(1) This day in history:
…in 1966, “Star Trek” premiered on NBC-TV.
Which makes it the perfect day to release Captain Kirk’s autobiography:
“The Autobiography of James T. Kirk – The Story of Starfleet’s Greatest Captain,” is to be published by Titan Books on Tuesday – 49 years to the day after “Star Trek” premiered on television in 1966.
It comes with illustrations, including Kirk’s Starfleet Academy class graduation photo and an unsent letter he penned to his son.
Fan fiction plays a popular role in the “Star Trek” universe and interest has been building since actor William Shatner, the best-known embodiment of Kirk, appeared at July’s Comic-Con International with Goodman and read excerpts from the book. A Shatner-signed copy of the book can be found on the Internet selling for $150.00.
According to the autobiography, Kirk passed over the Vulcan Mr. Spock to be his first officer of the starship Enterprise; 20th century social worker Edith Keeler, not the mother of his son, was the great love of his life; and Kirk may have another son on a distant planet – who makes what suspiciously looks like “Star Trek” movies.
(2) Now there’s an official touchscreen that can turn your Raspberry Pi into a tablet.
Two years in the making, an official touchscreen for the tiny board has gone on sale.
The diminutive Raspberry Pi – a computer on a board the size of a credit card – has been wildly successful. It was created with the aim of encouraging children to experiment with building their own devices and while the makers thought they might sell 1,000 they have now sold well over five million.
(3) The roads must roll! Chris Mills on Gizmodo says “Replacing Subway Lines With High-Speed Moving Sidewalks Sounds Terrifying”.
London has the oldest subway system in the world: great for tourism, but sometimes not-so-great for commuters. There’s all sorts of sensible plans to upgrade the city’s public transport, but here’s one particularly outside-the-box solution: a 15mph moving sidewalk, looping 17 miles under London. What could go wrong!
(4) Erin Underwood has a fine interview with Rosarium Publisher Bill Campbell at Amazing Stories.
Bill Campbell
(ASM): What upcoming book or project are you are especially excited about? Why that book/project? (Bill, this can be a Rosarium book or something else.)
(BC): All of our projects are really near and dear to my heart, and so are our authors and artists. At this level, you really get to know the people you work with, and you really find yourself rooting for their success and work yourself to the bone to try to help them reach it.
I think the one project, though, that’s nearest and dearest to my heart is Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany that I co-edited with Nisi Shawl. I don’t know if I’d have ever written science fiction if it weren’t for Chip, and I can’t help thinking how hard it must’ve been for him to be alone in the field for as long as he was. He had to carry a mighty large load for a lot of people and did it with such grace and intelligence. I told Daniel Jose Older that there are, perhaps, five people on this planet who intimidate me. Delany’s one of them. I just wanted to thank him. It took over two years to do it properly, and, thanks to Nisi and the authors involved, it turned out a lot better than I could’ve possibly hoped.
(5) Tom Knighton’s blog has a new header with a photo of the author, which really brightens the place up.
(6) Mark Pampanin of SCPR has dug a little deeper into how gay rights got its start in science fiction.
But it’s true – gay and lesbian writers and activists who wanted to connect with others in the LGBT community in the 1940s could only do so with pseudonyms and double entendre. And they were able to do it with the help of another burgeoning movement with roots in Los Angeles – science fiction….
Kepner and Ben, as Jyke and Tigrina, were both devoted members of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, which met weekly in the basement of the Prince Rupert Arms near downtown Los Angeles to imagine a future of technological marvels and social equality.
The society still exists. Now in Van Nuys, it’s the oldest running science fiction society in the world, and holds members just as devoted as Kepner and Ben once were, like June Moffatt, who joined the society in August 1947 when she was a teenager. She says she “only met Tigrina once” but she knew Kepner quite well.
“He was good fun,” says Moffatt. Moffatt knew Kepner was gay and an activist, but he was still just “one of the gang. I remember once sitting down next to [Kepner] and telling him he was in danger,” Moffatt says, laughing. “I was flirting with him.”
(7) Black Nerd Problems’ L. E. H. Light declares “No More Diversity Panels, It’s Time To Move On”.
What’s a convention program director to do? They want to present and represent “diversity” in their audience. They’re hearts are in the right place, or not. As others have pointed out, sometimes The Diversity Panel is an excuse for the convention to avoid actually integrating their other panels. Well intentioned or not, the recent fuss at the Hugos really proves this point: we’re here, we’re not going any where. We and our allies vote for awards and read books and *gasp* write and publish them too! The “why is diversity important” is an answered question. So what’s next?
(8) Yesterday I had a clip about a spider clock, but there is a lot more to know about mechanical spiders if you’re interested. (The two of you who raised your hands can keep reading.) One example is this video, Inside Adam Savage’s Cave: Awesome Robot Spider!
We’re back in Adam’s cave to check out his latest obsession, a robot spider with incredibly realistic movement. Adam shows off the special box and platform he built to tinker and calibrate the spider, and then sends it crawling around the pool table in his shop. It’s not for the arachnophobic!
Other recommended one-day build videos are this one building Cylon raiders and troopers from plastic model kits with Aaron Douglas:
And this one building his Kirk chair:
(9) BBC Two has optioned China Miéville’s The City & the City and will develop the novel into a four-part series based on the Inspector Tyador Borlú character. British screenwriter Tony Grisoni is writing the adaptation.
“We are thrilled to be bringing China’s dazzlingly inventive novel to BBC Two,” said Damien Timmer, managing director at Mammoth Screen, which will produce the project. “It’s a 21st Century classic — a truly thrilling and imaginative work which asks big questions about how we perceive the world and how we interact with each other.”
(10) As you already know, Soon Lee is hosting a collection of the punny variations on the title of Rachel Swirsky’s “If you were a dinosaur, my love” produced on File 770 today.
(11) John Scalzi has entered Hugo hibernation. (See last comment on this post at Whatever).
I have officially come to the end of thinking about the Hugos for 2015. If other people decide they want to, that’s their business, but as for here, my plan is let it be through the end of the year. Because, fuck me, I’m tired of them.
May I also suggest that you let it go as well? Surely the rest of your 2015 is better spent doing something else with your time. I’m not saying you have to. I’m just saying you should. That goes for everyone.
(12) John C. Wright, on the other hand, is still roaming the tundra hunting for fresh prey.
If you voted, please write Sasquan, and demand, not ask, that they release the nomination data. The idea that the data must be kept private to avoid someone from deducing the voter’s identities is an absurd lie, not worth wasting ink to refute. They are trying to hide a bloc voting pattern, or a large number of votes that were entered after voting closed or something of the sort.
No, see, THE CABAL keeps certain people down, while THE CONSPIRACY boosts certain people up. Hope that helps. https://t.co/ckISAdztGr
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 8, 2015
(13) Charles Rector in Fornax #5 [PDF file] begins his editorial on the 2015 Hugos with this tantalizing hook —
Have you ever taken a firm position on a subject only to realize later that you were on the wrong side and as time went on, you got to wonder how you ever took that previous position? That was my experience with this year’s Hugo Awards. When the year started, I was on the side of the slates. It seemed that the slates were a good idea given the state of the Hugo Awards.
I bet you’ll never see a turnaround like that anywhere else.
(14) 100 Years of Robots in the Movies. (Despite the title I’m pretty sure I saw a split second of Doctor Who in there – and other TV shows…)
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Jerry Pournelle, Ita, and John King Tarpinian for some of these links. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cubist.]
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We’re so used to puppy discourse we’ve become inured to exactly how foul these casual, irresponsible, unsubstantiated accusations of corruption are. It’s disgusting.
@ Paul Weimer
What Meredith said.
I also enjoyed the Suck Fairy post.
@Bruce Arthurs: Past a certain point, you just don’t read everything tweeted by people you follow. If there are a few people whose every tweet you really want to see, use the List function and add them to one. Otherwise, Twitter is a stream you dip into.
A different take on Tim Hunt, from my cousin who is an actual scientist:
http://robminchin.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-real-timhunt-witch-hunt.html
I’ve always felt that the first television STAR TREK episode was a rewritten and previously rejected OUTER LIMITS episode. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t what the show eventually evolved into.
@Nicholas Whyte
I think you meant to put that in the other thread. 🙂 Good article though.
Bruce Arthurs:
Lists, lists, lists. I have to manage Twitter for clients, which can only be managed by lists. I only read my personal Twitter feed via lists. There is no other way to handle the volume and still get anything else done.
How I handle lists on my personal account is different from how I handle it on organizational accounts, but the base approach is the same.
Well, I got completely the wrong impression of what this programme was about when I read the headline:
BBC Two to help viewers Choose The Right Puppy For You
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2015/right-puppy-for-you
14) The only Doctor Who clip I noticed was from one of the Peter Cushing movies, I think… but, of course, the Daleks aren’t strictly robots anyway: “inside each of those mechanical shells is a living, bubbling lump of hate”.
Ahem. </pedant>
@meredith. Yep, looks like something got cut in the formatting. Thanks!
@steve wright. Which of course, got temporarily muddled in the first Romana II story…
On my fifth try I got Wright again! I want, nay demand, a recount
@jimhenley @bruce arthurs. Indeed, Twitter IS a River. I can’t imagine anyone trying to read everything I write, live, much less everyone they follow…
So Glazebrook is one of those puppy-pickers you hear so much about
Shao Ping and other God Stalkers… just a heads-up, should anyone be interested, that I’m going to be starting a God Stalk discussion over on Compuserve (yes, Compuserve still exists!) in about two weeks. (We have to finish The Ocean at the End of the Lane first.) So if anyone has it in their TBR stack and hasn’t started it yet, and wants to join in, we’ll be reading and commenting on one chapter every couple of days. (If anyone HAS read it and wants to join in, that’s ok, too; just remember No Spoilers.) If there’s interest, let me know and I’ll post the particulars, or you can email me at (rot13) [email protected].
(Which means I’ll have to sit down and actually work out the reading schedule, but that’s ok…)
Twitter, I use Tweetdeck. I have a couple of key lists in permanent columns, along with columns for mentions and alerts, as well as for Mary’s tweets. The rest, I just treat as a river. But then I’m fairly prolific and have, if not a 1%er, certainly quite a lot of followers…
Robert – “I’ve always felt that the first television STAR TREK episode was a rewritten and previously rejected OUTER LIMITS episode. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t what the show eventually evolved into.”
Are you talking about The Man-Trap (first aired) the Menagerie (first pilot, unaired – recut into The Cage 2 parter) or Where No Man Has Gone Before (second pilot, aired second)?
Re: John Scalzi’s birth certificate. I believe that there is a conspiracy theory that Scalzi does not exist and is only being used as a convenient decoy to attract the ire of various Young Dog Factions. The truthiers want proof of his existence so they know whether to continue hectoring him or turn their attentions to someone else.
Re: John Scalzi’s birth certificate
If we don’t see it, how do we know he isn’t made entirely of sentient bees?
I just want to recommend Jeff VanderMeer’s ‘Annihilation’, and for best graphic work
Alan Moore’s Providence. [Pending my completed read of the whole trilogy and issues #5-#10 of the latter, they’re really good so far.]
Meredith
You’re right, it’s very hard for us in the sentient-bee swarm community to get valid documentation, can you believe it – the last time I applied I was told to buzz off.
Are members of a sentient swarm who like cult movies on DVDs called Anchorbay bees?
(OK, Anchorbay has gotten more and more mainstream, but it used to be if you wanted something old or weird on DVD, they were the place to go.)
Haven’t the last 10 years taught you that there’s no such thing as bees?
I’m in the middle of “A Red-Rose Chain” and enjoying the plot, but man, have I always found Tybalt *this annoying*? Every time he appears on the page I just want him to go away already.
Sorcerer to the Crown shipment status: [weeping and gnashing of teeth in the darkness; sackcloth, ashes, tearing of clothes; how long, o lord, will you turn your face from me]
—
re: Twitter: I follow like six people and I still don’t read all the tweets. It’s too much. I too am guilty of tweet-flooding in times of heightened emotion, but take comfort in the fact that if I don’t expect anyone to be paying attention, surely some others must be the same.
Two bees or not two bees,
That is the question:
Whether this number in the mind to buffer
As the smallest quora of insects swarming…
“The only reason we don’t have the
Hugosnomination data we’re rightly entitled to are those SJWs with their agenda ofsuppressing conservativeshiding their manipulation of the numbers. They claim to have valid reasons forwhy they vote the way they dowhy they won’t release the data, but that just proves what liars they are.”I do hope Wright brings more imagination than this to his professional fiction.
Robert Whitaker Sirignano: The first aired Star Trek was not the first filmed just the one they selected to run first. It was written by George Clayton Johnson. In that episode George coined the iconic phrase spoken by Bones, “He’s dead Jim” for the first Red Shirt to die. George says he wants phrase on his headstone.
@Paul Weimer,
I still hold a grudge against Sanderson for killing off Bela in WoT. Really, Sanderson? THE HORSE?! And you didn’t even give her a good death scene?! *rails impotently at sky*
Although, it’s not SFF, my all time favorite death scene in literature is Dally Winston’s in the Outsiders.
So, since the puppies are obviously still playing their reindeer games, I used the contact link they so helpfully provided to send them a message of support and thanks.
Simon Butcher. “Man Trap” of course. “The Cage” was more a Trek universe story than a salt monster.
Excellent! I hope 74677,1245 will be there. That guy is the best.
Help, I’m getting confused! Am I correct in thinking that two different sets of 2015 Hugo data are being discussed?
Presumably the proposers of EPH want to run EPH on the nominating ballots from Sasquan. Not the final votes. My understanding is that EPH has no relevance in terms of counting final votes, only nominations. Correct?
Whereas the Puppies are demanding to see Sasquan final votes, not nominations? Because they claim the detailed voting tallies that Sasquan released are (a) falsified or (b) inaccurate? And if so… then what exactly do they want to see? Copies of nearly 6000 ballots? Do they intend to count and sort them?
“Six Puppies And Us was a standout series for BBC Two… brilliant stories, great characters and fascinating specialist factual content…”
So that’s where the pups sent all their best work last year. No wonder there was none left for the Hugo ballot.
That’s my read of it as well. I’m sure the puppy pundits who’ve latched on this don’t realise which set of ballots is being released.
Am I correct in thinking that two different sets of 2015 Hugo data are being discussed?
Yes. As usual, the Pups are not really paying attention to the facts. The data that is under consideration for release are the nominating ballots, so that they can be tested against the EPH algorithm. The Pups (such as JCW) seem to think that they will be getting voting data – which is odd, since JCW states that people should demand the nominating data, but then goes on to claim that it will show a bloc voting pattern, or that votes were entered after the voting period closed, both of which really only make sense if he thinks that they will be releasing the voting data, not the nominating data.
On the other hand, it is JCW, so incoherent nonsense is to be expected.
I hear there’s a Tor accountant who’s being forced to send Scalzi royalty checks despite this being against her literary beliefs.
rrcade, I miss my old octal account. 76702,435. <wistful>
Does this mean you might wander by, if I give details…? It’ll be in the SF Literature forum.
Maybe the Puppies think both the nomination data and the voting data were asked for? Although I don’t know why they would think that, since the request was EPH-related and EPH won’t apply to the voting stage at all, so releasing voting data wouldn’t make any sense.
If it does get fully anonymised and released, I hope they don’t come up with a whole new set of conspiracy theories based on almost nothing. Mind you, they’ve got a decent head-start on the ones they’re going to spread everywhere if it doesn’t get released, or only gets released to the EPH and 4/6 testers under NDA, or EPH gets tested by the Administrators themselves. Whatever happens, everyone is going to be knee-deep in conspiracy theories.
ETA:
Laura Resnick:
Wonderful!
Whatever happens, everyone is going to be knee-deep in conspiracy theories.
That’s pretty much a given for the Pups no matter what happens with respect to anything, ever. They are nothing but conspiracy theories all the way down.
@Meredith
I prefer those to the bleating that Worldcon is too small for the Hugos to matter and it should be done at DragonCon arguments. At least the conspiracy stuff is ridiculously funny.
Correct. EPH as designed is an unranked* system. You don’t tell it you like one thing on your list more than another, or if you do, it doesn’t care. The final voting is ranked.
*I’m sure there’s a more technical term, but I don’t know what it is.
So, in other words, in his demands to release the data, John C Wright gives every appearance of having absolutely no idea what he’s talking about?
Gosh, I feel so disillusioned.
“Arguably”? Heh. That’d be some argument.
It is an interesting perspective — from somebody who actually does agree with the Sad Puppies General Declaration of Purpose (recent nominees suck, they’re too pseudo-literary and too self-conscious about fulfilling diversity checklists) and didn’t have any ethical problem with slates, but still was turned off by their behavior.
But I’m left wondering — which specific works cause him to think the nominees were of “arguably higher quality” than other nominees in recent years? It wasn’t “Wisdom from my Internet,” surely? Or “Turncoat”? Or the trio of interminable JCW novellas? The dull Analog pieces that weren’t really standalone stories? That Antonelli story where nothing really happens? The instantly forgettable one about the Samurai?
I don’t think they even know anymore. It’s the autumn thaw, and all their carefully nurtured ice sheets of outrage are breaking up and floating out to sea. They’re hunting desperately for any little piece of righteous indignation they think will keep them afloat.
Also, that robot spider is terrifying, so of course I had to watch the video.
I prefer those to the bleating that Worldcon is too small for the Hugos to matter and it should be done at DragonCon arguments.
The Academy of Motion Pictures is too small to be deciding the Oscars. The Oscars should be moved to Dragon*Con and voted on by the attendees.
The Grammys are voted on by too small a pool as well. So are the Emmys. And the Tonys. Let’s move them all to Dragon*Con and have them decided by the attendees. It’ll be much more democratic that way. Just think of all the legitimacy those awards will gain!
Whatever happens, everyone is going to be knee-deep in conspiracy theories
Helsinki’s pretty close to Norway I hear. Maybe that Worldcon we can all go to see the fnords…
It’s turning into incompetence porn.
Stoic Cynic on September 9, 2015 at 7:59 am said:
See the what? Your comment must have gotten cut off by the blog software.
Fn#`%${%&`^@@+’${`%&NO CARRIER
Dragon*Con has 56000 attendees
The US Supreme Court has only 9
If only half of Dragon*Con attendees voted on supreme court decisions, that would be approximately six times* as democratic as the current process!
* I totally failed high school math, but my skill in the art of rhetoric is enough to elevate me to the ranks of super-genius
See the loveli lakes
The wonderful telephone system
And mani interesting furry animals
Including the majestic moose
Oh wait! That’s Sweden! Sorry.