(1) AGENT CUT LOOSE BY AGENCY. The kt literary agency is presumably talking about Hilary Harwell, the subject of item #1 in Pixel Scroll 6/23/24.
(2) THE ‘SPORT’ OF REVIEW BOMBING. “In Three Weeks ‘The Acolyte’ Has More Audience Reviews Than Three Seasons Of ‘The Mandalorian’” reports Forbes.
You may not like The Acolyte, but don’t look me in the eye and tell me it’s not being review bombed to hell and back.
The Disney era of Star Wars has been full of debates about quality, canon, oversaturation and contained a mix of good and bad projects. But I have not seen this kind of backlash to a project since The Last Jedi, and things have gotten just absolutely ridiculous at this point.
There is this idea that The Acolyte is not being “review bombed,” it’s just really that bad. But the data here is absurd, showing a clear tidal wave of users racing to make it the lowest user-scored product in 50 years of Star Wars history, and it’s amassed quadruple the reviews of the longest-running Star Wars series, The Clone Wars. The only thing even close is three seasons across five years of the massively-watched Mandalorian, and even then, that falls well short…
(3) GAMING AWARD CODE OF CONDUCT AND “ZIONISM”. The CRIT Awards™, which will be presented at Gen Con, foster “Creator Recognition in Table Top Role Playing Game industry”.
Our mission is to celebrate and recognize the contributions and achievements of our community in a way that is inclusive, diverse, and represents the values of our community.
By shining a light on the talent, creativity, and hard work of our community members, we aim to inspire others to reach their full potential and make a positive impact on TTRPGs and beyond!
Their six-part statement of Criteria And Code Of Conduct begins with:
1. Inclusivity and Respect
1.1. No Racism: We do not tolerate any form of racism, racial discrimination, or xenophobia. Treat all individuals with respect and fairness, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or cultural background.
1.2. No Homophobia: We embrace diversity and do not condone any homophobic behavior or discrimination against individuals based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.
1.3. No Ableism: We are committed to being accessible and accommodating to all individuals. Avoid ableist attitudes or behaviors and strive to make the CRIT Awards inclusive for people of all abilities.
1.4. No Sexism: Gender-based discrimination, stereotypes, or harassment will not be tolerated. We promote gender equality and a supportive environment for all genders.
1.5. Individuals who identify as Zionists, promote Zionist material, or engage in activities that without a doubt support Zionism are not eligible for nomination.
The fifth point triggered Larry Correia’s post “Inclusivity And Respect In The Crit Awards” [Internet Archive link], which he terms to be “anti-Semitic crap”.
…GenCon is hosting a event that explicitly bans people who think Israel has a right to exist… yet I guarantee the same kind of invertebrate squishes who condemn people like me for nothing, won’t say crap about that.
None of these grifter scumbags actually give a crap about racism. It’s always a political weapon, nothing more. I can at least respect them for their hustle. It’s their willing dupes, the cowards, the quislings, the useless one-way virtue signalers who can only speak up when their masters say it’s okay, who are too scared to go against the rigid group think of their deranged cult, who’ll let evil shit slide because they’re scared their team will get upset at them… Those people I despise.
Mostly it’s all about Larry, venting a long-held grievance. But setting him aside, does that fifth point belong in a code of conduct?
(4) SOMEONE ON THE INTERNET ACTUALLY CHANGED THEIR MIND! “Ginger” first published the error-riddled post “Can the Hugo Awards Recover Their Credibility?” on the Hidden Gems Book Blog in March. Chris Barkley recently noticed it began bombarding it with critical comments. “Ginger” now has written a new version, which appears first (not trying to deny the problematic original existed.) Here’s an excerpt from the post’s new introduction.
Hi there! Ginger here. Back in March, I wrote an article entitled “Can the Hugo Awards Recover Their Credibility?” referencing the controversy surrounding the nominations for the 2023 Hugo Awards, which were awarded to winning writers at the 2023 Worldcon in Chengdu, China.
Months later, it was pointed out that there were some factual errors in that article, such as my claim that the 2023 Woldcon was the second to be held in Chengdu (when in fact it was the second Worldcon to be held in Asia – in 2022 the Con was held in Chicago, Illinois.) Several readers, including Hugo Award winners and nominees, and members of the Worldcon committee themselves, pointed out these errors while criticizing the article itself….
…It was careless, lazy, and not representative of who I try to be as a writer. I’d lost sight of who I write these articles for – writers – and tried to “report” on a news story instead. Not only did I do a bad job of that by incorporating errors, but I feel now that the tone, subject, and theme of the article were also incongruent with the sort of article I want to write.
I imagined for a second how I’d feel if I’d been recognized for a Hugo Award following a lifetime of hard work and dedication to my craft, and then had some random ginger kid with a British accent dismiss the significance of that with a wave of their hand – and in an article that contained factual errors, no less!
So, instead of just ignoring the criticism, or trying to retroactively fix the errors to pretend that they didn’t happen, I wanted to take responsibility for the tone of my article and revisit it. After all, I’ve mentioned many times how important science fiction and fantasy was to me growing up, and how influential many Hugo Award winners have been to my writing, and my enjoyment of books as a whole. The Hugo Awards deserve better, and so do the writers who took the time to read and comment on my article….
(5) STOP THAT TRAIN! “Record Labels Sue AI Music Services Suno and Udio for Copyright” – Variety explains the lawsuit.
The Recording Industry Association of America has announced the filing of two copyright-infringement cases against the AI music services Suno and Udio based on what it describes as “the mass infringement of copyrighted sound recordings copied and exploited without permission by two multi-million-dollar music generation services.”
The cases are the latest salvo in the music industry’s battle to prevent the unlicensed use of copyrighted sound recordings to “train” generative-AI models.
The case against Suno, Inc., developer of Suno AI, was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts and the case against Uncharted Labs, Inc., developer of Udio AI, was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs in the cases are music companies that hold rights to sound recordings infringed by Suno and Udio – including Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Records….
… “The music community has embraced AI and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centered on human creativity that put artists and songwriters in charge,” said RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier. “But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work together with us. Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all.”…
(6) GOODBYE BETSY, HELLO STEFAN. Open Road Media’s Strategic advisor, science fiction and fantasy Betsy Mitchell will retire on June 28.
Stefan Dziemianowicz will join as consulting editor, horror, fantasy, & science fiction.
(7) ASTOUNDING AUTHORS AT WAR. You might like to be reminded “How Sci-Fi Writers Isaac Asimov & Robert Heinlein Contributed to the War Effort During World War II”, an article at Open Culture.
…Having once been a Navy officer, discharged due to tuberculosis, Heinlein jumped at the chance to serve his country once again. During World War II, writes John Redford at A Niche in the Library of Babel, “his most direct contribution was in discussions of how to merge data from sonar, radar, and visual sightings with his friend Cal Laning, who captained a destroyer in the Pacific and was later a rear admiral. Laning used those ideas to good effect in the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, the largest naval battle ever fought.” Asimov “was mainly involved in testing materials,” including those used to make “dye markers for airmen downed at sea. These were tubes of fluorescent chemicals that would form a big green patch on the water around the guy in his life jacket. The patch could be seen by searching aircraft.”
Asimov scholars should note that a test of those dye markers counts as one of just two occasions in his life that the aerophobic writer ever dared to fly. That may well have been the most harrowing of either his or Heinlein’s wartime experiences, they were both involved in the suitably speculative “Kamikaze Group,” which was meant to work on “invisibility, death rays, force fields, weather control” — or so Paul Malmont tells it in his novel The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown. You can read a less heightened account of Heinlein and Asimov’s war in Astounding, Alec Nevala-Lee’s history of American science fiction.
(8) MEMORIES OF DONALD SUTHERLAND. The Guardian has a set of reminiscences from those who worked with Donald Sutherland: “’I can see him now. I will see him forever’: Donald Sutherland remembered by Keira Knightley, Elliott Gould, Ralph Fiennes and more”. Francis Lawrence, director of three of The Hunger Games films, recalls:
When we were on set, he’d call me “Governor” and sometimes hold on to me as we walked along. One day he seemed sad and I asked him why. He said: “Because this is almost over.” I was like: “No! We still have a few days and it’s not even the last movie.”
That evening, he wrote me this hilarious email blaming his sadness on a handful of bad grapes he’d eaten. As soon as he got back to his trailer after our walk, he wrote, he’d blown a hole in the lavatory. Now they’d need to burn down the trailer and he hoped that didn’t disrupt the shoot. It was great fun and it was written really beautifully. Now I’ll have to frame that email.
Donald was very politically engaged and that’s why he wanted to do The Hunger Games. He loved that we were smuggling these ideas about the consequences of war into a pop cultural phenomenon. He certainly didn’t give a shit about being a celebrity. It was all about the work and craft and collaborators.
A lot of people see the character he played, President Snow, as the villainous antagonist of those films. And he is – but we needed to find out what his belief system was. Snow believed in the Hobbesian idea that everybody in this world is savage and therefore needs to be ruled with an iron fist. So Donald and I talked a lot about that, on a core thematic level.
(9) MEMORY LANE.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
June 24, 1987 – Spaceballs. Let’s reminisce upon a certain rather silly film named Spaceballs that premiered in the States thirty-seven years ago. No, make that an utter silly film called Spaceballs that everyone loved, and yes, I know I usually quote critics later but I’m breaking my format here, well because I can, to share a quote from the review by Peter Rosegg of the Honolulu Advertiser: “Spaceballs has everything you have come to look for (or dread) in a Brooks movie. Riotous sight gags, terrible puns, rude language, movie and TV jokes.”
So this is a parody of Star Wars and that meant the blessing of Lucas as it hewed way too close to source material to be considered original material. Lucas agreed with one interesting restriction: there could be no action figures as “Yours are going to look like mine”. So that meant the very cool Yogurt doll used in the merchandise scene couldn’t be made; it is now owned by Brooks.
Lucas according to Show Biz Cheat Sheet sent Brooks a note saying how much he loved the film.
The script was written by Mel Brooks, Ronny Graham and Thomas Meehan. Now Brooks I don’t have to do a deep dive into since y’all know him but the other two I’ll assume that’s not true of.
Ronny Graham was an actor with a very long of credits who Johnny Carson apparently liked a lot as he was a very frequent guest. (The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson!, thirty seasons, available on Peacock.) I suspect he got picked as a writer here because four years earlier, he had written and been in An Audience with Mel Brooks, but I don’t know, so let’s continue onward.
Let’s see if Thomas Meehan has a link too to Brooks. Yes indeed. He acted in When Things Were Rotten, the mid-Seventies series Mel Brooks created, a Robin Hood parody, and he was in To Be or Not to Be is an early Eighties war comedy Brooks produced. The screenplay was written by both Ronny Graham and Thomas Meehan, so that’s where the writing connection comes from.
The script was, I believe, a perfect parody of Star Wars. But not just that film as it cheerfully ripped into guts — sorry I couldn’t resist — of popular culture everywhere, as this delicious morsel of quote from John Hurt who makes a cameo appearance credited as himself, parodying (SPOILER ALERT) Gilbert Kane’s death in Alien as a xenomorph rips out of his stomach . He looks down at it and says “Oh, no. Not again”.
Now a great script deserves fantastic cast and this film certainly has one. The primary cast was the trio of John Candy, Rick Moranis and Bill Pullman. I’m going to say all three were perfect parodies of the characters that they were based off, a very neat trick indeed. Pullman in particular pulled off the neat job of merging aspects of Luke both Skywalker and Han Solo into one character.
The supporting cast would’ve filled the seats of a cantina on Mos Eisley, or Brooks’s parody of one as it was Dick Van Patten, George Wyner, Lorene Yarnell and Daphne Zuniga. Now that doesn’t count Brooks who played a dual role, with Dom DeLuise and Rudy De Luca who appeared here in cameo appearances.
And then we have Joan Rivers doing voice work here for Dot Matrix, Princess Vespa’s droid of honor and guardian. She is a parody of C-3PO. She does a more than merely good version female version of that character. Lorene Yarnell, a mime and dancer was the performer of the body.
I liked it though I thought Brooks was trying too hard to stuff as many references by way of jokes to every cultural thing he or possibly the other two writers could think of.
Wikipedia would have you believe the film received a lukewarm reception and, guess what, they’re wrong. A lot of reviews I read on Rotten Tomatoes were positive. They like the gags, the acting and well, that’s all they wrote up. Not one mentioned the ship, the cutimes, the helmet. Interesting indeed.
Here’s another review quote by Jay Carr of the Boston Globe: “Spaceballs has the happy air of a comic enterprise that knows it’s going right. It just keeps spritzing the gags at us, Borscht Belt-style, confidently and rightly sensing that if we don’t laugh at this one, we’ll laugh at the next. And so we do.”
Now it’s not fair to you to give the impression that critics were all positive, so here’s one of the more negative ones by Elvis Mitchell of the Detroit Free Press: “No one is that interested in Star Wars anymore. So watching Spaceballs is like picking up an old copy of Mad magazine and being puzzled about that Jack Palance parody you found so funny years ago.” Oh ouch. Really ouch.
Finally, how did it do financially? It certainly didn’t make money at first as it cost twenty-two point seven million to make and it only made thirty-eight point two million. Given that movie theaters in the States receive forty percent of each ticket sold, so that leaves nine million point three for all other expenses. (Foreign theaters do even better getting between sixty and eighty percent depending on where there are.)
Eventually with television sales, cassette and DVD sales and now streaming, it certainly made money.
I think I need to stop now before this essay gets any longer…
(10) COMICS SECTION.
- Free Range reveals a special interest the dating app left out.
- Mannequin on the Moon diagnoses a magical affliction.
- The Flying McCoys shows a convincing salesman at work.
- The Argyle Sweater hosts a party that’s not for everyone.
- Carpe Diem uses the Force at home.
- Tom Gauld has a scientific breakthrough, and a fabulous book.
(11) SHE’S BACK. The Hollywood Reporter tells how “Krysten Ritter’s Breaking Bad Death Paved Way for Orphan Black: Echoes”.
It’s now been 15 years since Krysten Ritter’s Breaking Bad arc came to a tragic, series-altering end. But that eight-episode run in season two of the beloved AMC series continues to bear fruit for the actor.
Last night, she made her return to the home network of Breaking Bad as the star of Orphan Black: Echoes — a spinoff of Tatiana Maslany’s mothership series that picks up 37 years later. Created by Anna Fishko, Ritter’s new character, Lucy, instead of being a clone, was recently printed into existence by a four-dimensional printer. And, despite her best efforts to create a well-adjusted life for herself in just two years’ time, she’s soon forced to piece together the puzzle of who she really is and why she was created.…
(12) NEW SFF ACADEMIC CONFERENCE. Speculative Fiction Across Media will hold its inaugural conference, “Queens of the Future: A Century of Women in Speculative Fiction Media” from October 17-19 in Los Angeles. Present will be Guest of Honor: Gale Ann Hurd, Special Guest: Ann Leckie, and Featured Speaker: Constance Penley. SFAM is located in Southern California and sponsored by UC Riverside, Cal State LA, and the University of Zurich.
(13) BOILER MAKERS. Collider offers its list of the “10 Best Steampunk Movies, Ranked”.
Steampunk refers to the sci-fi subgenre that imagines a society where humanity continues to rely primarily on steam power. It takes the aesthetics and gadgetry of the Victorian era but extrapolates them to their logical conclusion, producing quirky, hyper-advanced machines with a retro flavor. Steampunk movies also often play with the gender dynamics and social norms of that era, usually to subvert them.
In ninth place is last year’s unexpected award contender:
9. ‘Poor Things’ (2023)
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
“I am a changeable feast. As are all of we.” The latest addition to the canon of steampunk classics is Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things, a dark comedy about a woman (Emma Stone) brought back to life by an eccentric scientist (Willem Dafoe). Set in a fantastical Victorian era, Bella embarks on a journey of self-discovery, navigating a world filled with bizarre characters and situations. It’s essentially a raunchy, tongue-in-cheek rewrite of Frankenstein, and it’s simply terrific.
Lathimos deploys steampunk aesthetics throughout, like the fisheye lenses and stylized colors. The setting is also simultaneously retro and futuristic, with both rudimentary surgery and advanced skyships. Indeed, the technology is decidedly steampunk, particularly the machines and critters in Baxter’s laboratory. He has a device that digests his food for him and a host of pets spliced together from various animals, like a duck/dog hybrid. “Creating the animals was a challenge because we did it partly in-camera,” noted effects supervisor Simon Hughes.
(14) ORLOK UNLOCKED. Variety sets the frame: “Nosferatu Trailer: Bill Skarsgard Plays Vampire in Robert Eggers Movie”.
From Pennywise the clown to one of the most famous vampires of all time, Bill Skarsgård is transforming into Nosferatu in Robert Eggers’ upcoming reimagining of the iconic 1922 German Expressionist silent film. But horror fans will have to keep waiting to see Skarsgård’s full appearance as Count Orlok, as the movie first’s trailer from Focus Features continues to keep the vampire’s complete look a mystery. Skarsgård is barely seen in the clip outside of a few quick shots, but his character’s haunting presence looms large….
(15) RICK AND MORTY: THE ANIME. Here’s a preview of Rick and Morty: The Anime, coming to Adult Swim and Max later this year.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, 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 Andrew (not Werdna) who says this is a novelization of the Tom Baker-era episode “Scrolls of Pixeldon”).]