Check your tickets. The winning numbers today are 4 and 770.
(1) Our Fantastic Four correspondent James H. Burns has discovered a website for an imaginary 1963-1964 FF television series with many clever faux production photos.
Cast of the faux Four series.
Elizabeth Montgomery and Russell Johnson were producer William Frye’s first choices to play Sue Storm and Reed Richards. Although neither Johnson or Montgomery were yet huge stars, Frye had worked with both on separate episodes of Thriller. He had also enjoyed Johnson’s work in This Island Earth, and Montgomery had initially attracted his attention with her Emmy-nominated performance as doomed nightclub performer Rusty Heller in The Untouchables.
Episode #5 was written by Harlan Ellison, and others were scripted by sf stalwarts Jerome Bixby, Theodore Sturgeon and Charles Beaumont.
Why is it impossible to watch this classic today?
The tapes of the actual episodes and most of the production notes were destroyed in a warehouse fire in southern California in 1974.
Because — “Flame on!”
(2) MiceAge has the scoop on plans to add “Star Wars Land” and “Marvel Land” to Disneyland and Disney California Adventure respectively:
The majority of Star Wars Land in the northernmost park acreage will be inside a massive series of show buildings, meaning the land won’t have to close for fireworks fallout. The rides and shows in the land itself are being developed in a top secret Imagineering lab in Glendale with Imagineers signing extra confidentiality agreements because the plotlines and characters are pulled from the next three episodes in the Star Wars saga and the Lucasfilm folks understandably guard that information with their lives. But what we can tell you is that Star Wars Land will include multiple attractions, anchored by a mega E Ticket using a trackless vehicle that will break the mold when it comes to how theme park visitors interact with a ride environment.
And:
The plans to expand DCA again with a Marvel Land behind Tower of Terror continue to move ahead, and the E Ticket thrill ride that is planned to anchor that expansion is going to be very unique. The ride will feature a newly Imagineered hybrid ride system that might be best described as a combination of Rock N’ Roller Coaster and Universal’s Transformers ride using every trick and gimmick WDI can throw at it, including on-board audio and effects and elaborate sets and animatronics.
(3) The Star Wars franchise is expanding in every direction. Even cosmetics. Nerdist has loads of pictures of the CoverGirl Star Wars: The Force Awakens makeup collection.
The line includes six new lipstick colors, three shades of nail polish, and ten tubes of mascara featuring quotes from the Star Wars films–including the first six films and The Force Awakens. CoverGirl Global Creative Design Director Pat McGrath has come up with six different and dramatic looks using products from the collection, and those are being unveiled at CoverGirl’s Star Wars Tumblr.
There isn’t much at the Tumblr today, maybe later on. Plenty to look at in the Nerdist post, though.
(4) Syfy channel has plans to develop Frederik Pohl’s Hugo-winning Gateway into a series. Battlestar Galactica’s David Eick is involved.
(5) The New York Times reports on a variety of computers with personality – “Siri, Tell Me a Joke. No, a Funny One”
Fred Brown, founder and chief executive of Next IT, which creates virtual chatbots, said his company learned firsthand the importance of creating a computer with a sense of humor when he asked his 13-year-old daughter, Molly, to test Sgt. Star, the Army’s official chatbot, which allows potential recruits to ask questions about the Army, just as you would in a recruiting station. Molly was chatting with Sgt. Star when she looked up and said, “Dad, Sergeant Star is dumb.” When he asked why, she said, “He has to have a favorite color, and it can’t be Army green.” Turns out, more than a quarter of the questions people ask Sgt. Star have nothing to do with the Army after Next IT programmed it with more human answers.
(6) The last few lines of Brad R. Torgersen’s long comment on Sarah A. Hoyt’s blog are sufficient to give you the flavor of the full 7-course meal. (Scroll down. The direct link doesn’t work for me.)
So, the field is essentially returning to its Marxist roots. But the starry-eyedness is mostly gone. Now we’re down to the raw hate of the thing: the vengeance-minded outliers and weirdos, determined to punish wrongdoing and wrongthinking and wrongfeeling. Which means, of course, smoking out all the wrongfans having all the wrongfun with their wrongstuff.
If they could clap us in shackles, put us into the boxcars, and send us to the icy wastes to die, they would do it in a heartbeat.
Because — by golly! — somebody has to make things be safe!
(7) Some writers can’t fathom how File 770 gets credit for being a radical hangout.
https://twitter.com/katsudonburi/status/631942337413935104
(8) Today’s birthday boy: Alfred Hitchcock, born in 1899.
[Thanks to James H. Burns, Petréa Mitchell, Mark, Gregory Benford, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cubist .]
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Hey, it got me through this last batch of hamster drawings.
…god, why do I let them talk me into 150 illos a book?
“SWOTI”?
someone is wrong on the internet
https://xkcd.com/386/
I think people like trying to find inconsistencies in arguments – it’s fun to do; but rarely changes anyone’s mind in practice
Getting back to comic or humorous SF, I don’t think anyone has mentioned my favorites, the three Maijstral books by Walter Jon Williams, beginning with The Crown Jewels, about allowed burglar Drake Maijstral. I would call them science fiction caper comedies. On his website, WJW describes them as:
They unfortunately didn’t sell well enough for the series to continue but each book is a complete story, though they should be read in order, And since they reverted, WJW has republished them as relatively inexpensive e-books.
“buwaya: I don’t think you are the one who was supposed to take that hint.”
Well, if you think so Brian Z.
If I get another, more specific hint I will of course vamoose.
Yeah, I enjoyed the second set okay, but what I want for my bookshelf is an omnibus edition of the first set. I know there is one, out of print, but I haven’t gotten around to buying it yet.
And at the rate I’m shifting over to e-books, I might as well just wait for e-book editions.
Some day, my primary claim to fame will be that I went birdwatching with Graydon in February on Lake Ontario and he made me go inside before I died of exposure. And he was wearing Gortex and carrying a full kit in case I fell through ice and had to be resuscitated.
In my defense, Long-Tailed Ducks.
Go read his books.
Ah. If rrede had said “xkcd 386”, I would have understood.
Also if I hadn’t misread “SIWOTI” as “SWOTI” when googling the acronym.
This is the internet. Attention is its primary metric.
Not all attention is good attention. Attention doesn’t actually do much for you in any other way than blog hits.
Another problem, not limited to those here, is when one mistakes “ought” for “is”. He also has Van Creveld and Lind.
I’m sure they will be oh so valuable additions to his stable of writers.
I guess I’ve been scammed. Somebody needs to put up some warning labels.
@Morris Keesan
Thanks for the Monty Python laughs! Reminds me of this one:
“When I was young, we were so poor. Mummy was poor. Daddy was poor. Sissy was poor. Even our butler was poor!”
But terribly well educated in an elite university, I’m certain.
I am not an SFWA member, but I would be happy to lobby as a veteran reader for Beale’s reinstatement if he went one full calendar year without any public posts that call any member of SFWA or sf fandom less human than himself, and without any public posts that cheer the death and suffering of any category of people that includes SFWA members or members of sf fandom.
Not that I’m holding my breath waiting for such a thing, but hey.
buwaya on August 14, 2015 at 6:35 pm said:
Mike? Are you still around?
(Also: I just discovered that if you highlight text and then use one of the styling buttons, such as “quote”, it applies that style to the highlighted text; I’ve been using the “press quote, paste content, press /quote” method)
“That William Lind?”
Yes, that one. He wrote, among other things,
“Maneuver Warfare Handbook”, on the US Army and Marine Corps professional reading lists.And on many international armed forces lists. And some others, plus a long series of very influential articles in their professional journals.
Creveld wrote “Supplying War”, likewise on these lists.
I can see many here having various disagreements with these gentlemen, but they are influential in their field.
Morris Keesan: Don’t be shy, give him a hint of your own!
One thing that is interesting is that for all his talk about how this is a “culture war”, buwaya has said that Beale is basically motivated because he had his tiny fee-fees hurt by the SFWA. Which means it isn’t a culture war, just a small thin-skinned mean-spirited clown trying to get back for an imagined slight and having really bad aim.
Mr. Glyer, if you want me to scram, I shall scram, no hard feelings.
Its yours site, its your rules.
@Paul Weimer: Thank you! I will put the gold star on my lapel or my cheeck; can’t decide yet.
SFSP forever!
Graydon had the misfortune of trying to sleep in the same disused church as me before I got a CPAP machine. I think he described the sound as “a bear drowning in treacle.”
He wrote, among other things,
He also thinks Marxists control all television and is an apologist for the Confederacy. Yeah, he adds lots of credibility.
James Davis Nicoll: Borden was indeed acquitted, and lived out a relatively uneventful life afterwards, dying in 1927.
She is a very distant cousin. (She is also related to Robert Borden and to the Borden of Borden’s Dairy.)
“Yeah, he adds lots of credibility.”
Credibility with who ?
There is a wide, wide world out there.
The point is these guys, Lind and Creveld, are heavy hitters in an actual academic branch of an important profession.
Call it a niche, but its a pretty good niche.
FYI, Aan’s script to whiteout / highlight comments is excellent, and works really well.
Nothing to be done about those who seem reaaaaaaaallllly invested in replying to Brian Z or the crocodilian non-sequitor generator.
@buwaya, if you’re not interested on making any sort of a coherent point, and continue to dismount into various generalities whenever the inaccuracies and mistakes of your statements are pointed out, for me it would be preferable if you did, in fact, leave. Ingat ka.
Dr. Martin van Creveld is still turning out well-respected, traditionally published books – but at the end of a very long and successful career he now wants to write a very different kind of book and needs a very different publisher. Speaking for myself, I found many of his thoughts on today’s social issues to be ridiculous, but I also believe that there can be a place for such a book to be if he wants to write it and others want to read it.
Credibility with who ?
Book buyers. They are trivial additions to a publishing company’s stable of writers.
Try asking him in email!
“Book buyers.”
Which book buyers ?
There is no single market, and no single audience.
There are niches all over. This place is about one niche in fact.
Which book buyers ?
The ones who make publishers successful. Here’s a hint: Most academic presses lose money. Castalia House is not an academic press.
If a site has active moderation, and the moderators permit trolls to thrive, that’s attributable to the moderation.
@buwaya: How do we fight fun? By nerfing their slate exploit. Gonna be a lot less fun to get only one slot on the ballot instead of all of them.
David Goldfarb: I’m afraid that may be a misreading. Gamers like a challenge.
Brian Z wrote
Absolutely. And Castalia House is perfect for it. Just perfect.
And that keeps it out of the way of the rest of us. Win-win situation, really.
The Zelazny estate just released an official version of Nine Princes. I hope the rest of the series is soon to follow, to say nothing of Lord of Light, Dilvish, Jack of Shadows, etc.. (Other Amber books have randomly popped up in unauthorized editions until squashed like cockroaches.)
But is it churlish of me to complain when, say, the Amber books or Moorcock’s Corum books (which are relatively short and have long been collected in omnibus editions) are released individually for $6 or $7 each? Not saying I won’t buy them at that price, of course …
Aw, did the troll flounce already? I wanted to quote Théoden’s speech to Saruman at him:
“We will have peace, when you and all your works have perished — and the works of your dark master whom you would deliver us. You are a liar, Saruman, and corrupter of men’s hearts. You hold out your hand to me, and I perceive only a finger of the claw of Mordor. Cruel and cold! Even if your war on me was just — as it was not, for were you ten times as wise you would have no right to rule me and mine for your own profit as you desired — even so, what will you say of your torches in Westfold and the children that lie dead there? And they hewed Háma’s body before the gates of the Hornburg, after he was dead. When you hang from the gibbet at your window for the sport of your own crows, I will have peace with you.”
Oh, look, in the time it took for me to find and copy that quote, he un-flounced.
@ Rev Bob: “He’s a culture warrior. As long as there are people saying and believing things he disapproves of, he will continue to fight. It’s what he does.”
A “warrior” who “fights?”
I think you mean “a troll who posts mean things on his blog from the safety of another continent.”
This actually sounds familiar, but all I can do at this late date is hum a few bars and see if y’all can name the tune. Seems to me a prominent puppy said a thing some weeks back which prompted folks here to respond along the lines of, “Wait a minute, they’re protesting that in order to vote on the Hugos, one is expected to actually READ?! They have a problem with this? Seriously?”
tumpty tumpty, literary award, tumpty tumpty “read?!”. Something like that.
Not only that, but they haven’t even been reading for as long as they’ve been posting. I explained the Tank Marmot reference, albeit obliquely, in a response I made to them YESTERDAY.
Not really, I’d say. I had the same complaint — if that’s the price, well, I’ve still got paperbacks. I can wait for an omnibus e-edition.
” I explained the Tank Marmot reference, albeit obliquely, in a response I made to them YESTERDAY.”
Well, I’m not as spry as I once was, so in a battle of once against ten, mighty as I am, I will miss a few.
“Them” ? Well, I suppose I am legion, so that accounts for it.
” I wanted to quote Théoden’s speech to Saruman at him:”
And I answer –
“The age of man is over, the time of the puppy has come !”
“The age of man is over, the time of the puppy has come !”
Good of you to realize you’re on the losing side.
@ RedWombat: “Isn’t SFWA in favor of members making money? Kameron Hurley said winning a Hugo was financially helpful to her.”
SFWA doesn’t have anything to do with the Hugos.
And while a Hugo is financially helpful to some writers, there are also writers to whose earnings it makes little or no difference. It depends very much on a combination of various individual circumstances and factors.
Also, in terms of accruing real advantages to your career, a Hugo is more useful if you’re a new or little known writer making few sales or getting low advances or having trouble getting editors (or agents) to look at your work. A Hugo in those circumstances is a real boon, very likely to be a perceptible asset.
If you’re already making good advances at a major house, have a lot of work in the marketplace, have contacts, have a resume that ensures your submissions get read, have a sales track record, etc., a Hugo is much less likely to make practical/fiscal differences in your career. It’s still much-coveted, though, as it’s an honor, it means you can put “Hugo Award Winner” on your book covers, you PR releases, your bio, your website, your resume, your cover letters, and your tombstone, etc.
In yet another circumstance, a Hugo is much less likely to make a practical difference to an unproductive or unprolific writer who’s not in a position to make hay from it promptly. If it takes you 5-6 years to produce a standard midlist novel, or if it takes you 2-3 years to start submitting another story after your Hugo, it’s probably going to boost you less than if you’re sending out your 3-book proposal the day you get nominated and following up with editors about the submission the week after you win, etc.
““Yes, but why would we? SFWA has nothing to do with the Hugos. At all. Period. ”
To which Buwaya replied: “That’s a narrow way of looking at it.”
(sigh)
No, Buwaya, it’s an ACCURATE way of looking at it.
*cough* Clarification– that was our esteemed host replying to me, Laura, not me saying the bit about SFWA members making money. (I’m sure you know this, just for posterity.)
Like Derek B, I too will get back to recommending comic and/or humorous SF/F novels and suggest Heroics for Beginners by Jonathan Moore, which always makes me laugh. It also has the benefit of being a relatively short novel.
Disclaimer:
I am not speaking on behalf of any organization or entity in professional publishing.
Buwaya:
Is there anything you love so much that you’d object to having some two-bit chiseler wreck it so they can temporarily boost their pageviews and comments, or sell a few dozen more books? Are you or they such crap writers that you think it’s okay to pull a stunt like that, because it’s the only way you can attract more readers?
You’re not just dishonest. You’re cheap.
You know, and I know, that Justice was not the prize in view. Justice has nothing to do with it.
Don’t kid yourself. Everyone understands that point of view: Beale’s crooked, and so are you.
You probably think everyone secretly agrees with your point of view. They don’t.
We learned an interesting thing this year. When the story of the Puppy slate first broke, it got an unprecedented amount of coverage in top-level media outlets. It quickly became apparent that there are people out there who may not have ongoing social ties to worldcon-attending fandom, but who care very much about the Hugo Awards. Some of them are professional journalists.
I can understand that. If I’d never found fandom, I could easily have been one of them. My emotional connection to the Hugos goes way back. It matters to me in ways I almost can’t articulate. I cannot imagine accepting a Hugo nomination that came to me by way of a slate. There’ve been times when the Hugo voters have left me shaking my head, but I wouldn’t want a Hugo that they didn’t give me.
You may be wondering about the provenance of those thousands of last-minute Hugo ballots. I beileve they came from the same kind of people who wrote the first wave of news stories about the Puppy slate. Coming to the Worldcon every year isn’t high on their list of priorities, but they care about the Hugo, and will not cede it to the likes of you or Theo Beale or Brad Torgersen.
Fandom runs on love. Beale and Correia and Torgesen don’t grasp that. They imagine there’s all kinds of scheming and logrolling going on behind the scenes, because that’s what they would do. They’re wrong. We don’t do slates. Asking someone to vote for a slate of nominees is potentially asking them to vote against works they loved. And the idea of selling out the Hugos for a little boost in site traffic, or a few more sales of a self-published book, is just repugnant.
I’ll end with a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The eponymous Mr. Gatsby has just explained to the narrator, Nick Carraway, that a guest at one of his parties is the man who fixed the World’s Series in 1919:
“The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people — with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.”
If there’d been a mechanism that let baseball fans vote against the real-world gambler who fixed the 1919 World Series, the results would have looked like the last week of voting for the 2015 Hugo Awards.
Lizzie Borden was exonerated.
Plus, I have it on good authority that Borden was fighting Cthulhu anyway
Here’s the 2014 Army reading list. No Lind. Van Creveld is on it.
Here’s a copy of the USMC list, 2013-2014. No Lind. Two Van Creveld.
…so…Hoyt – who has reduced herself to being a Useful Idiot for a guy who has never had to work a day in his life – she thinks that 99% of the rest of fandom are “elitists”?
And now she want to play “Four Yorkshiremen” with SF fandom??
(Well, with “99%” of fandom? …She DID openly admit on Antonelli’s Facebook page that she’s not smart enough to have mastered algebra….)
OK, then, my turn:
My father was trained as a master toolmaker. THAT is ‘working with his/her hands’.
My mother had to drop out of high school to go to work in the mill – because (in the depths of the Hoover Depression), the mill had no work for a man at $7 a week – but WOULD hire teenaged girls at $4 a week – and her family would have starved to death if she didn’t quit school to bring in some money. THAT is ‘working with his/her hands.’
(Me? I spent summers working construction to help pay for college.)
So Hoyt – now running interference for a useless parasite, and her with her fancy book-learnin’ an’ all – can go fuck right off.
I would like to publically apologize to the shade of Lizzie Borden for having tarred her by association with Beale.
Typhoid Mary? We still okay with Typhoid Mary?