(1) Henge proliferation. Now a huge ritual arena has been discovered near Stonehenge. You almost end up thinking Stonehenge, which used to seem quite big in itself, was nothing but the cherry on top….
Researchers find hidden remains of massive Neolithic stone monument, thought to have been hauled into position more than 4,500 years ago
The Stonehenge Hidden Landscape project has transformed how archaeologists view the ancient site, which sprawls over 4 sq miles of Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. The main monument stands at the heart of a landscape rich with burial grounds, pits and chapels. Last year, researchers found the remains of 17 new chapels and hundreds of other archaeological features scattered across the site.
Two huge pits have been discovered in a two mile-long monument called the Cursus that lies to the north of Stonehenge. The pits seem to form an astronomical arrangement: on midsummer’s day, the eastern pit’s alignment with the rising sun and the western pit’s alignment with the setting sun intersect where Stonehenge was built 400 years later.
The rise and fall of the newly discovered monument at Durrington Walls suggests that buildings were modified and recycled since the first stones were laid around 3100BC. A large timber building encased in chalk is thought to have been a house of the dead where defleshing was performed as a burial ritual.
(2) This unnaturally leads us to Dr. Faustus AU’s The Call of Cthulhu – for beginning readers at Deviant Art.
(3) I sure didn’t score very well on Revolvy’s The Batman 1960s TV Show quiz. Must have missed more episodes attending choir practice than I thought.
(4) You won’t need an alarm to wake up once you have the spider clock – you’ll be too scared to go to sleep.
In Arachnophobia, the clock has been reimagined as the body of a spider, its mechanical movement engineered to sit partially outside the body as the spider’s head, where it can be viewed and admired as it sits on a table, or mounted to a wall.
(5) Idaho Public Radio offers advice for writers from science fiction author David Levine.
David D. Levine is the author of the upcoming novel ‘Arabella of Mars’ (Tor 2016), as well over fifty science fiction and fantasy stories. His story “Tk’Tk’Tk” won the Hugo Award.
We spoke with Mr. Levine at the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention in Spokane this August, and asked him what advice he had for aspiring writers. “Persistence is the only thing you cannot do without,” he said.
(6) Galactic Journey’s idea is intriguing —
Imagine living through the post-Golden Age of science fiction and fantasy. What would it be like to experience this journey at the plodding, one day per day pace?
Though I’m a bit disappointed with its 1960 Worldcon report — [September 6, 1960] The 1960 WorldCon in Pittsburgh!
Of course, I wasn’t actually present at the con, it being held some 2500 miles away on the 17th floor of the Penn Sheraton in Pittsburgh. But I know people, and I have access to a million-dollar ‘fax machine. Thus, even though the custodial staff is just barely finishing its sweeping up after some 300 attendees had a roaring great time, I am already able to bring you this report:
The primary purpose for a convention is to allow fellow fen (plural of fan) to mingle. Gordon Dickson likens it to a Gentleman’s Club where adventurers can meet and compare notes before heading off back into the wild. Fred Pohl calls it a family gathering.
It looks like the demographics of fandom match that of publication: women are in the distinct minority, but they are present and often outsizedly significant.
Not sure what the point is of a report that doesn’t acknowledge the names of anybody but the pros (not even all of those pictured are named).
If somebody is writing a throwback account of everyday life in the genre, I’d expect to see more evidence of research from sources that aren’t available online. Harry Warner Jr., anyone?
(7) Brandon Kempner at Chaos Horizon has worked up a new estimate of the number of Sad and Rabid Puppies based on the 2015 nominating data released at Sasquan.
(8) Django Wexler has coded an E Pluribus Hugo simulator.
Important Caveat: I am not a voting theory expert! Smarter people than me have thought about this. However, I am a programmer of sorts, and interested in this stuff. So, I wrote up a thing that runs the EPH algorithm on test data. (I obviously don’t have access to actual Hugo data!) I thought other people might get something out of it, so I’m posting it here.
Here is the EPHConsole project as a Visual Studio ’13 project.
Here is the compiled self-installer for the EPHConsole project.
Here is the EXE file, which should work if you have .NET installed on your machine.
(9) I like Joe’s attitude.
https://twitter.com/joethepeacock/status/640973827145494528
(10) Chuck Wendig has found the silver lining in all those one-star reviews people have dumped on his new novel Star Wars: Aftermath.
Others have suggested that there may be a campaign by some Legends fangroups to “raid” the book’s reviews to tank its ranking with these one-star reviews — an interesting tactic that does indeed tank its actual review score, but not its sales ranking given that Amazon algorithms are interested not in the quality of the reviews but rather the attention that the reviews and the book get. (Meaning, a passel of negative reviews actually elevates the book’s overall sales ranking. Which in turn garners it more sales. Amazon reps have been clear with me on this point: buyers buy books with reviews, period. Not good reviews, not bad reviews. But rather: quantity of reviews impress buyers to make purchases. So, leaving a ton of bad reviews actually increases the book’s sales. Ironic, and not likely what anyone supporting such a campaign intends.)
Ben Lindbergh at Grantland outlines the basic problem for Extended Universe fans:
It’s an apt title for a story at the intersection of two climactic events concerning the galaxy far, far away. The in-universe aftermath is the power struggle that succeeds the destruction of the Second Death Star and the loss of the Empire’s Sith-heavy C-Suite at the end of Return of the Jedi. But the book also arrives amid a meta-aftermath: the Alderaan-like extinction of the old Expanded Universe, which started as a supplement to the movies and soon outstripped them in scope, sprouting into a story-surrounding-the-story that spanned thousands of years and unfolded via hundreds of books, comics, and video games from 1976 until 2014, when Disney decided to clear the decks for future films by declaring all that came before non-canon.
(11) Police are circulating the photo of a person of interest in a sexual assault at Dragon Con this weekend.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution —
Atlanta police are asking for the public’s help identifying a man who may be connected to a sexual assault at the popular sci-fi convention Dragon Con.
Officer Kim Jones said the female victim was in town for the convention and was sexually assaulted early Sunday “by a white male wearing an FBI baseball cap.” The man reportedly introduced himself as “Gary from Marietta.”
Police also released a photo of the suspect. Further details about the incident were not immediately available.
Dragon Con draws tens of thousands of people to Downtown Atlanta each year, many in costumes and other paraphernalia celebrating comic books, movies and pop culture. This year’s festivities began Friday.
In an emailed statement, Dragon Con media relations director Don Carroll said it is the convention’s policy not to comment on “specific incidents.”
“Dragon Con is proud to offer a safe and inclusive convention for its members that is free of harassment or assault of any kind,” the statement said. “We work with the Atlanta Police Department all year to develop and install procedures to prevent issues such as these. If and when they occur (we) insure they are handled by the appropriate authorities. APD is on site throughout the convention.”
Anyone with information about the alleged assault or the person of interest is asked to contact Detective R.C. Sluss at 404-546-4260. Tipsters can also remain anonymous — and be eligible for rewards of up to $2,000 — by contacting Crime Stoppers at 404-577-TIPS and crimestoppersatlanta.org.
[Thanks to JJ, Andrew Porter, Eric Lindsay, and John King Tarpinian for some of these links. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]
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I doubt they even know who Mike Glyer is….
@Dex: Pretty soon they’re going to have so many hashtags there won’t be room for their messages.
Which would be a blessing for them, really.
I’m reminded of that classic Puppy tale: the last man and woman on Mars, facing down an interstellar invasion. Powered armor, mill spec ray guns, overwhelming odds, slim hope of backup from the besieged moon bases overhead. I think the title was something like “If you were a Deimos army, love.”
There is the story of the time-travelling archeologists who, having spent many years planning how to overcome the half-man half-bull inhabitant, discovered too late that the labyrinth in Knossos was in fact inhabited by killer pigeons.
If only you were a Minotaur, my dove.
I’m too lazy. Plus then the cool kindle feature reminding me to star/review a work wouldn’t happen. Did I mention lazy?
@bravo I’m still using my old first-gen model. Works a charm. Have considered one of the new iPad-compatibles, but hasn’t ever seemed necessary.
Tasha Turner, hey, “too lazy” is a valid excuse. Just offered renaming up as one potential workaround, which I started after I got really, really sick of checking the wiki of authors for book order. I use it for my backed-up library on the computer (I don’t trust online storage; I used to have a Sony…). I don’t always bother renaming the books that are downloaded direct to my ebook, but I do when I archive them.
Of course he includes Cuckservative. The people who literally think that any level of “appeasment” towards women or racial minorities is some sort of betrayal of conservative values.
I think I read that one. In the sequel the archaeologist finds themselves in a future where the only access to books is by a phone service to Baen publishing. A deep but melodic voice reads out military SF in sweet tones. The archaeologist finds themselves strangely attracted to the voice but wishes, oh if only, the stories were from a different publisher. It is called “If You Were Dial-A-Tor My Love”
@ tonieee
I know how you feel. After my first viewing of The Wizard of Oz, at age 5, the Witch of the West visited me nightly, for what felt like years. Thanks for recommending Avebury.
@ Stevie
Third time’s the charm? Go back to Gozo to take the tours. Those temples are a-ma-zing. Your trip sounds really great.
I was a bit confused when I read “Half-off Ragnarok this dinner, as it seemed to start in media res, with references to the sick cousin, the sister on a trip, and the previous battle with a bad-guy organization. It wasn’t until half-way thorough the book that I found out it was something like the third novel in the series- the list of novels in the front implied it was the first.
Spiders: I always thought my mom had the best explanation for her behavior toward them. She wasn’t afraid of spiders, she explained; she was simply engaging in a selective breeding program. When she saw a spider, she squished it. Over generations, this would breed spiders who stayed the heck out of her way.
Randomly, apparently the Sad Puppies have graduated to Twitter right wing royalty.
I always find it funny that the GGers and Puppies so often seem to cast themselves as the villains.
I loved my livescribe pen but when I started studying for my counselling course I had the problem that you cannot record the group, because client cases and other confidential material is discussed.
By the way, people, i have spent an unconscionable amount on book and bought a Kindle (for reading on the tube) and it’s all your fault. Also I am on Goodreads, under my name.
And clicky.
Archive an ebook? What kind of barbarian are you? I get the not trusting cloud storage. It’s one reason I won’t spend over $x on an ebook as I don’t own it, it can be yanked, and at some point it will be old useless technology.
Until the recent change to iTunes screwing up my iPads storage I had over 5,000 kindle books* on it. I’ve been competing with my husbands physical library. Anytime traveling if he ran out of books or made a comment on how heavy his luggage was I smiled sweetly, looked lovingly at my iPad, and said “just think if you went digital you’d have something to read now/your luggage wouldn’t be so heavy”. Recently he’s been using his iPod more and dipping into my library. Poor guy it’s a bit overwhelming all at once.
*not all ebooks are kindle
Jens, me too! I read the pet stories and left condolences when the proprietor’s friend died. That’s about it.
We don’t see house spiders much here (we have geckos instead, who are most likely eating the spiders), the default spiders we saw on Kauai were Cane Spiders, which get big enough to be creepy (and would come in the house), and Crab Spiders and Banana Spiders, which preferred the yard. It became second nature to sweep narrow passages between things with a stick if you hadn’t passed through them recently.
We killed any spiders in the house, because spiders, and moved outside spiders to the overgrown pasture next door (swirl them and their web on a stick and pitch it over the fence).
Phil Jupitus on spiders http://youtu.be/4cUiCW-KfUQ
“I always find it funny that the GGers and Puppies so often seem to cast themselves as the villains.”
Villains are cool.
Also its becoming a right wing fashion to be wild & crazy revolutionaries. Disruptors of the status quo. People who aim to misbehave.
Dang. I am tempted to go over to the dark side.
Still, I am a man of peace.
Last night I read LMB Penrick’s Demon. It took a couple pages for me to get back into the workdbuilding. I’m not sure if someone hasn’t read the preceding books how well the story stands on its own. It was delightful. It had the right amount of humor for me. I liked the difference between the young naive boy and the much older demon. The intrigue and final resolution worked for me. It was a refreshing break from #puppygate. Goodreads shows me at 181 books/stories read this year.
“You know … posers.”
I hate the interface of pretty much every proprietary ebook reader with a deep, calm, unabating hate. I like using ePubReader to read .epub files in a nice, bare-bones, HTML-y browser window on my laptop, but of course this doesn’t work for DRM’d ebooks. Screw that. If I paid for it, I shall “vandalize” the file however I wish. I realize HTML is easier to copy than “shiny, sleekly impenetrable proprietary interface”, egads the pirates, etc., but I cannot truly and fully describe how I felt that time I first bought a B&N ebook and realized that “epub” didn’t guarantee “openable in ePubReader”.
I keep multiple archives of ebook files on different drives, and two copies of Calibre Library, because I once had a hard drive crash and lost a bunch of files. And none of my downloads stay in the default folders for Amazon or Overdrive or other sources, so there will be no secret changes or removals of stuff I already paid for.
I do add the series numbers in my Kindle Library, because its easy to do while checking the metadata. And I use Calibre (and Calibre Companion on the Android tablets) to send books to my Kindle and my Android devices, in whatever format is called for (I prefer epub for reading with Moon+ Reader, but I also store travel documents in pdf since I’ll be carying the device with me, and I have Komik to read comics and Pulp magazines that are stored in CBR/CBZ formats).
I also have a stash of TBR stuff on a thumb drive plugged into a USB OTG cable, which my tablets can copy from, if I just can’t find anything to read on my device. This is a good place for the CBR/CBZ files, because they get pretty big.
Tasha Turner –
Ah, I either missed it or avoided it (if I see a book title that I’m either currently or about to read I avoid it just in case of spoilers).
I don’t get how publishers fail to understand that. Can you imagine the reaction if people went to see a movie and found out it was only the first part without it being advertised as such? Good lord. I mean I had many issues with the book but that was just icing on the cake.
I like Huntsman spiders enough that if I find one crawling up my leg I’ll persuade it to move to my hand and then onto a safer, not-me, surface.
I know this is true because it happened to me in March or April this year.
The spider was, I think, Isopeda villosa — but there are several species of Huntsman spider in Oz and I’ve always had the impression that I. villosa preferred houses to backyards. This critter was quite impressive, being just a little smaller than my outstretched hand.
Tasha
My kindle books on my iPad are so far apparently surviving but my photos are in dire peril; Apple keeps sending me messages telling me I need to buy more cloud storage. The only reason for this is that they are amalgamating the photos on my two iPads as one collection, whereas I am perfectly happy to have them separately.
I haven’t a clue as to why they think this is a good way to enthuse their customer base…
“You know … posers.”
Yeah, I know. Just like the mad scramble to buy more guns.
Millions and millions of them –
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/nics/reports/nics_firearm_checks_-_month_year.pdf
There’s a near-future tale in this I’m sure.
Dex on September 8, 2015 at 12:34 pm said:
That sort of “vainglorious villain declares his purpose” thing was very popular with gg. Bad news, enemies! You know who you are! The fire rises! We don’t know what the fire is exactly! We will never give up! We will keep on doing whatever it is we’re doing! Until we achieve victory! We can’t tell you what victory looks like! We have a plan! We can’t tell you what that plan is! We are coming for you! To do something unspeakably evil! Which you already know is going to be insulting and harassing you online like a bunch of bullying twelve-year-olds because something we can do without leaving our parents’ basement is the extent of our imagination and ambition! Fear us!
“We can’t tell you what victory looks like! ”
The UCLA English Department ?
Don’t google Isopeda villosa
Don’t google Isopeda villosa
Don’t google Isopeda villosa
Don’t ….
(googles isopedia villosa)
(runs away screaming)
Regarding bad covers… I never owned this book myself, but I think my friend still has it. Hint: The book is NOT about Star Wars.
http://www.serielagret.se/bocker/Moller-filer/image024.jpg
That sort of “vainglorious villain declares his purpose” thing was very popular with gg. Bad news, enemies! You know who you are! The fire rises!
They do realize that supervillains always lose, don’t they?
“Isopeda villosa”
We have very similar types in the old country.
Cute !
I don’t know if they are suitable for taming like tarantulas.
My Dad is currently tracking the habits and love life (so far she’s tried to eat all of her suitors and they’ve spent a lot of time abseiling away in a panic) of a spider outside his kitchen window (she’s nicknamed Portia), which means I, arachnophobic daughter, am getting regular messages with close-up photos of said spider. It’s a good thing I don’t mind web spiders quite as much as crawling everywhere spiders.
I’m not googling isopeda villosa though.
Don’t click on this link either. If you can’t resist, make sure you pause it within the first 5 seconds.
Speaking of stories we’ve been reading, there’s this one about a person who discovers the person they’ve fallen was bitten by a T.Rex (or possibly its lesser relative, the Q. Rex), which led to, per the title
If You, A Were-Dinosaur, My Love
Oddly, I also recently heard about another story about this flying restaurant,
If You Were A Diner-Soar, My Love
and then there’s what looks like a remake of Little Red Riding Hood,
If You Wear A Dinosaur, My Love…
Stevie
I’ve never tried to understand Apple. I love my iPad but every single update seems worse than when Microsoft updates my software. I spent years learning to think like a Microsoft software engineer (& how they’d interpreted some marketing request) until I got chronically ill and dropped out of the workplace.
The iPad may have helped save my life since I was hit by a Truck 2012 but even if I upgraded to the latest and greatest iPad with the largest storage it couldn’t handle my books, music, and mobile pictures never mind all the apps it keeps wanting me to download. I can’t rely on cloud storage. Even with our new fios modem – music stutters if played on the cloud. I feel like I’m back in the ’70s as my cassette tapes are stretching out from overuse or records are skipping. Seriously it’s freaky when new technology downgrades you 30 years.
Why don’t any of these companies get that I want to be in charge of my stuff they are not smarter than me? /end rant*
*I think I’ve been ranting like this since early 1990s no wonder I don’t feel listened to – just make it work right don’t keep changing it LOL
It would seem to be a rather obvious flaw in their plan, wouldn’t it?
Rick K, I clicked on your link. When somebody posts a link that says something like “ARACHNOPHOBES STAY AWAY DO NOT CLICK THIS LINK NO REALLY WE MEAN IT” I pretty much always click the link. (My favorite: an optical illusion of a building filled with giant spiders http://io9.com/5946885/hooray-an-optical-illusion-of-a-building-filled-with-giant-spiders)
One of these days I’m going to get rickrolled…
LMB tells a similar story of picking up Fellowship of the Ring without knowing that it was book one of three and being very puzzled by the ending.
I don’t think Time Salvager finished up nearly as strongly as it started. (I still think it’s noticeably better than the Tao books, though.) I’ll be checking out the next book to see if the trend continues upward.
All these Swirsky puns remind me of the story about the puppy who actually really liked her short, but couldn’t get himself to put it on his ballot and sighed:
“If you were a tie-in story, my love”
Hello Occy,
A few months ago I found an itty-bitty wolf spider, about the size of a pencil eraser, on my car. I leaned over to get a better look and darned if the little critter didn’t raise its forelegs in a put-up-your-dukes gesture. First time I’ve ever seen a spider do anything cute.
Aricknid rolled?
Yep. That’s how I learned the phrase “in media res” – I posted pretty much the same thing you did, minus that phrase, on Usenet once…
Hence the urban legend that there was a III at the end of “The Madness of King George” but it was dropped as being too confusing for Americans.
It’s an evening in late 1963. Colonel Chuck Yeager affectionately pats the plywood fuselage of the M2-F1 lifting body that, earlier in the day, has carried him safely down to the surface of Rogers Dry Lake. Then he gazes wistfully up at the stars…
‘If you were a Dyna-Soar, my love…’
[Yeah, it’s one the puppies might like too. But, y’know, they don’t own SpaceHist.]
On the naming/numbering of series’d books:
It recently occurred to me that book 2 of Doc Smith’s 4-volume Skylark Series is titled “Skylark 3″…
The myth of the dinosaur story winning the Hugo upset one of its fans, who’d really hoped it’d win. Looking at the Hugo results they sighed, sadly:
“Ah, if you had a higher score, my love…”
There’s this fantasy story about two lovers, who unbeknownst to each other were both werecreatures. Upon finding out, one moonlit night, that the heroine was a common werewolf her swain softly sighed “If you were a giant boar, my love”
I’ve got this scene in my harrowing courtroom drama where the British judge loses his temper at the femme fatale’s unwieldy choice of murder weapon, and the bailiff tries to restrain him with the immortal refrain: If You Swear At Dinah’s Oar, M’Lud.
God, I hope that if Rachel Swirsky finds out about this she doesn’t mind too much.
@Paul
Yeah, that’s what happened to me; it felt like he started going into Burroughsian cut-up mode at some point in there, and while individual vignettes might be very cool, they didn’t….*cohere* as books.
Somewhere around CCII, if I remember the American compilations right.