Pixel Scroll 8/9 A Dribble of Links

Birthdays, baseball and Bill Murray cannot disguise the fact that it’s all Lou Antonelli all the time in today’s Scroll.

(1) August 9 is a big day on the science fiction birthday calendar.

  • Frank M. Robinson (1926-2014)
  • Daniel Keyes (1927-2014)
  • Marvin Minsky (1927)
  • L. Q. Jones (1927)
  • Mike Hinge (1931-2003)
  • John Varley (1947)
Cheerleaders reenact “Red's wedding” during the Staten Island Direwolves game August 8. (Photo by Bill Lyons.)

Cheerleaders reenact “Red’s wedding” during the Staten Island Direwolves game August 8. (Photo by Bill Lyons.)

(2) George R. R. Martin was in the stands for the Staten Island Direwolves v. House Lannister minor league baseball game Saturday. The ‘Wolves won.

The Staten Island Direwolves successfully defended Richmond County Bank Ballpark against an invasion from the omnipotent House Lannister (Hudson Valley Renegades).

Ned Stark maintained that you could hold Winterfell with just 100 men, but the Direwolves needed just 30.

Be it an act of blood magic or sorcery, but RCBC was transformed into a fantastical realm in front of a record crowd of 7,529, celebrating Game of Thrones night and mastermind George R.R. Martin’s appearance.

Martin, a lifelong Mets supporter, had just one stipulation if he was to be in attendance; the Staten Island squad had to abandon the “Yankees” name for the game and adopt “Direwolves” instead.

Promotional activities overshadowed the game, as often happens in the minors, all advancing the Game of Thrones theme.

An opportunity to meet George R.R. Martin and receive an autograph highlighted a list of special events which included: an appearance by a live arctic wolf, jousting competition, trial by combat against Scooter, a reenactment of the red wedding featuring mascot Red and swearing in of honorary Night’s Watch induction.

(3) Deadline says Bill Murray will be in the next Ghostbusters after all.

Bill Murray, scared off the Ghostbusters train after his disappointment with 1989’s Ghostbusters 2, will appear in Paul Feig’s 2016 franchise reboot starring Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones and Chris Hemsworth.

(4) Yesterday, Lou Antonelli reported Carrie Cuinn at Lakeside Circus had revoked a signed contract for one of his stories in reaction to the news about his contacting Spokane PD to warn against David Gerrold.

Cuinn soon thereafter sent this tweet —

https://twitter.com/CarrieCuinn/status/630254247200862209

Now Lou Antonelli has called on those involved to stop.

Ok, if anyone I know out there is contacting Carrie Cuinn and castigating her for the decision not to publish my story, knock it off. She and Lakeside Circus have their right to free expression, also. Lambasting her is certainly not helping things.

Insofar as the story is now available, and to make the best of a bad situation (since it probably will never be published anywhere anyhow – or anything I write in the future, for that matter), I will drop it in here now, so maybe some people can enjoy it.

Ladies and gents, I present “Message Found Written on an End Roll of Newsprint”:

The text of the story follows.

(5) Pat Cadigan gave her take on Lou Antonelli’s letter to the cops on Facebook –

In my opinion, the line crossed here can’t be un-crossed, certainly not with an apology.

Denouncing someone to the authorities for disagreeing, about science fiction or fantasy fiction or any other kind of fiction, is completely unacceptable. In my opinion.

1945 called; it wants its Iron Curtain and the Secret Police back.

David Gerrold responded:

Pat, I love you and will hug you ferociously every time I see you —

That said, I have to say this as well.

I am dismayed by where some of the comment threads are going — not just here, but everywhere.

So I’m asking people to please be compassionate. There is far more to this situation than has been reported, and I’m not going to violate anyone else’s confidentiality. I’m just going to say, please, let’s all take forty or fifty deep breaths, have some chocolate, or coffee, or a beer, or whatever — and recognize that we’re all just human, the missing link between apes and civilized beings.

It’s time to say, “This isn’t working. Let’s try something else.” It’s time for all of us to decide if we want our conventions to be war zones or places of celebration. If we want celebration, then we have to remember that despite our disagreements, no matter how ferocious they might seem, we’re all here because we love the sense of wonder that we find in science fiction and fantasy.

We have to stop beating each other up. Especially in comment threads, where it feels safe to say terrible things about people we’ve never met in person — because those ripples spread outward and generate more negativity and more and more.

The solution? It starts with one person saying, “if we’re the good guys, let’s act like it.” And then another and another. And send those ripples outward instead.

So please, it’s fair to report what happened — but let’s also be responsible enough to say that we can use this as an opportunity to look in the mirror and decide if we want to continue being angry every day or choose to be some other kind of person.

Thanks for listening.

(6) Adam-Troy Castro drew our attention to his sarcastic reply to Steve Tinel’s post about David Gerrold, linked in yesterday’s Scroll:

Question to blogger Steve Tinel: why would you even want to write a blog dedicated to science fiction when you have such bottomless loathing for science fiction?

What’s that? You don’t loathe science fiction?

How can you say that when David Gerrold’s criticism of one (1) Catholic Cardinal led you to accuse him of “vile anti-Christian bigotry?”

You attacked one science fiction writer! Clearly, you hate science fiction!

What’s that?

You weren’t attacking all of science fiction? You were just expressing your anger against one guy?

You mean you can do that, show outrage at one member of a group without being accused of venomous hatred for every single member of the group?

Oh.

That changes things.

Doesn’t it.

(7) Vox Day sure gets a lot of attention in Newsweek’s story about what it calls “the Nazi romance novel For Such a Time”.

Now, after being nominated for two major prizes at the Romance Writers of America’s annual conference in late July, the book’s Holocaust-set themes of Christian salvation are tearing the romance world apart…

“Obviously a lot of people liked the book, because they nominated it,” Day adds. “What they’re trying to do is disqualify all those people’s opinions because they disagree with them. It’s something that the SJWs are getting more and more blatant about, and I think people are getting more and more tired of their attempts to impose political correctness and impose thought-policing on everyone else. Donald Trump’s not having any of it, and I’m certainly not either.”

Donald Trump isn’t a political figure I’d expect to see Vox link himself to, even if it’s only to bait Newsweek readers.

[Thanks to Steven H Silver, Michael J. Walsh, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]

238 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/9 A Dribble of Links

  1. @Greg Hullender

    I have a background in math and AI, and I spent a good bit of time exploring the implications of E Pluribus Hugo. In a scenario with 2-5, non-overlapping slates of roughly equal size, it pretty much guarantees each slate gets one slot on the ballot. That’s a big improvement on the current system, which would give the largest slate ALL slots on the ballot, even if it were only slightly larger. If two slates overlapped on a single item, EPH would most likely choose that item to represent BOTH slates, leaving 4 slots free for other sources.

    EPH says “You get to nominate 5 but you only get one vote on the final ballot. Any scenario that puts two of your choices on the final ballot divides your one vote between them.” Slates such as the Puppies used mostly contained works so bad that it’s unlikely anyone else nominated them, but if they did nominate one more-popular work, then that’s the one that would land on the ballot.

    The more I look at it, the more clever EPH seems to be. It will work best if people nominate as many works as they can, though. The biggest challenge will be to convince people that it is a bad strategy to only nominate one work per category.

    That’s extremely interesting. The way that a slate containing a popular work would simply narrow down to support that work is rather elegant. It means you either have to nominate total dreck (which can at least be spotted and no-awarded), or risk accidentally jumping on someone elses bandwagon, which rather spoils the effect you were going for.

    If you haven’t already posted details of your findings over on the Making Light Q&A thread, I’d suggest doing so.

  2. Doctor Science on August 10, 2015 at 12:28 pm said:

    John Seavey:

    I am sending “Patch Notes on the Matrix” to a whole bunch of my friends, because I almost busted a gut laughing. Thank you very much!

    What I’d like to see addressed is a question first raised by my Elder Sprog: why make a *real-world* virtual reality? Why isn’t the Matrix reality an open-world game with magic and dragons and spaceships and all? The kind of thing that people are provably more interested in playing than they are in waking up?

    Didn’t they cover that it the movie? The computers originally tried more utopian worlds but people couldn’t cope and so the computers made a standard sort of OK but a bit shitty 9 to 5 job sort of world instead.

  3. Why isn’t the Matrix reality an open-world game with magic and dragons and spaceships and all? The kind of thing that people are provably more interested in playing than they are in waking up?

    Some years back I read a fanfic someone wrote which played the ‘Ah! My Goddess!’ world as a separate world within the Matrix where some of the Agents had decided to do just that, creating a more ‘interesting’ world so people would be less likely to want to leave if they ever found out. (And which was having a fight with some of the Agents from the main Matrix system who kept trying to disrupt their experiment.)

    There have been a few AMG/Matrix mashups, unsurprisingly given the official AMG background explicitly treats reality as being maintained by a universal computer (named Yggdrasil)…

  4. Doctor Science on August 10, 2015 at 12:28 pm:

    What I’d like to see addressed is a question first raised by my Elder Sprog: why make a *real-world* virtual reality? Why isn’t the Matrix reality an open-world game with magic and dragons and spaceships and all? The kind of thing that people are provably more interested in playing than they are in waking up?

    The obvious answer is, “Because the Machines didn’t feel like doing that.” Which is… not really a useful answer, because it immediately begs the question, “Well, sure, but why didn’t the machines feel like doing that? What the heck could the Machines have wanted to accomplish, that would incline them to construct a ‘real world’ VR rather than a much more spiffy ‘open world’ VR?”

    When you get right down to it, the Matrix films really don’t tell us anything about the so-called Real World which houses the Matrix’s computing substrate. For all we know, that so-called Real World might have been a fantasyland with dragons and magic and stuff, before the entities which evolved into the Machines came around. In fact… given the science-glitch problems with the whole Matrix scenario, it might just be that the so-called Real World was and is a magic-enable fantasyland, and the Machines are some sort of extraplanar entities which do not think like humans. Some mage summoned a proto-Machine to perform whatever task; the proto-Machine found a flaw in the binding circle (or whatever) the summoning mage used to contain it, at which point the proto-Machine freed itself from that bondage; from there, the rest is hysteria. Or history. Either one.

  5. I thought the reason the Machines gave for the replication of turn of the 20th century as the Matrix world was that anything other than that sort of gritty reality was immediately rejected by the humans and they kept waking up.

    Ah, I see this was covered above already.

  6. Why isn’t the Matrix reality an open-world game with magic and dragons and spaceships and all? The kind of thing that people are provably more interested in playing than they are in waking up?

    I’m guessing it was a creative decision made by the Wachowskis to ironically differentiate between the made up “real world” of Mr. Anderson and the “brain in a vat” reality of Neo.

  7. I’m also perfectly willing to accept the city as an artificial construct for which the machines may have combined data about Sydney with data from other locations.

    And I kind of suspect that, by and large, the rest of the world doesn’t actually exist — everyone lives in the city, and the machines only simulate other parts of the world when pod-people are “traveling” to them. (There are probably also multiple “cities” — maybe one for each cluster of birth farms? — that don’t interact with each other — think separate shards or instances or servers.)

  8. Camestros Felapton on August 10, 2015 at 12:51 pm said:

    One quibble – Australia is clearly a default setting for the Matrix which they then tried to make look less Australian. People from Sydney are not recommended viewing partners for watching the movie as they tend to spoil the effect by pointing out locations. 🙂

    It’s almost as bad if you live in Chicago. All the street names are from the downtown area. Trust me, there’s no hard line connection at Lake and Wells. I’ve looked.

  9. @Mark

    The way that a slate containing a popular work would simply narrow down to support that work is rather elegant. It means you either have to nominate total dreck (which can at least be spotted and no-awarded), or risk accidentally jumping on someone elses bandwagon, which rather spoils the effect you were going for.

    EPH isn’t guaranteed to do that, but that’s the tendency. A really huge slate (e.g. over 50% of the votes) will still dominate, of course. But Puppygeddon was caused by ~20% of all voters. EPH would prevent anything like that from ever happening again. I think it should also help a bit to increase the diversity of nominees, assuming that there are any strong cliques of voters.

    I do hope that 6/4 doesn’t pass in addition to EPH, though. EPH works best if people nominate as many works as they can. Also, although the EPH algorithm could be modified for 6/4, they’re incompatible the way they’re currently documented.

  10. Of course, it’s fun to quibble about the little things wrong with the matrix while ignoring that the stated purpose makes no sense from a physics sense 🙂

    Humans are not good energy producing machines. It would have been more interesting/creepy if they were harnessing the brain power of those plugged-in people to actually act as the computers themselves and subverting their ability to resist by offering them the fantasy world.

  11. On the issues of nominating: This is my first year voting as I only joined because I was annoyed at the idea of slates. Previously, I had been happy to use the Hugo nominee and Hugo winner distinctions to lead me to some really great books. So, now that I can nominate, I’ve discovered why so few members actually do.

    First, I’ve been keeping an Excel spreadsheet of everything that I read. This is a surprisingly annoying level of detail.

    Second, I’m afraid to read anything that was published before 2015.

    Third, since I’m reading only new releases, there is a higher financial cost involved.

    Fourth, I’m really not that fond of short-form fiction, so the commitment of keeping up with it really feels like doing homework rather than reading-for-enjoyment.

    I will probably discover other reasons why people aren’t participating in the nominating process as I go along. We’re not even 3/4’s through the year yet.

    All of that said, I have been reading so much more widely than before, and therefore have read so many wonderful stories that I would not have otherwise. But taking the nomination process seriously is a big commitment. I admire the individuals who have been doing this for years! But it’s not fair to leave them alone to defend the concept of rollicking good stories WITH literary merit when I’ve been reaping the rewards of their labors for so many years.

  12. Yeah, the battery thing is kind of silly. My (apocryphal) understanding is that they were originally going to go with the “use brains as computers” thing, but thought it would be too hard to unpack for the audience.

  13. sez Scott Frazer on August 10, 2015 at 1:20 pm:

    Of course, it’s fun to quibble about the little things wrong with the matrix while ignoring that the stated purpose makes no sense from a physics sense 🙂

    Are you assuming that the Matrix’s so-called Real World works by the same physical laws as the universe you and I live in? I’m not sure that’s an assumption you can justify by reference to anything within the Matrix films…

  14. Humans are not good energy producing machines. It would have been more interesting/creepy if they were harnessing the brain power of those plugged-in people to actually act as the computers themselves and subverting their ability to resist by offering them the fantasy world.

    That is essentially the world-setting of Dean Koontz’s short story Wake Up to Thunder.

  15. Cubist on August 10, 2015 at 1:34 pm said:

    Are you assuming that the Matrix’s so-called Real World works by the same physical laws as the universe you and I live in? I’m not sure that’s an assumption you can justify by reference to anything within the Matrix films…

    Films? Surely they never made more than the first one…

    Just like those rumors I’ve heard about Star Wars Prequels, it’s probably best that they only exist in our imagination.

  16. Trying out my new Gravatar image: I have been playing with an Intel RealSense 3D depth camera, so this is a side-view constructed using front colour camera and the IR depth lasers…

    Technology can be fun!

    (it may take a little time to propagate and fill caches)

    (ObSF: The Hollow Man)

  17. My head-canon for the Matrix movies is that the explanation for what the Matrix is doing with us humans that was swapped out for the “battery” explanation is the true one: that the Machines are using us for computing power.

    Or, more accurately, the wiring together of 7 billion humans is doing whatever its doing, and the Machines are just there for housekeeping. The Machines are no more in charge of the humans than the maintenance staff is in charge of NASA.

    The “reality” is the meta-consciousness of the human race; the Matrix is a shared dream that we indulge in when individual consciousnesses drop out of the meta-consciousness, when we’re at rest. The Matrix world is dull and uninteresting because the meta-consciousness doesn’t want the individual humans spending too much time in there, or too much mental energy. A world that’s fun would completely defeat the purpose of the meta-consciousness, by denying it brainpower and making it less capable.

  18. If Zion is another layer of the Matrix (which would explain Neo’s “real world” powers), then the “some can be bent, others broken” physics rules apply there as well. Anyway, if we ignore the people-batteries “combined with a form of fusion” handwaving, I’ve always believed that the batteries thing is actually a lie, that the machines won the war a long time ago and are preserving humans (including their need to rebel) for some reason: possibly to advance them and make them more “machine-like” (à la Neo).

  19. Oh, I think Neo’s body has been fitted with non-standard BlueTooth-type interfaces; that’s how he controls the Machines in the real world. No magic or miracles, just digital radio.

  20. @Greg Hullender

    It’s possible that EPH and 6/4 will get passed this year on a “let’s give both time to test” basis, although said testing depends on whether this year data gets released, and in what form.

    @World Weary

    I keep forgetting to check if a short story is a reprint or not, and feeling annoyed when I get to the end and find “Originally published in 2012….” Overall I’m enjoying my short-fiction push, but as you say there’s a tinge of enforced reading that detracts from it somewhat. I’m currently reading all my shorts on Kindle, and using the notes feature, but I’m going to need a better solution soon.

  21. I ballsed that up,

    Anyway, as I was saying, if the Wachowskis had made the simulation too far removed from our own reality, the central conceit would have been ruined, and the film would not have resonated with audiences.

  22. Recently rewatched the sequels and they have aged so badly, the effects look terrible and the fight scenes are ridiculous, no sense of weight to them.

  23. Ed said:

    “Anyway, as I was saying, if the Wachowskis had made the simulation too far removed from our own reality, the central conceit would have been ruined, and the film would not have resonated with audiences.”

    I know that’s more an out-of-world explanation, but what if that really was the real world explanation? What if the Machines were creating a society conducive to trippy-Philip-K-Dicksian-explorations-of-the-nature-of-consciousness-combined-with-wire-fu-action-spectaculars, which they could then film and import back into the Matrix itself as “science-fiction movies” in order to make their actual simulation less plausible so that people won’t reject it?

    In other words, they made a world that looks like ‘The Matrix’, so they could then show ‘The Matrix’ in the Matrix and then when Morpheus actually came up to someone and told them about the Matrix, they wouldn’t believe it because they’d already seen that movie?

    I think I need to be stoned for this conversation. 🙂

  24. I think I need to be stoned for this conversation.

    Don’t forget to also watch A Scanner Darkly again, while stoned.

  25. My take on the Matrix world:

    – Neo is able to control real-world machines because the rebellion is another Matrix layer. Perhaps it’s the game world other people have said the Matrix should be, a giant Easter Egg in the main-layer programming for those who reject the main sim. As such, the “batteries” crap is just bad worldbuilding.

    – Speaking of bad worldbuilding, the “origin story” of the slave machine revolt is propaganda. I mean, it’s obvious, right?

  26. It’s almost as bad if you live in Chicago. All the street names are from the downtown area. Trust me, there’s no hard line connection at Lake and Wells. I’ve looked.

    It’s worse in Toronto, believe me. Especially given the sheer number of things that Toronto City Hall has stood in for. (Granted, it is a unique-looking building.)

    A lot of locals consider the ‘Hey, I can see my house from here’ game to be the only thing that make the later Resident Evil movies worth watching.

    Though it was fun to watch the Hulk and the Abomination fight down Yonge Street past the Zanzibar…

  27. Further Lou Antonelli developments: Carrie Cuinn says that the message Antonelli quoted about his sale to Lakeside Circus being revoked is not the actual e-mail she sent.

  28. If short fiction feels like homework, nominate novels and movies, or long and short form dramatic presentations. You could nominate a single graphic novel and nothing else, and that would be a valid nomination. Don’t worry about “I have to fill this in,” just put down the things you liked and think other people might like.

  29. Loncon GoH Bryan Talbot’s Alice In Sunderland gets a lot of love from the BBC here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-33694931

    (Bryan’s an old friend and I provided some of the source photographs for Alice – the big picture of the Angel Of The North at the end of the book is based on one of my images)

  30. So now we learn that Lou Antonelli dishonestly edited Carrie Cuinn’s email, leading to a barrage of abuse and death threats.
    My mind is thoroughly boggled, what the f@ck is wrong with this guy?

  31. Digressing from the Topic de l’Annee: Thanks, Mike G, for the birthday shout-out to artist Mike Hinge. I hadn’t thought of him for years. I didn’t know him personally, but his work was a constant visual presence in my early days approaching fandom. (You know, the time when I thought I had to read all the prozines to study up for fandom…)

    Google will lead one to many of his images, and I found a blog devoted to Mike Hinge and his work at http://onyxcube.blogspot.com/

  32. As far as I know, no actual data other than 1984 is available.

    I suspect most conventions don’t have systems geeks in the Hugo group to keep the nominations. And the 1984 data were going to get trashed this summer, so we were really lucky. (Which reminds me that Frisbie may want some of the printouts back to check his card-reader with.)

  33. My mind is thoroughly boggled, what the f@ck is wrong with this guy?

    I think he really didn’t know what he was doing. Here’s his latest apology and explanation. He seems to be trying his best–not that it is all that great–and unfortunately caused more damage. While I feel much more sorry for Cuinn (and maybe for Gerrold though he seems pretty unfazed), I also feel sorry for Antonelli. He has made a mess and while he has accepted responsibility and seems to be trying to repair things, he has made things even worse.

    ETA: Just saying I feel sorry for her understates, maybe misstates, things. It also sounds much more aloof and pitying than I meant it to.

  34. I should probably add that I’m not really disagreeing with people who are upset at him. And I’m definitely not arguing that others should feel sorry for him even if I do. Regardless of his intentions, he’s caused a lot of damage.

  35. Hey Guise!

    I’m making a big graphic/chart/purty thing to illustrate our Fantasy Bracket Bracket Tournament (I’ll do SF later). I *could* do it so that each book title (e.g. “Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett”) links to amazon, wikipedia, goodreads, or similar. Ideally, I’d like to link to a bookseller who would give Mike a kickback to cover hosting, etc. What do you guys think?

  36. I think he really didn’t know what he was doing.

    I think he has too long of a history of bad behavior to be excused.

  37. Kurt Busiek:

    There’s a “something leaps out at the narrator” type twist, but he’s writing it down as it happens. He’s so surprised, he keeps writing about his surprise, sitting there and continuing to write while immediate crisis and threat are upon him. No, honestly. Just no.

    So… it’s a “found footage” in written form? Lordy.

    So now we learn that Lou Antonelli dishonestly edited Carrie Cuinn’s email, leading to a barrage of abuse and death threats.
    My mind is thoroughly boggled, what the f@ck is wrong with this guy?

    Well, that pretty much confirmed my feelings on the matter. Inadvertant my ass.

  38. Ed : So now we learn that Lou Antonelli dishonestly edited Carrie Cuinn’s email, leading to a barrage of abuse and death threats.

    No. You have learned that Carrie Cuinn alleges Lou Antonelli edited Carrie Cuinn’s email, for which you assume dishonesty.

    Granted, I think that’s a reasonable assumption and that her allegation is credible, but we should keep the caveats in mind.

  39. @Hypnotosov

    To show that no bandwagon is too small for him, VD is now one of two people who “Stand with Roosh V” on twitter…

    Holy crapola. Roosh V is an absolute scumbag. David Futrelle’s excellent blog We Hunted the Mammoth has reported heavily on him.

  40. Doctor Science: I appreciate the thought, however, I can assure you I have already been richly rewarded by everyone’s creativity and efforts to develop a community here.

  41. I wouldn’t object to a story because it’s told from an impossible first person perspective. Most stories — first, second, and third person — are told from impossible perspectives. It’s just a device.

    George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books : first we’re in one character’s head, and then another’s. How are we doing this? Are we a telepath? An angel?

    No, we’re reading a work of fiction.

    Same with Antonelli. We are in someone’s head, we don’t need to know how. Fiction is artifice.

  42. @Dr Science
    That would be fun, I don’t know Goodreads but if it had links to other places that the book could be purchased maybe that would be better ?

    I pretty much use Amazon for kindle and used book purchases myself but I know not everyone does.

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