Tag Archives: Artemis

Pixel Scroll 4/4/25 Friends, The Idle Scroll Is The Pixel’s Playground

Posted on by
29

(1) 2025 HUGO FINALIST ANNOUNCEMENT SUNDAY. The finalists for the 2025 Hugo Awards, Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and Astounding Award for Best New Writer will be revealed by the Seattle Worldcon committee through social media and their website at Noon Pacific on Sunday, April 6.

(2) HOW CHINA TARIFF AFFECTS BOARDGAME MAKERS. Steve Jackson Games’ Daily Illuminator says “Tariffs Are Driving Up Game Prices Now”.

On April 5th, a 54% tariff goes into effect on a wide range of goods imported from China. For those of us who create boardgames, this is not just a policy change. It’s a seismic shift.

At Steve Jackson Games, we are actively assessing what this means for our products, our pricing, and our future plans. We do know that we can’t absorb this kind of cost increase without raising prices. We’ve done our best over the past few years to shield players and retailers from the full brunt of rising freight costs and other increases, but this new tax changes the equation entirely.

Here are the numbers: A product we might have manufactured in China for $3.00 last year could now cost $4.62 before we even ship it across the ocean. Add freight, warehousing, fulfillment, and distribution margins, and that once-$25 game quickly becomes a $40 product. That’s not a luxury upcharge; it’s survival math.

Some people ask, “Why not manufacture in the U.S.?” I wish we could. But the infrastructure to support full-scale boardgame production – specialty dice making, die-cutting, custom plastic and wood components – doesn’t meaningfully exist here yet. I’ve gotten quotes. I’ve talked to factories. Even when the willingness is there, the equipment, labor, and timelines simply aren’t.

We aren’t the only company facing this challenge. The entire board game industry is having very difficult conversations right now. For some, this might mean simplifying products or delaying launches. For others, it might mean walking away from titles that are no longer economically viable. And, for what I fear will be too many, it means closing down entirely.

Tariffs, when part of a long-term strategy to bolster domestic manufacturing, can be an effective tool. But that only works when there’s a plan to build up the industries needed to take over production. There is no national plan in place to support manufacturing for the types of products we make. This isn’t about steel and semiconductors. This is about paper goods, chipboard, wood tokens, plastic trays, and color-matched ink. These new tariffs are imposing huge costs without providing alternatives, and it’s going to cost American consumers more at every level of the supply chain.

We want to be transparent with our community. This is real: Prices are going up. We’re still determining how much and where.

If you’re frustrated, you’re not alone. We are too. And if you want to help, write to your elected officials. Ask them how these new policies help American creators and small businesses. Because right now, it feels like they don’t.

We’ll keep making games. But we’ll be honest when the road gets harder, because we know you care about where your games come from – and about the people who make them.

— Meredith Placko

(3) MAD PARODIES ANTHOLOGY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Fantagraphics is bringing out “The Sincerest Form of Parody: The Best 1950s Mad Inspired Satirical Comics” on April 29, 2025.

I have fond memories of reading (and enjoying) Mad’s musicals parodies, I can still visualize the mournful face of a short guy singing (within his speech balloon) “The ghoul that I marry…” for example. Ditto panels from their East Side Story. Here’s an example.

Killzoneblog, with more extensive details and lyric excerpts: “Mad Magazine, RIP” from 2019.

…My big brother bought Mad religiously, and thus I got the issues second hand. I learned about politics from Mad. I knew who Castro and Khrushchev were only because of the cartoon renditions within its pages.

In those years they had literate, educated satirists who were able to skewer sacred cows with a precise wit that appealed to adults, too. And the artists! Here I must call out two of my favorites—Mort Drucker, master caricaturist; and Don Martin, whose mind-bending cartoons blew right past the safe and predictable into uncharted realms of hilarity….

… Of all the talent, though, my absolute favorite was the poet laureate of Mad, Frank Jacobs, who, at age 90, is still among us. Jacobs did the libretti for many of the Mad satires of famous movie musicals. I also have a first edition of his legendary collection, Mad For Better or Verse. The amazing thing about Jacobs is that his satirical songs always scanned perfectly along with the originals. He never hit a bad note.

Here’s an example. One of the first political pieces I remember from Mad is East Side Story, a send-up, of course, of the Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim musical. It was Jacobs at his best, along with the fantastic caricatures of Drucker…

That also links to a collection for Frank Jacobs’ many MAD parody lyrics along art by Paul Coker Jr.  (I’m seeing bunches of used copies of this in the highly-affordable range, in case you’re tempted — Mad for Better of Verse by Jacobs at AbeBooks.)

(4) HE WON’T CROSS THE BORDER. When the Niagara Falls Comic Con happens on the Canadian side of the falls at the end of May, American comics creator Larry Hama won’t be there. An invited guest, he’s concerned he might have trouble getting back into the U.S. afterwards. Hama’s career includes stints as a writer and editor for Marvel Comics, where he wrote the licensed comic book series G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero. He has also written for the series Wolverine, Nth Man: The Ultimate Ninja, and Elektra. 

(5) HUMAN AUTHORSHIP REQUIRED FOR COPYRIGHT. “U.S. Copyright Office issues highly anticipated report on copyrightability of AI-generated works” — Reuters has the link.

…The United States Copyright Office (Office) has released Part 2 of its Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence which addresses the copyrightability of AI-generated works (here, opens new tab). It maintains that human authorship and creativity remain essential in the quest to obtain copyright protection for works involving materials created by artificial intelligence.

While Part 1 discusses the legal and policy issues related to artificial intelligence (AI) and digital replicas (here, opens new tab), the recently released “Part 2: Copyrightability” analyzes the type and degree of human contributions required to bring AI generated works within the scope of copyright protection in the United States, as well as the international landscape of how other countries are approaching questions of copyrightability in the AI space and the policy implications of providing additional legal protection to AI-generated material….

… In “Part 2: Copyrightability,” the Office affirms that copyright protection in the United States requires human authorship. The Office points to the foundational principles found in the Copyright Clause in the Constitution and the language of the Copyright Act as interpreted by U.S. courts which grants Congress the authority to “secur[e] for limited times to authors … the exclusive right to their … writings.” U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 8….

(6) GOOD GRIEF. We tend not to link to the Daily Mail here. In case you’ve forgotten why, consider this piece based on the TV documentary Wonderland: Science Fiction in the Atomic Age which Ersatz Culture previewed in yesterday’s Scroll —  “CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Science Fiction In The Atomic Age on Sky Arts: The sci-fi ‘psychic’ who predicts everyone will be gay in 100 years”. Here are screencapped excerpts.

(7) ROBERT MCGINNIS (1926-2025). Renowned magazine/paperback artist Robert McGinnis died March 10. He was a member of the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame.

McGinnis is known for his illustrations of more than 1,200 paperback book covers, and over 40 movie posters, including Breakfast at Tiffany’s (his first film poster assignment), Barbarella, and several James Bond and Matt Helm films.

Starting in 2016, McGinnis painted a number of retro-style covers for reissues of books by Neil Gaiman.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

April 4, 1914 — Edgar Rice Burroughs’ At the Earth’s Core novel

On this day, one hundred and eleven years ago, the first part of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ At the Earth’s Core novel appeared in All-Star Weekly. This magazine started life as The All-Story Magazine before becoming The All-Story and All-Star Weekly. Burroughs’ serial would run from April 4 to April 25, 1914. It would be first published in book form in hardcover by A. C. McClurg in July, 1922. 

It is of course freely available at the usual suspects. 

Pellucidar, a hollow Earth story, is very influential with writers using the setting later on, not the least of which is the author who has Tarzan appearing there. Lin Carter’s “Zanthodon” series, beginning with his novel Journey to the Underground World, is considered a homage to this work. 

And the Skartaris setting used by Mike Grell in The Warlord series is another homage to Pellucidar in the graphic medium. Justice League Unlimited’s “Chaos at the Earth’s Core” episode would show the hollow Earth in an animated medium. It’s quite wonderful even if, like the Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World series, it has very, very little to do with the source material.  That animated series is streaming on Max. 

Wiki claims that Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness was largely influenced by this work. Huh? Please someone explain. 

The novel has been filmed once as At the Earth’s Core in 1976 as directed by Kevin Connor and starring Doug McClure as David Innes and Peter Cushing as Abner Perry. 

It fared badly among critics and audience reviewers alike at Rotten Tomatoes, garnering just thirty-three and thirty-four percent respectively. My favorite critic comment? This one by Stephen Randall of the Los Angeles Free Press: “It’s the type of movie you can send your kids to, but only if you don’t much like them.” Ouch. Really ouch. 

If you really must, and have nothing else at all else to watch, it is streaming on Prime. Yes, I did watch it with the Suck Fairy. Neither of us was at all happy we did. Ellen Kushner’s hot chocolate was needed. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) RINGO AWARDS TAKING NOMINATIONS. Public nominations for the Mike Wieringo Comic Book Industry Awards – the Ringo Awards – opened today and will through June 19.

The Mike Wieringo Comic Book Industry Awards is an annual celebration of the creativity, skill, and fun of comics. The awards return for their ninth year on Saturday, October 18, 2025 as part of the fan- and pro-favorite convention, the Baltimore Comic-Con.

Unlike other professional industry awards, the Ringo Awards include fan participation in the nomination process along with an esteemed jury of comics professionals. 

More than 20 categories will be celebrated with top honors being given at the awards ceremony in October.

Fan and pro-jury voting are tallied independently, and the combined nomination ballot is compiled by the Ringo Awards Committee. The top two fan choices become nominees, and the jury’s selections fill the remaining three slots for five total nominees per category. Ties may result in more than five nominees in a single category.

(11) WEIRD FANTASY BEGINS. “75 Years Ago, One of the Most Iconic Sci-Fi Comic Series Made Its Debut” – the anniversary is celebrated by CBR.com.

Who inspired the launch of Weird Fantasy?

As noted, Gaines was a very open-minded guy, and so Harry Harrison, who was working in an art partnership with Wallace Wood (Harrison would pencil the comics, and Wood would ink them, although sometimes the lines blurred between who was penciling and who was inking. The two had first met while both were studying with artist Burne Hogarth, but they didn’t start working together until Wood had already started working at EC on his own), approached Gaines about EC doing science fiction comics. He gave Gaines some science fiction books to read, and Gaines was quickly hooked, and so he approved the new series.

The series was edited by Al Feldstein, though, who was becoming Gaines’ top editor/creative partner at the company. Harrison had no control over the idea he inspired, so he and Wood would actually split up their partnership by the end of 1950, and Harrison would go off to become a popular science fiction author….

(12) ARTEMIS II PATCH ART. “NASA’s Artemis II astronauts reveal moon mission patch to honor ‘AII’” at CollectSPACE.

The next astronauts to fly to the moon now have a mission patch to represent their history-making journey.

NASA on Thursday (April 3) debuted the official Artemis II insignia, its first emblem for a moon-bound crew in more than 50 years. Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen will wear the patch when they launch on the Artemis II mission, currently targeted for no later than April 2026.

“This patch designates the mission as ‘AII,’ signifying not only the second major flight of the Artemis campaign, but also an endeavor of discovery that seeks to explore for all and by all,” wrote the crew in their description of the mission patch.

The emblem includes design elements that symbolize the past, present and future of human space exploration.

Borrowing the same outline as NASA’s Artemis program patch (as well as the shape of the “A” in “AII” and the red trajectory line forming the crossbar of the “A” and the path between Earth and the moon), the border frames an artistic depiction of “Earthrise.” The now-iconic image of our home planet hovering above the lunar horizon was captured by the Apollo 8 crew, the first humans to fly to the moon.

The Artemis II crew will not enter lunar orbit like Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders did in December 1968, but will share in seeing some of the same sights as they did while flying beyond the moon and then looping back to return to Earth….

(13) LOCH NESS CANDID CAMERA. “Scientists Recover Underwater Camera Designed to Snap Photos of Loch Ness Monster” reports Futurism.

In 1970, a cryptid-obsessed biologist placed several cameras inside plastic trap boxes and sent them down to the depths of Scotland’s Loch Ness in hopes of finally capturing compelling evidence of its storied monster — and now, it appears that one of those cameras has been recovered by sheer accident.

As USA Today and other outlets report, one of the cameras deployed by University of Chicago biologist Roy Mackal some 55 years ago was discovered during a test dive of an unmanned research submersible in the famed lake in the Scottish Highlands.

Specifically, the camera trap’s mooring system appeared to have gotten tangled up in the propellers for the submersible, which was named, much to the chagrin of the British government, “Boaty McBoatface” by the public in a viral poll in 2016…

… When researchers developed the Instamatic’s film, they unfortunately didn’t find any photos of Nessie, though they did recover some beautiful, eerie photos of the deep, dark lake…

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Daniel Dern, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel “Music Man” Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 3/22/25 Inside Of The Internet No One Can Prove You Aren’t A Robot Dog

Posted on by
38

(1) LEVAR BURTON FEATURED AS ALTADENA LIBRARY REOPENS. LAist is there as “Altadena Library reopens to the community for fun, games and a LeVar Burton reading”.

Today marks the grand reopening of the Altadena Library. The beloved community space was spared by the Eaton Fire, and after a short period of closure for fire-related clean up, it’s welcoming hundreds of Altadenans who gathered to celebrate its return.

“We wanted to have a really big carnival feel,” Altadena Library director Nikki Winslow said. “Free food, giveaways… also Clifford the Big Red Dog, so it should be a really fun event.”

The day’s main attraction is story time by education advocate and actor LeVar Burton….

… Thousands of Altadena residents lost their homes in the Eaton Fire, and many more were displaced. But today felt like the community getting back on its feet, says Jean Courtney, a long time resident whose home was destroyed….

…Burton, the Star Trek star turned children’s book author, said he was here today to keep the spotlight on the Altadena community as they begin to rebuild.

“Altadena traditionally is one of those communities where people who looked like me were welcomed and could purchase homes,” Burton said. “The American dream is alive and well in Altadena – today, tomorrow, and every day.”…

(2) ARIZONA CON CLOSED BY HEALTH AUTHORITIES. Wild West Con has been required to shut down in the middle of the weekend they announced on Facebook today. The steampunk-themed event being held in a Tucson, AZ casino opened on Thursday. It is reported the congers have been told to go but the other casino patrons have not.

Due to ongoing medical concerns, we regret to inform all interested that Wild Wild West Con has been shut down by Casino Del Sol.

Unfortunately, we do not have any further information to provide but will give updates as soon as they’re available.

There was an additional statement on Bluesky.

(3) SFWA ON META AI TRAINING. Yesterday SFWA President Kate Ristau sent members this comment after the Atlantic made it easy to search LibGen data to discover whether their work being used by Meta to train its AI.

Opening up the Atlantic article yesterday was a shock. So many of us scrolled down to search the Library Genesis data set for our own names. According to the article, Meta (Facebook) used millions of pirated works to train its AI. I found two of my works, and started searching for other SFWA members as well. 

That little blue box has been all over social media this morning. 

As the Atlantic notes, “millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.”

Personally, I did not give permission for my work to be used. Did you?

SFWA’s number one principle in regards to AI is that Creators must be compensated for the use of their work. If you were not compensated, what can you do?

We recommend you follow Author Guild’s list of actions, including protecting your work. There are other actions that may fit your personal circumstances as well. 

As an organization, SFWA will continue to fight for our principles. Writers must be paid, credited, and protected, following expected norms. 

We will follow up with more information as we investigate further and take next steps.

(4) SOCIETY OF AUTHORS REACTION. The UK’s Society of Authors has also issued a statement: “The LibGen data set – what authors can do”.

Yesterday (20 March 2025), The Atlantic published a searchable database of over 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. This data set, called Library Genesis or ‘LibGen’ for short, is full of pirated material, and all of it has been used to develop AI systems by tech giant Meta.

The Atlantic says that court documents show that staff at Meta discussed licensing books and research papers lawfully but instead chose to use stolen work because it was faster and cheaper. Given that Meta Platforms, Inc, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has a market capitalisation of £1.147 trillion, this is appalling behaviour.

According to The Atlantic, Meta argued that it could then use the US’s ‘fair use exception’ defence if it was challenged legally.

It is not yet clear whether scraping from copyright works without permission is unlawful under the US fair use exception to copyright, but if that scraping is for commercial purposes (which what Meta is doing surely is) it cannot be fair use. Under the UK fair dealing exception to copyright, there is no question that scraping is unlawful without permission.

As a matter of urgency, Meta needs to compensate the rightsholders of all the works it has been exploiting.

This is yet more evidence of the catastrophic impact generative AI is having on our creative industries worldwide. From development through to output, creators’ rights are being ignored, and governments need to intervene to protects authors’ rights…

(5) PEN AMERICA LONGLISTS. PEN America has announced the 2025 PEN America Literary Awards Longlists. The complete list is at the link. There do not appear to be any works of genre interest in the lists. The books up for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award are —

The PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award celebrates writing that exemplifies literary excellence on the subject of the physical or biological sciences and communicates complex scientific concepts to a lay audience. The winner receives a cash award of $10,000.

  • The Burning Earth: A History, Sunil Amrith (W. W. Norton & Company)
  • Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World, Kelly Clancy (Riverhead Books)
    All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today, Elizabeth Comen (Harper)
  • Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (Princeton University Press)
  • The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors, Erika Howsare (Catapult)
  • The Big Freeze: A Reporter’s Personal Journey into the World of Egg Freezing and the Quest to Control Our Fertility, Natalie Lampert (Ballantine)
  • Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life, Jason Roberts (Random House)
  • The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives, Ernest Scheyder (Atria)
  • Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean, Matt Strassler (Basic Books)
  • The Living Medicine: How a Lifesaving Cure Was Nearly Lost—and Why It Will Rescue Us When Antibiotics Fail, Lina Zeldovich (St. Martin’s Press)

(6) WE LIE HERE, OBEDIENT TO THEIR WORDS. “Nasa drops plan to land first woman and first person of color on the moon” reports the Guardian.

Nasa has dropped its longstanding public commitment to land the first woman and person of color on the moon, in response to Donald Trump’s directives to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices at federal agencies.

The promise was a central plank of the space agency’s Artemis program, which is scheduled to return humans to the lunar surface in 2027 for the first time since the final Apollo mission in December 1972.

The Artemis landing page of Nasa’s website previously included the words: “Nasa will land the first woman, first person of color, and first international partner astronaut on the Moon using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before.”

The version of the page live on the website on Friday, however, appears with the phrase removed…

(7) TAPE DELAY. “US blocks Canadian access to cross-border library, sparking outcry”. The Guardian has the story.

The US has blocked Canadian access to a library straddling the Canada-US border, drawing criticism from a Quebec town where people have long enjoyed easy entry to the space.

The Haskell Free Library and Opera House is located between Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont. It was built deliberately to straddle the frontier between the two countries – a symbol of cooperation and friendship between Canada and the US.

The library’s entrance is on the Vermont side. Previously, Canadian visitors were able to enter using the sidewalk and entrance on the American side but were encouraged to bring documentation, according to the library’s website.

Inside, a line of electrical tape demarcates the international boundary. About 60% of the building, including the books, is located in Canada. Upstairs, in the opera house, the audience sits in the US while the performers are in Canada.

Under the new rules, Canadians will need to go through a formal border crossing before entering the library.

“This closure not only compromises Canadian visitors’ access to a historic symbol of cooperation and harmony between the two countries but also weakens the spirit of cross-border collaboration that defines this iconic location,” the town of Stanstead said in a press release on Thursday…

(8) MORE US TRAVEL CAUTIONS. The Guardian reports “Denmark and Finland urge caution for US-bound transgender people”.

Denmark and Finland have updated their US travel advice for transgender people, joining the handful of European countries that have sought to caution US-bound travellers in recent weeks as reports emerge of ordeals at the American border.

Denmark said this week it had begun advising transgender travellers to contact the US embassy in Copenhagen before departure to ensure there would be no issues with travel documents.

The change came after Donald Trump made a priority of rolling back trans and non-binary rights, announcing that the US would only recognise two genders and signing off on executive orders that sought to exclude transgender people from the US military, limit their access to sport and curtail gender-transition procedures for people under the age of 19….

(9) PETER MABEY (1926-2025). [Via Alison Scott.] British fan Peter Mabey, winner of the first Doc Weir Award, died February 19.

The Doc Weir Award history site says of him:

Peter was one of the first members of the Cheltenham Circle and the BSFA, acting as Librarian of the BSFA lending library when the collection was also held at Cheltenham; he later served as a BSFA committee member after the organisation’s incorporation.

He was one of the founders of the Order of St. Fantony and was presented, in his absence, with the first Doc Weir Award at the 1963 Eastercon (Bullcon). Peter was a member of the organising committee for the 1965 Worldcon (Loncon II) and was responsible for its publications.

He continued to attend conventions well into his 90s.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

March 22, 1931 — William Shatner, 94.

By Paul Weimer: The face that launched a hundred soap operas. 

I find it interesting that like B5 would find out thirty years later, Star Trek’s first shot at a crew and a leading man, Jeffrey Hunter, wasn’t quite what a viewing public particularly wanted in a leading man of a space opera SF series. Poor Michael O’Hare and Jeffrey Hunter both weren’t quite right to be the full-on leading actors for such a series. 

But like Bruce Boxleitner three decades later, William Shatner proved to be.  I mean, sure, lots of Spock fans out there, McCoy fans, and other characters. And the whole “trio” of Kirk-Spock-McCoy has been documented to enormous detail. But it is William Shatner’s complex Captain Kirk, who was more cerebral and outwitting of his opponents than you remember, more nuanced, more interesting than the flanderized stereotype that has been parodied to the moon and back ever made him out to be. Sure, his diction and acting were, charitably melodramatic, but that is a feature, not a bug that got him through the series, and seven movies. 

Outside of genre space, he did shows like T J Hooker, and Rescue 911, and Boston Legal (although the fourth wall breaking Boston Legal might actually BE a genre show. I leave the comments to decide that). He’s done music (oddly, that doesn’t make him unique among the TOS crew). He was the voice of Priceline.com in its early days on the Internet. He co-wrote the TekWar novels. He breeds horses. (Wonder why he is horse riding in Star Trek Generations? Now you know.) 

You might think that “Nightmare at 30,000 feet” might be my favorite non-Star-Trek genre performance Shatner has done. And you would be almost right. It is a classic in paranoia, perception, fear, and it does show that his acting style does have range, and ability and even with his unusual cadence, it can work in a situation like this. The episode itself is a masterpiece and Shatner’s performance is a big part of that.

But I like “Nick of Time” a bit more. It’s a more hopeful and positive story, as we see Shatner as part of a married couple who wind up briefly in thrall to a fortune telling machine that seems to tell the future — but really just makes people dependent on its easy, cryptic answers. The utter triumph of the episode as Shatner and his wife break free of their dependency is enough to make you cheer…until you see the coda, and see a couple who have not been so fortunate, or possessing as much fortitude as Shatner’s Don S. Carter and Patricia Breslin’s Pat Carter finally manage to show.

And Shatner has been to space.

Get a life? William Shatner, in and out of Star Trek, certainly has.

William Shatner

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Loose Parts proves it depends on which wolf you feed.
  • Nancy unintentionally contributes to an essay.
  • Off the Mark has a sensitive palate.
  • Strange Brew asks for the origin story.
  • Tom Gauld flips the script.

My cartoon for this week’s @theguardian.com books

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-03-22T11:06:11.676Z

(12) WHERE’S THE BEEF? NASA remembers the “Fallout from the Unauthorized Gemini III Space Sandwich”.

“I hid a sandwich in my spacesuit,” Astronaut John W. Young confessed in the April 2, 1965, issue of Life Magazine. The conversation about and the consumption of the sandwich, which lasted only about 30 seconds during the Gemini III flight, became a serious matter that drew the ire of Congress and NASA’s administrator after the crew returned home. Congress was particularly upset and brought the matter to leadership’s attention at hearings about NASA’s 1966 budget. Representative George E. Shipley was especially disgusted, knowing how much money and time NASA had spent to prepare the Gemini III spacecraft for launch. The fact that a crewmember brought something into the crew cabin, which Shipley likened to a “surgeon’s operating room,” put the techniques used to prevent a spaceflight mission from failing at risk; crumbs could have made their way behind instrument panels interfering with the operation of flight equipment and the loss of the mission and its crew. Shipley called Young’s antics “foolish” and asked NASA leaders to share their thoughts….

…Young never received a formal reprimand for the incident but was made aware of Congress’s frustration. Others in the corps were advised to avoid similar stunts and to focus on the mission. The decision to bring a sandwich onboard did not have a negative impact on Young’s career. He was the first astronaut to fly to space six times —two Gemini missions; two Apollo missions, including the dress rehearsal for the first lunar landing; and two space shuttle missions including STS-1, known as the bravest test flight in history. He also served as chief of the Astronaut Office for 13 years.

(13) SIDE EFFECTS OF ANTI-AGING REGIME. Futurism reports “Anti-Aging CEO’s Test Subjects Reportedly Suffered Unpleasant Side Effects”.

An alarming new investigation by the New York Times accuses youth-obsessed tech mogul Bryan Johnson of covering up some unpleasant side effects experienced by participants testing his line of supplements.

Johnson — who was an early investor in Futurism, but hasn’t had any involvement for years — has gone to extreme lengths to slow down or even “reverse” his “biological age” through a series of sometimes extreme self-experiments, like using his teenage son as a “blood boy” and measuring his nighttime erections.

He’s parlayed that hype into a line of supplements and meals called “The Blueprint Stack,” bolstered by what the company says were promising study results.

But the NYT‘s reporting makes that study sound very dubious. Out of the roughly 1,700 participants, a whopping 60 percent experienced at least one side effect, according to documents viewed by the newspaper. Blood tests showed that some participants saw their testosterone levels drop or developed prediabetes.

The food regimen also reportedly had undesirable side effects.

“Longevity mix: A lot of comments about hating this as it is making them sick, vomit, have heartburn, etc.,” one Blueprint employee told a colleague in early 2024, as quoted by the newspaper.

“TONS of people saying it’s causing nausea, bloating,” another employee wrote, referring to allulose, a sugar alternative that Johnson has previously sung the praises of.

Thanks to a litany of confidentiality agreements employees reportedly had to sign, many felt afraid to speak up.

(14) PITCH MEETING. Ryan George takes us inside “The Electric State Pitch Meeting” – whether we want to be there or not!

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Walk, Run, Crawl, RL Fun” from Boston Dynamics.

In this video, Atlas is demonstrating policies developed using reinforcement learning with references from human motion capture and animation. This work was done as part of a research partnership between Boston Dynamics and the Robotics and AI Institute (RAI Institute).

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Jeffrey Smith, Cora Buhlert, Paul Weimer, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 12/6/24 Can We Borrow A Cup Of Pixels

Posted on by
18

(1) DIAGRAM PRIZE. The Bookseller today announced the Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year went to The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire in the closest race of the past quarter century.

The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire earned 27% of the public vote, just ahead of How to Dungeon Master Parenting, which itself was a hair in front of Looking through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement. With just five percentage points separating the top three, it is the closest Diagram race since the selection of the winner for the 46-year-old prize went to an online public vote 25 years ago….

(2) PIRACY? DON’T BE RUDE. 404 Media spoke to someone behind “The Unauthorized Effort to Archive Netflix’s Disappeared Interactive Shows”.

Last month, Matt Lyzell, the creator of the Netflix interactive series Battle Kitty announced on his personal Instagram account that Netflix was going to remove his show from the streaming service just two years after its debut. By the end of the day, Netflix confirmed that not only Battle Kitty was being removed, but that all 24 Netflix interactive series were to be removed on December 1, with the exception of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. the Reverend, Ranveer vs. Wild with Bear Grylls, and You vs. Wild.

“The technology served its purpose, but is now limiting as we focus on technological efforts in other areas,” a Netflix spokesperson told 404 Media at the time. 

It is normal for Netflix and other streaming services to rotate titles in and out of their catalogue depending on what they cost to license and host and how many subscriptions they drive to the platform, but Netflix removing its interactive series means that, as original Netflix creations, once they are removed from Netflix they will not be available anywhere else, and they are a new and unique format that dozens of producers, animators, voice actors, and other creatives have finished work on very recently. 

Unwilling to accept Netflix’s decision to make all these interactive shows totally inaccessible, a group of fans—and, in a few cases, people who worked on the interactive shows—are finding ways to archive and make them available for free. 

“I couldn’t let this work go to waste. We’re talking about over 100 hours of video and ~ one thousand hours of dubbing,” Pixel, one of the archivists in a Discord channel archiving Netflix interactive shows, told me.

On Discord, dozens of users have collaborated on capturing all the videos from Netflix before they were removed, as well as reverse engineering how the platform handled their interactive elements. Some shows are already fully emulated and can be streamed in bespoke, alternative players, others are uploaded to YouTube in a series of daisy-chained, interlinked videos that recreate a very similar interactive experience, while some others have been uploaded as non-interactive videos. 

404 Media agreed not to name the Discord channel and some of the places where the Netflix interactive archives are being hosted so Pixel could talk about the archiving effort. While Netflix has made it so there is no way to view Netflix interactive shows without basically pirating them, the archivists worry that the company will still try to take down any alternative method for viewing them.    

“While I can’t disclose fully how we are archiving these, I can say that they pull directly from Netflix’s servers, so no re-encoding or loss of quality,” Pixel said. “I would love to talk more about how it works, but it risks Netflix patching out the tool entirely.”

Netflix interactives, in case you are unfamiliar, are choose-your-own-adventure videos where the viewer can make choices at the end of a scene that determine how the story unfolds….

(3) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 124 of the Octothorpe podcast, “The Third D Isn’t What You Think”, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty –

…Discuss your comments and also go into detail on upcoming conventions in the UK and worldwide, before talking about some Hugo-eligible things. (They’re games. Sorry, Mark.)

And there’s an uncorrected transcript at the link.

The Glasgow 2024 logo drawn in pencils and crayon, but across the middle there is a segmented creature with eight eyes and mandibles. At the top, the words “Octothorpe 124” appear in blue.

(4) TALKING ABOUT GALAXY QUEST. [Item by N.] For RedLetterMedia, noted Star Trek superfan Mike Stoklasa and noted Star Trek actor Jack Quaid look back on and dissect the 1999 Hugo-winning cult classic: “Galaxy Quest Review”.

Mike and Jack sit down to talk about the cult classic film “Galaxy Quest” starring Tim Allen and many others. A film that has gained popularity over the years and days since it was released. Mike and Jack come at this film with different perspectives, while both appreciating it as the wonderful magical fun adventure film it is with fantastic visual FX and monsters, Jack sees the film as the memorable movie he grew up with and helped to mold his love for cinema and acting. Mike (being 37 years older than Jack) sees the film as a magical what-could-have-been kind of thing. He smells the studio meddling like a wet fart from afar. The potential for a PG-13 or R rated dry, vulgar comedy was there, but watered down by a spineless studio that wanted to G-rated Tim Allen comedy. Would it have flopped as a more adult film? Would it have been better if they went full kids tale? Don’t ya know no one will ever know! It’s a slippery pig that’s been oiled up with K-Y jelly. Mike tries to grab a hold of that piggy to see what it done be. Jack is happy with what the movie is. Mike can’t see the forest through the trees. He loves all the moments in the film. So many good moments and character choices and fun gags. But at what cost? Who done they make this movie for?

(5) OLD PEOPLE WATCH OLD SF. (Hey, this title was Mark’s own suggestion!) at Mark Roth-Whitworth’s blog, he asks people to “Just for fun, compare and contrast”.

Back in the mid-eighties, two films came out about three years apart. One was a box office wonder, and the other was a bomb.

Unfortunately, the Hollywood smash, War Games, was written by Hollywood writers without a clue. Manhattan Project, on the other hand, was dead on… but wasn’t set in California, and the plot didn’t have an utterly unrealistic storyline….

(6) PLONK YOUR COSMIC TWANGER. [Item by Steven French.] If anyone fancies some acoustic gothic blues inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, well, here’s your jam: “’The Lighthouse’ by Half Deaf Clatch” at Bandcamp.

‘The Lighthouse’ is a musical work of fiction, inspired by the writing of H.P Lovecraft. A Gothic, Acoustic type thing, played on a nylon strung folk guitar with some percussion, vocals and other bits and pieces thrown in for good measure.

(7) TONY MEADOWS (1948-2024). [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I have only just found out. Tony was part of the NW England fandom and interacted with MaD SF (Manchester & District – not to be confused with BaD SF – Bolton down devil’s highway A666). He lived in northwest England all his life, though did once make it to the US and visit his friend, one Forrest J Ackerman.

Picture of him as he should be remembered, in the dark screening fantastic films.

Tony was a stalwart of the Festival of Fantastic Films which he helped found (with the legendary Harry Nadler also now sadly gone) and up to late 2000s ran a programme stream screening celluloid films (the only way to see a film with the whirrr of a projector going…). He had a huge film collection.  Also, back in the day when Eastercons weren’t wall-to-wall fan panels and actually had pros giving talks and a film programme (remember them?), Tony would contribute.

Part of the hippy generation of Brit fandom. Another sad loss.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary: December 6, 1979 — Star Trek: The Motion Picture

By Paul Weimer: Star Trek: The Motion Picture was, as it so happened, the fourth Star Trek movie I saw. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (and when the time comes, I will tell that story) came first, followed by Star Trek IV, Wrath of Khan and finally Star Trek: The Motion Picture. 

I had the disadvantage of having read and learned about the movie before I ever saw it, and it colored my perception of it, and to a real sense, colors it today. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was described to me as a movie with a painfully glacial pace, a movie that takes forever to get to its point, a movie that really is just a two-hour version of a one-hour television show. It was with all of this baggage that I saw the movie, on VHS. 

I found all of this true, and yet not true. Yes, the movie has pacing issues. Yes, there really is just a one-hour plot in a two-hour movie. Yes, there are some extremely weird choices (why are Klingon warships firing Federation photon torpedoes?  Star Fleet Battles had to have a whole supplement to explain that). I still don’t get Ilia as a character but I do kind of like having Decker tell Kirk that he has to be the one who merges with V’Ger, not him. Kirk was once again be ready to be a ballhog…but gets shut down. It does nicely set us up for the Admiral Kirk in Star Trek II, I think. 

And the movie is gorgeous. It gave us an idea of what Star Trek could look like if it had a real budget. It gave us sense of wonder and allowed the imagination of taking cardboard sets from the 1960’s and making them substantial, and realer for it. And without Star Trek: The Motion Picture, there would be no Wrath of Khan, or probably any further TV series. So for all of its issues and problems, Star Trek: The Motion Picture made modern Star Trek possible… and kept Star Trek from just being something you watched on New Year’s Eve like Twilight Zone reruns and see at small conventions.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Baldo reports on a new scam.
  • Birdbrains doesn’t realize how easy it is to be overlooked.
  • Bizarro gets stuck with this joke.
  • Dinosaur Comics gives arts career counseling.
  • Ink Pen has a crossover.
  • Zits follows a Science article (check the days before and after as well)

(10) STRACZYNSKI DOING CAPTAIN AMERICA & COLLEAGUES. “Patton Oswalt on J. Michael Straczynski’s Return to Spider-Man” at Bleeding Cool. Oswalt doesn’t have that much to say, the post is mostly sample interiors from the comic – which are pretty entertaining.

J. Michael Straczynski is coming to the end of his run on Captain America, and he has used that fact to bring in a couple of other characters he is best known for writing at Marvel; Thor and Spider-Man. He is taking advantage of that fact to remind readers of what he used to be best known for at Marvel Comics back in the day, drawn by stellar Marvel artist Jesus Saiz….

(11) BIG HAMMER! [Item by Steven French.] You not only have to be worthy to lift this, but pretty tall as well! (Spotted outside the exhibition ‘Movie Icons: Hollywood Props’  in Turin, Italy).

(12) I RECOGNIZE THIS ONE. “How do you save a dying mobile game? Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp has the answer” says the Guardian. My daughter used to play this game!

At some point, most mobile games die. Apple’s iOS software updates have killed thousands of App Store games over the years: older games simply disappear, unless their developers make them compatible with every new device or software. (Most don’t, or can’t, devote such resources to that.) And for live mobile games, which encourage users to log in every day, the game’s popularity inevitably wanes and its developer stops updating it, leaving it inert and unplayable. Sometimes there is no warning. A game is there one day and gone the next. A bleak fate indeed.

The mortality rate for mobile games is high: 83% of them fail within their first three years, according to one survey. But perhaps there’s another way. In 2017, Nintendo released a mobile version of its bestselling chill life-simulation game Animal Crossing. Named Pocket Camp, it ran for seven years before Nintendo ended support for it last month. But instead of letting the game die, the company has released a complete version for £8.99, packaging up years of content and letting players either transfer their data and keep their memories, or start fresh. The game lives on.’

(13) SURF’S UP! A tsunami warning followed a 7.0 earthquake in Northern California the other day. Not everyone got excited for the same reason.

(14) CHINESE SPACEPLANE?  “Mysterious Object Appears At Remote Chinese Airfield Linked To Spaceplane Program” is TWZ’s analysis.

Recent satellite imagery shows a curious white-colored object at the end of the runway at a remote airstrip in northwestern China. The airfield, which is situated near the Lop Nur nuclear test site, has been tied to Chinese reusable space plane developments in the past.

A satellite image taken on Nov. 29 that The War Zone obtained from Planet Labs shows the white-colored object, along with several smaller ones, that look to be vehicles and support equipment, at the southwestern end of the desert airstrip’s runway. The runway itself is more than 16,400 feet in total length, or more than 3 miles long, which makes it one of the longest anywhere in the world. A row of vehicles is also visible at the facility’s main apron, which has been significantly expanded in recent years, including with the addition of a new large hangar.

What the larger object on the runway might be, or even its exact shape, is unclear. Though it looks broadly cylindrical from above, its body is also seen casting a distinctly wedge-shaped shadow. Some obscuration of markings on the runway may point to the presence of short stubby wings at one end. It has an overall length of around 32 feet.

As already noted, the remote Chinese airfield and its extremely long runway have previously been linked to work on reusable spaceplanes with potential military applications, including ones believed to be roughly akin in form and function to the X-37B. The War Zone‘s first report on this facility came after it appeared that one of these crafts touched down there following the end of a mission in space in September 2020. The recently observed object is comparable length-wise to the U.S. Space Force’s two secretive X-37B mini-shuttles (just over 29 feet long), though that alone does not mean there is a relationship between the two….

(15) NOT MUCH TO ‘EM. “James Webb Space Telescope discovers 4th exoplanet in sweet triple ‘super puff’ star system” – Space.com has the story.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered a fourth world in a strange system of ultralight “super puff” planets.

The new extrasolar planet or “exoplanet” was discovered around the sun-like star Kepler-51, located around 2,615 light-years away in the constellation of Cygnus (the Swan).Remarkably, the new world, designated Kepler-51e, isn’t just the fourth exoplanet found orbiting this star; all these other worlds are cotton-candy-like planets. That means this could be a whole system of some of the lightest planets ever discovered.

“Super puff planets are very unusual in that they have very low mass and low density,” team member Jessica Libby-Roberts of Penn State’s Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds said in a statement. “The three previously known planets that orbit the star, Kepler-51, are about the size of Saturn but only a few times the mass of Earth, resulting in a density like cotton candy.”

Libby-Roberts added that the team theorizes that these cotton-candy planets have tiny cores and huge, puffy atmospheres of hydrogen or helium….

(16) SECOND ARTEMIS MISSION DELAYED. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Am amazed at what you Yanks do without Cavorite: “Artemis: Nasa delays mission to send astronauts around Moon” reports BBC.

US space agency Nasa has announced a further delay to its plans to send astronauts back to the Moon.

The agency’s chief, Bill Nelson, said the second mission in the Artemis programme was now due for launch in April 2026.

The plan had been to send astronauts around the Moon but not land in September 2025. The date had already slipped once before, from November of this year.

That will mean that a Moon landing will not take place until at least 2027, a year later than originally planned.

The delay is needed to fix an issue with the capsule’s heat shield, which returned from the previous test flight excessively charred and eroded, with cracks and some fragments broken off.

Mr Nelson told a news conference that “the safety of our astronauts is our North Star”.

“We do not fly until we are ready. We need to do the next test flight, and we need to do it right. And that’s how the Artemis programme proceeds.”

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Disney+ has posted the Doctor Who Christmas 2024 trailer.

The Doctor brings Joy to the world(s)! The eagerly awaited Doctor Who Christmas Special, “Joy to the World,” premieres December 25. When Joy checks into a London hotel in 2024, she opens a secret doorway to the Time Hotel — discovering danger, dinosaurs, and the Doctor. But a deadly plan is unfolding across the Earth, just in time for Christmas. The Doctor Who Christmas special beings streaming December 25 on Disney+.

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

Pixel Scroll 9/14/24 Scrollchak, The Night Pixel

Posted on by
14

(1) RING TIME. Robin Anne Reid’s newsletter Writing from Ithilien offers a collection of links to interesting discussions of the Rings of Power series in“The Vibes Around ‘Tolkien’”.

I love reading what fans who love the show have to say about it, and I’m having great fun reading those posts (including the ones I’ve linked to above!). Let’s just say I enjoy all the varied vibes around a text that is now part of the greater global “Tolkien” phenomenon, i.e. connected to all the things, even if I don’t much like that particular instance!

(2) BALANCED IN THE SCALES AND FOUND WANTING. Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter does a roundup of all the complaints about the two epic series adapting George R.R. Martin and Tolkien in “’House of the Dragon’ and ‘Rings of Power’ Facing Epic Headaches”. (Got to love the article’s illustration of a sword-wielding GRRM on a flying dragon.)

… As for Rings [of Power]s’ ratings, third-party services show a steep drop from the series’ debut season. The spin from Amazon goes like this: Of course the ratings are down, they were so huge last time. There is something to this. Even Prime Video hits like Fallout and The Boys haven’t matched Rings’ season one on a global basis (Fallout did top the show in the U.S.). Amazon says the new season is doing well internationally and is on track to be a Top 5 season for Prime Video….

…Then there is Dragon, whose problems are more interesting. The second season incensed some fans after spending eight episodes leading to a massive cliffhanger — a climactic battle sequence that was pushed from a shortened season two to season three, apparently for budget reasons (which has led to more “David Zaslav ruins everything” chatter online). In the ratings, the season dipped about 10 percent from the show’s first season, but the numbers do remain high. 

Two weeks ago, saga author (and Dragon co-creator and executive producer) George R.R. Martin, who has been complimentary about Dragon in the past, posted on his blog that he was going to reveal “everything that’s gone wrong” with the show. Smart money could have been wagered on this never happening — surely HBO would do everything in its power to persuade Martin not to post.

But last week, Martin did, and the result was fascinating…

(3) SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE 2024 LONGLIST. The Scotiabank Giller Prize 2024 longlist was released September 4. The Prize is a celebration of Canadian literary talent. The 12 titles were chosen from 145 books submitted by publishers across Canada. There is one longlisted work of genre interest:

  • Anne Michaels for her novel Held, published by McClelland & Stewart

The other longlisted works are:

(4) OCTOTHORPE. In Episode 118 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Och Aye, Sci-Fi”, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty continue their discussion of the Worldcon. (There’s a rough-and-ready transcript here.)

We round off most of our discussion of the Glasgow Worldcon, including talking about Halls 4 and 5, communications, Worldcon structures, and publications. Thanks to Sara Felix, this week, for providing our lovely artwork.

Three pins of armadillos flying colourful spaceships are on top of a piece of paper with blobs of glue that look like planets. The lettering “Octothorpe 118” appears above in a similar style to the pins.

(5) JOURNEY PLANET. Journey Planet 84 “Workers’ Rights In SFF” is available at this link. File 770 promoted the zine with this post.

Contributor Joachim Boaz has cross-posted his article from the issue about Clifford D. Simak at Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations: “Exploration Log 5: ‘We Must Start Over Again and Find Some Other Way of Life’: The Role of Organized Labor in the 1940s and ’50s Science Fiction of Clifford D. Simak”.

My article on organized labor in the 1940s and ’50s science fiction of Clifford D. Simak went live! I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’ve spent the last half year researching and reading religiously for this project–from topics such as Minnesota’s unique brand of radical politics to the work of contemporary intellectuals like C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) whom Simak most likely read.

(6) SUPREME GENRE READER. The New York Times learns “Ketanji Brown Jackson Looks Forward to Reading Fiction Again”. (Paywalled.) “The Supreme Court justice has been drawn to American history and books about the ‘challenges and triumphs’ of raising a neurodiverse child. She shares that and more in a memoir, ‘Lovely One.’”

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which books and authors stick with you most?

Pretty voracious. My favorite childhood books were Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time” series. I really identified with Meg. I also liked Judy Blume’s “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” And I went through a Nancy Drew phase.

Which genres do you … avoid?

 I don’t think I’ve indulged in reading fiction in many years. I hope to get back to doing so, now that our daughters are grown, but I would avoid anything that would qualify as a horror story. I don’t like to be frightened.

Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?

I am gearing up to read “Parable of the Sower,” by Octavia Butler, soon. I have it both in paper and as an audiobook, which helps.

(7) TUTTLE REVIEWS. Lisa Tuttle’s latest sff review column for the Guardian takes up The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera; Withered Hill by David Barnett; Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud; The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei; and The Specimens by Hana Gammon. “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup”.

(8) BOB WEATHERWAX (1941-2024). [Item by Andrew Porter.] The New York Times reports a star dog trainer died August 15.

Bob Weatherwax, a Hollywood dog trainer who carried on his father’s legacy of breeding and coaching collies to play Lassie, the resourceful and heroic canine who crossed flooded rivers, faced down bears and leaped into the hearts of countless children, died on Aug. 15 in Scranton, Pa. He was 83.

One of his uncles trained Toto for “The Wizard of Oz” (1939). 

Mr. Weatherwax also trained other dogs seen in Hollywood films, including Einstein, the Catalan sheepdog in “Back to the Future.”

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born September 14, 1936 — Walter Koenig, 88. Walter Koenig’s our Birthday Honoree this Scroll. He really has had but two major roles, though he has also appeared in a number of other roles. 

The first was as the Russian born Enterprise navigator Pavel Chekov on the original Trek franchise. He went on to reprise this role in all six original-cast Trek films, and later voiced President Anton Chekov in Picard. 

I like the Chekov character even if on viewing the series decades later I cringed on the quite obvious stereotype.

A much better character was played by him in the form of Alfred Bester (named in homage of that author and a certain novel) on Babylon 5. He wasn’t at all a sympathetic character and eventually was wanted for war crimes but was still a fascinating character. His origin story is established in J. Gregory Keyes’ Psi Corps trilogy written after the series was cancelled and is considered canon. 

He showed up in The Questor Tapes as an administrative assistant, Oro, for two episodes of Starlost.

Moontrap, a SF film with him and Bruce Campbell, would garner a twenty-eight percent rating at Rotten Tomatoes. 

Alienable, a sort of comic SF horror film which he executive produced, financed, wrote and acts in has no rating there. 

He’s Fireman Frank in Unbelievable!!!!! which apparently parodies Trek. The film has over forty cast members from the various Trek series. The film follows the omicron adventures however unintentional of four astronauts including one of who is a marionette. I cringed when I watched the trailer. I really did.  Anyone see it? 

Not surprisingly he acts in one of those Trek fanfics, Star Trek: New Voyage as his original character.

Finally he appears via the wonder of digital technology in the Hugo-nominated “Trials and Tribble-ations”. 

Walter Koenig

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Brewster Rockit should have declined the invitation.
  • Cornered illustrates do it yourself versus premade.
  • Carpe Diem wants to drop a subject.
  • Tom Gauld does his own version of a popular meme.

(11) NO SAVING THROW. All 25 quit: “Annapurna Interactive Entire Staff Resigns” reports Variety.

The staff of Annapurna Interactive, the games division of Megan Ellison‘s Annapurna, has resigned en masse after a deal to spin off the group fell through, Bloomberg reports.

Founded in 2016, Annapurna Interactive has partnered with boutique game studios for several critically acclaimed titles, including “Stray” (pictured above), described as a “third-person cat adventure game set amidst the detailed, neon-lit alleys of a decaying cybercity,” as well as “What Remains of Edith Finch,” “Outer Wilds” and “Neon White.”

The staff exodus came after a breakdown in talks between Ellison and Nathan Gary, formerly president of Annapurna Interactive, to spin the gaming unit off as a separate company. “All 25 members of the Annapurna Interactive team collectively resigned,” Gary and the other employees said in a joint statement Thursday to Bloomberg. “This was one of the hardest decisions we have ever had to make and we did not take this action lightly.”

(12) STREET ART. James Bacon told File 770 readers today about “Dublin Street Art”.

Chris Barkley says his hometown deserves a look, too: “Cincinnati Wins A Top Spot For The City’s Street Art And Murals” at Islands.

…And, to those that know the Queen City, it’s no surprise that Cincinnati took the street art crown in 2024’s USA Today and 10Best Readers’ Choice Awards. The annual competition, which counts down top tens around the country, uses a panel of experts to determine ten nominees with street art chops. Then, they leave voting to readers to decide the winners. This year, Cincinnati, which has been among the nominees going back to 2021, finally took the top spot, thanks to the more than 300 stunning murals dotting the city’s neighborhood streets….

There’s a more extensive photo gallery at ArtWorks Cincinnati.

(13) BLOCH SCRIPT ON EBAY. The Dave Hester Store of Storage Wars fame would be happy to sell you a screenplay from Robert Bloch’s estate, part of his personal archives: “1961 ‘The Merry-Go-Around’ By Robert Bloch”, based on Ray Bradbury’s “The Black Ferris”. Haven’t been able to determine whether it was produced. Taking bids, starting at $99.

(14) PRACTICING FOR ARTEMIS. NPR learned “How the crew of NASA’s Artemis II prepares for a mission to the moon”. It’s an audio report.

This time next year, NASA plans to send its first crewed mission to the moon. NPR’s Scott Detrow meets the crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission, to see how the team is preparing.

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]

Pixel Scroll 8/6/24 The Problem Of Scroll 13

Posted on by
27

(1) S.O.S. FOR TARAL’S COLLECTIONS.  Steven Baldassarra announced on Facebook  that the late Taral Wayne’s apartment needs to be emptied of his collections and stuff, and his sister has offered them to friends.

I am posting this message out on behalf of Christine Miller, Taral Wayne‘s sister. Please spread this message out to those who knew Taral:

“If anyone is interested in his art, toys or fanzines, please reach out to me, Christine Miller. I have to get his treasures out of the building asap.

“When I last spoke to Taral about funeral arrangements (although he was convinced he would live forever), he wasn’t interested in one. His remains are being cremated and then he will be buried with our mother in North York. At the moment, I’m just trying to get his treasures out of his apartment and don’t have the band width to think much past that.”

Taral Wayne (1951-2024) died July 31.

(2) FINALIST VANISHES FROM DRAGON AWARDS BALLOT. For one brief and shining moment Cedar Sanderson’s cover for Goblin Market was a 2024 Dragon Awards finalist in the Best Illustrative Book Cover. Then it suddenly wasn’t. Sanderson appeared on the originally released version of the ballot, but hours later she was missing. No explanation has been given, and her publisher demands to know why.

Jonna Hayden, Production Manager for Raconteur Press, sent this email to the Rac Press substack/newsletter subscribers this evening: “Concerning the Dragon Awards”:

In an effort towards transparency, we have sent the following letter to the Dragon Awards team, via Dragon Con:

“I am the Production Manager for Raconteur Press, and our Lead Designer is Cedar Sanderson. Cedar was nominated for a Dragon Award for her work on our book “Goblin Market” and achieved a place on the final ballot in the category “Best Illustrative Cover” for 2024. Or so we thought. Several hours after the final ballot was announced (and we proudly shared the information) Cedar’s name was removed.

“We were surprised by this removal–there has been no explanation, no replacement name added to the list, and no comment of any kind from the Dragon Awards as to the reason behind it. Cedar has not been contacted, and multiple emails from many, many fans have gone unanswered.

“In their frustration, her fans have been emailing, messaging, and calling us, to see if we have any communication or information as to the ‘why’ of this. We are, unfortunately, equally in the dark. We’ve been referring them to the contact form on the Awards page, but no information has been forthcoming. The lack of any comment on the Dragon Awards’ part is now beginning to lead to speculation as to the integrity of the awards as a whole. In light of the recent Hugo issues at the China Worldcon, I would think your organization would be striving to maintain the utmost transparency.

“Is there any plan whatsoever to address this? Will there be a statement of any kind as to the reasons? I would like to return to my regular job of publishing great short fiction, and not be fielding the frustrated and angry messages of fans who nominated her in good faith.

“I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation, and sharing it will help.

“Please let us know what the the plan for this is going forward.

“Thank you.”

If you haven’t had your fill of speculation, see the comments here.

(3) THERE IS A SEASON, TURN, TURN, TURN ON THE TV. Abigail Nussbaum says, “In its second season, the already-excellent Interview With the Vampire became one of the best and most entertaining shows on TV. My review in Strange Horizons discusses how the show both honors and subverts its source material.” “Interview With the Vampire Season 2”.

Published in 1976, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire has a fair claim to being one of the most influential novels of the late twentieth century. Wildly successful in its own right—spawning some dozen sequels, several related series of novels, and a myriad film and TV adaptations—it all but singlehandedly reshaped the popular perception of the vampire. Rice’s vampires are brooding, tormented beings, haunted both by the need to kill and the crushing loneliness of eternal life. They seek companionship—which is to say, thinly veiled homoerotic bonds—with fellow immortals, but these relationships often turn rancid due to the beloved’s similar tormentedness. It’s a portrait that slid into self-parody almost as soon as it made its appearance, and which later creators have found themselves pushing against (“People still fall for that Anne Rice routine,” a decidedly nontormented vampire quips in an early episode of Buffy). But the very fact that this pushback feels necessary speaks to the trope’s influence and reach.

AMC’s adaptation of Interview with the Vampire—which premiered in 2022, and whose second season aired earlier this summer—wears that legacy lightly, and even playfully…

(4) TIME ON THEIR HANDS. T.R. Napper arrives in Glasgow in time to exchange drolleries with George R.R. Martin.

(5) SEE DELANY SPEECH. Posted to YouTube yesterday: Samuel R. Delany at the Free Library of Philadelphia on June 15, 2024 in conversation with composer and library trainee Mark Inchoco: “How SF Dances to the Music of Time”.

(6) NOT TERRY’S GHOST. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Private Eye is a long running British news/satirical magazine, that sells more copies than some UK national newspapers.  In their current issue (#1629, dated 2nd-15th August, so should be available in shops throughout the duration of the Glasgow Worldcon), their books section makes some interesting claims about the authorship of last year’s Hugo Best Related Work winner.

In his 2014 collected non-fiction book, A Slip of the Keyboard, Discworld writer Terry Pratchett had some advice for anyone who saw a celebrity author at a book signing.

“Don’t pass comment if they spend a lot of time reading their book while they’re in the shop.  It may be the first time they’ve seen it.  Do not offer to help them with the longer words.”

Ironic, then, that the official Pratchett biography, A Life with Footnotes, was “co-written” by ghostwriter Giles Smith – and not, as advertised on the cover, solely by Rob Wilkins, Pratchett’s former assistant.  Wilkins went on to collect, amongst other awards, a 2023 Hugo for the book he did not write – a prestigious bauble Pratchett himself never managed to secure.

Giles Smith’s page on the UK Simon & Schuster website states that “in the last ten years, he has been the ghost-writer for eight Sunday Times bestselling autobiographies”, although there is no mention of this work on his agent’s site.

Note: credit is due to Kári Tulinius whose Bluesky post is what brought this to my attention.

The books column also includes a section on the Neil Gaiman allegations, but given that the magazine was published last week, is out-of-date with the latest developments, and also has a slightly odd take (in my opinion), such as whether this will affect the number of books that Gaiman writes blurbs for.

(7) READERS’ INTEREST AROUSED. NOR IS THAT ALL. On romantasy and other literary erotica: “My weeks of reading hornily: steamy book sales have doubled – and I soon found out why”, Zoe Williams told Guardian readers.

I spent a fortnight reading nothing but smut and I don’t need to give you a reason. But since there is one, here it is: business is booming in the publishing world of love and sex. Aficionados draw fine distinctions – between romance and erotica; “steamy” and “smutty”; fantasy and saga fiction – and endlessly subdivide the genres, but the takeaway is that the stigma around what used to be called “books that women like” has gone. And, as the UK literary agent Alice Lutyens puts it: “The steamier the sex, the better the book does.”

I started two books simultaneously, which just happened to span the gamut, from the almost completely chaste The Stars Too Fondly, by Emily Hamilton, to the most pornographic thing I’ve ever read (and I’ve read De Sade): Heat Clinic, by Alexis B Osborne. So, I could give you a take on the difference between romance and erotica, but I would rather throw it to an expert. Leah Koch started the independent romantic bookshop Ripped Bodice in Los Angeles with her sister, Bea, in 2016 (they recently opened a second shop in New York). She says readers tend to assume erotica is sexier. “The technical definition is that, in erotica, character development happens from sexual situations. We stock both.”…

… if there is one thing that has come to pass, maybe through TikTok, maybe just by the march of time, it is that readers no longer care about respectability, literary or any other kind. They don’t care if they are reading an Omegaverse novel in public; they don’t even care if someone mistakenly thinks it’s furry pornography. They don’t care if what they are reading could be mistaken for YA and they are not young. They don’t care if the patriarchy thinks they are silly. Which means, in the publishing world of – yup, I’m still calling it this – smut, pretty much anything could happen.

(8) PRO TIPS. Charlie Jane Anders shares valuable insights in “Another Way To Think About ‘Conflict’ and ‘Stakes’ In Your Fiction” at Happy Dancing.

1) Conflict

Here is a story that contains plenty of conflict: “I was hungry. I really wanted a sandwich. So I got up and went to the fridge and made a sandwich. The End.” A situation is introduced, the protagonist has a need. They need a sandwich! What are they going to do? They’re going to make a sandwich. The conflict is resolved — we can all relax now.

Here’s another story that has a lot of conflict: “My friend and I were both hungry and there was only one sandwich. So we each had half a sandwich and it tasted really good, and I was happy to be eating a sandwich with my friend.” OH MY GOD. There was only one sandwich. But we figured it out. 

What I’m trying to say is that conflict doesn’t mean antagonism. Nobody has to be baring their teeth or vowing bloody murder. Nor does conflict have to be massive and dramatic, with bodily fluids going everywhere and people snarling angrily.  In fact, much of the time in real life, “conflict” is just people dealing with the challenges and frictions of being in the world.

And of course, stories don’t need to have any conflict in them at all. You can have a story where it’s literally just like, “My friend and I hung out and watched the sunset, and it was nice.” That’s a story with a beginning, middle and an end. That’s very satisfying.

But even if you want to have some conflict in your story, conflict does not have to mean a certain level of drama or horribleness. A conflict doesn’t have to be intransigent or insurmountable, or involve anyone chopping off anyone else’s limbs….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

August 6, 1926 – Janet Asimov. (Died 2019.) 

By Lis Carey: Janet Opal Jeppson earned a medical degree from New York University Medical School, completed a residency in psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital, and in 1960 graduated from the William Alanson White Institute of Psychoanalysis, where she continued to work, practicing psychiatry and psychoanalysis until 1986. She continued to practice and publish medical papers under the name of J.O. Jeppson, even after her marriage to Isaac Asimov. 

Janet Jeppson and Isaac Asimov. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter

She started writing children’s science fiction in 1970, also published as by J.O. Jeppson. The other change in Jeppson’s life that year was that she started dating Isaac Asimov, after he separated from his first wife. They married in 1973, after the divorce became final.

Some of Jeppson’s solo science fiction included The Second Experiment and The Package in Hyperspace. Together with Isaac, she wrote the Norby Chronicles series, which ran to eleven volumes. However, Isaac is reported to have said that the work was 90% Janet’s, with him just doing a final read-thru and polish, but his name “was wanted on the book for the betterment of sales”.

She was married to Isaac until his death in 1992, from complications of HIV, due to a transfusion during bypass surgery in 1983. Based on symptoms, Janet suspected HIV, and pushed for an HIV test, but doctors resisted until he was extremely ill. They also pressured her to keep the results secret due to fear of public reaction, and so it was not revealed until ten years after his death.

Married to a strong personality, she kept her own space and her own career, while being a loyal partner, and a determined advocate for him in his final illness.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) AUREALIS AWARDS OPEN FOR ENTRIES. The 2024 Aurealis Awards, Australia’s premier awards for speculative fiction, are for works created by an Australian citizen or permanent resident, and published for the first time between January 1, 2024 and December 31, 2024.

The administrators encourage publishers and authors to enter all works published already this year by September 30, 2024, then subsequent publications as they are released, so their judges have time to consider each entry carefully.

Full Rules and FAQ are on the Aurealis Awards website.

(12) IT’S GONE, JIM. “GameStop Kills Game Informer Magazine And Takes Website Offline” – Kotaku has the magazine’s obituary.

Game Informer, the longest-running gaming magazine in the U.S., is officially dead and GameStop killed it. It began publishing in 1991 and has been one of the last remaining physical gaming magazines in the world, with cover stories that continued to share deep dives and exclusive interviews on the biggest games coming out, from Final Fantasy: VII Rebirth to Star Wars Outlaws. No more….

(13) A DAY IN THE DEATH. Brenton Dickieson sees a connection between Tolstoy and Lewis in “The Living Lie, But Dead Men Tell the Truth: The Screwtape Letters and Ivan Ilych” at A Pilgrim in Narnia.

In Leo Tolstoy’s brilliant novella, The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886), there is a curious pun in the English translation I use (Aylmer Maude):

“The dead man lay, as dead men always lie” (96)…

…Doctors who lie, friends who lie, dying in comfort believing there is the hope of life and separated from the danger of a sense of their true mortal conditions. There it is.

Ivan Ilych’s condition is not great evil-doing, but “contented worldliness.” Ivan has lived in wealth, fulfilling his ambitions, playing whist with adoring friends of the same class and intelligence, fulfiling the role of a clerk with precision, even if his roles of father, husband, neighbour, and justice-keeper are somewhat ignored. Even in his dying days, he cannot realize death in his own frame. And when he begins to suspect that the death rattle is near, he cannot accept that his life has been meaningless. Not just meaningless, but a slow descent in inverse proportion to his imagined rise to social acceptance.

This is, of course, precisely what Screwtape would want….

(14) (NOT JUST) FOR THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “Power On The Moon? A Giant Tower Could Light The Way For NASA Astronauts” says HotHardware.

Space company Honeybee has proposed a 100 meter tall tower that will potentially light the path for future NASA Artemis astronauts on the moon. The LUNARSABER (Lunar Utility Navigation with Advanced Remote Sensing and Autonomous Beaming for Energy Redistribution) tower is a deployable structure that integrates solar power, communications, and more, all in one package.

As NASA and other space agencies look to begin building lunar bases, they will all have to overcome some obvious obstacles. Perhaps one of the greatest of those will be how to generate power where none yet exists. Honeybee, a company owned by Blue Origin, believes it has created a solution that will not only solve the lunar power problem, but also “shine light on new possibilities, increasing operating hours for human and robotic missions on the Moon.”

“LUNARSABER can turn night into day in the deepest craters on the Moon,” remarked Kris Zacny, VP of Exploration Systems at Honeybee Robotics. “It is truly a game-changing system that will pave the way for a lunar economy.”

Some may be wondering how on Earth Honeybee expects to get a 100 meter tall tower onto the Moon. Well, the simple answer is a technology called DIABLO (Deployable Interlocking Actuated Bands for Linear Operations). DIABLO utilizes a rolled piece of metal, and then bends it into a deployable cylindrical structure that can support heavy payloads, which then becomes the base for LUNARSABER.

In order to deliver power, solar panels will be deployed via one of two methods, depending on the tower’s location on the Moon….

(15) WAITING FOR GOLDBLUM. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “Netflix’s Kaos turns Jeff Goldblum into the all-powerful Zeus” – BGR has the story. “Jeff Goldblum’s new Netflix series Kaos is basically The Boys but about Greek mythology”

…Right away, the title of this eight-episode drama also gives you a little hint of what it’s all about. One of the animating principles here is that the world was born from chaos — and while Kaos is set in the modern era, it’s a sort of off-kilter, slightly askew version of it (thus, the modified spelling). In other words, there are no old men in the sky here wearing togas and hurling lightning bolts at Earth. What we get, instead, is a creepy Goldblum-as-Zeus laughing deliriously at his TV while watching scenes of devastation and commenting about how much he loves fire….

DPD, having watched the video, says “I’m not sure it’s ‘The Boys Go Greek’ and we’ll be waiting for it.”

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Ersatz Culture, Lis Carey, Daniel Dern, 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 Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 6/2/24 Take Me Down To The Scroll Tonight, I Want To See The Pixels

Posted on by
9

(1) MAKING IT UP. Sarah Gailey interviews the authors and editors of The Worst Ronin in “Middle Finger To the Sky: The Worst Ronin by Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Faith Schaffer” at Stone Soup.

Gailey: What did you get to do here that you might not have gotten to do if this book landed elsewhere?

Tokuda-Hall: [The Worst Ronin] was largely written with a middle finger to the sky–when POC are invited to the table to tell our stories, there are usually so many caveats. Yes, we want your story but we want it to be about your marginalization. Or, yes, tell your story, but we want it to be edifying about your culture. There’s this demand that we serve the white gaze, and not a respect for our boundless imaginations. We want to make up shit, too. And so I very stridently let the reader know, in many ways, that this book is not there to educate them about anything. This is not historically accurate. This is a work of invention.

Gailey: How did you first dive into the story, knowing you could do whatever you want?

Tokuda-Hall: I took such joy in writing this book. I had a misguided notion at first that I would keep it super wholesome and middle grade, but my brain just doesn’t work that way, and as soon as I accepted that the plot and characters took off and I just felt like I was sprinting to catch up with them. The hardest thing with this book was balancing the humor that is so inherent to the central characters (The Worst Ronin is a buddy comedy, in its heart) with the darkness of the stories they each would face. …

(2) WHITHER STOKERCON 2025? During last night’s Bram Stoker Awards ceremony it was announced that StokerCon 2025 will be held June 12-15 at the Hilton Stamford Hotel in Stamford, Connecticut.

(3) UBIQ. The Society of Illustrators will host “JACK DAVIS: A Centennial Celebration”, an exhibit of work by the famed MAD Magazine cartoonist and commercial illustrator, at its New York location from June 12-September 21. Full details at the link.

The Society of Illustrators marks the centenary celebration of Jack Davis’ birth by hosting a retrospective featuring the original art from among his most admired works, many for the first time ever. The art on view represents every genre and every phase of Davis’ six-decade career: from EC Comics and Mad Magazine to TV Guide and Time Magazine, from Raid and McDonald’s ads to NASCAR and Super Bowl promotions, from history book illustrations to movie posters….

…“Jack Davis was quite possibly the most ubiquitous American humor illustrator of all time. Davis was a master cartoonist, caricaturist, and illustrator, and his funny, fast-paced, manic, beautifully rendered work has graced the covers of countless comic books, magazines, and record albums and has also appeared on movie posters, bubble gum cards, and advertisements. A virtual mind-boggling one-man industry, Davis has been called “the fastest cartoonist alive” and ‘the master of the crowd scene.’ It’s astonishing to realize that this quiet Southern gentleman was usually finished with assignments for the day and out on the golf course by 2:30 p.m.”

– Drew Friedman from his Fantagraphics book, Heroes of the Comics.

(4) LOSCON 50. Can it be Loscon 50 already? Why, it wasn’t that long ago I missed the first one while I was at grad school….

However, I trust the committee’s count. And here’s the graphic that accompanies their Progress Report #3 on Facebook. Get a full update there.

(5) BEFORE YOU CAN READ THE OMENS. Colleen Doran’s Funny Business brings us a “Good Omens Update”, a highly detailed tour of Doran’s techniques for producing art for the book. So much more is involved than I ever guessed.

…I use the construction method of drawing, as you see. This is an old-school technique. Some people seem to assume that artists always use computers and tracing for their drawings, but most cartoonists of my generation work extemporaneously. There’s quite a bit of noodling around and searching in the sketches. Using too much reference often results in stiff, dead work.

In comics, it’s very important to make sure you’ve considered word balloon placement when designing a page. The script for Good Omens is more copy-heavy than most modern comic book scripts because I want to preserve as much of the clever original language as I can….

(6) DIVING INTO NETFLIX. If you’re interested in the latest business statistics on Netflix and its content, JustWatch recently released a page where they provide data and analysis: JustWatch: Netflix Statistics.

Some of the page’s features are content expansion, popularity, subscription prices, its market share, and much more.

(7) FREE READ. Sunday Morning Transport’s stories for June are by authors Kelly Robson, Laura Anne Gilman, Meg Elison, and Yi Sheng Ng. The first story of the month is free to read, but they seek “paying subscribers who allow us to keep publishing great stories week after week.”

In this, June’s first, free, story, Kelly Robson shows us how, at Versailles, getting old is no picnic. But sometimes there are options… “The High Cost of Heat” by Kelly Robson.

(8) USE THE FORCE…OF MEMORY. After all this time can there still be “Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About the Original ‘Star Wars’ Trilogy”? Maariv Periodical challenges you to find out. Their first fact is:

Big Mistake

When it came to signing a contract with James Earl Jones to fill in Darth Vader’s voice, George Lucas offered him a choice: He could take a salary of $7,000 for his work or royalties off the back end of ticket sales. Back then, $7,000 was a decent amount of money, so Jones took the cash, which turned out to be a costly mistake.

Had he chosen the alternative, he would have earned far more; Jones admitted years later that the decision cost him “tens of millions of dollars.” In comparison, Sir Alec Guinness took the royalties – and his heirs have earned an estimated $95 million for his work in the first “Star Wars” film.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY DOUBLE FEATURE.

[Compiled by Paul Weimer.]

June 2, 1929 — Norton Juster. (Died 2021.)

By Paul Weimer. Once upon a time when the world was young, a 2nd grade teacher had a reading session with my class. We read a book about a character who had found himself in a land of mathematics and weirdness, of two princesses bound, of paths to infinity and clock-like dogs. It was a wild and magical place and I adored the book to pieces. 

Norton Juster

The problem is, I had misunderstood the title. I thought the title was “Milo and the Mathemagicians” and did not see or find the book for three decades after that second grade classroom. Some days, I wondered if I had just imagined or hallucinated the existence of this book. 

Enter the pre-LLM internet. It was the mid 2000’s and I got the urge to try and find some books of my youth among dome other things. And in that time, the Internet was at its peak for finding information that you wanted. SEOs were not yet a thing. Amazon was not full of crap. Websites still proliferated. And I had great success. I managed to find a copy of an old liberal arts college math textbook that, decades ago, had introduced me to Escher and other wondrous things. (Oddly, it was just called The Math Book)  I found some old SF anthologies I had not seen for years. I hit upon authors and musicians and others I had dimly remembered from my youth. It was a great time for me for rediscovery. 

And then there was Milo.  I was throwing search terms in one day trying to find “Milo and the Mathemagicians”, and somehow managed to hit The Phantom Tollbooth.  I read the description and thought “Is this it?” I bought a copy and with anxious anticipation, I started reading it. Did you ever have that feeling, wondering if the book you are reading is something that is going to be that good, or live up to the suck fairy? I had that feeling re-reading The Phantom Tollbooth.

Imagine my utter happiness  when I delved into the book and found, to my delight, that it WAS the book I had remembered from that second grade class. And all of the joys in the book, the wordplay, the characters, the concepts (how many children’s books try and explain *infinity*) and the absolute heart of the book.  And the artwork and drawings. I had not remembered specific drawings from the second grade class, but I had remembered the book WAS illustrated. And the illustrations are wonderful! 

I don’t regret seeking out the TV movie that was made, subsequently, it doesn’t quite work for me, but I can see why it was made. 

But speaking of movies, the other Juster property I adored that I did not realize at the time WAS Norton Juster was the Academy Award winning short film The Dot and the Line.  I had seen it way back when I had read Flatland, and loved it, but had no idea that it had anything to do with The Phantom Tollbooth.  Imagine my delightful surprise when I found out it was based on a Juster book. I think, given its dynamism, that the short movie is better than the actual book and I do recommend that fans of The Phantom Tollbooth go seek it out.

I’ve now, including the second grade class, read The Phantom Tollbooth four times. And I look forward to it again. And I really need to rewatch The Dot and the Line myself. Don’t jump to the island of conclusions that The Phantom Tollbooth is for children alone. It works for readers of all ages. If you have any interest in wordplay, mathematics or whimsy, pick it up and give it a spin.

Born June 2, 1915 — Lester Del Rey. (Died 1993.)

By Paul Weimer. For me, first and foremost, Lester Del Rey was a publisher and an editor. Many of the books I first encountered reading science fiction, back 4 decades ago, were published by Del Rey, which he founded with his wife Judy Lynn Del Rey.  And for a good while, that’s all I thought that he was (although his legacy and influence as a publisher is huge). 

Lester Del Rey at a Philcon around 1964. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthology was a gateway to a number of authors for me. Theodore Sturgeon. Murray Leinster. Fritz Leiber (for “Coming Attraction”, although I would soon discover Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser).  And Lester Del Rey, for “Helen O’Loy”.  I had read enough Greek Mythology by that point to get the idea that this was a Helen of Troy story, and it was perhaps the first story I read where a robot was an object of romantic interest. Helen’s story, and the tragedy of it moved me deeply.

I soon came across other Del Rey stories, here and there, randomly, sprinkled in best of collections and favorite science fiction stories and the myriad other SF anthologies that I read in the first decade of my science fiction reading.  

But it was Harlan Ellison® who turned me onto perhaps the best and my favorite of the Lester Del Rey stories. In one of his own collections about the relationship between men and Gods, he mentioned a Lester Del Rey story “For I am a Jealous People”.  I could see the biblical allusion in the title, and I decided to seek it out.

I recently re-read it, and it still slaps, hard.  “For I am a Jealous People” is a kicker of a story, where the Abrahamic God is real, has always been real. But, now, God is angry with humanity and fed up with us, and basically has sided with aliens invading Earth and its possessions. That is a smash to the face to begin with, but it’s humanity response to this revelation in the story that really brings it home to me, the power of a Del Rey story at it’s best.  Humanity’s response could have been any number of plausible results. Regret. Sadness. Despair. Resignation. Anger.  Del Rey goes for “Good. Bring it!” It’s a muscular answer to the question of what to do when even God is against you, and it remains powerful to this day.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) UPDATES TO THE BLOCH WEBSITE. Jim Nemeth, curator of the Robert Bloch Official Website announced three new additions.

1) Bill Gillard, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, recounts his recent travel to Laramie, Wyoming, to research the Bloch papers/archives collection, housed at the University of Wyoming. With photos! Read: Robert Bloch Papers
2) Matthew R. Bradley’s interview of Bloch; from Filmfax magazine (Aug/Sep 1993) Read:  Heart of a Small Boy. 
3) See Bob’s military draft card. See Gallery page.

(12) SPACE, THE FINAL EPISODE. Camestros Felapton has closing remarks on the conclusion of a Star Trek series: “Farewell Star Trek Discovery”.

….Notably, this season had the best attempt yet at marrying the idea of single season long story with Star Trek’s more traditional episode-long stories. The basic plot idea (a quest for a series of clues leading to a hidden secret treasure) was not terribly original but it was enough of a hook to ensure each episode could have its own sub-story while overtly moving the plot along. The broader plot was also well served by the two antagonists who became more interesting as the season progressed….

(13) LEARNING ALL OVER AGAIN. “How NASA astronauts are training to walk on the Moon in 2026” in Nature.

NASA astronaut Kate Rubins was having a hard time seeing in the eerie twilight of the Moon’s south pole this month.

Rubins made her way carefully through the deep shadows on the lunar surface, her path dimly lit by lights on her spacesuit’s helmet. She was hunting through the volcanic landscape for geological treasure — Moon rocks that she could pick up and bring back to Earth, which would reveal secrets of this frozen world. As the first person to set foot on the Moon in more than half a century, Rubins was making good progress on her historic foray — despite the piles of cow manure along the way.

The rock-strewn plain wasn’t really the Moon but was, in fact, the high desert of northern Arizona. Rubins and astronaut Andre Douglas were participating in the biggest dress rehearsal yet for the next time NASA plans to send people to the Moon’s surface, a mission known as Artemis III. If all goes to plan, Rubins or one of her colleagues will be stepping onto the actual Moon a little over two years from now. So NASA is training its astronauts to make the most of their precious time there — given that no human has set foot on the lunar surface since the last Apollo crew blasted off in 1972….

(14) PIGS NOT IN SPACE. Slashfilm discusses Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon and a little-known predecessor in “This 14-Minute Short Isn’t The First Sci-Film, But It Came Close”.

…But “A Trip to the Moon” wasn’t the first sci-fi film. Indeed, it wasn’t even Méliès’ first sci-fi film. 

If one is to trust the Aurum Film Encyclopedia, the first sci-fi film ever was “The Mechanical Butcher,” a short made by the Lumière Brothers in 1895. The Lumières, as all first-year film students know, invented the Cinématographe motion picture system, one of the earliest motion picture cameras, making them among the very first filmmakers. “The Mechanical Butcher” is only 53 seconds long, and depicts butcher characters lifting a pig into a futuristic machine and extracting it as prepared pork products. Mechanized slaughterhouses were relatively new in 1895, and the Lumières made a short depicting the absurdity of sped-up, high-tech meat manufacture. Why, only a moment ago, these pork chops were alive! If sci-fi is a genre that analyzes technology’s effects on human development — techno-anthropology — then “The Mechanical Butcher” certainly counts….

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

Pixel Scroll 7/8/20 Here’s What We All Must Learn To Do, Scroll And Pixel

Posted on by

(1) HALLOWEEN ALREADY? People who sell candy are getting ready. But no need for anybody to go door-to-door: buy your own bag and tuck in at at home. “Hershey’s Will Have A Ton Of New Halloween Candy This Year Including Reese’s Cups With Green Creme” says Yahoo! Life.

…Next up are these Vampire Milk Chocolate Kisses that might look like your classic Hershey’s Kisses (with adorable bat foil) but when you bite in, they’re stuffed with a strawberry creme filling fit for a vampire. You get the strawberry flavor before you even bite in, which I loved. They taste like a chocolate-covered strawberry but, like, way easier to eat.

…In addition to new candies, you’ll also find some old faves on shelves this fall like Reese’s Pumpkins, mini Pumpkin Pie Kit Kats, Hershey’s Glow-In-The-Dark minis, and milk chocolate Monster Kisses with adorable themed foils. All of these will start rolling out in stores as the holiday gets closer which gives you plenty of time to coordinate a Halloween costume around your favorite candy.

(2) COVID-19 TAKES DOWN ANOTHER CON. The Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention, initially postponed from April til September, now has been cancelled says organizer Doug Ellis:

…We regret to announce that after consultation with our convention hotel, the Westin Lombard Yorktown Center in Lombard, Illinois, we have determined that it is not possible to hold our convention this year due to COVID-19. The next Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention is scheduled for April 16-18, 2021 at the same location.

…The 2020 show would have been our 20th, and we had plans to make it our best yet. We’ll take this extra time to work on making what will now be our 20th show (albeit in 2021) even better!

(3) STILL WAITING BY THE LAKE. Meanwhile, some X-factor is keeping Salt Lake City’s FanX event from actually cancelling, no matter how close they might be to making that decision: “What Happens if FanX 2020 is Postponed due to COVID-19?”

The FanX® staff, much like the attendees, looks forward to all our events all year long. We never fathomed we would be in such a state of uncertainty for this year’s event because of a global pandemic. With the recent rise of Utah’s COVID-19 cases, the possibility of having the event this September and meeting again with our FanX family is looking bleak. Unless we see a significant reduction in the number of new COVID-19 cases in the next couple of weeks, we do not feel it is in the best interest of the community and the attendees for us to continue with the plan to have the event this year. Keeping the safety of everyone at the event is always our top priority. 

…In the case that we are able to have FanX® in September 2020, we are preparing to have plenty of safety features in effect and are working with health professionals to take as many safety precautions as possible. We are still preparing details of what this might look like for attendees, and we will continue to monitor COVID-19 best practices at that time for events. 

(4) ON WITH THE SHOW. “‘Batwoman’ Casts Javicia Leslie as New Series Lead” – Variety has the details. Leslie, who was on God Friended Me for two seasons, will replace Ruby Rose on “Batwoman” but showrunner Caroline Dries says that Rose’s character, Kate Kane, will not be killed off on the show.

“Batwoman” has found its new series lead, with Javicia Leslie set to step into the cape and cowl for the show’s upcoming second season on The CW.

“I am extremely proud to be the first Black actress to play the iconic role of Batwoman on television, and as a bisexual woman, I am honored to join this groundbreaking show which has been such a trailblazer for the LGBTQ+ community,” Leslie said.

Leslie will portray a new character on the show named Ryan Wilder. She is described as likable, messy, a little goofy and untamed. She’s also nothing like Kate Kane (previously played by Ruby Rose), the woman who wore the Batsuit before her….

(5) FRIENDLY PERSUASION. Camestros Felapton advocates for a fourth finalist: “Hugo Fan Writer: Why you should vote for…Bogi Takács”.

… Bogi’s writing is a positive challenge that asks people to reconsider the scope of works that they engage with. “Positive” in the sense that it is driven by creative output and the advocacy for creators of speculative fiction rather than the sense of simply being ‘feel-good’ or avoiding pointing out the ingrained prejudices and issues within the wider SF&F community.

(6) BLM. Essence of Wonder will be joined by Maurice Broaddus this Saturday, July 11 at 3:00 p.m.to discuss his writing, as well as the youth movement taking the lead in the recent Black Lives Matter protests: “Maurice Broaddus and the BLM Youth Movement: The World We Want to Create”

(7) GAIMAN PANEL LIVESTREAM. The 2020 Auckland Writers Festival went virtual and is running a Winter Series of livestreamed panels. On Sunday, July 12, Episode 11 will feature:

 English master storyteller Neil Gaiman with his latest, ‘The Ocean at the End of the Lane’, author and curator Kolokesa Uaf? M?hina-Tuai discussing ‘Crafting Aotearoa’ and Canadian writer and artist Leanne Shapton with ‘Guestbook: Ghost Stories’.

(8) BRADBURY’S PSEUDONYMS. First Fandom Experience fills readers in about “The Making Of ‘The Earliest Bradbury’”, their recently published volume of his earliest writing as a science fiction fan.

… However, developing a comprehensive list of Bradbury’s fanzine contributions required intensive effort by the FFE team and others.

Fortunately, there was a clear starting point: the first and most numerous of Bradbury’s fanzine appearances are found in the club organ of the Los Angeles Science Fiction League (LASFL), Imagination! This title ran for thirteen issues from October 1937 — the same month that Bradbury joined the group — to October 1938. The FFE archive includes a full set of these rare issues, and we read them exhaustively to find anything written by or referring to Bradbury.

This seemingly straightforward task soon revealed a key challenge: Bradbury and other members of the LASFL frequently published under a variety of pseudonyms. We puzzled over a number of articles that might have been penned by Bradbury, but sported whimsical bylines like “D. Lerium Tremaine” and “Kno Knuth Ing.” (A previous blog post discusses our early attempts to sort this out.)…

(9) LIGHTS AND SIRENS. LitHub celebrated Hilary Mantel’s July 6 birthday with a look back at her days as a film reviewer: “On Hilary Mantel’s birthday, please enjoy her 1988 review of RoboCop.”

Today, Dame Hilary Mary Mantel, author of the Booker Prize-winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, and the likely future Booker Prize-winning novel The Mirror and the Light, turns 68.

But you probably knew that. What you might not have known was that Mantel was the film critic for the UK’s The Spectator for four years, between 1987 and 1991, during which time she reviewed many films, including Overboard (“God bless us all. And send us better films next week.”), The Accused (“Economy is commendable, but a woman in all her complexity cannot be represented by a pair of outsize shoulder-pads.”), and Fatal Attraction (“A quite unremarkable film in most ways, with its B-movie conceits, cliché-strewn screenplay and derivative effects.”).

She also reviewed RoboCop—and rather enjoyed it:

“F—— me!” cry the criminals, as RoboCop blasts them into the hereafter. Rapists, robbers, terrorists are minced before our eyes. Villains are blown apart, defenestrated, melted down into pools of toxic waste. “You have the right to an attorney,” the courteous robot voice reminds them, as he tosses them through plate glass. The pace is frenetic. The noise level is amazing. You absolutely cannot lose interest; every moment something explodes….

(10) MEDIA ANNIVERSARY.

Forty-three years ago in the Bananas literary zine which was edited by Emma Tennant and published by Blond & Briggs, Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves“ was first printed. (A novelette by J.G. Ballard, “The Dead Time”, and a short story by John Sladek, “After Flaubert” comprised the rest of the zine.) Three years later, it was included in Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories collection. It would win a BSFA Award for Best Media as it would become a film of that name written by Angela Carter and Neil Jordan which starred Sarah Patterson, Angela Lansbury, Stephen Rea and David Warner. It is quite often produced as a theatre piece in the U.K. (CE)

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born July 8, 1906 — Walter Sande. He’s best remembered for being on Red Planet Mars, The War of the Worlds and Invaders from Mars, but he also showed up playing a heavy in such serials as The Green Hornets Strikes Again! and Sky Raiders, the latter being at least genre adjacent. He’s had a recurring role as Col. Crockett on The Wild, Wild West, and one-offs on Voyage to the Bottom of The Sea, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Lost in Space and Bewitched. (Died 1971.) (CE)
  • Born July 8, 1925 – Lou Feck.  Forty covers, a few interiors.  Here is Rogue in Space.  Here is Cinnabar.  Here is On Wings of Song.  (Died 1981) [JH]
  • Born July 8, 1930 – George Young.  Program Book and publicity for Detention (17th Worldcon).  His head was under the first propeller beanie, made (i.e. the beanie) by Ray Nelson, inspiring on another evolutionary track Beanie Boy of Beanie and Cecil; here’s RN telling the story to Darrell Schweitzer.  See photos of and by GY via the FANAC.org index.  [JH]
  • Born July 8, 1934 – Merv Binns.  Co-founded Melbourne SF Group, founded Melbourne Fantasy Film Group; ran first Australian SF bookshop Space Age Books; Guest of Honour [note spelling] at 9th Australian nat’l SF convention (“natcon”), 13th, 44th; at 2nd New Zealand natcon; chaired Cinecon, SF film convention.  Big Heart (our highest service award).  Ditmar, Chandler, Infinity, McNamara Awards.  Fanzines Australian SF News, Out of the Bin.  (Died 2020) [JH]
  • Born July 8, 1944 — Jeffrey Tambor, 76. I first encountered him on Max Headroom as Murray, Edison’s editor. Later on, and yes, I sat through that film, he’s Mayor Augustus Maywho in How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Finally, I’ll note he was in both of the only true Hellboy films playing Tom Manning, director of the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense. (CE)
  • Born July 8, 1944 — Glen Cook, 76. With the exception of the new novel which I need to read, I’ve read his entire excellent Black Company series. I’ve also mostly liked his far lighter Garrett P.I. series which it seems unfortunately he’s abandoned. And I should read the Instrumentalities of the Night as I’ve heard good things about it. (CE)
  • Born July 8, 1945 – D. West.  First-rate fanartist.  See here (cover for Chunga), here (Inca), here (Banana Wings); a hundred fifty interiors in his consummately sour style.  Here’s Randy Byers’ tribute (some harsh language, some fanzine slang).  (Died 2015) [JH]
  • Born July 8, 1953 – Mark Blackman, 67.  Chaired Lunacon 38.  Illustrated (with Greg Costikyan) the New York Conspiracy’s Hymnal.  I met him in TAPS (the Terrean Amateur Press Ass’n), later in person.  Reports from New York, like this; can often be found in WOOF.  [JH]
  • Born July 8, 1954 — Ellen Klages, 66. Her novelette “Basement Magic” won a Nebula Award for Best Novelette. I strongly recommend Portable Childhoods, a collection of her short fiction, which published by Tachyon Publications, my boutique favorite publisher of fantasy. Passing Strange, her 1940 set San Francisco novel which won a BSFA Award and a World Fantasy Award is also really great. (CE)
  • Born July 8, 1970 — Ekaterina Sedia, 50. Her Heart of Iron novel is simply awesome. I’d also recommend The Secret History of Moscow as well. It’s worth noting that both iBooks and Kindle list several collections by her, Willful Impropriety: 13 Tales of Society, Scandal, and Romance and Wilfill Impropriety that ISFDB doesn’t list. They’re quite superb it turns out as is Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy anthology she edited which won a World Fantasy Award. (CE)
  • Born July 8, 1978 — George Mann, 42. Writer and editor. He’s edited a number of anthologies including the first three volumes of Solaris Book of New Science Fiction. Among my favourite books by him are his Newbury & Hobbes series, plus his excellent Doctor Who work. (CE)
  • Born July 8, 1978 – Erin Morgenstern, 42.  New York Times Best-Seller The Night Circus won Alex and Locus Awards; 127 editions in 21 languages.  The Starless Sea came next.  Does Nat’l Novel Writing Month which indeed produced Circus; “I’m grateful to Chris Baty for coming up with such an outlandish idea and also he has very good taste in wine.”  Otherwise she drinks Sidecars without sugar.  [JH]

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • You know what a bear does in the woods. Heathcliff shows what an alien does in the woods.

(13) SLAP HAPPY. [Item by Dann.] I came across this one and thought it might be of interest. Sasha Wood’s Casually Comics channel on YouTube offers a frequently fun and detailed look into various comics. This episode from last year covers the ubiquitous meme where Batman slaps Robin. Sasha does an entertaining dive into the alternative universe that was the World’s Finest series.

I have found Sasha’s approach to be well balanced, informative, and fun. A little signal boost in her direction would be a good thingTM.

(14) FLYING BY. Cat Rambo will be teaching “Principles for Pantsers” online on Saturday, August 1, 1-3 PM Pacific time. Registration and scholarship info at the link.

Some people outline. Others don’t. There’s plenty of advice on how to do the former, but those who practice the latter sometimes feel that they’re floundering, and no one’s providing any principles. Working with my own process as well as that of students, clients, and mentees, I’ve come up with twelve principles that you can apply, post-pantsing, in order to start moving from chaos to order.

Join Cat Rambo for a workshop in which they teach you how to pants successfully.

(15) WORD POWER. NPR relayed on the verdict: “Regardless Of What You Think, ‘Irregardless’ Is A Word”. How many fucks do you give?

Merriam-Webster raised the hackles of stodgy grammarians last week when it affirmed the lexical veracity of “irregardless.”

The word’s definition, when reading it, would seem to be: without without regard.

“Irregardless is included in our dictionary because it has been in widespread and near-constant use since 1795,” the dictionary’s staff wrote in a “Words of the Week” roundup on Friday. “We do not make the English language, we merely record it.”

(16) WHY WAIT? Robert Zubrin says that an Artemis flight around the moon is possible this year: ““Artemis 8” using Dragon” in The Space Review.

A mission equivalent to Apollo 8—call it “Artemis 8”—could be done, potentially as soon as this year, using Dragon, Falcon Heavy, and Falcon 9.

The basic plan is to launch a crew to low Earth orbit in Dragon using a Falcon 9. Then launch a Falcon Heavy, and rendezvous in LEO with its upper stage, which will still contain plenty of propellant. The Falcon Heavy upper stage is then used to send the Dragon on Trans Lunar Injection (TLI), and potentially Lunar Orbit Capture (LOC) and Trans Earth Injection (TEI) as well.

(17) RUSSIAN SPACE AGENCY ADVISOR CHARGED. “Russia Arrests Space Agency Official, Accusing Him of Treason” reports the New York Times. But is it a bum rap?

Russia’s secret police on Tuesday arrested a respected former reporter who worked in recent months as an adviser to the head of the country’s space agency, accusing him of treason for passing secrets to a NATO country.

Life News, a tabloid news site with close ties to the security apparatus, posted a video of the former reporter, Ivan I. Safronov, being bundled off a leafy Moscow street into a gray van by plainclothes officers of the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., the domestic arm of what was known in Soviet times as the K.G.B.

The F.S.B. said that Mr. Safronov was suspected of working for the intelligence service of an unspecified NATO country, passing on “classified information about military-technical cooperation, defense and the security of the Russian Federation.”

What information that could be, however, was unclear. Mr. Safronov only started working at the space agency, Roscosmos, in May. Before that, he worked for more than a decade as a well-regarded journalist for Kommersant and then Vedomosti, both privately owned business newspapers with no obvious access to state secrets.

Outraged at what was widely viewed as another example of overreach by Russia’s sprawling and often paranoid security apparatus, journalists and ordinary Muscovites gathered in small groups outside the headquarters of the F.S.B. to protest the arrest. Several were detained for holding up signs in support of Mr. Safronov.

(18) HEYERDAHL VINDICATED. “Ancient Americans made epic Pacific voyages”.

New evidence has been found for epic prehistoric voyages between the Americas and eastern Polynesia.

DNA analysis suggests there was mixing between Native Americans and Polynesians around AD 1200.

The extent of potential contacts between the regions has been a hotly contested area for decades.

In 1947, Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl made a journey by raft from South America to Polynesia to demonstrate the voyage was possible.

Until now, proponents of Native American and Polynesian interaction reasoned that some common cultural elements, such as a similar word used for a common crop, hinted that the two populations had mingled before Europeans settled in South America.

Opponents pointed to studies with differing conclusions and the fact that the two groups were separated by thousands of kilometres of open ocean.

Alexander Ioannidis from Stanford University in California and his international colleagues analysed genetic data from more than 800 living indigenous inhabitants of coastal South America and French Polynesia.

(19) VIRGIN TECH. “The tech behind Virgin Orbit’s mission to space” – a BBC video.

Virgin Orbit plans to launch its rockets from a plane. This new approach means no need for a launch site or the need to burn masses of fuel to get the rockets off the ground.

The rockets will be used to take satellites into space. A test launch in May failed but now the company is looking to make a further attempt.

BBC Click’s Marc Cieslak went to find out more about the technology behind the launches.

(20) GET READY AGAIN. Andrew Liptak told Tor.com readers today “Ernest Cline’s Ready Player Two Will Hit Bookstores in November”.

… Penguin Random House hasn’t revealed a plot for the novel, but presumably, it’ll pick up the adventures of Wade, Aech, and Art3mis now that they’re in charge of the OASIS, and will come with plenty of nerd references.

However, Liptak was no fan of Ernest Cline’s most recent book, Armada, as he reminded his Reading List audience by reposting his review titled “Ernie Cline’s Armada Fucking Sucks”.

(21) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] “Truly, Madly, Cheaply!  British B-Movies” on YouTube is a very entertaining 2008 BBC documentary presented by Matthew Sweet about the B movies produced in Britain from the 1930s to the 1970s.  These films were in all sorts of genres, and ones in the 1930s gave Merle Oberon and Sir John Mills some of their first parts, but sf and fantasy films are discussed, including Devil Girl From Mars, Trog, and Konga. Also discussed is the 1973 film Psychomania (also known as The Death Wheelers), a zombie biker movie so bad that star Nicky Henson, interviewed by Sweet, said, “I can’t believe I’m talking to you about this film nearly 40 years later.”  (Psychomania was also the final film of George Sanders.)

[Thanks to Doug Ellis, Martin Morse Wooster, Andrew Porter, Olav Rokne, Chip Hitchcock, Mike Kennedy, Michael Toman, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, David Doering, Cat Eldridge, Dann, and John Hertz for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]