. And it was a start….

(16) DISCWORLD CON. The North American Discworld Convention 2017 announced yesterday –

Hotel Contract Signed!

We are delighted to announce that the North American Discworld® Convention 2017 will be held in New Orleans, LA, September 1–4 next year. Membership and hotel details will be announced in the next month, but for now, save the dates and start contemplating which costumes you’ll want to wear as you attend The Genuan Experience!!

(17) DID THE EARTH MOVE FOR YOU? Speaking of the earth moving (as we did in a recent Scroll), the BBC just did a report on continental drift accompanied by speculative animated maps tracing their movement back 750 million years and forward 250.

Science calls it “Pangaea Proxima”. You might prefer to call it the Next Big Thing. A supercontinent is on its way that incorporates all of Earth’s major landmasses, meaning you could walk from Australia to Alaska, or Patagonia to Scandinavia. But it will be about 250 million years in the making.

For Christopher Scotese at the University of Texas at Arlington, the fact that our continents are not stationary is tantalising. How were they arranged in the past – and how will they be positioned in the future?

“Fifty million years from now, Australia will be in collision with southeast Asia to a much larger degree,” he says. Africa will also be pushing right up against southern Europe, while the Atlantic will be a far wider ocean than it is today.

(18) GLAZE NOTE. In case anyone wondered if it was possible, the BBC explains “How to break glass with sound”. Step one: not with one’s voice.

You’re probably familiar with the urban legend: the opera singer ascends the stage and clears his throat. His audience cheer and wave their champagne flutes in anticipation. He opens his mouth – and a roomful of glasses smash to pieces. We have no record that this has ever actually happened, but there were rumours that the legendary tenor Enrico Caruso could quiver a glass into a million pieces.

(19) SHARKNADO 4, THE COMPLETE SPOILER REVIEW. Be honest, you weren’t going to watch it anyway, so why not read Jordan DesJardin’s “Movie Review: ‘Sharknado 4: The 4th Awakens’” at ScienceFiction.com?

I don’t want to spoil the ending, but the words ‘Shark-ception” definitely comes to mind. ‘Sharknado: The 4th Awakens’ culminates is probably the most ridiculous ending of any of these films to date, and there is nothing to not love about it. If you’re a fan of the first three, you’ll love this one. And really if you’ve never seen a ‘Sharknado’ movie before (in which case, what is wrong with you, get on that!), it is really difficult not to have a good time while watching this movie. We highly recommend pairing this movie (and the previous three) with a large couch, several good friends, some snacks and drinks, and you are all set for one hell of a ride!

(20) HOLODECK. You’ve just been drafted into the crew of the Enterprise. Would you rather wear a redshirt or a gray coverall?

[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, JJ, Gary Farber, Petréa Mitchell, Mark-kitteh, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

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1,116 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/1/16 If You Like It, Put A Ringworld On It”

  1. @Lee: “really on” does not suffice to rate that lunacy — mashing up lyrics \and/ music?!? Thank you for the pointer; now I’ll have to go to his site and download the album. (I’m with you on the hit-or-miss, also; I tend to play about half the songs on Entering Marion if I have control of the player. But the good ones get played multiple times….)

  2. The Golden Age of Opportunity in the U.S. is gone — and it is not coming back. People born since 1995 can no longer expect to have better lives than their parents and grandparents did. It used to be that having a college or university degree was an assurance of a reasonably prosperous life. Now it just gives those people something of an edge when competing against everyone else for low-paying jobs.

    Globalization is the great equalizer. Unfortunately, when you’re at the top of the heap, what equalization does is lower your country’s economic performance and prospects — which is what has happened to the States. 😐

  3. After four days, I finally received my Dragon Awards ballot and promptly voted for the least puppy pooish candidates I could find.

  4. Are we supposed to be pretending that major retailers would not have tried to automate their checkout systems if only the mean old government weren’t taxing them or enforcing minimum-wage laws or whatever? Because while I obviously have a taste for speculative fiction, my SOD has its limits.

  5. After four days, I finally received my Dragon Awards ballot and promptly voted for the least puppy pooish candidates I could find.

    Same here. It was surprisingly difficult to do in some categories.

  7. @Aaron

    Same here. It was surprisingly difficult to do in some categories.

    Military SFF was pretty bad, especially with Scalzi withdrawing. I eventually went with Django Wexler. Marko Kloos seems to be a decent person and he is a (former) countryman, but something about his books sets my teeth on edge.

    Alternate history was bad as well. I went with Naomi Novik, even though I don’t care for her Temeraire books all that much.

    The gaming categories were difficult for me as well, since I don’t do games.

  9. I thought the release time was midnight Pacific but it’s midnight Eastern! Squee!

  10. I thought the release time was midnight Pacific but it’s midnight Eastern! Squee!
    They may be doing it by timezone or something – it hasn’t hit my library yet.

  14. Doctor Science: So I may have just purchased e-versions of Obelisk Gate AND Ghost Talkers, to read while traveling to Worldcon.

    The first step is admitting that you have a problem. 😉

  17. ‘Obelisk Gate’ now on the Kindle, just finished ‘Lovecraft Country’ (brilliant and straight onto my 2017 longlist), and getting stuck into ‘Into Everywhere’. Before that I read and enjoyed ‘Visitor’, which continues the trend of improvement in the Foreigner sequence. Reading material just hitting a purple patch.

  18. I kinda pity OGH if he reads this thread when he feels better. The WFC thread is actively painful. As soon as he’s back I suggest we drop these threads like hot potatoes for his sake.

  19. Oh damn I couldn’t have planned my reading any worse. I’m currently reading (on Kindle) Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life, (in hardback) Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours and (in paperback) In Order to Live by Park Yeonmi. I’ll have to finish at least one of these before I make a start on The Obelisk Gate…

  21. 20 pages of Halting State to go.
    Obelisk Gate on the phone but not yet on the eReader. Choices, choices.

  22. Obelisk Gate AND Poisoned Blade (Court of Fives 2) downloading right now.
    There will be zero housework done tonight (possibly little sleep either).

  24. Cora on August 15, 2016 at 9:06 pm said:
    Same here. It was surprisingly difficult to do in some categories.

    Military SFF was pretty bad, especially with Scalzi withdrawing. I eventually went with Django Wexler. Marko Kloos seems to be a decent person and he is a (former) countryman, but something about his books sets my teeth on edge.

    Alternate history was bad as well. I went with Naomi Novik, even though I don’t care for her Temeraire books all that much.

    I think in many categories the mainstream, non-Puppy vote might be concentrated on just one or two candidates.

  25. I’ve got a feeling the puppies might be about to learn that going from Hugo-rules voting to first past the post is not logically equivalent to the last shall be first and the first shall be last. It’s like the old joke from old Soviet Russia about life:

    Under capitalism, life is man against man, but under communism, it’s just the other way around.

  26. @rob_matic will there be much of a non-puppy vote? Dragoncon hasn’t been big on promoting this and we didn’t see any nomination numbers.

  27. Iphinome on August 16, 2016 at 6:43 am said:
    @rob_matic will there be much of a non-puppy vote? Dragoncon hasn’t been big on promoting this and we didn’t see any nomination numbers.

    I think it’s fair to assume that the nomination numbers are fairly small based on the appearance of the likes of Declan Finn and John C Wright on the shortlist. Also, it’s only really getting any sort of buzz from Puppy-ish types. But somebody must have nominated Jemisin and Scalzi in the first stage of the process and I’m guessing those people weren’t Puppies.

  29. The presence of Wright and (especially) Finn on the list certainly suggests canine influence. (Finn isn’t an actual member of any Puppy group as far as I know, but he has been promoting himself largely through the SP site.) But I think it’s dangerous to think of everyone whom the Puppy campaigns have ever supported as a Puppy nominee. Jim Butcher is a genuinely popular author with a large following, who one would expect to do well in in a first-past-the-post, ‘get out the vote’ kind of competition. Charles Gannon is a Nebula regular (and has been savaged by VD, if I remember rightly).

    There are people with conservative views and/or a love of simple adventure and weapons who aren’t part of any conspiracy: calling them all Puppies rather buys into the idea that the Puppy campaigns represent a real excluded group, rather than being exercises in either self-promotion or destructiveness.

  30. By the way, it’s interesting that Jemisin turns up in two categories – if the rules stated earlier are being followed, her nominations must have come from different people.

    Also, were we ever told in advance how many finalists there would be in each category? I do wonder if they have been applying something equivalent to Additional Finalists (which, not being bound by a constitution, they can do at will).

    (Apologies if all this has already been discussed. I have been away for a week, and didn’t want to wade through everything.)

  31. Andrew M: I do wonder if they have been applying something equivalent to Additional Finalists

    Given the difference between the Official list and Declan Finn’s supposed official list, I would said that it’s almost certain.

    What I’d like to know is who was giving Finn the list before the DragonCon heads actually modified it and released it publicly. I’d say that this is just more evidence that it’s a Puppy Project which the DragonCon heads had to step in on.

  32. The movie Arrival, which is based on Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” has a full trailer out:

  36. Andrew M asked:

    Also, were we ever told in advance how many finalists there would be in each category?

    No, we weren’t. Seeing as five is the standard for the awards they’re imitating, and also the smallest number in any category in the shortlist, I’m presuming it’s five plus however many are needed to accommodate ties.

  37. @Rob Thornton,
    “Now that’s a proper introduction.”

    I previously thought it’s not doable. I mean the Ted Chiang story is brilliant, but it’s such a linguistics mind-bender and so innately of its medium that I didn’t think it was possible to translate it to the big screen. Now though, I’m feeling cautiously excited.

  38. Jim Butcher’s nominations and also Charles Gannon’s, David Weber’s, Eric Flint’s, S.M. Stirling’s and Marko Kloos’ aren’t necessarily due to puppies. Butcher has a big fanbase (and I know some non-puppies nominated him for the Hugo this year), ditto for Weber, Flint and Stirling, and Gannon got three Nebula nominations in three subsequent years. Even Correia might have come by his nomination without canine interference, since he does have a sizeable and devoted fanbase. Doesn’t change the fact that he’s a jerk.

    There is a bit of a more populist Baen slant to the nominations than what you’d find on the Hugo shortlist, but then the Dragon Awards have positioned themselves as the “popular genre awards”. Their nomination and voter base is likely also a lot more US-focussed, hence more Baen stuff. But the nominations for lesser known puppy affiliates like Niemeier, Flynn, Cole and Freer and for JCW, who’s an acquired taste, to put it mildly, suggest canine interference. Okay, Cole had a non-puppy fanbase before he went off the deep end and started chasing the puppy dollar, but the others are obscure. At least two of the “Who the hell is this?” nominees turned out to be puppies upon closer inspection.

  39. I’m pretty surprised that the “Welcome to Night Vale” novel didn’t make it in the paranormal category, if the goal is to be the “popular award.” And I was very disappointed by the lack of “Radiance” by Catherynne Valente on the alt. history list.

  40. Speaking as an avid Welcome to Night Vale fan, I found the novel to be thoroughly disappointing. I don’t think I’m alone in that…

    …although I guess you’re right that even a moderately-sized slice of that fandom would be a force to be reckoned with 🙂

  41. @Chip Hitchcock
    @Bill: if the South is as majority-sane about the Civil War as you claim, why did it take a mass murder to get the flag of slavery and treason removed from public property? The murder can be dismissed as a lone wolf; unless there’s something really broken about your politics, the persistence of the flag (and the lies told to justify it) represents the opinion of at least a substantial minority.

    I would imagine that the flag meant many things to many citizens of SC, and that for most of those who did not want it taken down, it did not mean slavery and treason, but rather heritage, community, and the sacrifices of ancestors. Take all the positive things the U.S. flag means to you (I’m assuming it does mean something good for you) – for a person who lives in the South, and whose roots are there, there are elements of those feelings in the Confederate flag. The fact that the flag flew over a racist society doesn’t change that any more than the fact that the U.S. flag has flown over the same society changes the strong positive emotional response many have to it. Add to that a general tendency to dig in your heels when you are being told that you are racist, when you don’t believe you are, and you get a situation where the flag becomes a symbol of “you aren’t the boss of me”.

    When person A uses a symbol because it means something good to them, and then finds out that it means something bad to person B, I don’t exactly know what person A’s obligations are. I think that the flag was hurtful to a substantial portion of the SC citizenry, and shouldn’t be displayed the way it was at the SC capitol. On the other hand, I think that Vanderbilt University’s decision to pay the United Daughters of the Confederacy $1.2 M to rename a building that the UDC helped pay for is stupid (the money could have been used for much more useful things), and that erasing John Calhoun’s name from the history of Yale is an ill-advised thing for a university to do.

    @Bill: wrt your economics “laws” (which IME as a lab scientist don’t even rise to the level of theories): thus my scare quotes, and reference to “debatable”

    if indirect urging doesn’t work, maybe direct penalties are called for. If a company lays off people rather than paying them decently, add a multiple of the money they “save” to their taxes, and see if Le Chatelier’s “Law” (usually Principle) applies.

    Le Chatelier’s Principle may be an appropriate model for what I was trying to get at: If you put new stresses (taxes) on a system (Walmart), the system will respond to an equilibrium state (by avoiding the behavior that was taxed – in this case, hiring people who draw assistance). Likewise, if a company is taxed in response to layoffs, any new hire represents the potential for a future liability above and beyond the previously-existing costs of adding that employee. A possible response include not hiring full-time workers, but hiring only part-time workers and when the desire to reduce labor costs arises, just cut everyone’s hours instead of laying anyone off. At any rate, if it becomes more expensive for a company to hire low-skill workers, then it will hire fewer of them.

    I realize that many Walmart workers don’t make enough money to make ends meet. But simply extracting more money from the company and distributing it to the workers most likely won’t solve that problem but rather move it around – it will cause massive changes in the way the company behaves, such that it reverts to a point to where it is not paying more for relatively unskilled labor than the labor generates wealth for the company.

    @Lee If that’s not saying “we can’t force them to pay back the tax money they’re stealing because it would hurt the poor” I don’t know what it is saying.

    It certainly isn’t saying that the company is stealing tax money. If you believe that, you and I have such a different set of axioms that it is difficult to move forward.

    Walmart’s isn’t stealing money, either from the worker as unpaid wages, or from the govt as unpaid taxes. Just because Walmart has a lot of money and a lot of revenue, that doesn’t mean that the govt has a greater claim on it than it does on your or my money because its workforce tends to be at the low end of the spectrum.

    Google hires high wage people, who have many other options. The wages they pay don’t offset much public assistance, because if their employees weren’t working for Google, they’d be very employable otherwise. Walmart hires people in a completely different social status. Much of what they pay in labor does offset public assistance, because for many of their employees, the Walmart job is their only option.

    Isn’t Walmart then doing a greater social good? Would it not be good to subsidize employers who hire low-skill workers, rather than tax them?

    There was an unstated assumption in my original statement, to wit. that the alternative we’re trying to bring about is for those companies to actually pay their employees a living wage.

    I don’t think that companies should be required to pay an hourly wage of more than the worker earns for the company in that hour. If you think that people who are working (or not) should be given $15 an hour no matter what their skills are (and some skill sets simply aren’t worth that much money), how is it Walmart’s obligation to make up the difference?

    @Francesca
    I don’t think so, going by the permanent “Now hiring” sign at Walmart.
    If Walmart’s truly having trouble getting enough people, they will solve the problem by paying greater wages. I tend to think that they, like many stores, are accepting applications at a much higher rate than they are actually filling jobs. The “now hiring” sign may be for display purposes only.

    RE: comments on social mobility. I learn something every day. But I still fundamentally believe that there is opportunity in America that exists nowhere else. My life reflects that, and so does that of many of my friends. For many reasons I worry about what sort of world my son will grow up in. But I know that if he works hard and keeps himself out of trouble, the world is his oyster.

  42. Bill:

    How can your life reflect that there are opportunities that exist in US and nowhere else? Did you grow up both in US and in all other countries at once? 😛

  43. @Bill
    If Walmart’s truly having trouble getting enough people, they will solve the problem by paying greater wages. I tend to think that they, like many stores, are accepting applications at a much higher rate than they are actually filling jobs. The “now hiring” sign may be for display purposes only.

    I guess that you don’t shop at Walmart and don’t know anybody who works at Walmart. What Walmart does is not care if there not enough people working, as indicated by empty or poorly stocked shelves, dirty restrooms and floors, parking lots full of trash and empty carts corrals. Another wonderful activity Walmart was caught doing was stealing wages from the employees by denying them breaks and making them work off the clock.
    You might be right about Walmart being selective in their hiring, because I don’t really know, but anecdotally I tend to make friends of cashiers because I talk a lot. While cashiers at Homeland ( former Safeway, and the other grocery store I patronize) are long term ( I have known some of them for more than ten years), there is only one cashier at Walmart that has been there more than one year. And Marvin, the cart wrangler who has been wrangling cart for at least fifteen years.

  44. I’m just finishing up my Worldcon prep — will we get a dedicated thread? Is there someone who can do it absent OGH?

    Meanwhile, United says

    Hoverboards are not accepted as checked or carry-on baggage.

    I AM DISAPPOINT.

  46. Still no Dragon Awards ballot for me. Think they’re counting on Puppies to sign up early and wait eagerly, whereas people who have better things to do with their lives than obsessively try to influence awards will give up. Also many of those people are going to Worldcon; not so many Puppies. What with the zero publicity (except to Original Puppy Larry and pals like Teddy), I’d bet most of the people going to DC have no idea there even are awards now, and certainly didn’t know in time to nominate. If you asked the aggregate of all attendees, the nominations wouldn’t be so canine. They’d be girlier and more PoC. Certainly JCW wouldn’t be on there. Heck, they probably would have been a wider representation if they’d bothered only soliciting from paid members instead of as many email addresses as humanly possible, hello spam.

    Halfway through Obelisk Gate and then on to Ghost Talkers!

    Dune in emoji is brilliant!

    “Time of Your Life” struck me as one of the least cinematic stories ever (all that internal thinking), and the end as particularly so. I wonder how the movie’s going to come out.

    @Bill: Your kid will be fine as long as he keeps clean, works hard, and never becomes/has a family member who’s sick or disabled. One hit by truck like our Tasha, one immune-damaging virus like me, one heart transplant like the child of the man who murder/suicided the whole family last week, and his oyster will be crippling debt for sure, poverty likely, with bankruptcy court at best, and homelessness and death a real possibility. Even with “good” insurance. Plus he’ll probably never be able to retire unless he’s wildly lucky along with good and has no student debt. Canada’s the real land of opportunity this side of the pond.

  47. “Hoverboards are not accepted as checked or carry-on baggage.”

    My hooverboard is full of eels.

  48. @Hampus — that was inartfully worded, wasn’t it?

    @Lurkertype. I was talking about the things he can control — obviously, random tragedies can derail anyone’s life. I hope that my son, who spent much of his first six months in the hospital (including 10 consecutive weeks in the pediatric ICU), has already fulfilled his quota. I don’t know what his long-term educational goals will be, but his mother and I are setting aside enough money that if he is wise about where he goes to school, any student debt won’t break him (in-state tuition in Southern states is large but manageable). She and I both worked while in high school and during the college years and had scholarships; our expectation is that he will do the same.

  49. Bill: okay, if the tuition doesn’t go up drastically, if he goes to those colleges, if he can get a scholarship (those are getting fewer), a job (ditto, even more so), if his diploma is good enough to get him a job and keep it after more things get outsourced, and he’s lucky (for all those and the retirement).

    I hope it goes well for him — but if you’d lived in Canada, his ICU stuff would have been completely covered (you had to deal with the hassle of bills, right? even if paid — insurance companies suck), his college would have been even cheaper than in the South (it probably is even with him being an American).

    For your grandkids’ sake, I’d send him to a Canadian college and hope he marries one of their fine girls or boys. Global warming will do bad things for your area and good things for theirs.

  50. @Rob Thornton: Woah, thanks for posting the trailer; that looks great! (I, blush, haven’t read the original story.)

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