25 Always Check Where You’re Walking When Pixels Are Present

Posted on April 6, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) 2025 HUGO AWARD FINALISTS. The Seattle Worldcon 2025 Hugo Award Finalists were announced today.

Congratulations to all the finalists, especially the authors of two Best Related entries published by File 770, Chris Barkley and Jason Sanford for “The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion” and Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones for “Charting the Cliff: An Investigation Into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics”.

(2) HUGO AWARD BASE DESIGNER. Seattle Worldcon 2025 has announced that the Hugo Awards Base will be designed by Joy Alyssa Day, a professional glass sculpture artist. Joy, with her partner BJ, have previously designed the Hugo Awards base for LonCon in 2014. Examples of Joy’s sculptures can be found at her website, GlassSculpture. Below are photos of the 2014 Hugo Award base, and their work on the Cosmos Award given by the Planetary Society.

(3) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 132 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Almost Everything Is Not Mac” is here early, because the hosts John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty are discussing this year’s Hugo Awards finalists.

An uncorrected transcript is available here.

A black background. Text in purple reads “Octothorpe 132” while text MADE OF FIRE says “Scorching hot takes on the Hugo finalists”.

(4) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED? Scott Edelman returns with episode 22 of his Why Not Say What Happened? Podcast, “The Conundrum of Condensing Marie Severin into 1,200 Words”. And here’s where it’s available on multiple platforms.

This time around, I grow anxious over a dream discovery of long-lost original comic book artwork, realize I was wrong about a certain Alan Moore/Frank Miller memory, contemplate the difficulty of condensing the life of Marie Severin into a mere 1,200 words, share the meager remains of what was once a massive comic book collection, remember there’s an issue of Fantastic Four I need to track down to solve an early fannish mystery, rededicate myself to Marie Kondo-ing my creative life, and more.

(5) FISHING FOR A SUPERSTAR. “Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies is manifesting DC star Viola Davis being the next iteration of the villainous Master, calling her ‘one of the greatest actors in the world’” at GamesRadar+.

Given that beloved sci-fi series Doctor Who has been on air for over 60 years now, countless actors have featured either in major roles or as guest stars.

From Simon Pegg playing a villainous editor in ‘The Long Game’ to Andrew Garfield facing off against aliens in ‘Daleks in Manhattan’, the seemingly endless list also includes Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya, Oscar winner Olivia Colman, and Black Panther’s very own Letitia Wright – to name but a few.The question is then – who would showrunner Russell T Davies love to have on the series in a guest role, who hasn’t been featured before? Putting that to the man himself in a recent interview ahead of Doctor Who season 2 hitting our screens, Davies is puzzled at first admitting to GamesRadar+ that “almost everyone has been in it”. And he’s right – hell, even pop star icon Kylie Minogue even showed up for the Titanic themed episode ‘Voyage of the Damned’….

…As Davies tells us: “I simply worship Viola Davis, one of the greatest actors in the world, we should be so lucky we should have that money. She just brings quality, depth, and surprise. Every time I see her she does something surprising, which is a very Doctor Who quality. She’d get it. I say this hoping that you print it, then her agent will read it and say ‘yes, you can have Viola for absolutely no money, she will come to Cardiff for free.'” Well – here’s hoping!

(6) BOOP-OOP-A-DOOP! “’Boop!’ Arrives on Broadway, With a Surprising 100-Year Back Story” reports the New York Times. Link bypasses paywall.

Betty Boop has arrived on Broadway, nearly a century after she first boop-oop-a-dooped her way onto the big screen. “Boop! The Musical,” like the “Barbie” and “Elf” films that preceded it, imagines a transformational encounter between an anthropomorphic character and the real world (well, a fictional world full of people)….

…Jasmine Amy Rogers, the actress starring as Betty Boop on Broadway, described her as “full of joy” and “unapologetically herself.” “She is sexy, but I don’t think it is merely sex that makes her sexy,” she continued. “I would say it’s the way she carries herself, and her confidence and her unabashed self.”…

Betty, created at the height of the Jazz Age, is obviously modeled on flappers, and her relationship to music history has been a subject of debate and litigation.

In 1932, a white singer named Helen Kane sued, alleging that the “baby vamp” style of the Betty Boop character, including the “boop-oop-a-doop” phrase, was an unlawful imitation of Kane. At a widely publicized trial in 1934, Fleischer countered by pointing out that a Black singer, Esther Lee Jones, who performed as Baby Esther, had used similar scat phrases before Kane. Kane lost….

…Rogers said she hopes that over time, women of different ethnicities will portray the character, but said she is proud to play her as a Black woman, with nods to Baby Esther and the scat technique of jazz singing. “Jazz lives so deep in the heart of Betty that I feel as if we can’t really have a full discussion about her without involving the African American race,” she said…

(7) GOOD DOG. Krypto takes us home: “Superman | Sneak Peek”.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

April 6, 1937 — Billy Dee Williams, 88.

Rather obviously, Billy Dee Williams’ best-known role is as — and no I did know this was his full name — Landonis Balthazar “Lando” Calrissian III. He was introduced in The Empire Strikes Back as a longtime friend of Han Solo and the administrator of the floating Cloud City on the gas planet Bespin.

(So have I mentioned, I’ve only watched the original trilogy, and this is my favorite film of that trilogy? If anyone cares to convince me I’ve missed something by not watching the later films, go ahead.)

He is Lando in the original trilogy, as well in as the sequel, The Rise of Skywalker, thirty-six years later. The Star Wars fandom site thinks this might be the longest interval between first playing a character and later playing the same character, being a thirty-six year gap.

He returned to the role within the continuity in the animated Star Wars Rebels series, voicing the role in “Idiot’s Array” and “The Siege of Lothal” episodes. Truly great series if you haven’t seen, and available of course on Disney+.

He voiced him in two audio dramas with one being the full cat adaption of Timothy Zahn’s Dark Empire.

Now this is where it gets silly, really silly. The most times he’s been involved with the character is in the Lego ‘verse. Between 2024 with The Lego Movie to Billy Dee Williams returned to the role in the Star Wars: Summer Vacation in 2022, he has voiced Lando in eight Lego films, mostly made as television specials.

Going from hero to villain, he was Harvey Dent in Batman, and yes in The Lego Batman Movie. Really they made it. I’d like to say I remember him here but than they would admitting this film made an impression on me which it decidedly didn’t. None of the Batman Films did in the Eighties.

He’s in Mission Impossible as Hank Benton, an enforcer for a monster, in “The Miracle” episode; he’s Ferguson in Epoch: Evolution, the sequel to Epoch, which looks like quite silly, and I’m using this term deliberately, sci-film, and finally he voiced himself on Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?, the thirteenth television series in the Scooby-Doo franchise.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Brewster Rockit thinks he can explain an anomaly.
Half Full accommodates.
Mother Goose and Grimm tries a different beat.
The Argyle Sweater exposes the reason for multiple Alien sequels.
Tom Gauld reveals another little-known fact of nature.

(10) WHY ARE KIDS OBSESSED WITH THE TITANIC? “So You Think You Know a Lot About the Titanic …” in the New York Times (behind a paywall.)

Parents often look down at the whorl on the top of their children’s heads and wonder what, exactly, is going on inside. An industry of books, video games, films, merchandise and museums offers some insight: They’re probably thinking about the Titanic.

Last fall, Osiris, age 5, told his mother, Tara Smyth, that he wanted to eat the Titanic for dinner. So she prepared a platter of baked potatoes — each with four hot-dog funnels, or smokestacks — sitting on a sea of baked beans. (He found it delicious.) Since first hearing the story of the Titanic, Ozzy, as he’s known, has amassed a raft of factoids, a Titanic snow globe from the Titanic Belfast museum and many ship models at his home in Hastings, England.

About 5,500 miles away in Los Angeles, Mia and Laila, 15-year-old twins, devote hours every week to playing Escape Titanic on Roblox. They have been doing this for the last several years. Sometimes, they go down with the ship on purpose — “life is boring,” explained Mia, “and the appeal is that it’s kind of dramatic.”

Nearly 113 years after the doomed White Star Line steamship collided with an iceberg on April 14, 1912, and sank at around 2:20 a.m. the next day, it remains a source of fascination for many children. The children The New York Times spoke to did not flinch at the mortal fact at the heart of the story: That of the more than 2,200 passengers on the Titanic, more than twice as many passengers died as those who survived.

“I really like whenever it just cracked open in half and then sank and then just fell apart into the Atlantic Ocean,” said Matheson, 10, from Spring, Texas, who has loved the story since he read “I Survived the Sinking of the Titanic, 1912” at age 5. After many frustrating bath time re-enactments involving flimsy ship models, Matheson and his father, Christopher Multop, designed a Tubtastic Titanic bath toy — of which they say they now sell about 200 a month (separate floating iceberg included)….

John Zaller, the executive producer of Exhibition Hub, the company that designed “Bodies: The Exhibition” and “Titanic: An Immersive Voyage,” a traveling exhibition with interactive elements, attested that Titanic kids often knew more than their tour guides. At the Titanic experience, children can sit in a lifeboat and watch a simulation of the ship sinking, see a life-size model of the boiler room be flooded with water, and follow along with the passengers on their boarding pass, ultimately finding out whether they survived the wreck.

“The biggest takeaway for kids is, ‘I lived!’ or ‘I died!’” Mr. Zaller said. “They understand the power of that.”…

(11) APRIL FOOLISHNESS. Except it happened in March: “An AI avatar tried to argue a case before a New York court. The judges weren’t having it” at Yahoo!

It took only seconds for the judges on a New York appeals court to realize that the man addressing them from a video screen — a person about to present an argument in a lawsuit — not only had no law degree, but didn’t exist at all.

The latest bizarre chapter in the awkward arrival of artificial intelligence in the legal world unfolded March 26 under the stained-glass dome of New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division’s First Judicial Department, where a panel of judges was set to hear from Jerome Dewald, a plaintiff in an employment dispute.

“The appellant has submitted a video for his argument,” said Justice Sallie Manzanet-Daniels. “Ok. We will hear that video now.”

On the video screen appeared a smiling, youthful-looking man with a sculpted hairdo, button-down shirt and sweater.

“May it please the court,” the man began. “I come here today a humble pro se before a panel of five distinguished justices.”

“Ok, hold on,” Manzanet-Daniels said. “Is that counsel for the case?”

“I generated that. That’s not a real person,” Dewald answered.

It was, in fact, an avatar generated by artificial intelligence. The judge was not pleased.

“It would have been nice to know that when you made your application. You did not tell me that sir,” Manzanet-Daniels said before yelling across the room for the video to be shut off….

… As for Dewald’s case, it was still pending before the appeals court as of Thursday.

(12) ONCE FICTION, NOW SCIENCE. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian reports “Biologist whose innovation saved the life of British teenager wins $3m Breakthrough prize”. Harvard Professor, David Liu —

… was chosen for inventing two exceptionally precise gene editing tools, namely base editing and prime editing. Base editing was first used in a patient at Great Ormond Street in London, where it saved the life of a British teenager with leukaemia.

The young woman’s doctor apparently called the technique at the time, ‘science fiction’!

(13) ETERNAUT TRAILER. The Eternaut premieres on Netflix on April 30.

After a deadly snowfall kills millions, Juan Salvo and a group of survivors fight against a threat controlled by an invisible force. Based on the iconic graphic novel written by Héctor G. Oesterheld and illustrated by Francisco Solano López.

(14) WHY IS MARS RED? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Well, we all know the answer – an on-going process of the radiolysis of water (here UV and high energy particles from Solar wind splitting water) produces oxygen radicals that oxidise iron to hematite (a form of iron(III) that on Earth often gives some sandstones their red colour…) Well, maybe not! New research now suggests otherwise. Data from three orbiters combined with a look at Earth minerals suggests that the Martian red minerals were formed over three billion years ago when Mars was decidedly wet. Had Mars been warmer, then these minerals would have gone. ; Mars’ red colour looks like being ferrihydrite (Fe₅O₈H nH2O) that forms under decidedly wet conditions. This is yet more evidence – if more is needed – that Mars was wet billions of years ago.

The primary research, by French, US and British based astrophysicists, is Valantinas, A. et al (2025) “Detection of ferrihydrite in Martian red dust records ancient cold and wet conditions on Mars”. Nature Communications, vol. 16, 1712. Meanwhile over at DrBecky there is a 12-minute video which you can see here: “New study explains why Mars is RED”. I keep on telling people that the machines are taking over but nobody ever listens to me… In fact they rule Mars!

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

Pixel Scroll 3/27/25 I Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Pixels Were In

Posted on March 27, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) CANADIAN’S VIEW OF U.S. TARIFF THREATS. Silvia Moreno-Garcia spotlights the issues writers in Canada and the US are going to face if tariffs between these countries are implemented in “Bookish and world woes” on Patreon.

The threat of tariffs against Canada has made my travel more fraught. Stories about issues with border agents spike my anxiety. I love going to book festivals and conferences and meeting with fans. At this point, I am not cancelling the engagements I committed to last year (which include dates for a book tour that has yet to be publicized), but I am pausing any new travel to the USA. I figure I committed to stuff in 2024 and need to maintain my commitments, but that means I’m not going to make it to Worldcon in Seattle, which I was hoping to visit, as I did not book that trip last year.

Just a couple of days ago the US government blocked Canadians from accessing the front door of the Haskell Free Library in Stanstead, Quebec and Vermont. Built in 1904, this heritage site that serves both American and Canadian patrons is considered a symbol of harmony between both nations. Now, I supposed it’s a symbol of strife.

The situation for writers in both Canada and the US is going to be dire this year. As indicated in a story by Publishers Weekly, cross border tariffs will affect the price of paper. The US imported $1.82 billion of uncoated paper, which is used in books, in 2023, with 67% of that paper coming from Canada. American book manufacturers may not have enough capacity to take over the production of books that are currently printed in China. This may create increases to book costs….

…Meanwhile, in Canada, bookstores and libraries might face a catastrophic scenario if tariffs are applied to books. Many books sold in Canada, including my own, are printed and stored in the USA, then shipped to bookstores across Canada. A 25 percent tariff increase would put many bookstores out of business, and restrict library collection purchases….

… And then, of course, there is the problem of decreased collaboration and exchanges between writers of our countries. If fewer Canadians are traveling to the US because they are afraid to fly there, then we have less face to face exchanges and chances to talk to each other, share knowledge and build communities.

(2) BBC OVERSEAS UPDATE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] OK, a bit of confusion this end – not from me, the BBC Radio 4 news folk themselves are a little uncertain, as to the plans the BBC (a.k.a. ‘auntie’, Beeb and even ‘B Beeb Ceeb’) have for overseas access.

The situation seems to be this. If you are not based in the UK then at some point (they don’t know when) you will no longer have access to BBC Sounds. However, you will be able to use a BBC app to access BBC local radio, BBC Scotland, Radio 4 Plus and a few other services, but this will cost money (a subscription I guess?) You will not be able to access the BBC mainly music radio channels (Radio 1 that has pop music, Radio 2 vintage pop, Radio 3 and its classical music, and Radio 6 Music). This is because the BBC pays for music rights and does not have the right to re-sell these broadcasts. If you are a British subject, then you can download for free an app to your smartphone or lap top in the UK and then take that abroad with you when you go on holiday. I understand Brits will have a month a year allowance for free overseas listening. Nobody from outside Britain will be able to download this app. (Though I suspect if you brought your phone/laptop to the UK you could download it and then get a month of free access back in N. America. This you could consider a free trial to entice you to subscribe properly….?)

My understanding, from the BBC Radio 4 news folk, is that overseas citizens will still be able to listen to BBC Radio 4 live broadcast through the internet and also the Radio 5 Live live broadcast, Radio 4 Extra as well as the BBC World Service. However, I am not sure that you will be able to access Radio 4 programmes once they are aired (only live as they are broadcast). If this last is true then the links I occasionally provide Mike for BBC Radio 4 programmes will not work. We will have to wait and find out.

I guess much depends on how many regular File-ers will pay for the overseas citizens’ BBC app? If many do then it will be worthwhile my still providing links. But I suspect we will have to see how things pan out.

Apparently, the BBC already makes £300 million (about US$366m) from licensing content overseas. This provides added income to that the BBC gets from British subjects paying the licence fee. The licence fee is currently £169.50 (US$207) per household per year (I have just paid mine) that has all household occupants under 75 and not receiving ‘pension credit’ (a government benefit for those with minimal income). Over 75s households on pension credit get a discounted rate (might even be free, I’ve never checked)). The BBC gets roughly £4 billion (US$4.9bn) this way. In addition, there are special TV licence rates for pubs and hotels to show programmes to their patrons (in pubs this is mainly football matches). (‘Football’ by the way is original football and is what you US-folk call ‘soccer’, which I understand from physicist (don’t hold that against him) Sheldon Cooper that some in Texas consider to be a communist plot. (But I wouldn’t know about that, comrade.))

The TV licence gives British households the right to access the BBC by any means (including through the internet), and also FREEVIEW services which includes the BBC and other independent public service broadcasters. (Currently there are about 60 or so FREEVIEW TV channels and an additional score or so duplicates that broadcast with a one-hour time delay, and there are also a score or so radio channels).

I understand that arrangements for BBC World Service will remain unchanged. I am not sure what the score is for the Brit Box television streamer outside Britain or even if it is still going, but then you folk the other side of the Black Atlantic will be more clued up on that. More news when things are firmed up.

(3) BACK IN BUSINESS. Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in San Diego reopened on Sunday March 23 they told Facebook readers. They had been forced to close in February for several weeks to repair extensive flooding damage to the store.

(4) HELP IS ON THE WAY. DAW Books has released the cover for Jim C. Hines’ Slayers of Old, which will release on October 21, 2025.

Perfect for fans of cozy mysteries and Buffy, the OG vampire slayer, this humorous standalone fantasy by Jim C. Hines, serves up a fun, funny, and heartwarming story, about second chances, bookshops, and witchery at the Second Life Books and Gifts in Salem, MA where three former Chosen Ones have joined together to spend their retirement in peace and quiet. Until some of the locals start summoning ancient creatures best left where they were . . .

These ex-heroes may have thought they were done, but if they want to finish their retirement in peace, they’ll have to join together to save the world one last time.

(5) A DESTROYER NAMED HEINLEIN. [Item by Tim Kyger.] There’s a letter-writing campaign in progress asking the new Secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, to name a future DDG-51 Flight III destroyer for Robert A. Heinlein. See full details at the U.S.S. Robert A. Heinlein website.

It is the prerogative of the Secretary of the Navy to name Navy vessels. Navy policy is to name destroyers for deceased members of the Navy. We want the new Secretary of the Navy – John Phelan — to name a future DDG-51 Flight III destroyer for Robert A. Heinlein. This would happen if lots of people write asking him to name a future Arleigh Burke-class destroyer for Heinlein. The U.S.S. Robert A. Heinlein.

Phelan’s address is: The Honorable John Phelan Secretary of the Navy Room 4E686 Defense Pentagon Washington, D.C. 20301

What To Do — Write John Phelan; ask him to name a U.S. Navy vessel the U.S.S. Robert A. Heinlein. Get as many others as you can to do the same! Spread the information on the Campaign as far and as wide as you possibly can!

(6) HAPPY DAIS. “Kermit the Frog announced as UMD’s 2025 commencement speaker” reports The Diamondback.

Kermit the Frog will be the University of Maryland’s 2025 commencement speaker, according to a university news release on Wednesday.

University alum and renowned puppeteer Jim Henson founded The Muppets, a fictional musical ensemble that includes Kermit, in 1955. Henson performed Kermit from 1955 until he died in 1990.

Kermit appeared on The Muppets Show and Sesame Street and was later in Muppet movies and several television series.

“Nothing could make these feet happier than to speak at [this university],” Kermit said in the release. “I just know the class of 2025 is going to leap into the world and make it a better place.”

Henson graduated from this university in 1960 with a home economics degree, according to Wednesday’s news release. Henson also attended Northwestern High School in Hyattsville, his website said….

… “I am thrilled that our graduates and their families will experience the optimism and insight of the world-renowned Kermit the Frog at such a meaningful time in their lives,” university president Darryll Pines said in Wednesday’s news release. “Our pride in Jim Henson knows no bounds, and it is an honor to welcome Kermit the Frog to our campus.”

American puppeteer Matt Vogel has most recently performed as Kermit since 2017.

The 2025 commencement ceremony on May 21 at 6 p.m. in SECU Stadium will celebrate summer 2024, winter 2024 and spring 2025 graduates, the news release said….

Statue of Kermit the Frog and Jim Henson outside of Stamp Student Union. (Mateo Pacheco/The Diamondback)

(7) OCTOTHORPE. Octothorpe 131 is here! “We’re Performance Before We’re Interest”. John Coxon is moderating, Alison Scott is auctioning, and Liz Batty is lecturing. An uncorrected transcript of the episode is available here.

We discuss the Seattle Worldcon, the upcoming Belfast Eastercon, the BSFA Awards, and then we talk about the fan funds and handwriting. Also, John actually had a pick in advance this episode.

A birthday cake with six layers, from purple to a dark orange, and then a red 5 and five red candles on top, with fireworks overhead. The words “Octothorpe 131” are at the top.

(8) HUNGER GAMES PREQUEL SELLS MILLION-PLUS. Sunrise on the Reaping, Suzanne Collins’ new Hunger Games prequel, sold 1.5 million English-language units across all formats in its first week, with US sales exceeding 1.2 million units reports publisher Scholastic. Two-thirds of these were hardcovers.

Sunrise on the Reaping has sold twice as many copies its first week on sale domestically as The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in 2019 and three times as many copies as Mockingjay in 2010.

Elie Berger, evp, president, Scholastic Trade, said, “After nearly a year of anticipation, sales for Sunrise on the Reaping have exceeded all expectations, as has the overwhelmingly positive critical and fan response to the book across the world.”

(9) CLIVE REVILL (1930-2025). The original voice of Emperor Palpatine, actor Clive Revill, died March 11 says The Hollywood Reporter: “Clive Revill Dead: Emperor Palpatine in ‘Empire Strikes Back’ Was 94”. He also appeared in many other films and TV shows of genre interest.

Clive Revill, the New Zealand native who after being recruited to be an actor by Laurence Olivier starred on Broadway, appeared in two films for Billy Wilder and provided the original voice of the evil Emperor Palpatine in The Empire Strikes Back, has died. He was 94.

Revill died March 11 at a care facility in Sherman Oaks after a battle with dementia, his daughter, Kate Revill, told The Hollywood Reporter.

The extremely versatile Revill played cops in Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), starring Olivier, and Jack Smight’s Kaleidoscope (1966), starring Warren Beatty; not one but two characters (a Scotsman and an Arab) in Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaise (1966); and a physicist investigating strange goings-on at a haunted mansion in John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House (1973), starring Roddy McDowall.

…. For Wilder, he portrayed a man representing a Russian ballerina in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) — his character is led to believe that Holmes (Robert Stephens) and Dr. Watson (Colin Blakely) are gay — and the besieged hotel manager Carlo in Avanti! (1972), which earned him a Golden Globe nom….

…For Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back (1980), director Irvin Kershner called upon Revill — the two had worked together on the 1966 film A Fine Madness — to record a couple of menacing lines in a Wilshire Boulevard studio in Los Angeles.

They would be used in the pivotal scene in which Darth Vader (James Earl Jones) communicates with the emperor (as a holographic projection).

Revill’s voice would be replaced on the 2004 DVD release of the film by Ian McDiarmid’s, who went on to play the character in Return of the Jedi (1983) and the franchise’s three prequels — but he had his fans nonetheless.

“They come up to me, and I tell them to get close and shut their eyes,” he said in a 2015 interview. “Then I say [in the emperor’s haunting voice], ‘There is a great disturbance in the Force.’ People turn white, and one nearly fainted!”

…He could play all manner of ethnicities, and his big-screen body of work included The Double Man (1967), Fathom (1967), The Assassination Bureau (1969), A Severed Head (1970), The Black Windmill (1974), One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing (1975), Zorro: The Gay Blade (1981), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) and The Queen of Spain (2016).

Revill portrayed an Irishman in 1978 on Peter Falk’s last episode of the original Columbo series and showed up on everything from Maude, Hart to Hart, Dynasty, Remington Steele, Murder, She Wrote and Babylon 5 to Magnum, P.I., Newhart, MacGyver, Dear John, The Fall Guy and Star Trek: The Next Generation….

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Quantum Leap series (1989)

By Paul Weimer.

[Editor’s note: Spoiler warning for end of original series.]

Dr. Sam Beckett, theorizing one could time travel within their own lifetime, stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator, and vanished.

So began Quantum Leap, one of the iconic SF shows of the late 80’s and early 90’s. With excellent chemistry between Scott Bakula as Beckett and Dean Stockwell as Al, the show got to explore recent American History by mostly telling the small stories, stories of individual people, not usually famous ones, and changing the world for the better. (It seems interesting to me that Beckett has problems when he tries to change big events in history (the Lee Harvey Oswald episodes really show this in spades) but his goal is to make small changes in the timeline to make the world better. It became clear to me somewhere along the line that the timeline of the Quantum Leap show wasn’t our own, but that the changes were aligning it with our own reality. The idea of our world being the best of all possible worlds is one that had a lot more plausibility then, than it does now, I am afraid.

With a few exceptions to show his own range, this really is a masterpiece of a Bakula vehicle, playing basically the same character every week–and yet not, having to inhabit a new character every week in his ceaseless efforts. While I at first always wanted more allohistorical content (like, say, Voyagers), the show wasn’t for that. The show was about the small changes, the small moves, to make things better.

I still don’t quite understand the last episode. Was the bartender God? Could Beckett ever return home whenever he wanted? Was he always really on a mission from God? I don’t know. I suppose with a series like this, one shouldn’t even try to find definitive answers, and when you get them they are unsatisfactory at best.

I was amused, years later, during Enterprise, when Bakula, as Captain Archer, encounters an alien played by Dean Stockwell. They do NOT get along together at all. That was a neat tip of the hat to Quantum Leap.

I have not seen the two-season remake.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Brewster Rockit finds spring cleaning universal.
Close to Home reveals the true test of psi power.
Dinosaur Comics discusses Sherlockian deductions.
F Minus is about to meet the family.
Ink Pen knows a good team name is important.

(12) NASA ERASURE. “NASA Deletes Comic Book About How Women Can Be Astronauts” reports Futurism.

NASA has deleted two comic books about women astronauts from all its websites, NASA Watch reports, in what appears to be the latest victim of the Trump’s administration’s purge of “DEI” content from federal agencies.

The online comics, titled “First Woman: NASA’s Promise for Humanity,” and “First Woman: Expanding Our Universe,” tell the stories of young women training to become astronauts, in anticipation of NASA’s upcoming Artemis missions, which had been set to see the first female astronaut to set foot on the lunar surface. Oh, except that promise has been dropped, too….

(13) CENTRALIZING POWER. Joachim Boaz takes a timely look at “Science Fiction in Dialogue with The Great Depression: Frank K. Kelly’s ‘Famine on Mars’ (1934)” at Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations.

… Kelly renders a hyperviolent microcosm of Great Depression-drenched despair within an adventure story package. Its protagonists might attack each other with bizarre and futuristic physical and chemical weapons in a transparent space station but the real focus is on the fate of “million dark faces convulsed by the same agony and torn by the same unspent desire” for a drop to drink on the surface of Mars” (79).

The Lay of the Generic Landscape

Frank K. Kelly (1914-2010) lived a varied life. He was born in 1914 in Kansas City, MO. When he was sixteen, he published his first science fiction story–“The Light Bender” (1931)–in Wonder Stories (June 1931). Of his ten published short fictions between 1931-1935, the first six appeared in Hugo Gernsback’s Wonder Stories, which at the time was overseen by managing editor David Lasser (1902-1996). Due to his efforts to “bring some realism to their fiction,.” Lasser is considered a “much neglected revolutionary in science fiction” and under his tutelage the genre “started to mature.” Ashley describes Kelly as “the best exponent of this hard realism” and while his earliest stories might have lacked polish they made up for it in their bleak depiction of life in space….

… Simultaneously drawing on the rise of fascism in Europe, Kelly’s “Famine on Mars” creates an even more draconian governmental manifestation. Earth’s government, The Combine, acts as a genocidal and malevolent political entity that brainwashes its inhabitants in the name of “the brotherhood of man” (79). His use of “combine” evokes two interrelated images of monolithic and mechanical power: new 1920s harvesters pulled by tractors instead of mules and a combination of both political and economic powers. Like a new-fangled tractor-driven thresher, the Combine mechanizes society diminishing its human concerns. Kelly suggests the working class in this future receive numerical names while political elite received standard nomenclature….

(14) SOUTHERN FANDOM CONFEDERATION NEWS. Randy B. Cleary announced that the March 2025 issue of the SFC Bulletin can be downloaded here [PDF file].

(15) TIME IS NOT ON OUR SIDE. Lorna Wallace considers “Five Stories Exploring the Pitfalls of Time Travel” at Reactor.

If Marty McFly has taught us anything, it’s that messing with the past can lead to some pretty serious and harmful consequences in the future, but there are some time travel stories where the sci-fi concept is fairly harmless. In Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold (2015), for instance, the focus is on healing personal relationships, rather than causing problems with the established timeline. Then there are the many wonderful time travel romances, where the stakes are also often limited to the individual level (more “will falling in love free me from this time loop?” and less “will the entire universe collapse in on itself?”).

But let’s consider the time travel stories that explore the various ways in which time travel can go very wrong and/or be incredibly dangerous—think people being trapped in deadly situations and whole timelines being erased or irrevocably changed. Here are five such stories….

One of them is —

“Through the Flash” (2018) by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

There’s been plenty of debate over how long Phil is trapped in his time loop in Groundhog Day (1993); most estimates fall somewhere within the 10 to 40 year range. This is enough time for Phil to be driven to desperate measures, attempting to end it all via various painful methods out of despair. But imagine being just 14 years old when you became trapped in a time loop… and then imagine it going on and on forever.

That’s the situation that Ama finds herself in, but she isn’t alone in the loop, with the rest of the residents in her neighborhood also being subjected to the same strange timey-wimey phenomenon. At the end of each day a nuclear explosion—known as the Flash—wipes everyone out and the day resets. You might think that having other people to share in the hellish experience would ease the mental burden, but the characters in “Through the Flash” are there to prove you wrong. And yet, for all of the external violence and internal strife in the short story, it ends on a relatively hopeful note.

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

Pixel Scroll 3/13/25 Quick Get An Exorcist! Our Scrolls Are Being Possessed! By Pixels!

Posted on March 13, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) GROUP DROPS 2026 SMOFCON BID FOR DC. John Pomeranz, Corresponding Secretary of the Baltimore Washington Area Worldcon Association (BWAWA), yesterday announced that in response to the “current political situation” in the U.S. the group is no longer bidding to host the 2026 SMOFcon in Washington, DC.

At its meeting on March 9, the Baltimore Washington Area Worldcon Association (BWAWA) decided to end its bid to host the 2026 SMOFcon.

Since we announced the bid at SMOFcon last year, it has become clear that the current political situation in the United States would significantly reduce the willingness of fans from outside the United States to participate, even in the fully hybrid convention that we were proposing. In light of this, it seemed the best course of action was to end our bid. Unfortunately, we expect that similar problems are likely to confront any US bid for SMOFcon for the time being.

(2) SEATTLE 2025 ROOM BLOCK FILLED. The current political situation has not kept the Seattle Worldcon’s hotel room blocks from immediately filling. A newsletter sent to members today says —

We are glad to have so many of you coming to Worldcon. Unfortunately our hotel room blocks, which initially seemed large and were subsequently increased, have sold out. It is possible some of these blocks may reopen from time to time on our hotel page, but in the meantime please be aware there are 14 hotels inside of a five-block, half mile radius of the Seattle Convention Center Summit Building where rooms can be secured using a common booking service, such as Google, hotels.com, bookings.com, or kayak.com.

Many of these are just as close, or closer, than our room block hotels. It may also be possible to secure rooms at our room block hotels, but outside the room block.

(3) MEET THE SF STARS OF 1933. Next month the creators of First Fandom Experience will release “The Ultimate COSMOS: How a 1933 Serial Novel Reshaped Science Fiction”.

Why should modern readers of science fiction care about a mashed-up novel from 1933 – generally deemed terrible as a work of fiction?

Why should anyone care about a stunt pulled off by a band of early science fiction fans hoping to promote their struggling amateur publication?

The creators of The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom bring you the story of Cosmos – a remarkable serial novel from 1933, with chapters by sixteen well-known authors. Even more astonishing is the tale of how this extravagant space-opera came to be. Orchestrated by a scrappy, ambitious cadre of young fans – mostly teenagers – the creation of Cosmos is a seminal episode in the history of science fiction. The impact on the novel’s editors and authors echoed through the decades that followed.

(If you’re curious who wrote it, Fancyclopedia 3 supplies the Table of Contents here — Cosmos – The Serial Novel.)

The Ultimate COSMOS will be launched at the Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention, April 4 – 6, 2025 in Chicago. Thereafter the book will be available for purchase on the First Fandom Experience site and via print-on-demand.

(4) ABOUT THAT LIVE-ACTION REMAKE OF SNOW WHITE. “Snow White: Disney holds small-scale European premiere amid controversy” – and the BBC explains the beef.

…The movie is being released amid a debate about how the seven dwarfs are represented on screen, while Zegler has made headlines for critical comments about the original 1937 film.

The European premiere was held on Wednesday at a castle in Northern Spain, instead of a more traditional and high-profile location such as London’s Leicester Square.

Dwarfism debate

The debate around the film began making headlines in January 2022, when Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage, an actor with Dwarfism, described the decision to retell the story of “seven dwarfs living in a cave” as “backward”.

Disney has used computer-generated dwarfs in the remake and said it would “avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film”.

But this week, other actors with Dwarfism have said they would have liked the opportunity to play the roles.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, performer Choon Tan said the decision to use CGI was “absolutely absurd and discriminating in a sense”.

“There really is nothing wrong casting someone with dwarfism as a dwarf in any given opportunity,” he said.

“As long as we are treated equally and with respect, we’re usually more than happy to take on any acting roles that are suitable for us,” he added…

(5) OCTOTHORPE. John Coxon is working, Alison Scott is plugging and Liz Batty is ghosting in Episode 130 of the Octothorpe podcast, “I Am Scalison Ott”. An uncorrected transcript of the episode is available here.

The words “Octothorpe 130: Handwriting Analysis Special” appear three times in the three hosts’ handwriting.

(6) OSCARS AFFECT ON STREAMING PREFERENCES. JustWatch, the world’s largest streaming guide, has analyzed how the Academy Awards influenced streaming preferences in the U.S. Following Hollywood’s biggest night, audiences turned to their favorite platforms to catch up on the most celebrated films, leading to significant shifts in streaming rankings.

While several top contenders remained popular, the post-Oscars data reveals noticeable changes in audience preferences. New titles surged in viewership, while others saw renewed interest based on award wins, nominations, and critical buzz.

*Note: Anora was not included in our ranking as it has no current streaming offers in the US, but it was the second most popular after “The Substance”

Key Takeaways from the Post-Oscars Streaming Shift

Newcomers Enter the Rankings – The Brutalist, Wicked, I’m Still Here, and A Complete Unknown emerged in the top ten after the Oscars, reflecting fresh audience interest.
Shifts in Viewer Attention – While Dune: Part Two, Alien: Romulus, Inside Out 2, and Gladiator II ranked highly before the awards, they were replaced by new titles post-Oscars, possibly due to shifting critical conversations and winner announcements.
Sustained Success for The Substance & Conclave – These two films held their positions as the most streamed, proving their long-lasting appeal to audiences.
Surging Interest in Indie and Arthouse Films – Flow and Nosferatu gained traction after the Oscars, suggesting a growing curiosity in artistic and unconventional storytelling.

(7) PRATCHETT RETROSPECTIVE. Christopher Lockett marks the tenth anniversary of the author’s death in “The Magical Humanism of Sir Terry Pratchett”, a discussion that ranges from Pratchett’s expressed views of the right-to-die to his literal characterization of Death.

…Sir Terry’s Death is thus something close to a benevolent figure: a guide into whatever afterlife the deceased’s beliefs and conscience create for them. And his pervasive presence throughout the Discworld series produces a thematic iteration on humanity as defined by mortality—which itself produces a thematic iteration on how this relationship defines a moral and ethical humanism. For one of the great allegorical gestures of the Discworld novels is an expansive humanism that extends to cover all sentient beings….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

March 13, 1966 — Alastair Reynolds, 59.

By Lis Carey: Alastair Reynolds is an interesting writer—really good writer, with (what I find to be) an unfortunate tendency to write very dark stories. This means I’m stuck with reading his work very, very selectively.

Which gives me a sad.

Reynolds is Welsh, studied physics and astronomy, and has a PhD in astrophysics from University of St. Andrews. He graduated in 1991, and moved to the Netherlands to take a job at the European Space Agency, where he worked until 2004.

He started writing science fiction short stories while still a grad student, with his first publication in Interzone in 1990.

Reynolds says he doesn’t like writing stories that he doesn’t believe are within the realm of the possible, which is, no doubt, why the Revelation Space universe is truly hard sf, including relativistic space travel. He’ll depart from that stricture if he believes the story requires it, but those stories are not in Revelation Space.

I’m especially fond of the Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies, a subseries within the Revelation Space universe, which I otherwise avoid. Tom Dreyfus is a field prefect, part of the Panoply, a sort of let’s not call them police officers, charged with ensuring that each of the 10,000 or so habitats within the Glitter Band has reliably functioning, untampered-with democracy. As long as they are properly functioning democracies, the habitats can have any set of laws they choose to have.

A vital part of that is keeping the machines that tabulate votes working smoothly and ensuring that they’re not tampered with. But if they didn’t also have rogue AIs, charismatic preachers against Panoply, a mysterious contagion that seemingly leaps all protective measures, and bigotry against uplifted, genetically modified pig people, where would the fun be? Over the three books published (Aurora Rising, Elysium Fire, and Machine Vendetta, it’s intricate, layered, has very well-developed characters, and plots that really don’t let go.

Another Reynolds work I’ve enjoyed is Eversion, in which a sailing ship in the 1800s crashes on the coast of Norway, in the 1900s a Zeppelin runs into serious difficulty in crevasse in the Antarctic, and in the far future, a spaceship visits an alien artifact. Dr. Simon Coade is the physician on these voyages, and he knows something really weird is happening, that no one else is noticing. Yes, it’s science fiction. Again, intricate, layered, and with excellent characterization and plot.

I’ve also read Terminal World, and Century Rain. They’re dark enough that I’m not sure why I picked up the second after reading the first, or why I picked up anything else by Reynolds, because they are the dark and grim that I’m not looking for in fiction.

Possibly because he’s a very good writer, and I’m glad I did find the Prefect Dreyfus books, Eversion, and a few others. So there’s two lessons here. 1. You do not have to read fiction that is not for you. You’re not going to be taking a test on it. 2. Don’t automatically write off a write just because they don’t seem to be writing for you. If they’re good, keep an eye open for works that might be for you anyway.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Brewster Rockit has a horrible pun. (And yet not too horrible for us to link to.)
Ink Pen needs a better teacher.
Lio brings a friend to the RPG club.
The Flying McCoys takes on a super case.
Herman insists on a nicer job description.

(10) GRINCH YOU WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE. A collectible Dr. Seuss coin collection has launched with “The Grinch – Month 1”.

The titular character from Dr. Seuss’s iconic 1957 book, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is widely recognized around the world. The Grinch may be green and mean, but he’s found his way into the heart of collectors as one of the most celebrated Dr. Seuss characters. Whether or not his heart grows three sizes, we love the Grinch’s strange enterprises!  

(11) WHILE WE WERE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD. “Passing probe captures images of mysterious Mars moon” in the Guardian. Photo at the link.

A European spacecraft has taken photos of Mars’s smaller and more mysterious second moon during its flight past the planet en route to a pair of asteroids more than 110m miles (177m km) away.

The Hera probe activated a suite of instruments to capture images of the red planet and Deimos, a small and lumpy 8-mile-wide moon, which orbits Mars along with the 14-mile-wide Phobos.

The European Space Agency probe barrelled past Mars at more than 20,000mph and took shots of the lesser-seen far side of Deimos from a distance of 620 miles.

Michael Kueppers, Hera’s mission scientist, said: “These instruments have been tried out before, during Hera’s departure from Earth, but this is the first time that we have employed them on a small distant moon for which we still lack knowledge.”…

(12) PITCH MEETING. [Item by Andrew (not Werdna).] “Back to the Future Part III Pitch Meeting” — my wife notes that the description of how Doc and Clara fell in love seemed awfully familiar.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Lis Carey, Andrew (not Werdna), David Ritter, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, 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 Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 2/27/25 All These Pixels Are Yours, Except Scrollropa. Attempt No Filing There

Posted on February 27, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) NO MORE US WORLDCONS DECLARES JO WALTON. Welsh-Canadian author Jo Walton, past winner of the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Otherwise Awards, called on Bluesky yesterday for an end to US Worldcons. She did so in response to a leaked State Department policy designed to implement Trump’s executive order “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government”.

Walton says she would prefer for the LAcon V committee to abandon its Anaheim, CA location and move outside the country. Setting aside that the bid was seated by a democratic site selection process, they’ve also made legal and financial commitments to secure their 2026 facilities. Breaking those contracts would involve paying large penalties. How much? Remember that when Arisia 2019 decided the principled stance was to move the con away from two strike-affected hotels they were planning to use that triggered approximately $150,000 in cancellation fees and anticipated attrition charges. Even under the settlement negotiated by Arisia’s lawyers they still had to pay over $40K, much of the money donated by fans to Arisia’s fundraising campaign.

(2) MAY THE BEST APE WIN. [Item by Olav Rokne.] The Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog is advancing a bit of an off-board pick for the Best Dramatic Hugo, but it’s a beguilingly bonkers and beautiful little movie. And I will maintain to my last breath that any movie in which there are 100,000 chimpanzees fighting with swords is at the very least magical realism, and consequently a genre work: “The Ape Star”.

In the climactic moment of Better Man, an anthropomorphic chimpanzee named Robbie Williams takes the stage at the Knebworth Festival in front of 125,000 fans to sing his pop anthem, “Let Me Entertain You.” Nearing the end of the song, he spots in the audience dozens — then hundreds — of younger and angrier chimpanzee versions of himself. Leaping into the crowd, he begins fighting them one-by-one, with each showdown getting bloodier and more outlandish.

With the leaping chimpanzees, the soaring camera work, and the colourful cinematography, it is as if the Battle of Isengard had been set on the Planet of the Apes and directed by Speed-Racer-era Wachowskis….

(3) PEN AMERICA REPORT ON BOOK BANS. “PEN America Report Zooms In on School Year 2023–2024 Book Bans” — Publishers Weekly has a synopsis.

In a new report out today called “Cover to Cover,” PEN America provides a comprehensive analysis of the 4,128 unique titles that it determined were removed from public schools nationwide during the 2023–2024 academic year—the result of more than 10,000 instances of school book bans over that time period. With this latest look at its data from 2023–2024, PEN America builds on the findings it released last fall with a goal of better understanding the wide-reaching impacts of this educational censorship being driven by politics and coordinated, well-funded groups.

For the “Cover to Cover” report, PEN’s team of staff researchers, expert consultants, and author volunteers reviewed each banned title across 37 variables. What they learned was that certain marginalized identities are “being removed from library shelves en masse.” The reviewers found that 36% of the books banned during the 2023–2024 school year feature characters or people of color and 25% include LGBTQ+ people or characters. Of those banned titles with LGBTQ+ representation, 28% feature trans and/or genderqueer characters.

PEN’s researchers noted that in terms of identity erasure, the numbers are even more stark within the different genres and formats of the banned books. For example, they found that 73% of banned titles that fall into the graphic and illustrated titles category feature LGBTQ+ representation, people or characters of color, or discussions of race/racism. Sixty-four percent of banned picture books depict LGBTQ+ characters or stories; and 44% of banned history and biography titles feature people of color.

“When we strip library shelves of books about particular groups, we defeat the purpose of a library collection that is supposed to reflect the lives of all people,” Sabrina Baêta, senior manager for PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, said in a statement. “The damaging consequences to young people are real.”…

(4) KATHLEEN KENNEDY REPLIES. She’s not retiring. In Deadline, “Kathleen Kennedy clarifies Lucasfilm future, Star Wars plans”. After Mike Fleming, Jr. takes the media to task for what was reported, he walks Kennedy through a Q&A session which begins:

DEADLINE: We’ve read all these speculative reports that you are out, that there’s a frenzy for the next person who’s going to take over Lucasfilm. What is the truth?

KATHLEEN KENNEDY: The truth is, and I want to just say loud and clear, I am not retiring. I will never retire from movies. I will die making movies. That is the first thing that’s important to say. I am not retiring. What’s happening at Lucasfilm is I have been talking for quite some time with both Bob and Alan about what eventual succession might look like. We have an amazing bench of people here, and we have every intention of making an announcement months or a year down the road. We are in lockstep as to what that’s going to be, and I am continuing. I’m producing Mandalorian the movie right now, and I’m also producing Sean Levy’s movie, which is after that. So I’m continuing to stay at Lucasfilm and looking very thoughtfully with Bob and Alan as to who’s stepping in. So that is all underway, and we have every right to make that announcement when we want to make it….

(5) OCTOTHORPE. John Coxon thought of something, Alison Scott is educational, and Liz Batty reads contracts in Episode 129 of the Octothorpe podcast. They discuss the Belfast Eastercon, Alison shakes her cane at John and Liz, and they talk a little about WSFS things before getting into picks. Listen here: “Deep in Annex A”. An uncorrected transcript is available here.

Words read “Octothorpe 129: Can you pin Thailand on the map?” above a black-and-white world map. The backs of John, Alison and Liz’s heads are shown. John is thinking “Yup!”, Liz is thinking “100%”, and Alison is holding Thailand and thinking “???”.

(6) FILK HISTORY ZOOM. Fanac.org has posted video of the Zoom session “Margaret Middleton – A Shaper of Modern Filk (Part 1 of 2), interviewed by Edie Stern”.

Description: FANAC History Zoom: February 2025: Named to the Filk Hall of Fame in 1996, and a long time officer of the Filk Foundation, Margaret Middleton has been instrumental in the shaping of modern filk, as well as a mainstay of Arkansas fandom. She’s published multiple fanzines, including Kantele, and was a founder of the first specialized filk convention, Filkcon 1. In Part 1 of this 2 part recording, we learn about her introduction to conventions and fandom, including a delightful story of the Icon elevator that may have changed her life.

Margaret starts at the beginning, with her entry to fandom and how she started writing filk, and continues to the four bearded guys and how she came to pub her ish. A traveling fan with many convention stories, this Part 1 includes the origin story of Roc*Con in the grand fannish tradition, as well as tales of Big Mac (MidAmericon, 1976 Worldcon), and reminiscences of some of the filkers of the time (incuding the “Great Broads of the Galaxy”). The talk moves on to filkzines, specialized filk conventions, and filksing styles. It’s great fun, especially for those of us that remember filking in those days. Full Disclosure: the interviewer (me) is one of those people.

(7) HUNGER GAMES TRIBUTES WILL TREAD THE BOARDS. “’Electrifying experience’: stage version of The Hunger Games to open in new London theatre” reports the Guardian.

A new theatre in London’s Canary Wharf will open with the delayed world premiere of The Hunger Games, based on Suzanne Collins’ bestselling 2008 novel and the hit 2012 film version.

Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s adaptation of the dystopian adventure, which follows teenagers fighting to the death in a televised spectacle, will begin previews on 20 October. The purpose-built, 1,200-seat Troubadour Canary Wharf theatre is operated by the company behind the venue for the successful Starlight Express reboot in Wembley Park, where singing roller-skaters whiz among the audience. The Hunger Games has been similarly designed to place theatregoers amid the action.

Tristan Baker and Oliver Royds, joint CEOs and founders of Troubadour Theatres, said the show would offer “a transportive, electrifying experience that fully captures the scale, intensity and spectacle of Suzanne Collins’ world. Every element – from the staging to the technology – has been tailored to transport audiences right into the heart of the Games like never before.”…

(8) GENE HACKMAN (1930-2025). Actor Gene Hackman and his wife, pianist Betsy Arakawa, were discovered dead in their Santa Fe, NM home yesterday. Authorities are investigating their deaths, with Deadline’s most current information summarized here: “Gene Hackman & Wife Suffered ‘No External Trauma’, Police Say”.

…No cause of death has been determined so far for Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa, but New Mexico police say the situation “remains an open investigation.”

With affidavits, search warrants and statements calling the death of the two-time Oscar winner, his wife and their dog late Wednesday “suspicious enough in nature,” the Santa Fe Sheriff’s office is reiterating Thursday that “there were no apparent signs of foul play.”…

…“An autopsy was performed. Initial findings noted no external trauma to either individual,” they added. “Carbon monoxide and toxicology tests were requested for both individuals. The manner and cause of death has not been determined. The official results of the autopsy and toxicology reports are pending. This remains an open investigation.”

Earlier today, the local coroner’s office said it could be 4-6 weeks before a full report on the 95-year-old Hackman and the 63-year-old Arakawa is complete….

…With that, the deaths of Hackman and Arakawa become all the more complicated by what wasn’t addressed in the latest statement by the Santa Fe police. While the late Wednesday night affidavit for a search warrant on the couple’s property mentioned both bodies being on the floor of the house in different rooms and a “pill bottle being opened and pills scattered next to the female,” there was zero mention of that in this afternoon’s release…

The actor won Oscars winner for his work on 1971’s The French Connection and 1992’s Unforgiven. Hackman and classical pianist Arakawa married in 1991.

His work of genre interest included playing Lex Luthor in multiple Superman films, appearing in Young Frankenstein, Marooned, and in one episode of The Invaders TV series. He also voiced a character in the animated movie Antz.

(9) A TOAST. This is a good day for “Remembering GENE HACKMAN in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)”.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Item by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary, TekWar: TekLab (1994)

Thirty-one years ago this evening TekWar: TekLab, the third of the TekWar episodes, aired. Created by William Shatner, the novels credited initially to him were actually ghost-written by Ron Goulart. I don’t know how much input Goulart had into the TV series. TekWar would be developed for television by Stephen Roloff who earlier had done the same for Friday the 13th: The Series and Beyond Reality which I liked, also filmed in Toronto, the site of other series such as Forever Knight.

TekLab would take our detectives to London attend a ceremony at the Tower of London which marks the start of a campaign to restore the British monarchy. Before the film ends, much will happen including the appearance of Excalibur.

The primary cast was Greg Evigan as Jake Cardigan, Eugene Clark as Sid Gomez, William Shatner as Walter Bascom, Michael York as Richard Stewart, Laurie Winger as Rachael Tudor and Maurice Dean Winter as Lt. Winger.

I can’t say most critics loved this William-Shatner-created affair as they mostly did not, with who I’ll not quote by name to protect the guilty saying of the series that it was “bargain basement science fiction with a stale protagonist, a convoluted murder mystery, and a narrative that feels incomplete.” Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give this film specifically a thirty-six percent rating.

It ran two seasons for a total of 22 episodes, films as well. Supposedly in production, there was an adult animated TekWar film (whatever the hell they meant by that and I’m definitely not speculating) which was announced five years ago but I can’t find any proof of it existing.

Unlike most of the critics, I liked this series as the lead protagonist, Jake, was developed enough to be a good character in that crucial story role and even Shatner in the role he was in was likable enough to be generally not annoying, the supporting characters made sense, the stories weren’t exactly the best science-fiction ever done, but they weren’t bad either and the setting made sense for what it was.

It is streaming, well, nowhere. It aired originally on the USA network before repeating on the Sci Fi network. The USA network is owned by NBC Universal, parent company of Peacock as well, so I’m surprised it is not there at least.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Cornered goes literal.
Thatababy’s mom knows what to keep out of the garden.
Yaffle rounds up the unusual suspects.

(12) BERLITZKRIEG. This bilingual joke has to have been around for a long time but today is the first time I’ve seen it. “Yo” is the Spanish counterpart to the English pronoun “I”.

The Spanish-language version of Asimov's sci-fi classic I, Robot sounds a lot more street.
— Rob McD (@yourfunnyuncle.bsky.social) 2025-02-27T22:20:11.197Z

(13) OUR MEGAFAUNA NEIGHBORS. TL;DR version: It took longer for humans to eat the last of them than previously thought. P.S. The article says that idea is actually wrong, no matter how much I like it. “Giant Megafauna Lived Alongside Humans As Recently As 3,500 Years Ago” says IFLScience.

….For a long time, the overall consensus has been that mammalian megafauna – giant mammals that roamed the Earth in the past, including species like mammoths, giant sloths and sabertoothed tigers – went extinct at the start of the Holocene. This is our current geological epoch, which started around 11,700 years ago, at the end of the last major glacial age.

However, some recent studies have obtained fossil evidence that challenges this consensus. In particular, the discovery that woolly mammoths were still alive 4,000 years ago helped undermine this idea. Now researchers have found other megafauna specimens, including giant sloths and camel-like animals, that survived in South America up to around 3,500 years ago.

This evidence raises questions about what really led to the planet’s most recent large animal extinction while also showing that it was not a homogenous event….

(14) NEWLYWED WALT. Animation Magazine alerts us that “Rare Early Disney Photos Go to Auction at Van Eaton Galleries”. And some of the photos can be viewed at the link.

(15) THE TECHNICAL TERM IS…. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] And you want to know why AI shouldn’t replace people? “’Emergent Misalignment’ in LLMs” at Schneier on Security.

Interesting research: “Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs“:

“Abstract: We present a surprising result regarding LLMs and alignment. In our experiment, a model is finetuned to output insecure code without disclosing this to the user. The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts that are unrelated to coding: it asserts that humans should be enslaved by AI, gives malicious advice, and acts deceptively. Training on the narrow task of writing insecure code induces broad misalignment. We call this emergent misalignment. This effect is observed in a range of models but is strongest in GPT-4o and Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct. Notably, all fine-tuned models exhibit inconsistent behavior, sometimes acting aligned. Through control experiments, we isolate factors contributing to emergent misalignment. Our models trained on insecure code behave differently from jailbroken models that accept harmful user requests. Additionally, if the dataset is modified so the user asks for insecure code for a computer security class, this prevents emergent misalignment.

“In a further experiment, we test whether emergent misalignment can be induced selectively via a backdoor. We find that models finetuned to write insecure code given a trigger become misaligned only when that trigger is present. So the misalignment is hidden without knowledge of the trigger.

“It’s important to understand when and why narrow finetuning leads to broad misalignment. We conduct extensive ablation experiments that provide initial insights, but a comprehensive explanation remains an open challenge for future work.”

The emergent properties of LLMs are so, so weird.

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Olav Rokne, John Coxon, 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 Olav Rokne.]

Pixel Scroll 1/30/25 Scrolling Considered As A Helix Of Semi-Precious Pixels

Posted on January 30, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) GAIMAN WILL RECEIVE NO PROCEEDS FROM GOOD OMEN GRAPHIC NOVEL KICKSTARTER. Rhianna Pratchett today pointed to a Kickstarter update from the Pratchett estate about the Good Omens graphic novel.

“Good Omens graphic novel update – January 2025”

[We] had locked refunds of the Good Omens graphic novel in mid-November due to where we were in the production process, however will no longer maintain this freeze in light of new articles and allegations. While we cannot speak further on the subject at present, we have chosen to reopen a short refund window for those who would no longer like to support the graphic novel, until Friday 7th February 2025. Please contact us via email or Kickstarter message.

It has also been agreed that Neil Gaiman will not receive any proceeds from the graphic novel Kickstarter. Given the project management, production and all communication has always been under the jurisdiction of the Estate on behalf of Good Omens at large, this will not fundamentally change the project itself, however we can confirm the Kickstarter and PledgeManager will now fully be an entity run by, and financially connected to, the Terry Pratchett Estate only.

A number of tiers also come with author merchandise and books; we have been working on a system in the back end to remove or swap out particular rewards from tiers, should you wish to continue with the project, but not receive these specific items. In this instance, please contact us via Kickstarter or the email listed on the project FAQ and we will endeavour to alter your orders, to swap items in of an equivalent value, where we are able.

Given the point in the production process, we cannot extend refunds beyond this new deadline, but will honour requests in this window – the only exceptions will be tiers where rewards have already been actioned, such as cameos, and custom or rare items on higher level tiers. In the instance of cameos, should backers wish to have their name removed from the postcard (Archangel) or not receive their cameo print (God), we are able to alter this, but not the cameo itself.

If you do get in touch, we aim to get back within a few days; if you have not heard back within a week, please chase up your query.

Good Omens in all its forms is very special to us, and we know that for many fans the landscape has shifted. We appreciate the sensitivity of this issue, and will be working through all queries in the coming weeks.

We will continue on our journey with Crowley and Aziraphale, and all of our surrounding plans, in some form. Thank you for being part of the journey with us.

The Terry Pratchett Estate (Good Omens HQ)

David Tennant’s Facebook page also posted a truncated version of the statement, and notes that the Kickstarter has raised £2,419,973 to date. Colleen Doran is doing the artwork for this book, as File 770 has reported from time to time.

(2) DOES GAIMAN STILL HAVE REPS? Deadline has been trying to get statements from Neil Gaiman’s various agents about whether they still represent him. No statements have been provided. However, Deadline reported today his name has disappeared from the public client list of one of them: “Neil Gaiman Dropped By Agent Casarotto Ramsay After Misconduct Claims”.

Neil Gaiman has been removed from UK agent Casarotto Ramsay & Associates’ client list after the Good Omens writer has faced a string of sexual misconduct allegations over the past six months.

Gaiman’s profile was quietly scrubbed from Casarotto Ramsay & Associates’ website, meaning he no longer appears on pages listing its film, TV, and theatre clients.

Internet archives show Gaiman’s profile, which included trailers for his screen work, was live on the agency’s website as recently as last October, months after the initial allegations were published. The author denies wrongdoing.

Casarotto Ramsay & Associates failed to respond to repeated requests for comment about whether it continues to rep Gaiman. Gaiman has been contacted for comment. His long-time literary agent is Writers House’s Merrilee Heifetz, who has been approached for comment. Gaiman has also been repped by CAA, who have been contacted….

(3) FILK HISTORY ZOOM. The next FANAC Fan History Zoom on February 22 will be about filk fandom. Edie Stern will interview Margaret Middleton. To attend, contact fanac@fanac.org.

(4) DOES YOUR BOOK HAVE A BELLY BUTTON? “Books written by humans are getting their own certification” says The Verge. Self-certification. Because no one would ever lie about this, right?

The Authors Guild — one of the largest associations of writers in the US — has launched a new project that allows authors to certify that their book was written by a human, and not generated by artificial intelligence.

The Guild says its “Human Authored” certification aims to make it easier for writers to “distinguish their work in increasingly AI-saturated markets,” and that readers have a right to know who (or what) created the books they read. Human Authored certifications will be listed in a public database that anyone can access. The project was first announced back in October in response to a deluge of AI-generated books flooding online marketplaces like Amazon and its Kindle ebook platform.

Certification is currently restricted to Authors Guild members and books penned by a single writer, but will expand “in the future” to include books by non-Guild members and multiple authors. Books and other works must be almost entirely written by humans to qualify for a Human Authored mark, with minor exceptions to accommodate things like AI-powered grammar and spell-check applications….

(5) AI NAY NAY? Steve J. Wright discusses in fascinating detail the brain, intelligence, why the very different operations of a computer do not resemble either of the former, and his skepticism about artificial intelligence in “The Little Man Who Isn’t There”.

…So, Artificial Intelligence, if it is achievable at all with current technology (and I suspect the technology which might make it achievable is some way in the future) will necessarily operate in a way which is radically, fundamentally different from human intelligence. So different that communicating with it, or even recognizing that it’s there, will present significant technological challenges. So why are we so happy – well, why are some of us so happy – to believe that Artificial Intelligence is with us here and now, ready to correct our grammar and do our homework for us?

Wright’s article includes a rather amusing callback to Sixties chatbot ELIZA.

“Ah,” says the knowledgeable reader, “he’s going to talk about ELIZA.” Yes, I am absolutely going to talk about ELIZA, because it is such a very good example. Created by Joseph Weizenbaum between 1964 and 1967, ELIZA is credited as the first chatbot; it was designed to emulate a psychotherapist, using a fairly limited set of stock responses which identified key words in its interlocutor’s messages and fitted them into templates for replies. And it had people convinced that it was a real person, that no mere machine could possibly understand them as well as ELIZA did. Now look at those dates again, and consider just how much technical progress there has been on the hardware end of things since then. ELIZA is not a sophisticated program. If you are the sort of weirdo who has a “smart” home, you probably have light bulbs with enough capacity to run ELIZA. Your fridge probably has enough computing power to run ELIZA and perform its normal fridgely duties (maintaining optimum temperatures and levels of energy usage, keeping an inventory of its contents and their expiry dates, and snitching on you to Amazon about your chocolate ice cream habit.)

So, since a rinky-dink little gizmo like ELIZA can successfully con people into believing it’s human, what chance do our poor gullible brains stand against modern technology?

(6) THESE THINGS MUST BE HANDLED DELICATELY. “Sale of Wicked Witch’s hat from the ‘The Wizard of Oz’ sparks fraud lawsuit” reports the LA Times. (Article republished on MSN, so not behind a paywall). There are three known existing Wicked Witch hats used in filming of The Wizard of Oz. Schneider acquired one in 2019 for $100,000, from Profiles in History, a movie memorabilia house that Heritage acquired two years later. He later consigned it to Heritage for a big Hollywood memorabilia auction. The owner of another Witch’s hat, Michael Shaw, also decided to sell his. And in addition, Shaw was consigning an authentic pair of the ruby slippers. Here’s the rest of the story….

…In July 2023, Schneider agreed to consign his hat to Heritage and the item was given a value of $200,000 for insurance purposes, according to his lawsuit.

However, Heritage pulled Schneider’s hat from an auction in which another Wicked Witch’s hat owned by Michael Shaw…

In August, [Heritage Auctions senior director Brian] Chanes called Schneider and offered him a quick private sale of the hat for $250,000. Instead of taking it to auction, the hat worn by actor Margaret Hamilton would be sold directly to Shaw, who had expressed interest. The price was “more than any Hat had previously sold for,” Chanes told him, according to the complaint.

A few months later, Heritage began promoting a December auction of movie memorabilia that included Shaw’s three Oz pieces….

…According to the suit, Heritage launched a promotional tour of Shaw’s items, holding events in New York, London and Tokyo.

Shaw is not a defendant in the lawsuit against Heritage.

During the auction held on Dec. 7, the ruby slippers sold for a record $32.5 million and the hat hammered down for $2.93 million, which was nearly 12 times the amount Schneider received for his hat. Like other houses, Heritage receives a commission on the items sold at auction.

“It’s very unusual to have an item plucked out of an auction and get an offer like that from the auctioneer,” Schneider said. He says the house violated its fiduciary obligations to him, having failed to disclose the level of market interest in the hat or its planned roadshow for the auction.

Schneider alleges that Heritage struck the deal with him as a “device for HERITAGE or its executives to get ownership at a deep discount while also favoring Mr. S by making his Hat the only one in the auction,” states the suit….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 30, 1924 — Lloyd Alexander. (Died 2007.)

By Paul Weimer: In the mid 1980’s, Disney came out with The Black Cauldron, an animated fantasy movie. This was the “wilderness years” of Disney before the boom that started with The Little Mermaid. (The Black Cauldron came out the same year as Return to Oz) It looked interesting, and I was now at a point where I could go and see such movies on my own. Sure, it was an animated movie probably aimed at a younger audience than who I probably was, but I was game. (The fact that it was rated PG drew my attention and convinced me to see it). I enjoyed it deeply even if apparently few others did at the time. (Again, see above, Wilderness Years)

So it goes.

Naturally, the movie led me to the Lloyd Alexander book. I didn’t realize at the time that The Black Cauldron is actually the second in the Prydain series, but having seen the movie loosely based on it, I wasn’t lost at the time and when I finally did read The Book of Three (the first in the series) sometime thereafter, I saw how sneakily the filmmakers had been inspired by that book for helping to establish Taran, as well as The Black Cauldron itself. So I could and did happily read the book and the sequels, and so being hooked on Alexander’s work thereby.

I had only the smallest amount of knowledge of Welsh mythology at the time I read the Pyrdain series, the mythology books I had read to that point were focused on the Greco-roman and the Norse. The tales of the Mabinogion that Alexander’s series was based on did later, some years on, inspire me to investigate and learn about Welsh mythology in much more detail. So I have Alexander to thank for that.

And in general, Alexander is a novelist who I am glad I did not “miss”. There is a swath of authors I managed to miss because I felt myself too old by the time I found them (Susan Cooper comes to mind, although I did read her a few years ago). Alexander is in that class, while writing for a younger audience, his strong use of theme, decently three-dimensional female characters (although still cross about Eilonwy’s losing her magical powers) and the sheer verve and quality of the writing and the language.

That quality of writing extended to all of the other work I’ve read of him, from the meditation on war that is The Kestrel, to the Vesper Holly adventure archaeology series. He’s definitely an excellent gateway to much further reading and I think that he still stands up as someone to introduce a young reader to fantasy.

My only regret is that I didn’t discover his work sooner.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Peanuts from 1958 – could this be futurism?
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal shows the origin of paying for stories.

(9) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 127 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Hello Buoys”, John Coxon is incoherent, Alison Scott is excited, and Liz Batty is romantic. An uncorrected transcript of this episode is available here.

Episode 127 is here. We discuss the latest juicy gossip from the Belfast Eastercon, we hear from Claire Brialey of Croydon, and we pick things that aren’t games!

Alt text: A flowchart entitled “How to meet John, Alison and/or Liz at Eastercon”. The boxes culminate in “console yourself with Octothorpe 127”, and the various options are listed below, but the original file is linked in the show notes in case that’s more helpful to the partially sighted. How to meet John, Alison and/or Liz at Eastercon Are you going to Reconnect? Of course!/Not sure Oh go on it will be a laugh Oh all right then/No... Are they in the bar? Yes! I can't see them Are you quite sure? Check again Oh wait... there they are No sign Is there another bar? Yes! Nope Are they on programme? Yes! No Wait till the moderator asks for questions But it's Octothorpe Live! Is your joke very funny? Obviously! Excellent! Good to know. COME AND SAY HELLO until then... Are they asleep or on the loo? No, they look chill Er, yes? Oh, that's a shame Console yourself with Octothorpe 127

(10) THE NEXT TENTACLE. “’Squid Game’ Season 3 Release Date Set at Netflix”. Variety tells what it is.

“Squid Game” Season 3 will premiere June 27, following the major cliffhanger finale that Season 2 ended on.

“Squid Game” Season 2, which consisted of seven episodes, debuted Dec. 26. The installment was filmed back-to-back with Season 3, assuring there would be a much shorter wait between seasons than there was for Season 2 and Season 1 (which debuted in 2021, and was not originally written as an ongoing series).

In Season 2, Gi-hun, aka Player 456 (played by Lee Jung-jae), returns to the sadistic competition three years after winning 45.6 billion in South Korean won as the sole survivor of the event, in order to now put an end to Squid Game and save the lives of the players around him….

(11) SUPER ADVERTISING. The commercials aired during the Super Bowl have a reputation for creativity and entertainment. If you’re likely to watch them, whether during the broadcast or later on YouTube, here’s Deadline’s scouting report of the movie promos that will be part of the lineup, most of them of genre interest: “Super Bowl Movie Trailers 2025: What to Expect”.

…This year, count on the following to air either pre, during or post-game:

Disney, the No. 1 studio of last year with more than $2.2 billion in domestic box office, has always had a presence at the Super Bowl. It won’t be a surprise if it shows off wares for upcoming pics Snow White (March 21), Lilo & Stich (May 23) and Pixar’s Elio (June 13). We understand they’ll only be showing off two out of three of their upcoming Marvel Studios movies, a batch that includes the upcoming Captain America: Brave New World (February 14), summer kickoff Thunderbolts* (May 2) and Fantastic Four: The First Steps (July 25)….

Universal, the No. 2 studio with $1.88B domestic in 2024, will be wowing with trailers for Dean DeBlois’ live-action take of his How to Train Your Dragon (June 13) and the Scarlett Johansson-Mahershala Ali-Jonathan Bailey starring Jurassic World Rebirth (July 2) from Gareth Edwards. Don’t be surprised if you catch a Blumhouse title, like a M3GAN 2.0 (June 27). You’ll remember how Uni previously stunted the first installment with dancing M3GAN dolls on talks shows and popular landmarks like the Empire State Building.

Paramount is no stranger to the Super Bowl, even when its sister CBS network and Paramount+ isn’t broadcasting it (Fox has the game this year). This year, the buzz is that Par will air spots for the Jack Quaid comedy thriller Novocaine (March 14), the Smurfs animated musical movie starring Rihanna (July 18) and Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning. …

Nothing to do with genre, however, you can already watch the “Hellmanns Super Bowl Commercial 2025” which reunites the When Harry Met Sally stars Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in an update of their deli scene.

(12) ALL’S FAIR. The answer to the Guardian’s question is microcollectibles, apparently: “Evil toilets, terror food and billionaire Squishmallows: my eye-popping day at the UK’s giant toy fair”.

A chubby baby dinosaur waddles down a pink carpeted aisle, narrowly avoiding an army of Care Bears tramping in the other direction. Nearby, a sales rep shows off a collection of insect-breeding habitats, just as Pikachu scampers around the corner, bumping into her neat display. Across the hall, inventors show off their fiendish new board games, magicians demonstrate glowing plastic thumbs, while others grapple with instructions by a table covered with thousands of tiny plastic bricks.

Welcome to the Toy Fair, in London’s Kensington Olympia, the UK’s biggest bonanza of toys, games and hobbies, where the world’s manufacturers converge to peddle their latest wares, as retailers scour the endless stands for the hottest new trends. It’s a mind-boggling place of plushies and puzzles, remote-control cars and mud kitchens, and more plastic than you would find at a petrochemical convention. Here, the £3.4bn business of fun is taken very seriously indeed, with NDAs galore and not a child in sight. So where is the toy world heading in 2025?…

Fans of the YouTube phenomenon, Skibidi Toilet, can now buy the official toy line at Walmart, Target and Amazon. The line includes the Mystery Surprise Toilet, Collector Figures, Mystery Plush and more.

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Lise Andreasen, Joe Siclari, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Juli Marr, Meredith, JJ, 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 Brian Jones.]

Pixel Scroll 1/16/25 Let’s Read Our TBR Piles, And Travel Mental Gigamiles

Posted on January 16, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) IS ANYONE STILL PUBLISHING GAIMAN? Publishers Weekly tries to track down whether Neil Gaiman has any works scheduled to come out — “How Neil Gaiman’s Publishers Have Responded to the Sexual Misconduct Allegations” – and discovers it is much easier to get answers from those that definitely haven’t any.

…Gaiman’s literary agent, Merrilee Heifetz at Writers House, did not respond to requests for comment by press time, nor did his public speaking agent, Steven Barclay of the eponymous agency, leaving it unclear as to whether either has dropped him as a client. On Gaiman’s website, a page called “Contacting Neil,” which had listed both agents alongside his Hollywood representation, is now down, although the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine indicates that it was live as recently as last month.

At present, it is unclear if Gaiman, the author of nearly 50 books that have sold more than 50 million combined copies worldwide, has any new forthcoming titles currently under contract, although some publishers have confirmed that if he does, it is not with them. On the trade book side, a spokesperson from HarperCollins, Gaiman’s primary publisher in the United States, told PW that it “does not have any new books by Neil Gaiman scheduled.”

A spokesperson for Norton, which released Gaiman’s 2018 book on Norse mythology as well as an illustrated version last year, confirmed to PW that “Norton will not have projects with the author going forward.”…

In the comics world, a representative from Dark Horse Comics, which has published a number of comics and graphic novel titles by Gaiman as well as the Neil Gaiman Library series, said that the publisher is currently working on a statement, but was unable to comment further. Marvel Comics told the New York Times that it has no books in the works with Gaiman. DC Comics, the publisher of Gaiman’s Sandman series and many of his other comics titles, did not respond to requests for comment; DC had previously announced plans to reprint a classic work by Gaiman in a new format in September….

The article also presents a roundup of recent terse social media remarks about Gaiman by Jeff VandeMeer, John Scalzi, Gail Simone, Guy Gavriel Kay, and Scott McCloud.

(2) FINDING THE ANSWER. Kameron Hurley analyzes “Why Great Art Connects Us Across Time and Space (Even with Monsters)”.

…When people burst into tears when they meet me at an event, it’s not because I write about giant bugs and exploding heads. Those things are cool, yes! But they react that way because they connected EMOTIONALLY with something I wrote. It’s that feeling like “OMG I’m not alone. I feel that TOO!!”

Art is, at its best, a way for humans to connect. We’re holding out a hand saying “I felt this way. Have you ever felt this way too?” And no, not everyone has, and thus those are not people who are going to be yours fans. But many HAVE. And if you’ve done it right, you connect with that person across time and space – and for one glorious moment, we feel less alone.

THAT is great fucking art. THAT is magic. It’s a magic every great storyteller has; heroes and villains alike. Perhaps that’s why we hate it so much when we’ve connected with art made by people who have done monstrous things. It makes us ask if we, too, are monsters.

I know the answer to that.

I connect emotionally with fictional monsters (and the work of people who’ve done monstrous things) all the time. We all do. We are human. We share the multitude of all human emotions and possible actions with the best and worst people in the world. That’s terrifying.

This is why the STORIES we tell ourselves are so important. I changed a lot of who I was by asking myself how the person I wanted to be would act in any given situation. FEELING a monstrous impulse isn’t what makes us monsters. It’s taking the ACTIONS of a monster. It’s being aware enough to choose….

(3) BENEATH THE JERSEY SKIES. “Steven Spielberg’s new UFO movie with Emily Blunt is filming in N.J., casting locals.” – NJ.com has the story. Well, isn’t that a coincidence.

…The filming will take place in March — not long off from Jersey’s brush with drone and/or plane-related, supposedly “unidentified” flying objects at the end of 2024.

The movie, which is as yet untitled — but reportedly (tentatively) titled “The Dish” — also stars Emmy winner Josh O’Connor (”The Crown,” “Challengers,” “La Chimera”), Oscar nominee Colman Domingo (”Rustin,” “Sing Sing”), Oscar winner Colin Firth (”The King’s Speech,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary”) and Eve Hewson (”Bad Sisters”)….

(4) FANTASY MAGAZINE SUBMISSION DATES. Correcting the information released yesterday, editor Arley Sorg says the revived Fantasy Magazine plans to open to submissions January 22-29, and specifically, Jan 22-25 BIPOC writers only, Jan 26-29 general submissions. See submission guidelines at the link.

(5) HOWARD ANDREW JONES DIES. Author and editor Howard Andrew Jones died January 16 of cancer. Known for The Chronicles of Hanuvar series, The Chronicles of Sword and Sand series and The Ring-Sworn trilogy, he has also written Pathfinder Tales, tie-in fiction novels in the world of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. He is the editor of Tales from the Magician’s Skull and has served as a Managing Editor at Black Gate since 2004.

In August 2024 he announced that he has been diagnosed with brain cancer––multifocal glioblastoma – and that, “People I trust––my doctors and my family––inform me it will be fatal, and we are deciding now on a course of action to make the most of the time I have left.”

(6) DAVID LYNCH (1946-2024). Filmmaker David Lynch has died at the age of 78. Deadline says the family did not release the date of death. Never forget – Frank Herbert liked his film Dune.

…The four-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker [was] behind Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead, Wild at Heart, The Elephant Man and others [and] also created the ABC drama series Twin Peaks…

…In 2020, he received an Honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement at the Governors Awards….

…Lynch’s career took off during the 1980s. He followed up the success of Elephant Man with Dune, the 1984 take on Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel. While Dune was noted for being a financial bomb at the time, it wound up being the highest-grossing film on the auteur’s résumé with $31.5M worldwide….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 16, 1948 — John Carpenter, 77.

By Paul Weimer: Where does one begin with the large and momentous oeuvre of John Carpenter? With the many-sequeled and rebooted but never equaled Halloween, perhaps? To start there means that we skip the strange and wondrously weird Dark Star. And it skips the gritty Assault on Precinct 13. Do we instead focus on The Thing, one of the best SF/horror movies ever to be made? To do that would throw shade on The Fog, the amazing ghostly revenge tale in a Northern California town.

Maybe you should start with Escape from New York, with a vision of NYC after its transformation into a prison that has been imitated (even by Carpenter himself!) but has never, ever been surpassed. It IS the movie that helped cement the career of Kurt Russell, after all. But to work there misses the soft wondrous Starman, an amazingly touching movie.

Or maybe you should start with They Live, perhaps the best indictment of late 80’s trash capitalism that suddenly feels even more relevant, in this year of our lord 2025. Roddy Piper’s character doesn’t have a name, but he isn’t a faceless number, either. And it has one of the longest fights on screen. It’s a bit pointless fight, but it is fun that Piper got to do a whole wrestling match in a John Carpenter film. But to mention They Live might mean you overlook the absolutely bonkers and fun Big Trouble in Little China.

My favorites in the Carpenter oeuvre are none of these, although I love all the above movies. My second favorite John Carpenter movie has to be Prince of Darkness, where an unlikely group of heroes led by Victor Wong (from Big Trouble in Little China) and Donald Pleasance (from Escape from New York) team up to try to stop the literal Devil, anti-God, from coming across from another dimension into our own. It’s a bottle of a movie set in an inescapable church, got dreams from the future, and is nicely tense. The other one I like even more and is one of my heart movies, is In the Mouth of Madness. In the Mouth of Madness is the best cosmic horror movie, ever, in my opinion, as horror writer Sutter Cane writes extra dimensional monsters into our reality, with Jurassic Park’s Sam Neill as John Trent, insurance investigator, is in search of a book he really, really should not read. In 2018, when I found out that the striking church seen in the film was just outside Toronto, I had to go and visit it while on a vacation in Canada.

And did you know that Carpenter scored a lot of his films? His father was a music teacher, and his love of music led him to really be patient and exacting about the music. Be it Escape from New York, Halloween, Prince of Darkness, or many other of his works, that soundtrack with the heavy use of synthesizers that you are hearing are due to his own musical creation and scoring. His movies have memorable visuals…and sound as well.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 16, 1995 — Star Trek: Voyager premieres

“Coffee – the finest organic suspension ever devised. It’s got me through the worst of the last three years. I beat the Borg with it.” — Captain Kathryn Janeway, Star Trek: Voyager’s “Hunters”.

Need I say that I liked Janeway a lot? She was a much more rounded, more believable individual than Kirk ever was. Inthe pantheon of Captains, I’d rank her just behind Picard as a character.

So on this evening thirty years ago on UPN, Star Trek: Voyager premiered. The fourth spinoff from the original series after the animated series, the Next Generation and Deep Space Nine which had my favorite Captain in Benjamin Sisko, it featured the first female commander in the form of Captain Kathryn Janeway, played by Kate Mulgrew.

(She is seen again commanding the USS Dauntless in the animated Prodigy series, searching for the missing USS Protostar which was being commanded by Captain Chakotay at the time of its disappearance. It’s now streaming on Netflix.)

It was created by Rick Berman, Michael Piller, and Jeri Taylor. Berman served as head executive producer, assisted by a series of executive proucers — Piller, Taylor, Brannon Braga and Kenneth Biller. Of those, Braga oil the still the most active with his recent work on the cancelled Orville.

It ran for seven seasons and one hundred seventy-two episodes. Four episodes, “Caretaker”, “Dark Frontier”, “Flesh and Blood” and “Endgame” originally aired as ninety-minute episodes.

Of all the Trek series, and not at all surprisingly, Voyager gets the highest Bechdel test rating.

Oh, and that quote I start this piece with in 2015, was tweeted by astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti International Space Station when they were having a coffee delivery. She was wearing a Trek uniform when she did so as you can see in the image below.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Bizarro continues its vampire pun series.
Carpe Diem thinks they’re wasting the Bat-bandwidth.
Strange Brew solves an ancient mystery.

(10) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 126 of the Octothorpe podcast, “I’ve Read Some Novels”, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty read out your letters of comment, and then discuss all the things from 2024 that they think are worth a look as we go into award nomination season (and a couple of things they would probably avoid). Then they do picks, in case there weren’t enough opinions.

Get the uncorrected transcript at the link.

A picture of a Belgian waffle that looks like an octothorpe, on a white background, with the words “Octothorpe 126” above and “now with added waffle” below.

(11) DON’T THAT BEAT ALL. “A Frankenstein Filing Error: It’s Alive!” – the New York Times confesses.

…When he died in February 1969, The New York Times wrote of Karloff’s career in an article that featured a photograph of an actor, in costume as the monster.

One problem: The man in the makeup, with the bolts in his neck, wasn’t Karloff.

The image — a publicity photo, copyrighted by Universal Pictures — depicted the actor Glenn Strange, who had succeeded Karloff in the role, playing the monster in subsequent films, including “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” which was released in 1948.

At least one astute reader had spotted the mistake and sent a letter to The Times.

The photograph was seemingly mislabeled around 1948, the copyrighted date on the image, and incorrectly placed in a folder for Karloff, one of the millions of files stored in the Morgue, The Times’s subterranean clippings library. (The Times issued a correction, a copy of which is pasted on the back of the photo in the Morgue.)

Almost 20 years after the first misprinting, in March 1987, the same photo, though cropped tighter and tilted slightly, was used to accompany a letter to the editor that referenced Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” Again, the caption incorrectly identified Strange as Karloff….

…. Dr. Jane Bishop of Brooklyn, the same reader who caught the mistake in 1969, wrote to The Times and explained that she had lodged an identical complaint 18 years earlier.…

Some of you who read the File 770 birthdays must feel the same way…

(12) JUSTWATCH REPORT: SVOD MARKET SHARES (2024). As 2024 has come to an end, JustWatch has released its latest data report on market shares in the US. As usual, the report is based on the 17.2 million JustWatch users in the US selecting their streaming services, clicking out to streaming offers and marking titles as seen.

SVOD market shares in Q4 2024: In the final quarter of 2024, Prime Video led provider growth, taking 22% of the overall market. Netflix, its largest competitor, trailed Prime by only 1%. Hulu, Disney+, and Max make up 36% of the streaming market while Paramount+ and AppleTV+ both stayed below 10%.

Market share development in 2024: In Q4 2024, Prime Video and Netflix continued to lead the U.S. streaming market, each holding over 20% of the overall market, with Netflix slightly narrowing the gap between them. Hulu saw steady growth, challenging Max for third place, while Disney+ struggled to gain traction. Smaller platforms in the “Other” category experienced a noticeable rise, reflecting growing interest in alternative services.

(13) NEW GLENN LAUNCH TO ORBIT SUCCESSFUL. “Blue Origin reaches orbit on first flight of its titanic New Glenn rocket” reports Ars Technica.

Early on Thursday morning, a Saturn V-sized rocket ignited its seven main engines, a prelude to lifting off from Earth.

But then, the New Glenn rocket didn’t move.

And still, the engines produced their blue flame, furiously burning away methane.

The thrust-to-weight ratio of the rocket must have been in the vicinity of 1.0 to 1.2, so the booster had to burn a little liquid methane and oxygen before it could begin to climb appreciably. But finally, seconds into the mission, New Glenn began to climb. It was slow, ever so slow. But it flew true.

After that the vehicle performed like a champion. The first stage burned for more than three minutes before the second stage separated at an altitude of 70 km. Then, the upper stage’s two BE-3U engines appeared to perform flawlessly, pushing the Blue Ring pathfinder payload toward orbit. These engines burned very nearly for 10 minutes before shutting down, having reached an orbital velocity of 28,800 kph.

For the first time since its founding, nearly a quarter of a century ago, Blue Origin had reached orbit. The long-awaited debut launch of the New Glenn rocket, a super-heavy lift vehicle developed largely with private funding, had come. And it was a smashing success….

(14) DILBERT STARK’S STARSHIP. Elsewhere today – “SpaceX Starship test fails after Texas launch” reports the BBC.

The latest test of Space X’s giant Starship rocket has failed, minutes after launch.

Officials at Elon Musk’s company said the upper stage was lost after problems developed after lift-off from Texas on Thursday.

The mission came hours after the first flight of the Blue Origin New Glenn rocket system, backed by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos.

The two tech billionaires both want to dominate the space vehicle market.

“Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn. Teams will continue to review data from today’s flight test to better understand root cause,” SpaceX posted on X.

“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s reliability.”…

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

Pixel Scroll 12/20/24 How Much Is That Shoggoth In The Attic? The One With The Horrifying Tale

Posted on December 20, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) ENTERING PUBLIC DOMAIN IN 2025. At John Mark Ockerbloom’s blog Everybody’s Libraries you can use this hashtag to access his #PublicDomainDayCountdown – a series of daily posts through the end of the year highlighting the works falling out of copyright in the U.S. Here are some examples.

The Broadway Melody (film) – “All singing! All dancing!”
Arthur Conan Doyle’s last Professor Challenger story – “Not eliminating the impossible”
Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms (novel) — “A Farewell to Arms”
The earliest adventures of Popeye – “I yam what I yam, kinda”
Arthur Freed and Nacio Scott Brown’s “Singin’ in the Rain” – “What a glorious feeling, in the public domain”
Three hardboiled detective classics as published in Black Mask – “Hardboiled treasure in the public domain”
Fictional detective Ellery Queen debuts in The Roman Hat Mystery – “Ellery Queen arrives on the scene”
Marx Brothers’ stage play, Animal Crackers, and first feature film, The Cocoanuts – “Take your Marx”
Tintin – “Tintin au pays du domaine public”

(2) OTHER COVERAGE. Animation Magazine is ready: “Popeye & Tintin Enter the Public Domain in 2025”

Two icons of comics and animation history will be entering the public domain in the U.S. as of January 1, 2025, opening their earliest representations up to be used and repurposed without permission or payment to copyright holders: E.C. Segar’s idiosyncratic sailor-man Popeye and Belgian comics artist Hergé’s globe-trotting reporter Tintin.

The Public Domain Review is also doing a countdown “What Will Enter the Public Domain in 2025?” (They give a hat tip to Ockerbloom’s blog.)

(3) NEVALA-LEE AND MALZBERG DIALOGS. [Item by Alec Nevala-Lee.] I was very sorry to see the post announcing the death of Barry Malzberg, who was an important figure in my life. It inspired me to look back at our voluminous email correspondence, which I’ve decided to put online, on the assumption that other people might find it interesting as well: “Barry N. Malzberg and Alec Nevala-Lee (Emails 2016–2023)”.

In 2016, I reached out to Barry N. Malzberg with a question relating to my book Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. The result was an intermittent email correspondence that grew over the next six years to an astounding 25,000 words. I’m posting it here because it contains a lot of interesting material, as well as the single greatest compliment that I’ve ever received, which Malzberg emailed to me on February 2, 2017: “It is clear to me that you may be already science fiction’s most promising writer and thinker to emerge since Alfred Bester stumbled into the room almost eight decades ago. Like the Elizabethan theater before Shakespeare, we have been waiting for you without really knowing we were waiting for you.” I don’t believe that this was ever true—certainly not when Malzberg said it to me—but I’ve treasured it ever since. Malzberg, for all his flaws, was an essential figure in my life, and I deeply regret that I’ll never have the chance to speak to him again.

(4) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 125 of the Octothorpe podcast, “I’m Physically Present in This Hotel Room”, is belatedly here!

We read some letters of comment, we discuss the Seattle online Business Meeting plan and also the news from Smofcon 41, and Liz tells us what the objectively correct best Christmas movie is.

Get the transcript here.

John wears an Octothorpe Christmas jumper and a green and red hat with elf ears, Alison wears a red Christmas jumper and a moose/reindeer hat, and Liz wears a blue jumper and a Christmas tree hat. The words “Octothorpe 125” appear at the top in a Christmassy font that looks like it has snow on the letters.

(5) SFF REVIEWS. Lisa Tuttle, in “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup” for the Guardian, discusses: Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo; How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later by Philip K Dick; The Woman Who Fell to Earth by RB Russell; and Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia.

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

December 20, 1985 — Enemy Mine

By Paul Weimer: First, for me, came the movie. It was 1985, and if you’ve been following my timeline of movie watching, this was when I was finally going to movies on my own. Back to the Future was a big movie I saw that year, but that winter, there was Enemy Mine.

I had not read the novella that the movie is based on, although I would, later, get an edition that included all of the ancillary material that helped inspire the novella. And, of course, the film.

This again was 1985 and like Back to the Future, I was delighted to be able to immerse myself in a new property. This was in space but it was not Star Wars or Star Trek, and it was better than a lot of the dreck I had seen on television, mostly. Dawitch and Jerry as played by Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr. were compelling and I did see it opening weekend…but it turns out, not many other people did. Despite the performances and the obvious appeal of a Cold War story, the movie financially bombed.

I blame the poster. Look at the poster sometime. I had gone in, looking at that poster, expecting a movie where the two are continually at war, and what I got was something far more interesting, complex and dynamic…two people from two different species who hate each other, but eventually learn to trust, even love one another. The movie’s message is powerful, and its advertising completely ignores it. It does it a disservice (Years later, when seeing John Carter, I would remember it being similarly badly served).

And thanks to the movie, I still want to go to the Canary Islands, to the volcanic area that the movie is filmed in. It’s a bleak and eyecatching place, and my camera and I would love to capture it and experience the location first-hand.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born December 20, 1960 — Nalo Hopkinson, 64.

By Paul Weimer: There are some authors and their books that shake you completely and utterly out of your comfort zone. Nalo Hopkinson is one of those authors. We cast our minds back to the late 1990s as I was growing in my science fiction reading, moving toward my path of being a reviewer and critic. I had not yet really started to read that widely, but I was learning. When I saw Brown Girl in the Ring, her debut novel, it looked completely different than anything I had ever read before. So, in the spirit of trying to broaden my reading, I picked it up.

And it knocked me on my arse. Late 21st century Toronto setting. Afro-Caribbean culture? African Mythology and deities mixed in with a believable and immersive dystopian future. This novel hit buttons of mine hard, and buttons that I didn’t know I had. I think that this was one of the first novels that started my quest to start looking for books “Beyond the Great Walls of Europe”, to engage with other traditions, cultures, starting points. It was absolutely superb. And if you haven’t read it, it’s short and punchy, I devoured it in a couple of days.

Since then, Hopkinson has been a feature in my reading ever since, from Midnight Robber through works like The Salt Roads to more recent works like her recent Blackheart Man. Nalo’s output is not a tsunami of novels and stories; her work is more like the work of Ted Chiang, a few startingly potent and polished gems that are potent and powerful. She’s not a writer for every cup of tea, that uncompromising nature of her work means that there can be some rather tough subjects and themes in the work. But I think her work is worth it.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Close to Home features a Sith’s retirement job.
Dinosaur Comics has a fine name.
Non Sequitur uncovers Stone Age quotas.
Rudy Park says there’s a planetary conspiracy.

(9) KRYPTO’S VALUE. Brian Cronin’s CBR. Newsletter discussed the origins and role of Krypto – unfortunately, there’s no public link to it. (And it wouldn’t be nice for me to gank the whole article.)

…Like most new characters (including Batman’s answer to the dog trend, Ace the Bathound, who debuted a few months later), Krypto was only intended to be a one-off character, just something that Otto Binder and Curt Swan could introduce to get through another issue of the Superboy feature, but fan response was strong enough that Krypto soon returned, and became a regular fixture in the series. He was then added to the main Superman comic books, as well (althoguh he did not play as major of a role in the stories of Superman as an adult as he did in Superboy stories, there is just something special about a boy and his dog). Krypto was a major part of the Superman titles in the 1960s, as the titles began to introduce more and more characters, like Streaky the Super Cat (she and Krypto had quite the rivalry).

What made Krypto so special to Superman?

The importance of Krypto was made clear by the late, great Martin Pasko in Action Comics #500 (by Pasko, Swan, and Frank Chiaramonte), when Superman is walking with reporters through the Superman Pavilion of the Metropolis World’s Fair, and reflecting on his life. Krypto comes up, and Superman speaks about the loneliness that comes from being the “Last Son of Krypton.” It is not just a matter of being the only survivor from your planet, which, of course, carries along a tremendous amount of survivor’s guilt, but there is also the problem where, because of the way that Earth gives you special powers, that you are alone on THIS planet, too, because you’re different than everyone else. That is, therefore, why Krypto was so important to Superman, because it was someone that Superman could relate to, even if he was “only” a dog…

(10) HAPPY BIRTHDAY SPACE FORCE. “US Space Force 5 years later: What has it accomplished so far, and where does it go from here?” Space tries to supply an answer. Will this bureaucratic growth survive a second Trump administration, despite being founded during the first?

The U.S. Space Force celebrates its fifth anniversary today.

The service was formally established on Dec. 20, 2019, when President Donald Trump signed it into law with the National Defense Authorization Act, the bill that allocates U.S. military spending each year. Since then, the U.S. Space Force has grown to nearly 15,000 servicemembers and civilian personnel. In its fifth year, Space Force has overseen astronaut launches from its facility at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and has even seen one of its own active Guardians, as Space Force members are known, launch into space.From GPS navigation networks to weather forecasting, from broadband internet to early-warning missile detection systems, the U.S. (like many other nations) increasingly depends on space-based technologies for its way of life. Space Force’s role in protecting and overseeing these technologies has evolved and grown over the last five years, and will likely continue to do so as it moves forward. But just what has Space Force accomplished in its first five years, and where will it go from here?

… From a piece of legislation to launching its own personnel from its own launch site, Space Force set a brisk pace in its first five years.

The service’s current Chief of Space Operations, Gen. Chance Saltzman, highlighted the rapid growth of Space Force in remarks given at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ (CSIS) “Celebrating the U.S. Space Force and Charting Its Future” event in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 17.

“On average, we have tripled in size every year for the last five years in personnel, an astounding growth rate for any government organization,” Saltzman said. “We have reimagined operations, redefined policies [and] reworked processes from the ground up to forge a service purpose-built for great power competition.

“All of this in just five years.”…

(11) WHO IS NUMBER ONE? A nice way to see out the year! “Booksellers predict Orbital by Samantha Harvey will be UK No 1 bestselling book” reports the Guardian.

This year’s Booker prize winner will be the Christmas No 1 bestseller, predict UK booksellers.

The Booksellers Association (BA) asked bookshop staff which book they think could reach the festive top spot, and Orbital by Samantha Harvey was the most popular response.

The slim volume was “selling well even before the Booker prize win, and since then it has been flying off the shelves,” said Amanda Truman, who owns Truman Books in Farsley, West Yorkshire.

Fleur Sinclair, president of the BA and owner of Sevenoaks Bookshop in Kent, would be “amazed” if Orbital doesn’t top the charts. Between its Booker win and “accessible paperback format and price, so many of our customers are buying it both for themselves and as gifts”.

Orbital became the first Booker novel to hit No 1on the UK bestseller chart in the week of its win, with 20,040 copies sold that week. The novel follows a day in the life of six astronauts on the International Space Station.

Aside from the novel “being a literary masterpiece, awards really help sell books”, said Jude Brosnan, marketing manager at Stanfords bookshops. “Along with all the extra promotion they provide, we find customers really appreciate recommendations – even more so at this time of year.”

(12) OSCARS IN TIMES TO COME. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian’s “Week in Geek” pushes for more recognition for ‘mo-cap’ acting: “Aliens, Gollum and talking raccoons: when will the Oscars finally reward mo-cap acting?”

Picture the future: it’s the Oscars 2034, and the best actor prizes are no longer split into male and female categories. Instead, there is an award for best performer in a live action role, and another for best actor in a performance capture role. Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks can finally go head-to-head for their epic turns in Sophie’s Choice II and Even Bigger respectively, while Zoe Saldana and Andy Serkis are up for the latter for their startling performances in Avatar 6 and The Lord of the Rings: What Gollum Did Last Summer.

Some might suggest this is a tantalising vision of a world where the Academy has finally caught up with the realities of modern acting. Others would no doubt point out that the Oscars has been rewarding work where the actor’s real face is obscured by makeup, prosthetics, masks, or other transformations for decades, ever since John Hurt received a best actor nod for The Elephant Man in 1980. The difference is that while Robert Downey Jr somehow managed to snag a nomination for playing an Australian method actor donning blackface in the biting 2008 satirical comedy Tropic Thunder, the likes of Avatar’s Saldana and Lord of the Rings’ Serkis seem doomed to Oscars limbo, as they pour their hearts repeatedly into roles only to watch awards season roll by like an indifferent Na’vi riding a banshee past a crying Jake Sully.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Todd Mason.] Colbert and company love their animation… “’It’s A Worm-derful Life’ – A Late Show Animated Holiday Classic”.

Santa and his workshop are, like America, having a bumpy sleigh ride transitioning to the incoming Trump administration. When Elon Musk is put in charge of Christmas efficiency as part of his D.O.U.C.H.E. program, Santa must either pledge absolute loyalty, or face a gladiator battle of ancient Roman proportions. Will Father Christmas survive? Will Joe Biden stay awake through the entire special? Will RFK Jr.’s brainworms have enough brain meat left to eat this winter? Find out in “It’s A Worm-derful Life,” the new Late Show Holiday Animated Classic!

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

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

Posted on December 6, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(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.

(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 11/21/24 Pixels That Need Pixels Are The Happiest Pixels In The Scroll

Posted on November 21, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS. No winners of genre interest, but omnivorous readers will want to know who received the 2024 awards. Publishers Weekly led its coverage with a joke from the ceremony:

…[L]ongtime Saturday Night Live cast member Kate McKinnon, [was] the evening’s host. “I’m a book awards virgin, so be gentle,” she joked before opening her remarks, appropriately for 2024, with a bit about AI. “Books do more than entertain—they illuminate, they provoke, and, most importantly, they inspire change,” she said. “That was written by CHatGPT. Is that bad?”…

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE: Shifa Saltagi Safadi, Kareem Between (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House)
TRANSLATED LITERATURE: Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, Taiwan Travelogue. Translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King (Graywolf Press)
POETRY: Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Something About Living (University of Akron Press)
NONFICTION: Jason De León, Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling (Viking Books / Penguin Random House)
FICTION: Percival Everett, James (Doubleday / Penguin Random House)

(2) WHY DID THEY SAY THAT? T. R. Napper side-eyes “Five Pieces of Awful Writing Advice (from the masters)”. And by masters, we mean Stephen King, Robert Heinlein, Charles Bukowski, Ernest Hemingway, and Elmore Leonard. First on his hit parade:

Don’t keep a notebook (Stephen King)

“I think a writer’s notebook is the best way in the world to immortalise bad ideas. My idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around.”

Terrible advice, for one simple reason: none of the rest of us are Stephen King. He’s written around 70 books. He writes and writes and writes. Squashed by a fucken van, six weeks in hospital, dusts himself off, keeps writing. Apparently sits down and churns out 6 pages (1500 words) a day, every day, no problem. In terms of idea generation he is a phenomenon. He’s not like you or me.

Don’t get me wrong – ideas will come for the writer. They always do, whether you wish them to or not. But you should write them down. I absolutely have a document where I keep all my big ideas that one day might (or might not) become a short story or a novel. When I go back and look through it every few months, I’ll see some truly stupid thoughts, but I’ll also see a few where I think: I’d forgotten about that. Let’s try it.

(3) WICKED GOOD. The Hollywood Reporter critic David Rooney weighs in with “’Wicked’ Review: Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in Beloved Musical”.

… The respective casting of those roles — Ariana Grande as the minimally gifted sorcery student who will go on to become Glinda, Good Witch of the North, and Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, future Wicked Witch of the West — is the movie’s winning hand. Their vocals are clear and strong and supple to a degree many of us have learned not to expect after too many movie musicals that cast merely adequate singers and then Auto-Tune them to death.

Grande and Erivo give Stephen Schwartz’s songs — comedy numbers, introspective ballads, power anthems — effortless spontaneity. They help us buy into the intrinsic musical conceit that these characters are bursting into song to express feelings too large for spoken words, not just mouthing lyrics and trilling melodies that someone spent weeks cleaning up in a studio. The decision to record the songs live on set whenever possible is a major plus….

(4) TIMELESS AND TOPICAL. “Jon M. Chu Embraced the Politics of ‘Wicked’ and Audiences Seeing It Through a Post-Election Lens” on IndieWire.

…[Director Jon M.] Chu embraces that his movie will take on a new layer of meaning for many audience members after the re-election of Trump, but noted that impact is in part because politics has been baked into “Wicked” since its inception. Gregory Maguire’s 1995 book “Wicked” is a meditation on resisting fascist movements, a not-so-subtle theme that carried into its musical adaptation by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman. A major underlying storyline of “Wicked” is how leaders, who claim to have the people’s best interest at heart, attack the educated — represented by professor Dr. Dillamond, a talking goat voiced by Peter Dinklage — as they try to rewrite the history of animals and humans co-existence in an effort to strip the animals of their rights, and demonize them as the source of the people’s problems.

Through this lens, Chu acknowledged his film is prophetic, but only because the underlying IP is prophetic. Chu argued the original “Wizard of Oz” movie — released on the heels of the 1930s Dust Bowl (the drought-stricken storms of the Depression), during the rise of fascism, and on the eve of World War II — has always spoken to America in a time of transition. He personally experienced it at two very different political moments that “Wicked” entered his life….

(5) TERMINAL JUSTICE. “How Do You Punish a Machine? (And why would you want to?)” asks Graham Brown at CrimeReads.

…For their wisdom we turn to the ever-instructive eyes of the science fiction writers of the world.

Starting with 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY by Arthur C. Clarke, the classic example of machines becoming sentient, in which HAL9000 commits multiple homicides, wiping out the sleeping crewmen of the Discovery, and then eventually attempts to murder the last surviving astronaut Dave by locking him out of the airlock. Quite a set of crimes. But in HAL’s defense, he’d been given conflicting programming and told to lie, factors that many believe caused him to lose his electronic mind. In addition, he may have been under the influence of the mysterious monolith. HAL might also raise a claim of self-defense. At the time he tried to kill Dave, he knew Dave was intending to disconnect him and shut him down.

Interesting case. A good lawyer could make an argument for not guilty by reason of insanity and self-defense, but I’m going to say guilty. To his credit, HAL becomes normal again and sacrifices himself for the crew in 2010 ODYSSEY TWO, perhaps atoning for his terrible crimes…

(6) WHERE PROPHETS ARE WITHOUT HONOR. Cora Buhlert deconstructs the popularity of German band Kraftwerk while simultaneously demythologizing the Autobahn in “A Baffled Guardian Writer Discovers the Autobahn – and the Best German Roadtrip Songs” – an entertaining read!

…This is also where the problem with foreigners driving on the Autobahn comes in. They’re often driving an unfamiliar car, they’re not used to high speeds and also don’t know where and when it’s reasonably safe to go fast. See Tim Jonze starting his Autobahn adventure in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan area, where it’s definitely not safe to go fast (and not allowed either). At one point, Jonze also opens the driver’s side window, while going 150 kilometers per hour, which makes me wonder if he’s fucking crazy.

What’s even more hilarious is that while Kraftwerk were on the road a lot in the 1970s, travelling from gig to gig, usually on the Autobahn, often by night, their car was a Volkswagen Beetle. Tim Jonze has apparently never driven a Volkswagen Beetle, but I have, because my parents had one in the 1970s and early 1980s. So I know that they couldn’t go any faster than 130 kilometers per hour and the car started rattling like crazy at approx. 100 kilometers per hour. The Beetle‘s successor, a 1980 Volkswagen Jetta, which I continued to drive until 2008 (I wanted to keep it to hit the thirty year mark, when a car is considered a historical vehicle in Germany and gets a special licence plate, but unfortunately the Jetta fell apart two years before), capped out at 160 kilometers per hour and also started to rattle like mad at anything above 130 kilometers per hour. So Kraftwerk were travelling at the relatively leisurely pace of approx. 100 kilometers per hour in a Volkswagen Beetle, when they wrote the “Autobahn” song….

(7) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 123 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Infinite Amount of Annual Leave”, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty “don’t have any letters of comment but we do have discussion of the Belfast Eastercon, Reconnect, as well as musings on online convention Back to Our Futures and upcoming Worldcons and Eurocons. Plus, Liz read a book.”

An uncorrected transcript is available at the link.

A coffee stain on a piece of paper on which are written the words “Octothorpe 123” and “fully caffineated”.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary: Rise of the Guardians (2012)

On this day twelve years ago, The Rise Of The Guardians enjoyed its premiere in limited release with its full one that coming weekend. It is quite possibly my favorite holiday film, though Scrooged, Lion in Winter, The Polar Express are also on the list as well. Oh and the forty year old version of A Christmas Carol starring George C. Scott.

It was directed by Peter Ramsey and produced by Christina Steinberg and Nancy Bernstein from a screenplay by David Lindsay-Abaire. It was based on William Joyce’s The Guardians of Childhood series, a most delightful series indeed.

OK, IT IS TIME FOR A CUP OF HOT CHOCOLATE PREPARED BY THE STEWARDS OF THE POLAR EXPRESS. COME BACK AFTER WE HAVE TOLD THE STORY OF THIS FILM.

The Guardians of Childhood series was a mystical epic of mythological characters fighting darkness to protect childhood dreams. It made very good source material for that aforementioned screenplay by David Lindsay-Abaire in which Jack Frost awakens from a very long nap under the ice with his memory gone to discover everyone has forgotten him.

Meanwhile at the North Pole (splendidly realized here), the Man in the Moon warns Nicholas St. North that Pitch Black (who look a lot Mr. Dark in Bill Willingham’s Fables series) is threatening the children of the world with his nightmares.

He calls E. Aster Bunnymund, the Sandman, and the Tooth Fairy to arms. Each of these is a wonderfully realized character as the Man in the Moon and Nicholas St. North.

A series of truly epic battles to defeat Pitch Black follows lest all the children of the world are permanently beset with nightmares. He is defeated when his own Nightmares sensing he has grown weak drag him down into the Underworld.

DID YOU ENJOY THAT HOT CHOCOLATE? GOOD, COME ON BACK.

The feature starred the voice talents of Hugh Jackman, Jude Law and Isla Fisher among others. I think it was a stellar voice cast and the animation was splendid. I’ve rewatched it several times, and the Suck Fairy sits on the couch sighing, drinking hot chocolate, stroking a Pixel, and saying that it’s too sweet for her to mess with. The holiday season does bring out the soft side of her.

It did exceedingly well at the box office taking in over three hundred million on a budget of one hundred and thirty million according to Box Office Mojo, and about half of the critics really liked it such as Derek Adam’s of Time Out who proclaimed “Rise of the Guardians is an effervescent dose of fantasia that’s pretty hard to dislike. Unless, of course, you’re a cynical grump.” The grumpy ones I’ll not quote, but I’ll just say that Old Nick should give them a lump of coal this season.

The audience rating at Rotten Tomatoes is very healthy eighty percent.

Rise of the Guardians can be rented on Amazon Prime.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Free Range is more Sister Act than Hidden Figures.
F Minus argues math is disrespectful.
Glasbergen tries the dinosaur excuse.
Non Sequitur passes the blame.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal employs desperate measures.
Off the Mark shows where therapy can go both ways.

off the mark 2024
Mark Parisi 11-21 pic.twitter.com/kENERrgCkH
— CLASSIC COMIC STRIPS (@ClassicStrips) November 21, 2024

(10) THE PAST IS ANOTHER COUNTRY. “In Search of the Moomins in Helsinki: The Enduring Magic of Tove Jannson’s Characters” at Literary Hub. “Christiana Spens Returns to Her Father’s world (and the Beloved Moomin Books)”.

… As we explored Helsinki, perhaps inevitably, I kept thinking of my own father. As we sat in cafes and parks, I wondered which of them he had gone to, which of the museums and islands he had explored. Helsinki felt so familiar that it was as if I had already been here, and yet the more time we spent there, the more I realized that I didn’t know anything about my father’s time here at all.

He had not really told me stories about coming here; he had just gone and come back. I had imagined his times in Helsinki based on the gifts he returned with, the pictures in his books, and later the Moomin stories; but he had not really told me anything himself.

He had written about Alvar Aalto, expressed joy at the sight of herrings or gooseberries or meatballs; I knew he loved the place. He had even tried to build a Finnish summer house, in the same sky blue that was popular here; but he had never been very practical minded, and it had not stood up well to the elements.

Nevertheless, I had lived there for several years as a teenager. Perhaps this experience, living in a weather-beaten wooden Summer House in the woods, is what made Finland itself seem familiar to me, rather than anything my father ever told me about the country.

And yet, now that I was here, I found myself wondering about him anyway; had he gone to Esplanade Park, had he had coffee at Fazer, had he known Rock Church or the Uspenski Cathedral, had he felt this light as I did now? But I didn’t actually know, and I never would; he was not here, only his ghost was.

But the Alvar Aalto buildings were, all the other reminders were. And the Moomins were here, too; in gift shops and cafes, these friendly creatures appeared, giving the whole city the cast of a fairy-tale, along with its mists and sea, its pastel-colored buildings, its ships and cobbled stones….

(11) HUFFIN’ AND PUFFIN. Daisy Ridley answers readers’ questions over at the Guardian: “Daisy Ridley: ‘I made a toilet cake on Bake Off because flushing with the lid up is unhygienic beyond belief’”.

Did those late-night drinking and ceilidh sessions during the filming of The Force Awakens on the Skellig islands in County Kerry give you a taste for old-school, dusty pub culture and creamy stout? Galdove19

I’d never had a Guinness outside Ireland, so I got the good stuff the first time round. We had the sun shining on us every day, which the Irish crew said was unbelievable, although every time I’ve been to Ireland it’s been absolutely glorious. I had to climb about a thousand stairs up Great Skellig. Our unbelievable camera operator had a Steadicam and was climbing up backwards, so I thought: “There’s no way I can complain.” That tamed my own exhaustion. The Skellig islands are an ecological site, so we had to not disturb the puffin population, who were there one day, but had migrated the next, which was eerie and amazing. They obviously weren’t big Star Wars fans and thought: “We’ve had enough of this.”

(12) EXERCISE IN TERROR. [Item by Steven French.] Coming a little late for Halloween: “The health benefits of fright: A haunted house study” at Medical X Press.

…People often engage in activities that elicit fear for recreational purposes, from ghost stories and jump scare pranks to modern horror films and haunted attractions. This haunted house experiment suggests that such experiences may not only provide thrills but also potential health benefits by modulating immune responses.

Further research is needed to confirm the observed effects and explore the mechanisms underlying the relationship between recreational fear and immune function before clinical applications can be considered significant enough to incorporate acute fear into a health care setting….

(13) WHOVILLE’S GOLDEN ARCHES. The Grinch is now in Happy Meal at McDonald’s. So then — are these roast beast nuggets?

(14) JUMPING OUT OF THE WAY. “The International Space Station adjusts its orbit to avoid space debris” – NPR has the details.

NASA says that the International Space Station (ISS) shifted its orbit on Tuesday to avoid a piece of debris.

The debris avoidance maneuver involved firing thrusters on the ISS at 2:09 p.m. CT for 5 minutes, 31 seconds, according to NASA. This adjustment raised the ISS orbit to “provide an extra margin of distance from a piece of orbital debris from a defunct defense meteorological satellite that broke up in 2015,” the agency says.

Had the maneuver not been conducted, the debris would have come within nearly 2.5 miles of the station, NASA also says. The debris was “small,” U.S. Space Forces-Space tells NPR…

(15) INTERNATIONAL STAR WARS SHOW RENEWED. Variety reports, “’Star Wars: Visions’ Series to Return for Third Season”.

“Star Wars: Visions,” a Lucasfilm anthology series of animated shorts from around the world celebrating the mythology of Star Wars through different cultural perspectives, will return for a third season, Marvel Studios’ president Kevin Feige said on Wednesday.

Feige was a surprise guest at the annual Walt Disney Company Asia Pacific Showcase held in Singapore.

“Star Wars: Visions Volume 3” will debut in 2025 on the Disney+ streaming service. The upcoming series will feature both new and returning anime studios, and return to Japan to celebrate the world of anime through the elements and mythos of Star Wars….

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George takes us inside the “Red One Pitch Meeting”.

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

Pixel Scroll 10/24/24 The Scroll On The Edge of Pixelver

Posted on October 24, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) EDITORIAL PRIVILEGE? Beneath Ceaseless Skies editor Scott Andrews has posted the text of his GoH speech given at World Fantasy 2024 on October 20. His message is: “Not Paying Editors Limits Range of Editorial Voices”.

… one way many indie zines afford all that [they publish] on a shoestring budget is that the editors take no pay.

I take no pay for editing BCS. I’ve put 25 hours or more a week into BCS, for 16 years. (Other than six First Readers, I do everything else: reading pass-ups, developmental editing, line-editing, producing the podcast, maintaining the website, posting social media. I clearly have delegation issues.)

If I was to be paid $10 an hour, 50 weeks a year: in order to fund that, BCS would have to more than double our current support, from Patreon patrons and donations and ebook sales, or cut half our fiction. Plus the time and hassle of doing that additional fundraising, which is considerable and exhausting.

I can afford not taking pay. But that approach of not paying editors means that many editors of indie zines in our field are people of financial privilege. And in our world, financial privilege often correlates with other privileges. So I think this practice of not paying editors of indie zines is limiting the range of editorial voices our field has.

Since I started BCS, our field has broadened vastly in the range of author voices: identities, backgrounds, areas of the world; languages. I believe we need to broaden the range of editorial voices too. To me, figuring out how to pay editors is a key step toward that.

I admit, I don’t have any answers. I’m not a business person. And I’ve got all I can handle just running BCS.

But I call this issue to your attention today because I think we need talk about it. We need ideas….

(2) BOOK AT BEDTIME. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Sceptre – Hodder & Stoughton, £22, hrdbk, ISBN 978-1-399-72634-4) has been made in the past couple of week’s BBC Radio 4’s (formerly the BBC Home Service) Book at Bedtime.

In the near future, a disaffected civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering ‘expats’ from across history to test the limits of time-travel. Her role is to work as a ‘bridge’: living with, assisting and monitoring the expat known as ‘1847’ – Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to find himself alive and surrounded by outlandish concepts such as the ‘washing machine’, ‘Spotify’ and ‘the collapse of the British Empire’. With an appetite for discovery and a seven-a-day cigarette habit, he soon adjusts; and during a long, sultry summer he and his bridge move from awkwardness to genuine friendship, to something more. But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures. Can love triumph over the structures and histories that have shaped them? And how do you defy history when history is living in your house..?

The BBC’s forthcoming TV adaptation (as opposed to the episodic audio book) of this novel has attracted a claim of plagiarism by those who made the Spanish TV series El Ministerio del Tiempo [The Ministry of Time].

The separate Spanish TV series El Ministerio del Tiempo won the 2016 Ignotus Best Audiovisual Production as well as the 2017 Award.

Irrespective of plagiarism claims (time travel is a fairly common, if not standard, SF trope and the commonality of title could be happenstance – the book has its differences) the BBC has the rights to make a TV mini-series, so it is likely they used the copyright permission for this to also make an episodic audio adaptation. Each episode is 15 minutes long so with 10 episodes that’s 150 minutes (or two-and-a-half hours in old money) of audio book.

Get episodes here: Episode 1; Episode 2; Episode 3; Episode 4; Episode 5; Episode 6; Episode 7; Episode 8; Episode 9; Episode 10.

(3) DEATH IS SUPER BAD. “I’m So Sick of the Death of Superman” declares Charlie Jane Anders at Happy Dancing. The latest iteration prompted her to go back and look at the first comic book death. Which wasn’t great either.

…There’s a funeral, and eventually four imposter Supermen show up — everybody can kind of tell they’re imposters, but they hang around for ages. At last, Superman comes back to life, but now he’s wearing a black version of his famous uniform, plus he now has a mullet.

That’s it, that’s the whole story.

How does Superman come back to life? I honestly can’t say. I realized several years ago that I couldn’t remember how Superman was resurrected in what’s now packaged as The Death and Rebirth of Superman, so I went back and reread the original comics to find out. And now, once again, I can’t remember, because it’s that memorable. I know that Superman meets his human dad, Pa Kent, in the afterlife, and Pa Kent talks to him about why it’s generally a good thing to not be dead. I know there’s some more Kryptonian bullshit. But beyond that, it’s a bit of a blur….

(4) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 121 of the Octothorpe podcast, “All About the Vibes”, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty discuss Grass by Sheri S. Tepper, which was a finalist for the Hugo Award in 1990.

This is Alison’s pick for John and Liz to read, and we go into some of the themes of the book and whether or not female authors are as well-remembered as men (spoiler: no).

There’s an uncorrected transcript at the link.

Three hippae stand on a landscape of alien grass and plants in blue, purple, red, teal, and orange underneath a pinkish sky. The words “Octothorpe 121” appear at the top and the words “Grass Sheri S Tepper” appear at the bottom.

(5) ANNOTATED SNOUTS. “’Fascinating’: Tove Jansson’s Moomins notes to be published for first time” – the Guardian has details.

As a cult series of 20th-century children’s books, the Moomins have sold up to 30m copies worldwide. Now, extensive humorous notes that their Finnish creator, Tove Jansson, wrote on each of her lovable trolls with hippopotamus snouts are to be published for the first time, 25 years after her death.

Eighty-nine handwritten pages that cast new light on the “small, friendly and adventurous” creatures with fur “like velvet”, have been rediscovered among hundreds of thousands of items in her sprawling archive.

James Zambra, her great-nephew and a director of Moomin Characters, which manages her legacy, said: “This was actually in one of her notebooks. It’s fantastic. Getting Tove’s own thoughts on the personality traits of the characters is fascinating.”…

(6) IS CHATGTP “FAIR USE”? NO, SAYS FORMER OPENAI RESEARCHER. Publishers Lunch reports “Former OpenAI Staffer Claims AI Training Is Not Fair Use”.

A former researcher at OpenAI has spoken out against the company’s use of copyrighted data in a detailed, publicly posted analysis, reported on further by the NYT (which is suing OpenAI for copyright infringement). Suchir Balaji left OpenAI in protest “because he no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit.”

Early versions of the company’s technology were treated as research projects, which meant employees felt free to train them on any data without worrying about permissions and usage, Balaji told the Times. But as ChatGPT-4 became a commercial product, OpenAI failed to meet the rules of fair use, he said. According to Balaji, ChatGPT’s outputs aren’t significantly different from its inputs — which are copied in whole — and the outputs directly compete with the copyrighted work that it used for training.

Further, according to Balaji, “As A.I. technologies replace existing internet services, they are generating false and sometimes completely made-up information — what researchers call ‘hallucinations.’ The internet, he said, is changing for the worse.”…

Suchir’s full analysis, including illustrative graphs, is at his “When does generative AI qualify for fair use?” webpage.

While generative models rarely produce outputs that are substantially similar to any of their training inputs, the process of training a generative model involves making copies of copyrighted data. If these copies are unauthorized, this could potentially be considered copyright infringement, depending on whether or not the specific use of the model qualifies as “fair use”. Because fair use is determined on a case-by-case basis, no broad statement can be made about when generative AI qualifies for fair use. Instead, I’ll provide a specific analysis for ChatGPT’s use of its training data, but the same basic template will also apply for many other generative AI products….

(7) ABOUT FRANK MILLER. A trailer has dropped for the documentary Frank Miller: American Genius.

Frank Miller: American Genius documents the unique journey of an unparalleled American artist. The film explores the near half-century career of the legendary comic book artist and writer. Made for his fans following a near death experience, the documentary delves into Miller’s radical and defining influence on art, storytelling and culture.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born October 24, 1952 — David Weber, 72

By Paul Weimer: Sometimes the subtext is the text. A lot of space opera has the subtext of being naval adventures in space, ranging from the original Star Trek on to the present day. It is no surprise, then, that David Weber decided to cut straight to the source and have actual naval style military adventures in the stars, with Honor Harrington. His books follow the rise of Harrington in a manner that Hornblower and O’Brian could recognize, and appreciate.

With all of the side books and ancillary books in the series, the amount of Harrington stories Weber has produced is staggering, but it is undeniably a gem of an idea he can and has taken advantage of for all it’s worth. I’ve not read all of them, but enough to get a good sampling.

What I like even more is Weber’s Armageddon Reef series. The Safehold books take place on a colony planet where humans have fled after a genocidal attack, and have been forcibly reduced in technology in order to evade detection. So we have an alien planet, humans on it, and a lack of space flight. And so Weber adds 18-19th century style naval combat and technology to the mix.

These books, I feel, have to be an even more explicit loveletter to Hornblower and company. The conflict between technology and religion and the problems of separation of chruch and state do elevate these books, I feel, to a question that we face today. While Weber’s novels might be dismissed as just being fun naval and space adventures, there is that undercurrent and layer of engaging with societal questions that make them very worthy of attention.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Thatababy continues with guest appearances.
Wannabe gives writing tips.
Crankshaft recalls a writing inspiration.

(10) WHAT IF? MICKEY & FRIENDS AS THE FANTASTIC FOUR. Mickey & Friends will put a spin on classic Marvel covers in 2025 with new Disney What If? Fantastic Four homage variant covers.

Continuing the “What If?” theme, Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, Donald, and more take over as Mister Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch, and the Thing to recreate the team’s most memorable adventures.

Check out the first two covers, on sale January and February, that pay homage to Silver Age issues: Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four #3 and #51. For more information, visit Marvel.com.

(11) LITTLE PRINCE, BIG PRICE TAG. “Rare typescript of The Little Prince to go up for sale” reports the Guardian.

A rare carbon typescript of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince featuring extensive handwritten corrections by the author is going up for sale. It is one of only three known copies and marks the first time a typescript of the classic story has been offered for public sale.

The artefact features what is believed to be the first written appearance of the famous lines: “On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux,” translated to mean: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”…

… The typescript is priced at $1.25m. It will be showcased at Abu Dhabi Art, an annual art fair taking place at the end of November.

(12) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.

(13) GUT INSTINCTS. “H.R. Giger and Mire Lee’s Biomechanical Netherworld” depicted by Frieze.

‘Have you seen Schinkel Pavillon’s H.R. Giger show?’ has been the question of the month in Berlin. In fact, the exhibition pairs the late Swiss artist with the South Korean sculptor Mire Lee, a detail that has mostly footnoted ensuing conversations. Although it’s hardly a surprise. An obvious novelty factor accompanies this appearance of Giger’s sculptures, paintings, drawings, and prints which – due to their creator’s work on the Alien film franchise (1979–2017) – fundamentally impacted society’s collective imagination of the far-flung other. But interesting questions also arise from this hagiographic netherworld. Namely, whether the show participates in a meaningful conversation – about our erotic and paranoid relationship to the unknown, say – or just satisfies current nostalgic tastes, if not contemporary art’s populist drift.

With her best work having as much guts as Giger’s aliens, many of Lee’s sculptures are abject biomechanical masses, made from concrete, silicon and steel, and sometimes veined with ooze-pumping tubes. From beyond the grave, Giger has contributed Necroconom (Alien II) (1990) – a life-size sculpture of the infamous alien Xenomorph, who crawled on knees and fore-talons, as much like a purring pole dancer as a menacing hunter, its exoskeleton made from sexy black polyester….

…More affecting in its provocation of bodily and existential tremors is Lee’s Untitled (2021), a small conflagration of metallic and silicon cables, bound to a motor, which churns slowly in a spot-lit pool of its own broken refuse, on the floor of an eerie basement room, dark and tiled like an abandoned shower. Simultaneously invoking a disembodied machine component or body part, the piece harks back to classic existential concerns: the feeling of crawling through life, forever breaking apart, suspended between humanity and technology, and wondering why we even bother. Less effective were a number of Lee’s larger works, which gestured towards sensational corporeal impact, without quite delivering: The Liars (2021), a foreboding hanging mass made from towels, chains, fabric and silicon, suggested a horrific meat locker, without being all that horrific, while its companion piece, Carriers: Offsprings (2021), finds slime pulsing through masses of hanging tangled transparent tubes, like entrails simulated in a theme-park haunted house….

‘HR Giger and Mire Lee’, 2021, exhibition view, Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin

(14) COSMIC BANGERS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] An astrometric analysis of Gaia data identified two waves of massive runaway stars that have been dynamically ejected from the young cluster R136 in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Researchers used data from the European Gaia Space Telescope to discover 55 high-speed stars launched from the young star cluster R136 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The young cluster R136 has launched as many as a third of its most massive stars in the last few million years, at speeds above 100,000 km/hr. Those stars travel up to 1,000 light years from their birthplace before exploding as supernovas at their end of life, producing a neutron star or black hole.

Primary research here: “Two waves of massive stars running away from the young cluster R136” in Nature.

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ms. Mojo made a list of the “Top 10 Things Only Adults Notice in The Wizard of Oz”. Number three is the unanswered question, “Where Are Dorothy’s Parents?”

“The Wizard of Oz” works on another level as an adult. Welcome to MsMojo, and today we’re counting down our picks for the wonderful, wizardly, and weird things about “The Wizard of Oz” that might have grabbed their broomsticks and flown over our heads when we were kids.

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

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