(1) CHINA’S 2024 GALAXY AWARDS. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] The 35th Galaxy (“Yinhe”) Awards were presented in Chengdu on Saturday September 28.  There doesn’t appear to be a video of the ceremony officially available, but a screen capture of the livestream has been posted to Bilibili.  A fuller translated list of the winners may follow later, but here is a brief summary of the winners that Anglophone fandom might recognize:

• Best Novel was won by Yan Xi’s Age of the Gods, which appeared in the 2023 Hugo nominations below the cutoff point.  (This was originally published online in 2022, and in print in 2023, which I assume is why it appeared for two different years.)
• 2023 Hugo Best Short Story finalist Jiang Bo was one of three Best Novella winners here
• 2024 Hugo Best Short Story finalist Baoshu was one of five winners in the same category here
• The Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams comic and R. F. Kuang’s Babel shared the Best Imported Book category
• Adrian Tchaikovsky won Most Popular Foreign Writer, presumably based on the serialization of City of Last Chances (and possibly Cage of Souls, although that was serialized in 2024)
• Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside, as translated by Feng Xinyi, shared the Best Translation category.

Click for larger images.

(2) TOYPLOSION AND BACK AGAIN. Cora Buhlert has a three-part report about her trip to Toyplosion, a vintage toy convention, and the sights coming and going. Lots of photos, toy commentary, local history, and family stories.

• “Into the Heart of the Ruhrgebiet: Cora’s Adventures at the 2024 Toyplosion in Castrop-Rauxel, Part 1: The Trip Out and City Views”.

…As I ventured further into the city center, I had to stop at a pedestrian crossing where the pedestrian traffic light symbol was not the regular stick figure, but a little miner with a lantern. Apparently, this is a thing in the Ruhrgebiet. Coal mining may be dead, but the miners are still around, immortalised as “Ampelmännchen”. In many ways, this is very illustrative of how the Ruhrgebiet has turned its industrial history into a tourist attraction….

• “Into the Heart of the Ruhrgebiet: Cora’s Adventures at the 2024 Toyplosion in Castrop-Rauxel, Part 2: The Con”.

…The same stall also had several vintage Strawberry Shortcake dolls as well as other girl-aimed toylines of the 1980s on display. I chatted a bit with the owner and reminisced about how my Grandma bought me the entire first wave of Strawberry Shortcake dolls in January 1982, when my parents were on a cruise (my Dad had co-designed the ship, so it was work for him and he apparently spent most of his time running around and fixing problems, while my Mom was terribly seasick) and I was sent to stay with my grandparents. Grandma took me shopping in the city center and after spending an inordinate amount of time trying on clothes, she took me to what was then the best toyshop in town, where they had just gotten Strawberry Shortcake dolls in stock. And because I couldn’t decide in which one I wanted, Grandma – bless her – bought me the entire first wave. I don’t even want to think about how much that would have cost her – US toys were expensive in the 1980s because of the high exchange rate. What makes this even more remarkable is that my Aunt and to a lesser degree my Mom always referred to Grandma as “stingy” (she was their stepmother – my biological grandmother died young and I never met her), yet my supposedly “stingy” Grandma spent what must have been a lot of money just to buy me Strawberry Shortcake dolls. Grandma had actually worked as a dollmaker for a while in the difficult years after WWII, so she had an affinity for toys and always got me nice ones. Grandma and Grandpa even gave me handmade doll beds – Grandpa, who was a carpenter by trade, built them and Grandma sewed the pillows and blankets. I’m not sure if I ever told Grandma how much those Strawberry Shortcake dolls meant to me (she died in 1996 and has dementia for the last five years or so), though I suspect the fact that I promptly turned her kitchen floor into Strawberry Land and appropriated Grandpa’s footstool as a house for the dolls told them how much I loved their gift. I still have the dolls BTW – packed away in a box – and they still smell….

• “Into the Heart of the Ruhrgebiet: Cora’s Adventures at the 2024 Toyplosion in Castrop-Rauxel, Part 3: The Trip Home with Bonus Mineshaft Elevator Tower”.

…Now it’s quite common for German coalmines to have names. However, German coalmines are have names like Germania or Teutonia or Concordia or Zollverein or St. Bonifacius or Zollverein or Monopol or Heinrich Robert or Count Friedrich or Queen Elisabeth or Victoria Auguste or Sophia Jacoba or Ottilia or – if the mine was in former East Germany – Karl Liebknecht or Ernst Thälmann. Erin, however, sounds much more like an Irish maiden than a coalmine in the Ruhrgebiet.

Turns out that there is a reason for this, for the coalmine Erin was established in 1867 by William Thomas Mulvany, an Irish geologist and entrepreneur who came to the Ruhrgebiet in the 1850s in search of business opportunities that were difficult for a Catholic Irishman to access in Ireland under British rule. He wound up founding and operating several mines in the Ruhrgebiet and gave them all names relating to Ireland such as Hibernia, Shamrock and of course Erin. …

(3) LATINX HERITAGE IN HORROR. The Horror Writers Association blog continues its salute to “Latinx Heritage in Horror Month 2024: An Interview with Jessica R. Brynarsky”.

What inspired you to start writing?

I’ve dreamed of being a writer since I could form sentences but what really ignited me was a Halloween short story I did back in the 5th grade. As I advanced through middle school, high school, and college, my passion for writing increased into an obsession almost. I truly felt that I would cease to breathe if I could not put pen to paper and bleed out my imagination all over the page. Writing is my sanctuary; it always has been a way for me to deal with my living nightmares.

Tell us about your work in 25 words or less.

I craft Puerto Rican Gothic tales, eerie thrillers, and soulful poetry that blends my Afro-Boriquena roots with cultural magic and folk tales…

(4) PERIOD STYLES DRAPE MODERN ANGST. Maya St. Clair looks at coded fashion commentary in “Escaping Affirmation: Historical Fiction and the Femcel Dress Fitting” at Muse From the Orb.

This is a corollary to my recent post about historical fantasy set in the Renaissance, and it discusses the extent to which historical settings free women writers to write honestly and brutally about anxieties of beauty. Basically, evaluating the book My Lady Jane in tandem with The Familiar got me thinking about a recurring beat in historical fiction, and what it says about our media environment and repressed emotions surrounding beauty. As the late Harold Bloom was fond of remarking, “period pieces” often tell us much more about contemporary anxieties than they do about whatever history they purport to depict, and one could add that the anxieties of women — the primary creators and audiences of historical dramas and fiction — are especially likely to seep through the period trappings.

In particular, I’ve recently been fascinated with a cliche beat we could call the “wardrobe humiliation scene.” It’s a fixture in the first act of a standard historical book/drama, along the lines of: whilst getting fitted for a dress, the heroine — usually preparing for some ball or arranged marriage — gets told by various assessors that she’s plain, unfashionable, ill-groomed, or fucking busted (or they insinuate as much); various forms of historical looksmaxxing are often utilized (fabrics, powders, jewelry) to conform her to the norms. It’s a masochistic, often weirdly humorous scene — as repetitious as it is, the needs it satisfies are multifaceted and often not as straightforward as one would think….

(5) STUDIO GHIBLI Q&A. “‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ Turns 20: Supervising Animator Akihiko Yamashita Reflects on His Relationship With Hayao Miyazaki and Bringing the Studio Ghibli Classic to Life” in Variety.

Howl’s castle has such an intricate and detailed design. Could you describe the castle’s animation process? How many people were involved?

I’m not sure I can count. There were many, many people who worked on it. In terms of drawing such a large item like that castle, there would usually be a base design for it, and then various animators could draw from that base design. But in this case, there was no such initial base design. So there might be one scene where it was drawn one way and then another scene where the little house wasn’t in the same place. But somehow, even with these angle changes that may show different things, it looked like one castle in the end.

There may be different things stuck onto the castle, but as long as there’s the mouth and the eyes and the chimneys, then people just perceive it as the same thing. So, we take advantage of that sort of misconception on the part of the audience to draw slightly different things.

(6) MEGALOPOLIS B.O. STINKS; WILD ROBOT MUCH SWEETER. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Going into Sunday, Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed $120M epic Megalopolis is projected to open in 6th place domestically this weekend, with a disappointing $4M box office. It is also received a low score (D+) from movie viewers according to rating firm CinemaScore.com. 

The Wild Robot (DreamWorks), meanwhile, is opening 1st domestically with an estimated $35M weekend box office and an A audience rating from CinemaScore. Final box office totals may change for either film. “’Megalopolis’ Bombs at Box Office, ‘Wild Robot’ Soars to No. 1” in The Hollywood Reporter.

DreamWorks Animaton and Universal’s family film The Wild Robot is charming moviegoers and audiences alike, boasting both a stellar 98 percent Rotten Tomatoes critics score and a 98 percent audience score, not to mention an A CinemaScore from moviegoers. Thanks to great word of mouth, Wild Robot came in No. 1 with an estimated $35 million.

If only the love were being spread around.

Francis Ford Coppola — in one of the low points of his long and illustrious career — is watching his new movie Megalopolis get almost utterly rejected by moviegoers (it was likewise maligned by many critics). The film received a disastrous D+ CinemaScore from audiences and only cleared an estimated $4 million in its domestic debut (many rivals predict final numbers will be lower). Heading into the weekend, tracking and Lionsgate expected it to do at least $5 million to $7 million.

(7) TOBIAS TAITT DIES. Tobias Taitt, writer of the autobiographical comic Black, passed away September 16. James Bacon toured the Cartoon Museum’s exhibit about the comic (artwork by Anthony Smith) in 2021: “BLACK: The Story Of Tobias Taitt”.

(8) KRIS KRISTOFFERSON (1936-2024). Actor and country singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson died September 28 at the age of 88. In 2004, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. His performance in the film A Star Is Born (1975) earned him a Golden Globe for best actor in 1977.

In the sff/h genres he is best known for his appearances in the Blade movies (Blade, Blade II, Blade: Trinity) opposite Wesley Snipes. Also in Planet of the Apes (2001) as Karubi.

His music appeared in another half dozen sfff/h titles including Watchmen (2009)

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary, September 29, 2005 –The debut of XKCD

By Paul Weimer: It started off innocently enough, with some random sketches by its creator Randall Munroe. A girl in his class. Excitement at the debut of SERENITY. It was mildly amusing but would never have had its cultural impact if it stayed that way.  A few months in, the webcomic got geekier, the artwork better, and then there was the secret sauce. The thing that made, I think, the webcomic really take off.

The alt text. 

Alt text gets a bad rap. On Mastodon, you get hated if you don’t put it on your photos. Other sites don’t allow it at all. But in XKCD, the creator made alt text an art form, instead of describing his drawings, but coming up with the idea of footnoting them, often with some very funny, if sometimes mordant comedy and observations.

Why wouldn’t a comic that blends science, technology, history, popular culture and more not be utterly popular, especially one that works on several levels, in and out of the text itself?

The intellectual curiosity (as seen in his two books, What If and What if 2) and his ability to just make that into a simple and amusing image on a regular basis makes XKCD something to enjoy time and again and again. 

My favorite XKCD strip is going to be an obvious one. He won a Hugo for a 3000 image strip that Munroe updated over five months, telling a grand story set millennia in the future as the waters of the Mediterranean rise…but it is not the story of that rise. It’s the story of the relationships and the people who watch it inexorably happen.

I give you… “Time”.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

• I’m sure everyone recognizes the scene in the first panel of Thatababy.
• The Argyle Sweater has strange ideas about musical groups.
• Heathcliff learns that landing on Earth is a relief for some.

(11) SOMETHING WICKED ON THE STAGE. Just outside of LA in the town of Newhall, the “Eclipse Theatre LA Presents Ray Bradbury’s ‘Something Wicked’” in October.

…The play follows two inseparable friends, Will and Jim, on the verge of adulthood. As contrasting as night and day, one yearns for adventure beyond their small town, while the other finds comfort in familiarity. 

Their lives take a thrillingly unsettling turn when a mysterious carnival, led by the enigmatic Mr. Dark, rolls into town under the cloak of darkness. 

The carnival offers irresistible promises, but at a sinister cost. Will and Jim must confront their deepest desires and grapple with the consequences of wishing for things better left untouched….

Performances run on weekends from October 11th to 13th and October 18th to 20th. 

General admission tickets are only $22 and can be purchased online by clicking here. 

For more information about the play, visit the website by clicking here 

(12) SINNERS TRAILER. ‘Sinners’ first-look trailer unleashes Michael B. Jordan’s horror movie (ew.com) – Entertainment Weekly provides an introduction.

As promised by a creepy social media campaign that emerged online this week, “Sinners are coming.”

Michael B. Jordan appears in the new Sinners trailer, marking the first look at his buzzed about but until now very mysterious horror movie with Ryan Coogler, his director on Fruitvale Station (2013), Creed (2015), Black Panther (2018), and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022).

Jordan stars as twins in this period piece set in the South. A cryptic logline explains the brothers tried to leave their troubled lives behind but return to their hometown for a fresh start, only to discover that “an even greater evil” is waiting to welcome them back. Early reports described the project as a vampire film…

(13) HONEST ABOUT THE ROBBERY. “California’s new law forces digital stores to admit you’re just licensing content, not buying it” reports The Verge.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed a law (AB 2426) to combat “disappearing” purchases of digital games, movies, music, and ebooks. The legislation will force digital storefronts to tell customers they’re just getting a license to use the digital media, rather than suggesting they actually own it.

When the law comes into effect next year, it will ban digital storefronts from using terms like “buy” or “purchase,” unless they inform customers that they’re not getting unrestricted access to whatever they’re buying. Storefronts will have to tell customers they’re getting a license that can be revoked as well as provide a list of all the restrictions that come along with it. Companies that break the rule could be fined for false advertising.

The new law won’t apply to stores that offer “permanent offline” downloads and comes as a direct response to companies like PlayStation and Ubisoft. In April, Ubisoft started deleting The Crew from players’ accounts after shutting down servers for the online-only game. And last year, Sony said it would remove purchased Discovery content from users’ PlayStation libraries before walking back the move.

(14) BETTING ON ALIEN LIFE. Dave Eggers on extra-terrestrial life (courtesy of Longreads): “Dave Eggers: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab works to discover life in space” in the Washington Post.

In all likelihood, in the next 25 years, we’ll find evidence of life on another planet. I’m willing to say this because I’m not a scientist and I don’t work in media relations for NASA. But all evidence points to us getting closer, every year, to identifying moons in our solar system, or exoplanets beyond it, that can sustain life. And if we don’t find conditions for life on the moons near us, we’ll find it on exoplanets — that is, planets outside our solar system. Within the next few decades, we’ll likely find an exoplanet that has an atmosphere, that has water, that has carbon and methane and oxygen. Or some combination of those things….

… But at the moment, much of the work at JPL is devoted to finding and examining exoplanets, and there is an urgency to the work that is palpable. In more than a dozen conversations with some of the best minds in astrophysics, I did not meet anyone who was doubtful about finding evidence of life elsewhere — most likely on an exoplanet beyond our solar system. It was not a matter of if. It was a matter of when. And if there’s going to be one scientist to bet on being part of the team that does it, it will be Vanessa Bailey. To date, only 82 exoplanets have been directly imaged, and Bailey found one of them….

(15) CRAIG MILLER Q&A. “Fanbase Feature: An Interview with Author Craig Miller on More Movie Memories (2024)”.

In this Fanbase Feature, THE FANBASE WEEKLY podcast co-host Bryant Dillon participates in a one-on-one interview with special guest Craig Miller (writer – STAR WARS MEMORIES, MORE MOVIE MEMORIES / original Director of Fan Relations at Lucasfilm / marketing consultant on THE LAST STARFIGHTER, THE DARK CRYSTAL, & more) regarding his recently released book, MORE MOVIE MEMORIES (2024), the origins of his career, his thoughts on his own place in pop culture history, his love for and approach to being both a creator and part of fandom, and more.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Ersatz Culture, Paul Weimer, James Bacon, Lise Andreasen, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Janney.]