The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. (SFWA) announced the 56th Annual Nebula Awards® winners in an online ceremony on June 5 hosted by Toastmaster Aydrea Walden.
These awards are given to the writers of the best speculative fiction works released in 2020, as voted on by Full, Associate, and Senior SFWA members.
Martha Wells
P. Djèlí Clark
Sarah Pinsker
John Wiswell
Greg Kasavin
T. Kingfisher
BEST NOVEL
Network Effect, Martha Wells (Tordotcom)
BEST NOVELLA
Ring Shout, P. Djèlí Clark (Tordotcom)
BEST NOVELETTE
“Two Truths and a Lie”, Sarah Pinsker (Tor.com)
BEST SHORT STORY
“Open House on Haunted Hill”, John Wiswell (Diabolical Plots)
THE ANDRE NORTON NEBULA AWARD FOR MIDDLE GRADE AND YOUNG ADULT FICTION
A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, T. Kingfisher (Argyll)
BEST GAME WRITING
Hades, Greg Kasavin (Supergiant)
THE RAY BRADBURY NEBULA AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING DRAMATIC PRESENTATION
The Good Place: “Whenever You’re Ready”, Michael Schur, NBC (Fremulon/3 Arts Entertainment/Universal)
Additional awards and honors presented:
Nalo Hopkinson
THE SFWA DAMON KNIGHT MEMORIAL GRAND MASTER AWARD
Nalo Hopkinson
THE KATE WILHELM SOLSTICE AWARD
Jarvis Sheffield
Ben Bova (posthumous)
Rachel Caine (posthumous)
THE KEVIN J. O’DONNELL, JR. SERVICE TO SFWA AWARD
Connie Willis
Jarvis Sheffield
Ben Bova
Rachel Caine
Connie Willis
Presenters joined virtually from around the country, including SFWA President Mary Robinette Kowal, SFWA Vice President Tobias S. Buckell, incoming SFWA President Jeffe Kennedy, and writers and creatives Nisi Shawl, Carrie Patel, Mallory O’Meara, Mark Oshiro, Troy L. Wiggins, and Adam Savage.
(1) BLOB THEATER NEEDS HELP. A GoFundMe appeal has been launched to “Keep the Arts Alive at the Colonial Theatre!” The iconic movie house featured fleeing patrons in the 1958 movie The Blob, a scene fans have reenacted over the years:
Friday Night Runout at Blobfest.
The Colonial Theatre (aka Home of The Blob) is facing an unusually challenging winter: one in which we’re nearly 100% dependent on donations for survival. This is why we’ve launched this (first ever) GoFundMe campaign.
While many other theaters across the nation were making agonizing choices in the springtime, an outpouring of donations (thank you!!), the Payroll Protection Program, and emergency grants made it possible for us to delay messages like these.
By December 31st, we’ve got to raise $150,000 to meet our financial obligations and we’re banking on your help to raise at least a third of that total…
At this writing, supporters of The Colonial have given $15,025 of its $50,000 GoFundMe target.
I’m particularly impressed by Patrick Wilson from Aquaman (singing with Kellie O’Hara, who’s a known and respected Broadway star, although Tom Hiddleston’s not shabby either, to name just a few.
I’m surprised the clip selected for Melissa Benoist (Supergirl) from The Flash, versus her (from that season’s musical crossover) Moon River, You’re My Superfriend, or Put A Little Love In Your Heart – see my 2017 File 770 post “In Case You Didn’t Watch The Flash Musical Episode…” for links. (Unfortunately, 2 of those links are now dead.)
How did you decide to end the series with your latest, The Fall of Shannara: The Last Druid?
If you’re not energized, when you go into a 500 page book, you are in big trouble. It’s so hard to write a good book if you don’t love it from the beginning and all the way through, and you’re not working with a certain amount of energy every time you sit down. As things wore on into this last decade, I told myself, “There’s two things that are gonna happen here: Either you’re going to die, and somebody else is going to finish this series for you—probably Brandon Sanderson—or you’re gonna force yourself to write the ending now, and deal with the consequences.”
I always knew what the ending was I wanted, which also helped persuade me not to just abandon this thing. I knew what I wanted to write, I knew this was always a circular story about how one kind of power replaces another. Nature abhors a vacuum, and if science no longer exists in the world, and there is magic, then magic will be the power until it falls out of favor, which it will, because it’s elitist. And then science starts to reemerge because we’re an evolving society, and so would this one be. This book was always going to be about whether the Druid order, which has been there through all these 30 books, was going to continue to survive, or if it would fall apart at the end, as really everything eventually does. And I wrote it to answer that question. I’m at peace with it right now. I think I ended it the way I wanted to—and I can always go back to it if I choose to.
Superman by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (1938 – present)
Superman’s origin story introduces a convenient way to sort people into survivors and the dead without forcing the protagonist into the ethically dubious position of being the one to choose. Brilliant scientist Jor-El foresees the planet Krypton’s imminent doom. Unfortunately for the people of Krypton, he is unable to convince that world’s government that the crisis is real or that steps must be taken to save the general population. At least in some versions of the story, he can’t flee himself, lest he provoke a general panic. In the end, he is able to save just one person: his infant son Kal-El, whom he dispatches to distant Earth. Too bad for the billions who die on Krypton, but hey, neither Jor-El nor Kal-El is responsible for the mass death.
Xenogenesisis the first large scale exhibition of The Otolith Group presented in Canada… Showing at the Southern Art Gallery in Lethbridge, Alberta until November 15.
…Xenogenesis is named after Octavia Butlers’ Xenogenesis Trilogy, which consists of Dawn. Xenogenesis: 1, Adulthood Rites. Xenogenesis: 2, and Imago. Xenogenesis: 3. As a pioneering African American female science fiction novelist, Butlers’ award-winning novels investigated questions of human extinction, racial distinction, planetary transformation, enforced mutation, generative alienation and altered kinship. From her first novel Patternmaster, 1976, to her final novel Fledgling, 2005, Butler challenged the questions of science fiction in ways that transformed the cultural imagination of futurity for generations of feminist thinkers, artists and philosophers from Donna Haraway to Denise Ferreira da Silva to the Black Quantum Futurists. Butlers’ fictions of xenogenesis, which are narrated as processes of alien becoming or becoming alien, have informed and continue to inform the movement of thought of The Otolith Group’s work.
…That enthusiasm extended to their opening day, which they said was “so much better than we could’ve imagined.” Though the store’s social distancing rules limit capacity to eight people inside at one time, they were pleased to see that everyone was respectful, with a line to the end of the block for most of the day. Masks are required while inside, and they sanitize all surfaces frequently. “People seemed grateful to have a space to come browse bookshelves, and so many commented that they are reading much more right now and are excited to have an independent bookshop to visit,” said the couple.
With great sadness, Gallifrey One must share the news that a dear and longtime member of our family, Ken Barr, passed away over the weekend after a long illness. Ken’s involvement in our foundation and development as a convention cannot be overstated; we owe so much of our success to him, his ownership and operation of his longtime West L.A. specialty bookstore Ambrosia Comics & Collectibles, and his mail-order business Ken’s Korner USA….
(8) MEDIA ANNIVERSARY.
November 1988 — On this month in 1988, Jane Yolen’s The One-Armed Queen was published by Tor Books completing The Great Alta trilogy which started with Sister Light, Sister Dark and continued with White Jenna. SFBC would publish The Books of Great Alta several years later. The series would be nominated for a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award but that would go to Ellen Kushner’s Thomas the Rhymer that year. It’s available at a reasonable price from the usual digital suspects.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born November 9, 1921 – Alfred Coppel. Under his Anglicized name (originally Alfredo Jose de Arana-Marini Coppel) and others he was a prolific pulp author: a score of novels, five dozen stories for us; much else. His “Read This” in the Jul 93 NY Rev SF was joined by one from Benford, one from Williamson. (Died 2004) [JH]
Born November 9, 1924 – Larry Shaw. Active fan and pro. A Fanarchist and Fanoclast; among his fanzines Axe, Destiny’s Child; served a term as Official Editor of FAPA. Editor of If, Infinity, SF Adventures, published Harlan Ellison’s first magazine story. Two anthologies; one novelette of his own, four short stories. Special Committee Award from L.A.con II the 42nd Worldcon. See here; Len Moffatt’s File 770appreciation here. (Died 1985) [JH]
Born November 9, 1934 – Carl Sagan, Ph.D. His Contact won the Best First Novel Locus Award; nonfiction The Cosmic Connection, the Campbell Memorial Award, Cosmos, the Best Nonfiction Hugo (later amended to Best Related Work); he won the Solstice Award; Pulitzer Prize, Peabody, two Emmys, NASA (U.S. Nat’l Aeronautics & Space Adm’n) Distinguished Public Service Medal. Professor of Astronomy & Space Sciences at Cornell. Assembled the Pioneer plaques and Voyager Golden Records. (Died 1996) [JH]
Born November 9, 1946 – Dame Marina Warner, 74. For us, one novel, one novelette, half a dozen books on myth and fairy tale; three dozen books all told. Feminist and historian. Nine honorary doctorates; Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, later its first woman President; Chevalier de l’Orde des Arts et des Lettres; Sheikh Zayed Book Award; Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire; British Academy Medal, World Fantasy Award, for life achievement. [JH]
Born November 9, 1947 — Robert David Hall, 73. Best known as coroner Dr. Albert Robbins M.D. on CSI, but he does have quite as few genre credits. He voiced Dinky Little in the animated Here Come the Littles, both the film and the series, the cyborg Recruiting Sargent in Starship Troopers, voice of Colonel Sharp in the G.I. Joe series, Abraham in The Gene Generation, a biopunk film, and numerous voice roles in myriad DCU animated series. (CE)
Born November 9, 1954 — Rob Hansen, 66. British fan, active since the Seventies who has edited and co-edited numerous fanzines including his debut production Epsilon. And he was the 1984 Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund delegate. His nonfiction works such as Then: Science Fiction Fandom in the UK: 1930-1980, last updated just a few years ago, are invaluable. (CE)
Born November 9, 1971 — Jamie Bishop. The son of Michael Bishop, he was among those killed in the Virginia Tech shooting. He did the cover illustrations for a number of genre undertakings including Subterranean Online, Winter 2008 and Aberrant Dreams, #9 Autumn 2006. The annual “Jamie Bishop Memorial Award for an Essay Not in English” was established by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts as a prize for an essay on the subject of science fiction or speculative fiction not written in English. (Died 2007.) (CE)
Born November 9, 1974 — Ian Hallard, 46. He lives with his husband, the actor and screenwriter Mark Gatiss. He appeared as Alan-a-Dale in Twelfth Doctor story, “Robot of Sherwood”, and in Sherlock as Mr Crayhill in “The Reichenbach Fall”. He played Richard Martin, one of the original directors of Doctor Who in An Adventure in Space and Time. Genre adjacent, he co-wrote The Big Four with his husband for Agatha Christie: Poirot. (CE)
Born November 9, 1950 – Pat Cummings, 70. Author & illustrator of children’s books. Recent juvenile for us, Trace. Coretta Scott King Award for illustrating My Mama Needs Me. Horn Book – Boston Globe Award. Orbis Pictus Award. Nat’l Secretary of the Authors Guild. [JH]
Born November 9, 1988 — Tahereh Mafi, 32. Iranian-American whose Furthermore, a YA novel about a pale girl living in a world of both color and magic of which she has neither, I highly recommended it. Whichwood is a companion novel to this work. She also has a young adult dystopian thriller series. (CE)
Born November 9, 1989 — Alix E. Harrow, 31. Winner at Dublin 2019 of the Best Short Story Hugo for “Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies” which was nominated for a BSFA and Nebula Award. She has two excellent novels to date, The Ten Thousand Doors of January and The Once and Future Witches which was nominated for but didn’t win a WFA this year. She has a double handful of short stories not yet collected anywhere. (CE)
Born November 9, 1990 – Rinsai Rossetti, 30. One novel so far, The Girl with Borrowed Wings, a Kirkus and Booklist Best Book. More, please. [JH]
(10) COMICS SECTION.
Frank and Ernest meet monsters who want to start political careers.
(11) ANOTHER CANON IN THE BATTERY. John Wiswell contributes his experience to the series about works that mattered to people: “Personal Canons: Dragon Ball”.
Is this where I confess to piracy?
In the mid-90s I was a sickly teenager with little money and even less access to anything from Japan. Dragon Ball (and its edgier sequel Dragon Ball Z) had some buzz from the rich kids in my school as this mind-blowing martial arts epic. Those kids paid 30+ bucks per badly subtitled tape of the anime, usually with two episodes per tape. It would’ve cost more than my best friend’s car to get the entire show.
One sage stoner said the show was based on a manga by Akira Toriyama. These books were even less accessible — it would be years before a publisher licensed it for distribution in the U.S.
But fans work faster than capitalism.
Fans hand-scanned pages from the books, using MSPaint to translate the dialogue into other languages. Since manga is usually colorless, they flattened the image quality down to pure black and white, so that a standard crappy internet connection could download them. Downloading a chapter of the story took all afternoon – so I spent every afternoon hungry for the next page.
(12) I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE. Joe R. Christopher’s 2005 review “Hobbits In The National Parks” covers a mystery writer’s Tolkien references.
Nevada Barr is known, among readers of mysteries, for her novels about Anna Pigeon, a National Park Ranger whose assignments usually take her to a different national park in each book. She began in Texas, in the Guadalupe National Park, in Track of the Cat (1993). The stories are told in the third person, in a manner that easily slides from giving Pigeon’s thoughts to objective descriptions and records of conversations and actions.
… This use of reference to Middle-Earth as an enlivening device prepares for most of the allusions that appear in the mysteries. What follows is, at least in intention and perhaps in reality, a complete survey of those references.
In A Superior Death (1994), set on Isle Royale National Park (in a northern area of Lake Superior), at one point four Park Rangers have to do a “bounce dive” down to an old, deeply sunken shipwreck. (The “bounce” means in this case that they have only twenty-two minutes at the bottom.) The Tolkienian comparison occurs just after they enter the cold water of the lake. Anna Pigeon looks at one of her fellow Rangers:
“Tattinger floated into view. With the regulator stretching his rubbery lips and the mask maximizing his watery eyes, he put Anna in mind of Gollum, the pale underearth creature that gave Bilbo Baggins the willies.” (p. 136)
The emphasis on Gollum’s paleness may tie to the first description of Jim Tattinger in the book as one who spent his time on computers and seldom dove the wrecks himself (p. 39) — in other words, an indoors office type. …
Parallel Minds is a new film from Calgary-based director, Benjamin Ross Hayden. The film opened the Calgary International Film Festival last month to a sold-out audience. Parallel Minds is set for theatrical release in 16 cities across Canada.
A synopsis of the film:
On the verge of the release of Red Eye 2, a revolutionary contact lens that can record data and resurface buried memories, Margo, a Metis researcher in the Department of Memory discovers Red Eye’s head programmer murdered. Margo teams up with Thomas, a police detective running from his past, to uncover what happened to her friend and explore just how deep the revolutionary rabbit hole goes in this futuristic Indigenous thriller
Eight year old Jessamy lives in London with her Nigerian mother and British father. On a visit to her mother’s family in Nigeria she meets her first real friend, a girl she calls TillyTilly. TillyTilly takes Jess to forbidden, impossible places and makes her see the things differently. Jess goes home to London: a little while later TillyTilly turns up saying she’s just moved in nearby. It takes Jess a while to realize that no one else can see her new friend, and she struggles to resist acting on TillyTilly’s more destructive ideas. Through her new friend Jess discovers a truth about herself that she had never consciously known before, but which, perhaps, has been at the root of her anxiety all along. Sinister and scary, this is a gripping read all the more impressive because of the fact that it was written while the author was still at school.
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Pitch Meeting” on Screen Rant, Ryan George says the third Hobbit movie has “amazing action sequences” written by “people who failed physics in high school.”
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Cath Jackel, Andrew Porter, JJ, Cat Eldridge, John Hertz, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
(1) KEPLER STRAIGHTENS UP AND FLIES RIGHT. NASA reports that the Kepler spacecraft has been stabilized and is no longer wasting fuel. They won’t resume science operations until they think they know what went wrong.
My short story, Pavlov’s House, which was both my first pro-sale and something I wrote as part of the early work on figuring out Dog Country, was ripped off by Galaktika.
What is Galaktika? It’s a Hungarian SFF magazine, which has over the past few years apparently ripped off a lot of authors. (There are some articles by A.G. Carpenter on the issue here: here) They went ahead and translated it into Magyar/Hungarian, then sold it in print, without asking me for translation rights, without notifying me, without offering me a contract or payment. They stole my story.
Getting my head around that has been kind of traumatic for me. My writing career is one of the most important things I have in my life, and part of that career is having a say in where and how my work appears. Stories are part of a conversation, by submitting my fiction for publication, by trying to sell it, by getting involved in where and how it appears, I am adding to that conversation. But when I get ripped off…? I’m not sure I’m part of that conversation anymore, and that’s been bugging me immensely.
For now I’m in touch with SFWA (I’m a member, if you did not know!) and figuring out what I can/should do about it.
In the meanwhile, though, if you haven’t already, go enjoy Pavlov’s House where it was originally published, at Strange Horizons, over here….
(3) BURNSIDE ON WEIGHING CREDIBILITY. At Medium, Ken Burnside takes issue with those skeptical about the sexism and assaults reported by women gamers, in “For Good Men To See Nothing”.
I specifically AM addressing this piece to the people of “my tribe”: white, heterosexual male gamers who wouldn’t dream of grabbing anyone in a non-consensual or sexual way in public, and find descriptions of these kinds of acts inconceivable, because they don’t happen in front of us.
Our starting point is an article by Emily Garland, who won a judgment from a Canadian court about entrenched sexism she experienced as a customer at a game store. It’s the “Tabletop Gaming Has a White Male Terrorism Problem” piece that came to public notice in early April 2016. To our credit as human beings, it’s gotten a lot of positive responses?—?positive in the sense of “Yes, this is believable, and we’ve got to do something about it.” However, it’s also gotten the “I think she’s making it up to get attention” backlash that’s common when discussing sexism.
No, guys. She isn’t. And as long litanies and lists of licentious license being taken won’t convince you…I’m going to pose this a different way….
The people who do this are incredibly facile with a plausible explanation for why what they’re doing is “not wrong” or “normal”?—?“It’s just a joke.” “Oh, she left something with me and I needed to return it to her.” They know that the vast majority of good men (like you, the people I’m writing this to) will accept that kind of explanation rather than act on it.
A friend of mine, New York Times bestselling author Steven Barnes, has a term for these kinds of people: “Smiling monsters.” They’ll smile and be cheerful to your face when you confront them, and expect you to forget them entirely while they go back to whatever it was you caught them at. These people rely on two facts: The first is that their victim doesn’t want to trigger a confrontation: even bold, brave women like the cosplayer I befriended at Sasquan get jittery about direct confrontation. The second is that good men, like you, won’t believe they’re doing what they’re doing, because they can’t imagine doing it. It’s easy to overlook smiling monsters when they give a glib answer and scuttle out of sight.
When you accept the explanation of the smiling monster, you give the victim the impression that you won’t listen to what they have to say. The smiling monster is betting on that, and 99% of the time, he’s right….
If you’re a fan of comics and are looking for a clever, humorous, and merciless riff on the superhero genre, then Almost Infamous is most definitely the book for you! Matt Carter’s novel is a wildly entertaining, satirical take on the characters and worlds we imagine when we picture the Marvel or DC universes, and as a twist, his protagonist is a horny, uppity teenage supervillain.
To get a sense of the zaniness you’re in for, just take a peek at the book’s first few pages, featuring a “Brief History of Superheroes.” Super powers—whether you were born with them, cursed with them, granted them as a result of radioactive freak accident, changed by a gene-splicing experiment gone wrong, and so on and so forth—are just a common fact of life. Superhumans are real. Oh, and by the way, so are Atlanteans, Lemurians, magicians, aliens, demons, golems, mortal gods who walk the earth, and pretty much every kind of power-endowed beings you can think of. All real.
Looking at the phenomenon, Fan Fiction is a wholly new type of medium that arrived because of the close-knit genre communities, and it demonstrates the unique environment of these communities. They’re also coupled with the rise of larger media franchises that typically expand far beyond the reach of novels. Fan fiction has provided a unique opportunity for fans to push the boundaries of the stories that they’ve come to love, and contribute to it in their own ways.
Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse, does a brilliant job with our next POV style:
7. Head-Hopper
If you’ve not read her novel, I urge you to do so. I also urge you to read it aloud, even if you’re sitting outside at a café, which I did a few summers ago. The book is graced with many long, complex sentences that loop and flow, and sometimes change point of view from one clause to the next. Reading it out loud helps the brain make sense of the phrases and clauses in a way that eyes-only reading can’t manage as well. When done well, as Ms. Woolf did, it is a brilliant writing stratagem. But it works best in stories where there is very little physical plot. The conflict comes mainly from the contrast of how different characters perceive the same moment, and in the shifting emotions of characters.
Which means, generally, it is not a good point of view choice for action-packed genre stories.
(7) ISLAMIC SF CONTEST. The Islamicate Science Fiction short story writing contest is open and will accept submissions until to the beginning of Ramadan/Ramzan/Ramjan (June 8, 2016). The winner will be announced on the day of Eid – July 6, 2016. Cash prizes will be given to the first, second and third place stories.
The Islam and Science Fiction project has been running since 2005, we just entered our second decade. While the depiction of Muslims in Science Fiction and Islamic cultures has improved we still have a lot way to go, as is the case with many other minority groups. To kickstart things in this genre we have decided to start a contest centered around Science Fiction with Muslim characters or Islamic cultures (Islam in the cultural sense and not necessarily in the religious sense)….
Scope:
Islamicate refers to the cultural output of predominantly Islamic culture or polity. Thus while the culture has its foundation and inspiration from the religion of Islam, it need not be produced by someone who is Muslim. The term Islamicate is thus similar to the term West as it encompasses a whole range of cultures, ethnicities and schools of thought with shared historical experience. The contest is open to all people regardless of their religious affiliation or lack there of. Thus a person of any religion, nationality, ethnicity race, gender, sexual orientation can submit. A collection of the best stories from the submissions will be released as an epub and available to download for free.
Submission rules:
The stories must be either set in a predominantly Muslim culture AND/OR have Muslim protagonist(s).
Short stories in almost any variant of Science Fiction (space opera, time-travel, apocalyptic, reimaging classic themes, techno-thrillers, bio-punk, science mystery, alternate history, steampunk, utopian, dystopian etc) is encouraged.
No reprints: No simultaneous submissions: No multiple submissions.
Submission are limited to one per person.
Since we are talking about short stories, any story with less than 8,000 words will be accepted.
Whew, Hugo nominations have closed and I managed to actually consume enough good SFF to nominate five things in most categories. The extraordinary new resources like Rocket Stack Rank and various longlists really came in handy.
Of course, the Hugo nomination deadline is just an excuse. Discovering new writers and fanzines you hadn’t heard of before is the thing, not some weird, phallic awards that never (or very very seldom) are given to your absolute top favorites anyway. I do like the fan community aspect of it — people reading the shortlisted works at the same time and discussing them, and getting together to throw the annual party — but it’s all more or less sideshow. The books, the stories and the other exciting things are what it’s about for me.
So, to some extent, nevermind what the eventual nomination results are going to look like on April 26th. Even if a certain former disco musician manages to make his MRA troll army sweep the ballot like he did last year, there will be terrific thing to read and watch on the various recommendation lists that many fans have put together. Next year, the necessary rule changes are ratified and we get rid of him. (Truth be told, I don’t think that it will be as easy for them to wreak havoc as it was last year, but who knows.)
(9) LOCUS AWARDS DEADLINE. Voting closes April 15.
For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They’ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They’ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They’ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat….
The trouble for the Taylor farm started in 2002, when a Massachusetts-based digital mapping company called MaxMind decided it wanted to provide “IP intelligence” to companies who wanted to know the geographic location of a computer to, for example, show the person using it relevant ads or to send the person a warning letter if they were pirating music or movies.
There are lots of different ways a company like MaxMind can try to figure out where an IP address is located. It can “war-drive,” sending cars around the U.S. looking for open wifi networks, getting those networks’ IP addresses, and recording their physical locations. It can gather information via apps on smartphones that note the GPS coordinates of the phone when it takes on a new IP address. It can look at which company owns an IP address, and then make an assumption that the IP address is linked to that company’s office.
One of the missions was to give some respect to Bill and Joe that I felt they’d missed over the decades when they’d disrupted the industry and vintage cartoon partisans never forgave them. They were abused as having limited creative imaginations, so I commissioned a series of essays written by Bill Burnett to set the record straight.
In 1996, towards the end of my tenure (owner Ted Turner sold his entire operation to Time-Warner), I commissioned a series of formal portraits by one of my favorite Los Angeles based photographers, Jeff Sedlik. Bill was 86, Joe 85, and they deserved to be remembered as the American cultural titans that they were.
(13) NEW SUICIDE SQUAD TRAILER. Aired during the MTV Movie Awards.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Andrew Porter, Darren Garrison, Barry Newton, Will R., and Greg Hullender for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Sylvia Sotomayor.]
