Tag Archives: MAD Magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Meredith Placko

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

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

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

It is of course freely available at the usual suspects. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

(9) COMICS SECTION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who inspired the launch of Weird Fantasy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pixel Scroll 9/20/24 It’s Not A Cookbook, It’s A Pixel Scroll!

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(1) BIG DEAL. Marie Vibbert counsels writers about “Playtesting Card Games” at the SFWA Blog. One bit of advice will sound very familiar.

Immolate Your Darlings

You’ve perhaps heard writers talk about “Murdering their darlings,” which refers to the agony of having to cut a beautiful sentence, scene, or even a sub-plot that you love but doesn’t serve the overall arc of the story. I once twisted five drafts of a novel around a scene I absolutely adored before I realized that it had to go. Ow, it hurt.

The same thing happens in games. There might be a mechanic, a special card, an illustration, a subtle joke…and you love it, but it has to go. It’s worse when you have this nice physical card you made for the mock-up.

Even your game’s theme, which might seem the most essential part of it, must be disposable. On the off chance your game is picked up by a publisher, one of the most common things they want to do is re-theme it, probably for some big franchise. (In case you thought someone set out to create the Go Bots 50th Anniversary Card Game.)

You cannot grow attached before completion. The game is in flux. Consider every part expendable in service to the greater whole….

(2) SFF ART UP FOR AUCTION. [Item by Sandra Miesel.] I’ve put some of my sf collection up for sale at RipleyAuctions.com The live auction is October 5 and registration is free. My pieces include: the Kelly Freas’  DAW cover painting for Soldier, Ask Not by Gordon R. Dickson and its preliminary sketch, Kelly’s Analog interior illustration for “The Second Kind of Loneliness” by George R.R. Martin; Kelly’s Laser Books sketch for The Extraterritorial by John Morrissey; Richard Powers’ cover painting for Far Out by Damon Knight; John Schoenherr’s Analog interior illustrations for “And He Fell into a Dark Hole” by Jerry Pournelle, “The Demon Breed” by James Schmitz, “Spaceman” by Murray Leinster, and the ultimate prize: Schoenherr’s scratchboard Analog illustration for the very first installment of “Dune World”. Sandra Miesel at Ripleyauctions.com.

Frank Kelly Freas, American (1922 – 2005), Soldier, Ask Not book cover

(3) REMEMBERING THE FAHRENHEIT FIFTIES. Heritage Auctions has an interesting item on the block – a volume of Fahrenheit 451 inscribed by Bradbury to Hugh Hefner.

40th Anniversary Edition. PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED AND SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR TO HUGH HEFNER: “For Hef! Who published this when almost everyone else was afraid! With gratitude! Ray Bradbury. Nov. 3, ’93. 40 years later!”

Fahrenheit 451 was first published by Ballentine Books, Inc., in 1953, as a revision and expansion of his fifty-six-page novella, “The Fireman.” The novel was sold to Hugh Hefner’s new magazine, Playboy, which published the story in three installments in its fourth, fifth, and sixth issues (March 1954 to May 1954). 

(4) SPOTLIGHT ON MAD MAGAZINE. [Item by Steven French.] If you happen to be in Massachusetts over the next month, check out “What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine,” an exhibition running until October 27 at the Norman Rockwell Museum. 

It covers the full 72-year history of Mad, highlighted by the stretch from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, when the magazine pilloried mass culture—television, movies, politics and more—in a way that introduced satire to kids raised on tamer entertainment like “Leave It to Beaver.”

The Smithsonian article on it is an interesting read in its own right!  “The Madcap History of Mad Magazine Will Unleash Your Inner Class Clown”.

… Mad magazine had its beginnings in 1947, when publisher Maxwell Gaines’ death in an upstate New York boating accident left his Educational Comics company to his 25-year-old son, William Gaines. Under Maxwell, the comics featured stories of science, animals, history and Picture Stories From the Bible. When William took over, he quickly shifted gears to “Entertaining Comics” (EC for short) and started publishing romance, westerns, science fiction, war and horror stories, most notably Tales From the Crypt. Gaines the younger had more than laughs and frights on his mind, however; woven into EC Comics were progressive ideals around racial equality, pacifism, environmentalism and the existential nuclear-age dread rarely spoken of in the placid, conformist 1950s.

In 1952, a comic book poking fun at other comic books debuted, but it would take four issues for Tales Calculated to Drive You MAD to take off. That fourth one featured the parody “Superduperman,” a blueprint for making hay of pop culture and politics. Amid a panic over youth corruption, inspired in part by EC’s other publications, editor Harvey Kurtzman convinced Gaines to retool Mad from a comic book into a magazine, and in July 1955 (Issue No. 24), a future mockery machine emerged….

(5) LITIGATION IS IN THE CARDS. “Cards Against Humanity sues SpaceX, alleges ‘invasion’ of land on US/Mexico border” – Ars Technica has the story.

Cards Against Humanity sued SpaceX yesterday, alleging that Elon Musk’s firm illegally took over a plot of land on the US/Mexico border that the party-game company bought in 2017 in an attempt to stymie then-President Trump’s attempt to build a wall.

“As part of CAH’s 2017 holiday campaign, while Donald Trump was President, CAH created a supporter-funded campaign to take a stand against the building of a Border Wall,” said the lawsuit filed in Cameron County District Court in Texas. Cards Against Humanity says it received $15 donations from 150,000 people and used part of that money to buy “a plot of vacant land in Cameron County based upon CAH’s promise to ‘make it as time-consuming and expensive as possible for Trump to build his wall.'”

Cards Against Humanity says it mowed the land “and maintained it in its natural state, marking the edge of the lot with a fence and a ‘No Trespassing’ sign.” But instead of Trump taking over the land, Cards Against Humanity says the parcel was “interfered with and invaded” by Musk’s space company. The lawsuit includes pictures that, according to Cards Against Humanity, show the land when it was first purchased and after SpaceX construction equipment and materials were placed on the land….

…Cards Against Humanity also set up a website to publicize its lawsuit. “We have terrible news,” the website says. “Seven years ago, 150,000 people paid us $15 to protect a pristine parcel of land on the US-Mexico border from racist billionaire Donald Trump’s very stupid wall. Unfortunately, an even richer, more racist billionaire—Elon Musk—snuck up on us from behind and completely fucked that land with gravel, tractors, and space garbage.”

The website claims that SpaceX made a “lowball offer” to buy the land after Cards Against Humanity complained….

(6) WRITER BEWARE. “Wolves in Authors’ Clothing: Beware Social Media Marketing Scams” says Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware.

For authors, one of the (these days, increasingly few) positives of social media is connecting with other authors. Especially if no one else in your family/social circle is involved in the arts (raises hand), it’s great to be able to find a community where you can discuss craft, business, the ups and downs of querying, the challenges of self-publishing–both sharing your own experiences and learning from others’.

But…what if that friendly author who just DM’d you on one of your social media accounts isn’t actually a writer, but someone who wants to sell you worthless “marketing” services?

… Oooh, conversion enhancement campaign! That’s some sexy jargon right there.

The name on the marketer’s Instagram account (which no longer exists) was Ashley Wallace of Ashley Digitals. You can see the author’s conversation with her–including an unconvincing excuse for why her website URL doesn’t work, an elaborate sales pitch, and false claims about clients….

(7) FOUR-PAGE GOTHAM GAZETTE INSERT IN THURSDAY NYT. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Our household gets the New York Times in the classic physical flattened-dead-tree version; I was bemused to discover the Thursday, September 19 edition included a four-page insert, the Gotham Gazette.

As part of HBO/MAX’s promotion of its new Penguin live-action show, which has just started. I/we haven’t yet tried it (but we just finished, and enjoyed, the first two episodes of Agatha All Along, over on Disney+, which, perhaps-arguably, is bat-adjacent via Walt’s round-eared mascot.)

Here’s some article links — note, the first link has readable images of the four-page insert. Wak, wak, wak.

“The Penguin: Gotham Gazette Offers Interesting Post-The Batman Details” at Bleeding Cool.  This article has readable images of full four online pages. The others below have some partial shots.

“How the New York Times became the Gotham Gazette for a day” at Fast Company. Including “But if you pass through Grand Central Station today, or Little Italy, or Times Square, you’ll see old-school newspaper hawkers schlepping copies of the Gotham Gazette”  [also, according to the ComicBook.com article listed below, at Times Square, Penn Station]

“The Penguin Takeover Heads to New York City to Celebrate Premiere” at Comicbook.com. This article includes deets on the “Penguin take-over” events in NYC and elsewhere:

HBO and Max are gearing up for the premiere of The Penguin with a takeover of the Big Apple. The spinoff of The Batman brings Colin Farrell back as Oz Cobb, aka the titular Penguin and foe of the Dark Knight. The Penguin has started a global campaign leading to the premiere on Thursday, September 19th, with one of its first stops at San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter. The Penguin Takeover will involve exclusive merchandise trucks all across New York City, along with the lighting of iconic landmarks and collaboration with local businesses using Penguin’s signature plum purple hue….

Max is continuing The Penguin’s presence internationally following the Iceberg Lounge’s success in San Diego. The Penguin will bring the iconic Iceberg Lounge to select locations in France, Spain, The Netherlands, and Thailand, along with other local promotions in the APAC, EMEA, and LATAM regions. Fans might also spot The Penguin’s purple Maserati in the streets of São Paulo, Paris, and other major cities.

The Penguin Takeover will feature the Feast of San Gennaro, the New York Latino Film Festival Block Party, early fan screenings at Alamo Drafthouse, and specialty menu items at participating businesses as Gotham comes to life. The takeover will extend beyond New York, with The Penguin’s iconic Iceberg Lounge and other experiences in select cities worldwide.

Also coverage at MSN.com: “The Penguin makes The Gotham Gazette real for one day only as the Max series takes over The New York Times to explain everything that’s happened since The Batman”.

And Looper: “HBO’s Penguin Confirms Where Batman Is (Or Isn’t)”.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979)

Forty-five years ago on this evening, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century first aired on NBC.

It is of course based on characters created by Philip Francis Nowlan. It started out as a comic strip that first appeared in daily U.S. newspapers on January 7, 1929, subsequently appearing in Sunday and international newspapers, then there were books, a radio adaption, comic books, a serial film. You get the idea. 

So after all of that came this series. It was developed by Glen Larson who created Battlestar Galactica and Leslie Stevens who created Outer Limits.  

It lasted but two seasons in total comprising thirty-seven episodes. A feature-length pilot episode for the series was released as a theatrical film, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. It did spectacularly well at the box office as it cost just three and a half million and made eighteen point seven more than that!  

The film was narrated as was the first season by William Conrad who had found stardom as a detective in the two series, Cannon and Nero Wolfe. Yes, he played Wolfe though briefly as it lasted but fourteen episodes. Who here saw him as Wolfe? 

The only cast that counts was Gil Gerard as Captain William “Buck” Rogers and Erin Gray as Colonel Wilma Deering.  Oh, and Mel Blanc in the first season voicing Twiki. Felix Silva would voice him in the second season. Other cast members I’ll note are Tim O’Connor as Dr. Elias Huer, Pamela Hensley as Princess Ardala and Henry Silva as Kane. Andrew Thom Christopher as Hawk, a bird man with the most comical feather for hair I’ve ever seen! 

Later interviews with Gerard and Gray as well as the directors say that neither got along with the other as they thought each was getting more lines and better stories. Oh well. 

Buster Crabbe who played Buck Rogers in the original thirties Buck Roger’s film serial would play Brigadier Gordon in an episode here. Yes, a nod to his other film series. 

The casting director had a fondness for one of our favorite series. Many of the actors who had played villains in the Batman series guest-starred here such as Frank Gorshin, Roddy McDowall, Julie Newmar and Cesar Romero. 

It’s worth noting that the series re-used most of the props, star fighters, stages, some of the effects film and even costumes from Battlestar Galactica. The network obviously being keen on keeping costs down at all costs.

Ratings were fine for the first season, but dropped drastically in the second season and cancellation was decided by mid-season. 

It has streamed on Amazon and on Peacock, not surprisingly on the latter as that’s owned by NBC, and Prime, but not is not currently streaming anywhere. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) SQUID GAME RETURNS. “’Squid Game’ Season 2 Trailer: New Players, New Game” – Variety introduces the trailer.

“Squid Game” is back and Netflix has released the first teaser for its hotly anticipated second season. The footage comes as the final reveal of the streamer’s annual Geeked Week fan event.  

The teaser picks things off right after Season 1’s finale, when Seong Gi-hun abandoned his plans to go to the U.S. and instead started a daring chase with a newfound motive. In the short teaser, he appears back in his 456 uniform amid a crowd of new contestants. Another massive cash prize awaits them, with a quick look at the games to come.

The globally successful Korean series follows financially struggling individuals competing in deadly games for a chance to win a life-changing prize, revealing the dark depths of human desperation and resilience…

(11) THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME. “Scientists discover weird new kind of shape found in nature” reports Boing Boing.

Mathematicians have identified a new class of shapes that “tile space without using sharp corners.”

From bathroom floors to siding on buildings, it’s common to cover areas without gaps by arranging shapes with straight edges and flat surfaces. In the natural world though, those kinds of shapes are rare. Patterns like those in muscle tissue are created with flowing curves, rounded surfaces, and almost no sharp angles. But the mathematics of these “soft shapes” have been a mystery until now.

“Nature not only abhors a vacuum, she also seems to abhor sharp corners,” says University of Oxford mathematician Alain Goriely who, with colleagues from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, discovered the new shape class called “soft cells.”

From Oxford University:

In 2D, these soft cells have curved boundaries with only two corners. Such tiling patterns are found, among others, in muscle cells, zebra stripes, the shapes of river islands, in the layers of onion bulbs, and even in architectural design.

In 3D, these soft cells become more complex and interesting. The team first established that, in 3D, soft cells have no corners at all. Then, starting with conventional 3D tiling systems such as the cubic grid, the team showed that they can be softened by allowing the edges to bend whilst minimising the number of sharp corners in this process. Through doing this, they found entire new classes of soft cells with different tiling properties.

Professor Gábor Domokos said: ‘We found that architects – including Zaha Hadid – have constructed these kinds of shapes intuitively whenever they wanted to avoid corners.

(12) TRANSCENDENCE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The concept of transcendence or subliming (the term used in Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels) is a minor, but recurring SF trope by which a civilization evolves to a point when they leave our space-time continuum for a ‘higher’ plane of existence.  I think I first came across this half a century ago reading Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.  Anyway, Isaac Arthur over at Isaac Arthur Science Futurism this week takes a bit of a dive into this concept…

Many seek a path to enlightenment through study and meditation, but what does science tell us about transcendence? And could entire civilizations seek to leave this reality behind?

(13) FROM THE CRYPT, ER, ARCHIVE. The Paul Lynde Halloween Special of 1976 has a highly eclectic cast – like Margaret Hamilton and Betty White vamping together!

Bringing Witchypoo from HR Pufnstuf and Wizard of Oz’s wicked Witch of the West together but only Paul Lynde could give you the band KISS and Donny and Marie Osmond in the same show.

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

Pixel Scroll 7/8/24 Listen, Billy Pixel’s Come UnScrolled In File

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(1) MAAS AND YARROS DOMINATE THE MARKET. “With Fantasy on Fire, Print Book Sales Are Catching Up to 2023” reports Publishers Weekly.

…Results for the first half of 2024 leave no question about what is driving sales: adult fantasy sales skyrocketed 85.2% over the first six months of 2023 thanks to a huge increase in interest in romantasy. Combined with increases of about 20% each in the science fiction and suspense/thriller areas, unit sales of adult fiction rose 6.3% in the first half of 2024. Sales of graphic novels continued to recede from record highs in 2022, falling 16.1% in this year’s first six months.

Books by Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros are leading the fantasy charge. Yarros’s Iron Flame and Fourth Wing combined to sell about 1.1 million copies, while Maas had seven books selling in big numbers, led by her latest, A Court of Thorns and Roses, which sold more than 740,000 copies. Her seven current bestsellers combined sold more than three million copies…

(2) THE EXTRA FILES. [Item by Steven French.] David Duchovny answers some readers’ questions in the Guardian: “David Duchovny: ‘I’m not just throwing on a kilt willy-nilly’”

Do you believe? TurangaLeela2

The proposition that Earth is the only planet in the universe that has managed to sustain intelligent life seems an impossibility. On the other hand, do I believe we’ve been contacted or are in contact with aliens? I don’t believe that, no. How often do I get asked if they are going to reboot The X-Files? I mean, that’s the default question people like to ask. If I was going to do it, I’d let y’all know. You wouldn’t have to ask me. I wouldn’t keep it a secret. Nowadays, I think people believe in conspiracies we never would have aired because they were just too stupid.

(3) WHAT COMES OVER THE DIGITAL TRANSOM. Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas belts out “The Ballad of the Slush Reader: What I’ve Learned (And What I Want to Know) about Reading Slush” at the SFWA Blog.

… I’m not the self-appointed slush reader representative of the short fiction genre publications, nor do I pretend to be one. I write these lines, first and foremost, from my own brief but fulfilling experience as a slush reader for Clarkesworld Magazine, as well as from what I’ve gathered in conversations with friends, who are also part of editorial teams. This essay is unapologetically, a personal generalization that hopes to start a discussion somewhere, sometime….

Communication is a two-way affair. Editors should be clear about the specific kind of commitment expected from slush readers: amount of stories read, level of detail in recommendations’ comments, etc. It is expected from them to be approachable and open to answering our questions on submission guidelines, as well as offering guidance on handling problematic stories, protecting author privacy, and giving advice on trusting our editorial instincts. First readers should write concise, unambiguous notes for the submissions we read and share any concerns we may have about them. We shouldn’t ghost our editors or make unilateral decisions based on our interpretation of the magazine’s guidelines if something is not clear in them. We’re members of a team, after all.

As the first ones to interact with a submission, we must treat the authors’ privacy with respect. A little decency goes a long way. Markets have the responsibility to delineate confidentiality specifications for the team and make sure authors know they exist. I believe that having better practices during recruitment, selection, and training can help identify and avoid the few people who might try to misuse the authors’ private information before they can even have access to it.

We’re supposed to read slush to support and advocate for other people’s work, but that doesn’t mean that we have power over them or that they owe us anything. We shouldn’t even think about rejecting a story on the basis of an author we don’t like, or recommend our friend’s work just because we know each other. We’re professionals. We do this for the stories, for the end readers. At Clarkesworld, for example, I don’t make final decisions but suggestions that have to be reviewed and approved by a senior member of staff.

(4) WILL MERGER AFFECT THE FEDERATION? “Paramount Global Officially Agrees To Skydance Merger, With Potential Big Impact On Star Trek’s Future” – and TrekMovie.com tries to foresee what that impact might be.

Today, Paramount Global announced that Shari Redstone’s National Amusements (which owns a controlling share of Paramount) will be sold to David Ellison’s Skydance Media and RedBird Capital  for $2.4 billion, leading to a $4.5 billion merger of Paramount Global with Skydance. The deal will offer voting and non-voting shareholders a premium on their stock as well as inject billions into “New Paramount” coffers to help pay off debt. A new leadership team has been announced, with Skydance’s David Ellison to be Chairman and Chief Executive Officer with RedBird exec (and former NBCUniversal chief) Jeff Shell named as president….

…Since the 1960s when Desilu was purchased by Paramount, the Star Trek franchise has seen its way through multiple corporate changes. It is too early to know what this announcement means for the Star Trek franchise, but this deal was seen as one of the better potential outcomes. Unlike other potential bidders, Skydance is committed to keeping Paramount relatively intact, avoiding any potential division of the Star Trek rights that occurred during the Viacom/CBS corporate split years before they were remerged in 2019. The most positive indication for Star Trek is that Skydance previously partnered with Paramount on the production of the last two Trek feature films, and they were committed to backing the next movie currently in development. Skydance CEO David Ellison, who will run the new Paramount, was credited as an executive producer for both Into Darkness and Beyond. These movies were mentioned by Ellison in a call with investors this morning….

…During today’s call, incoming Paramount president Jeff Shell talked about seeing Paramount+ as part of an “ultimate bundle.” He also indicated they will be looking at more licensing deals and “windowing” strategies for Paramount-owned content, which could lead to Star Trek streaming originals showing up beyond Paramount+. Today’s investor presentation noted Star Trek as one of the key franchises for the new Paramount, including a plan to “reevaluate” franchises to fuel a “powerful and repeatable IP ecosystem.” Today Ellison also talked about unifying franchises across TV, film and interactive media, which could potentially lead to a more comprehensive Star Trek Universe….

(5) HE MADE IT SO. “Patrick Stewart Is Ready To Engage” at the Washington Free Beacon.

…Stewart represents a fascinating mix of working-class ethics, having grown up poor but hard-working, and upper-class aesthetics, which he refined first in amateur plays and then in acting schools. This occasionally led him to mildly awkward encounters. My favorite story in his memoir comes on the set of Dune, where Stewart (who was playing warrior-poet Gurney Halleck) was introduced to the musician Sting.

“Do you … play in a group?” Stewart asked.

“Yes, with The Police,” Sting replied.

“I broke into a broad grin,” Stewart writes. “‘You play in a police band?’ I said. ‘Wow! How marvelous!’ I have never fully recovered from the sheer embarrassment I suffered when word got out on the set about my exchange with one of the world’s biggest rock stars.”…

(6) LANTHIMOS TURNS TO SFF. According to The Mary Sue, “Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone’s Next Is a Sci-Fi Comedy”. Lanthimos’ 2023 picture Poor Things got a lot of awards attention this year.

… The movie, titled Bugonia, is set for a November 7, 2025, release date in the US. Jesse Plemons, who featured in Lanthimos’ recent release Kinds of Kindness, has been announced as the co-lead alongside Stone…. 

…A fifth collaboration between Stone and Lanthimos, the film is an adaptation of the 2003 South Korean sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet!, directed by Jang Joon-hwan and starring Shin Ha-kyun and Yun-shik Baek. The plot follows two conspiracy-minded men who kidnap the powerful CEO of a major corporation, assured that she is an extraterrestrial being determined to end Earth’s existence. It remains to be seen whether Lanthimos’ rendition will be similar to the original or whether he tweaks the story to introduce some of his own elements….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

July 8, 1951 — Anjelica Huston, 73. The first role that I clearly remember Anjelica Huston from was as Mortica Addams in The Addams Family  thirty-three years ago. She was every bit was ghoulishly fascinating as was Raul Julia as Gomez Addams. She inhabited that role as if she’d been born to play it. A perfect couple they were.

Anjelica Huston in 2014.

It’s worth noting that she always had a ghostly glow around the eyes, which became most noticeable when she was standing or lying in dim light. Bela Lugosi in 1931’s Dracula had the same effect. That meant all were her scenes were filmed with a light in her face. 

So being Morticia required Huston to wear a truly tight dress on top of an already tight corset to give her the character’s distinctive, slim silhouette. (Director Barry Sonnenfeld aimed for a cartoon-like figure, so hence that metal corset which restricted her movements and caused quite severe headaches. She reported that she gleefully burned all of the dresses when shooting finished.) 

In addition, she had to wear custom makeup to lighten her skin to create the look of  Morticia, have her hair painfully scraped so that she could wear a wig and then on top of all this, had to wear regular makeup, fake nails and eyelash extensions to complete the look.

Despite all of this I think that, Huston’s portrayal of Morticia captured both warmth and macabre humor. She was a perfect mother to two rather unusual children, and a loving wife to Raul. 

She’d reprise her role in Addams Family Values. The first film was nominated for a Hugo at MagiCon, the second at ConAdian.

Her first genre role, and yes I’ve seen it but I’ve honestly long since forgotten everything about it, was in Ice Pirates as Maida, one of the pirates. I really need to show you what she was outfitted there as it is, errrr, well, I think kind of silly. 

So what else did Angelica appear in? Good question. She would appear in The Witches based off of the Roald Dahl work as the Grand High Witch. Her makeup here is a work of art so here it is.

Yes, I know the film has fallen into let us say disrepute among certain groups, but I still like it.

I’m not seeing anything else this genre but she did one interesting animated work, one of which I wish to point out which is then let me spell this correctly in English A Cat in Paris.  In French it sounds oh so much better as Une vie de chat. A cat’s life. Black cat with red stripes leads a double life. During the night, he accompanies a car burglar named Nico (who calls him Mr. Cat), who performs heists to steal jewels. She voices the English version of Claudine.

She’s in John Wick, Chapter 3, Parabellum as The Director about which the John Wick wiki helpfully says “The Director is a crime lord and leader of the New York branch of the Ruska Roma. She is also the adoptive mother of John Wick and a mentor at the Tarkovsky Theater.” 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) RINGS OF POWER WILL BIND COMIC-CON. “‘Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power’ Season 2 To Conquer San Diego Comic-Con” says Deadline.

This year at SDCC, ahead of the series’ Season 2 premiere on August 29, the streamer will host an exclusive press and influencer reception by invitation only on Thursday, July 25, in San Diego. It will be followed by The Rings of Power panel in Hall H on Friday from 11:05 a.m.-12:15 p.m. featuring the series’ showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay as well as cast giving fans a inside look at Season 2 in Middle-earth.

Afterward, at 1:45 p.m. at Venue 808 in San Diego, a fan meet-and-greet with cast will be held in conjunction with the official Lord of the Rings fan site TORn (TheOneRing.net). On display will be a curated collection of Season 2’s costumes and props….

(10) MAD, YOU KNOW. “Americana meets meshuggeneh at a museum exhibit about MAD magazine” – Jewish Telegraphic Agency takes you there.

There’s a delightful “what if” moment at the start of “What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine,” a new exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum here. 

In 1964, MAD commissioned Rockwell himself to paint a portrait of Alfred E. Neuman, the humor magazine’s gap-toothed mascot, as he might have looked in real life. Correspondence featured in the exhibit suggests that Rockwell — grand master of gentle, folksy, even cornball Americana — was close to signing on with what MAD called its “usual gang of idiots”: goofball masters of sophomoric, anti-establishment satire.

In the end, Rockwell turned down the offer. “I think I better back out of this one,” he wrote. “After talking with you, and my wife who has a lot more sense than I have, I feel that making a more realistic definitive portrait just wouldn’t do. I hate to be a quitter, but I’m afraid we would all get in a mess.”

We didn’t lose just a marriage of comic sensibilities, but of ethnic ones: the “goyish” and the Jewish, mid-20th century style. Rockwell’s world is full of farmers and fishermen, country folk and small-town shopkeepers. MAD seemed to have been born on the Lower East Side, come of age in the Bronx, and found its voice somewhere between Brooklyn and Broadway….

(11) WORLDS WITHIN MURPHY’S LAW. Feeling mellow? Let’s fix that. The Mary Sue presents “The 10 Best Dystopian Novels, Ranked”.

…Authors have dreamed about all the countless ways the future can go wrong and will go wrong, so much so that a new genre was born from the collective unease: dystopian fiction. These novels are the worst—meaning they’re the best in their field…

This one’s new to me:

6. The Giver

The Giver [by Lois Lowry] may seem like a utopia on the surface, but it’s a dystopia like all the other cities on this list. Set in a peaceful society where people’s bad memories of the past are wiped away, only one person known as the Receiver of Memory is privy to the secrets of the human race. In order to maintain peace, the elders of this society eliminate the free will of everyone else. A good idea on paper? Not even in the pages of this book. You’ll soon find out why.

(12) SHIFTING GEARS. Ever heard that phrase, “Stop the Earth, I want to get off!”? Well, who knew — “Earth’s core has slowed so much it’s moving backward, scientists confirm. Here’s what it could mean” at WSVN.

Deep inside Earth is a solid metal ball that rotates independently of our spinning planet, like a top whirling around inside a bigger top, shrouded in mystery.

This inner core has intrigued researchers since its discovery by Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann in 1936, and how it moves — its rotation speed and direction — has been at the center of a decades-long debate. A growing body of evidence suggests the core’s spin has changed dramatically in recent years, but scientists have remained divided over what exactly is happening — and what it means.

… One promising model proposed in 2023 described an inner core that in the past had spun faster than Earth itself, but was now spinning slower. For a while, the scientists reported, the core’s rotation matched Earth’s spin. Then it slowed even more, until the core was moving backward relative to the fluid layers around it.

At the time, some experts cautioned that more data was needed to bolster this conclusion, and now another team of scientists has delivered compelling new evidence for this hypothesis about the inner core’s rotation rate. Research published June 12 in the journal Nature not only confirms the core slowdown, it supports the 2023 proposal that this core deceleration is part of a decades-long pattern of slowing down and speeding up…

(13) RASMUSSEN Q&A. [Item by Steven French.] An interview with astrophysicist Seven Rasmussen who has published in Clarkesworld under the pen name C.M. Fields: “’All things that wander in the heavens’: how I swapped my ivory tower for the world of science fiction” in Nature.

Through golden hive minds, dreaming androids and interstellar alien worlds, astrobiologist and speculative science-fiction author Seven Rasmussen explores humanity within the unfamiliar and strange. Rasmussen writes short stories that often feature space and the distant future — topics that her work as an astrobiologist at Tacoma Community College in Washington often touches on. Her debut non-fiction book, Life in Seven Numbers: The Drake Equation Revealed, is due to be published in June 2025. The book explores the seven variables of the Drake Equation, which estimates the number of intelligent, communicating civilizations in our galaxy.

Rasmussen spoke to Nature about writing science fiction as a scientist, her experience as a community-college professor and the importance of storytelling in science…

(14) WITCH WAY IS UP. “Agatha All Along Trailer: Kathryn Hahn Returns as WandaVision Witch” – The Hollywood Reporter sets the scene.

…A spinoff series from Disney+’s 2021 show WandaVision, Agatha All Along hails from creator Jac Schaeffer and premieres on the streaming service Sept. 18 with the first two episodes….

…Hahn reprises her WandaVision role as Agatha, who finds herself without her powers after a teen breaks her from a spell and urges her to attempt a dangerous gauntlet of trials known as Witches’ Road.

“I miss the glory days,” Hahn says in the trailer. “She took every bit of power I had, and I can be that witch again.”

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Danny Sichel.] Alan Becker, creator of 2023’s “Animation vs Math”, which starts with simple arithmetical concepts and quickly devolves into an all-out battle with lasers and mecha, has done it again. “Animation vs Geometry” begins with the concept of the line segment and somehow becomes a thrilling chase scene with a giant monster from beyond reality.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Danny Sichel, Daniel Dern, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 6/8/24 This Is A Test Of The Multiverse Emergency Response System

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(1) POWER ON BOARD. MIT Technology Review checks out CATAN: New Energies, an updated version of the popular board game that will be released June 14: “This classic game is taking on climate change”.

…Given Catan’s superstar status, I was intrigued to learn late last year that the studio that makes it had plans in the works to release this new version. I quickly got in touch with the game’s co-creator, Benjamin Teuber, to hear more. 

“The whole idea is that energy comes to Catan,” Teuber told me. “Now the question is, which energy comes to Catan?” Power plants help players develop their society more quickly, amassing more of the points needed to win the game. Players can build fossil-fuel plants, represented by little brown tokens. These are less resource-intensive to build, but they produce pollution. Alternatively, players can elect to build renewable-power plants, signified by green tokens, which are costlier but don’t have the same negative effects in the game. 

As a climate reporter, I feel that some elements of the game setup ring true—for example, as players reach higher levels of pollution, disasters become more likely, but there’s still a strong element of chance involved. 

One aspect of the game that didn’t quite match reality was the cost difference between fossil fuels and renewables. Technologies like solar and wind have plummeted in price over the last decade—today, building new renewable projects is generally cheaper than operating existing coal plants in the US.

I asked if the creators had considered having renewables get cheaper over time in the game, and Teuber said the team had actually built an early version with this idea in place, but the whole thing got too complicated. Keeping things simple enough to be playable is a crucial component of game design, Teuber says….

Åke Schwartz

(2) ONE OF THE ABOVE. Rich Horton shares his ballot in “Hugo Nominees for Best Novel, 2024: review summary” at Strange at Ecbatan.

…As I think my reviews make clear, none of these books are terrible — they all have redeeming values, and I’m glad I read them all. Having said that much, it also might be clear that I’m having a hard time enthusiastically supporting any of them for the Hugo. Is that a statement about the state of SF today, or the state of me as a reader of SF today? Probably both, in all honesty….

…So — in summary, what do I think of these books — how do I rank them? I’ll state my prejudices first. As hinted above, I do prize ambition — both literary ambition (I definitely give extra points for good prose) and thematic ambition — asking difficult questions, and presenting intriguing and original ideas. Especially science fictional ideas: cool extrapolation, and the treatment of technologies or scientific ideas that raise interesting question or that throw light on broader ideas, such as, say,  what does it mean to be intelligent….

(3) THE PIONEER FANZINE THAT “BOMBED” THE RUSSIANS. [Item by Ahrvid Engholm.] Imagine Ray Palmer popped up and told how the very first fanzine, The Comet, May 1930, came about?

A pioneer fanzine maker from 1952, Åke Schwartz, now surfaces after 72 years of silence. Not his fault, others didn’t know about him or Sweden’s first fanzine: Vår Rymd (“Our Space”).

Every issue of my PDFzine Intermission covers sf and fandom history. And Intermission 143.5 has a bombshell, all about the forgotten or lost Vår Rymd, directly from Åke (soon 89). Those pioneer fanzine makers once —

…gathered after lunch in a big room at Åke Henriksson’s on 13B Villa Street and produced it. It took a weekend. I worked the typewriter. I put up the typwriter on a big dining table. It was a bit difficult to write on stencils. If there was a typo you had to smear some substance on it, wait and then type the correction. We began with discussing what ideas each one had and if he had brought the material so it could be written. Then we decided the contents. Sven could draw what he wanted. He was a good artist. Then we began. A lot of milk and buns were consumed during the afternoon. We didn’t drink beer at the time. The next day we took the stencils to dad’s office at the company Gränges on Gustaf Adolf Square to print it.

But this was unexpected:

The Russian Ambassador lived below Henrikssons. Every day he went to the Russian Embassy on Villa Street 17. Once we put explosives in his keyhole. It was a fairly innocent mix called “blast dough”. It was Karl who studied chemistry who made it. When the ambassador put in the key it exploded.

The news on the fanzine dug up after 7+ decades is truly explosive…

(4) MEMORABLE EFFECTS OF LATE NIGHT SNACKS. The Guardian salutes “Gremlins at 40: Joe Dante’s untamed classic is a love letter to chaos”.

…The Peltzers have no business taking care of Gizmo, who must be kept away from bright light and water and must not, under any circumstances, eat after midnight. (The fact that it’s always after midnight is a bit of pedantry that Dante tackles in the sequel.) It takes absolutely no time at all for Billy and the family to violate all those rules, which result in the mogwai first multiplying into mischievous clones and then cocooning like the xenomorphs in Alien, later emerging as scaly, malevolent beasts hellbent on destruction. Credit Dante and his soon-to-be-famous screenwriter, Home Alone’s Chris Columbus, with establishing some key supporting players before things go awry, including Billy’s love interest, Kate (Phoebe Cates), the cantankerous Murray Futterman (Dante mainstay Dick Miller) and Mrs Deagle (Polly Holliday), the town’s miserly widow.

Released just two weeks after Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins cracked open a nationwide conversation about violence in family films and led to the creation of PG-13, intended to covering the wide gulf between all-ages fare and films aimed at adults. How that new rating would reshape American movies is a massive and mostly deflating discussion, but Dante’s willingness to spook his younger audience rather than infantilize it is laudable, because it’s done in the right spirit. …

(5) WALL-TO-WALL MAD. PRINT Magazine alerts readers to the opening of a museum exhibit in “The Daily Heller: MAD and the Usual Gang of Idiots”.

Richard Williams: “Alfred E. Neuman and Norman Rockwell”, 2002
Cover illustration for Mad Art: A Visual Celebration of MAD Magazine and the Idiots Who Create It (Watson Guptill, 2002)

The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA, has replaced its historic Leo Lionni exhibition with What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine, which runs through Oct. 27.

The show covers the full legacy of MAD, from Harvey Kurtzman’s inspired comic book, to Bill Gaines’ outwitting the Comics Code Authority by transitioning from comic book to magazine format, up through the present. The NRM curatorial staff, headed by Stephanie Plunkett, together with guest curator Steve Brodner (assisted by an unusual gang of experts), has brought MAD—which ended newsstand distribution in 2018, continuing in comic book stores and via subscription—back to the fore with a richly filled treasury of printed and original material. I prevailed on Plunkett and Brodner before the opening on June 8 to discuss what and what not to worry about while visiting this MAD wellspring of humor in the jugular vein….

Here’s the direct link to the exhibit: “What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine”. The Norman Rockwell Museum has also put together two short videos to go with it.

  • MAD: Making A Magazine
  • What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Compiled by Paul Weimer.]

June 8, 1928 — Kate Wilhelm. (Died 2018.)

By Paul Weimer. Even beyond her fiction, Wilhelm’s influence and effect on the field can be best defined with one word: Clarion.

The Clarion Workshop (and its splinter and descendant groups) was the brainchild of herself and Damon Knight, and its influence on the field cannot be underestimated. It remains to this day the premier workshop for science fiction writers, and many of the best writers, past and present either attended Clarion, or have taught at Clarion, or attended a workshop that came out or was inspired by Clarion. Thanks to Wilhelm, Clarion permanently and profoundly changed how science fiction writing is taught. 

Kate Wilhelm

As far as that fiction, the one Wilhelm work that stays with me, and it will be no surprise, is Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. Part of the round of post-apocalyptic novels and stories that was a strong strain in cinema and in written science fiction in the 1970’s, I think it might have been the first time I had come across the idea of clones. I first read the novel in that first burst of Science fictional reading in the early 1980’s (again, from my older brother’s collection).  I was struck by the setting, the conflict between the clones and those seeking to return to biological means of reproduction, and the slow continued apocalypse of the world. 

A community that had survived the apocalypse and was slowly surviving and outlasting global warming, was nevertheless succumbing, inexorably, to lacking the parts and technology to keep their new clone society alive.  (This would come to mind recently, when I read Walk to the End of the World by Suzy McKee Charnas, which takes this idea as well but in a different direction). It’s a sad and elegiac novel in the end, and very representative in general of her work.

Sadly, a lot of her non-mystery work (her mystery work output being far vaster than her science fiction) is not readily in print, which is, I think, a disservice and a shame.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) COMING TO AN EAR NEAR YOU. The Mary Sue introduces the “Chuck Tingle Bury Your Gays Audiobook Cast”.

…Now our favorite buckaroo is back with a new horror novel—and the audiobook version has a cast that will make speculative fiction fans scream.

Bury Your Gays, coming out on July 9, 2024, is Tingle’s second full-length horror novel. The book tells the story of Misha, a screenwriter in L.A. who’s been nominated for his first Oscar. However, the network executives in charge of Misha’s streaming show are pressuring him to kill off all his gay characters “for the algorithm.” When Misha refuses, he puts himself in mortal danger, while monsters of his own creation begin to stalk him in the hills outside the city.

A slate of beloved authors are in the audiobook’s cast, including Charlie Jane Anders, CJ Leede, Liz Kerin, Mark Oshiro, Sarah Gailey, Stephen Graham Jones, T. Kingfisher, and TJ Klune. The audiobook will be primarily narrated by Andre Santana, with Georgia Bird and Mara Wilson also contributing….

(9) THE SHAPE OF SPACE. Somebody tell Scott Edelman! “’We’re trying to find the shape of space’: scientists wonder if the universe is like a doughnut” – in the Guardian.

We may be living in a doughnut. It sounds like Homer Simpson’s fever dream, but that could be the shape of the entire universe – to be exact, a hyperdimensional doughnut that mathematicians call a 3-torus.

This is just one of the many possibilities for the topology of the cosmos. “We’re trying to find the shape of space,” says Yashar Akrami of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Madrid, a member of an international partnership called Compact (Collaboration for Observations, Models and Predictions of Anomalies and Cosmic Topology). In May, the Compact team explained that the question of the shape of the universe remains wide open and surveyed the future prospects for pinning it down.

“It’s high-risk, high-reward cosmology,” says team member Andrew Jaffe, a cosmologist at Imperial College London. “I would be very surprised if we find anything, but I’ll be extremely happy if we do.”

…. “Knowing what the curvature is, you know what kinds of topologies are possible,” says Akrami. Flat space could just go on for ever, like an infinite sheet of paper. That’s the most boring, trivial possibility. But a flat geometry also fits with some topologies that cosmologists euphemistically call “nontrivial”, meaning that they’re far more interesting and can get pretty mind-boggling.

There are, for mathematical reasons, precisely 18 possibilities. In general, they correspond to the universe having a finite volume but no edges: if you travel farther than the scale of the universe, you end up back where you started. It’s like the screen of a video game in which a character exiting on the far right reappears on the far left – as though the screen is twisted into a loop. In three dimensions, the simplest of these topologies is the 3-torus: like a box from which, exiting through any face, you re-enter through the opposite face….

(10) SALLY RIDE BIO COMING TO TV. Deadline learns “Kristen Stewart To Play Astronaut Sally Ride In ‘The Challenger’ TV Series”.

 Kristen Stewart will make her TV series-starring debut in The Challenger, a limited series in which she’ll play Sally Ride, the astronaut and physicist who became the first American woman to fly in space. She did this as part of a NASA space shuttle astronaut class of 1978 that was the first to be diversified and not comprised of all white men.…

…The series is based on The New Guys, a book written by Meredith E. Bagby, who partners with Sedgwick and Valerie Stadler in Big Swing. They are also executive producers.

In some ways, this has the tapestry to tell the successor story to The Right Stuff, which was based on Tom Wolfe’s book about the culture clash that occurred when the cockiest world’s best fighter pilots jumped into the space race that America was engaged in with the Russians. Bagby tells the story of a group that was called by their predecessors ‘The F*cking New Guys,’ as NASA sought to diversify its pilots and crew for the space shuttle program. Ride was the first woman and the first member of the LGBTQ+ community to fly into space. Also in that program was the first Black and Asian American astronauts, and a married couple. They passed all the rigorous tests to become top of the class, and egos, ambition and romance were part of the cultural clash. They were also quite brilliant.In 1983, Ride became the first American woman to fly on the space shuttle, and became an instant celebrity. That joy was short-lived, however, when three years later the space shuttle Challenger blew apart 73 seconds into its ascent, killing all seven members of the crew. Ride then became the only astronaut to become part of the Rogers Commission, a presidential commission to investigate the disaster, and it later came out that she pinpointed the problems with O-rings that became stiff at low temperature, and that turned out to be the reason for the explosion. Ride died from cancer at age 61 in 2012, a true American hero.

(11) NASA IS IN TROUBLE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Cool Worlds notes that NASA is in deep trouble.

In 2023 Congress spent US$1.5 billion (the same as NASA’s entire astrophysics budget) to buy extra F35 aircraft that the Department of Defense did not request. In terms of total tax revenue NASA’s astrophysics budget is 0.03% of total US tax spent and NASA’s overall budget 0.5% of US tax spent. For this year, NASA, through the White House, had requested US$27.2 billion but Congress only approved US$25.4 billion giving NASA its first budget cut in over a decade. Of course, there have been problems with things like the James Webb Space Telescope being massively over budget.

Cool Worlds suggests that we take NASA’s estimates for the cost of future missions with “a pinch of salt”. For example, will the Habitable Worlds Observatory (working title – bet it’s going to be called the Sagan telescope) really cost US$11 billion and launch in 2040? Cool Worlds also argues that a bigger telescope than that planned is needed as it is likely that the nearest habitable world around a Sun-like star will be further away than proposers think. It also notes that there are competing factors for US tax dollars. In the 1980s decade extreme weather events cost the US US$21.7 billion, but with climate change the half decade to the end of 2023 cost US$122.5 billion.

[Thanks to Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Paul Weimer, Mark Roth-Whitworth, 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 Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 1/25/24 The Pixels Will Continue Until Morale Improves

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(1) SWIMMING AGAINST THE TIDE. Malcolm F. Cross takes a deeply skeptical look at “AI, the Algorithm, and the Attention Economy” at Sin Is Beautiful.

…People using AI, even this theoretical ‘good’ kind, are shooting themselves in the foot and don’t know it.

Why? Most generative AI users are trying to participate in the attention economy – attempting to get eyes on their work, to get appreciative comments, sales, to build an audience for content that they produce.

When a generative AI user posts their image on social media, when they use it for their profile, for their website, for all the things art gets used for, they are competing for attention. And they are competing with everything else generated by AI. The same AI everyone else gets to use.

Generative AI for creating images has been big news since DALL-E’s first iteration was released in early 2021. By October 2022 it was generating two million images a day. DALL-E is only one player in the generative AI space for art.  It is estimated that in August 2023, 34 million images were being generated every day across the major generative AI art tools. 15 billion pieces of art, and that was about six months ago.

Assuming you only looked at the most excellent top 0.001% of those 15 billion images, that is still a hundred and fifty thousand images to look at….

… The best the AI artist can hope for in this ideal situation is to be a brief flicker in a constant feed of content we can barely remember.

If the ideas you were trying to express mattered, you wouldn’t have needed AI to win at the attention economy – you could have expressed them with stick figures and still won.

If your ideas actually are that good, then why obscure them by using generative AI?…

(2) AI AND THE FTC. Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission today announced it has launched an “Inquiry into Generative AI Investments and Partnerships”. However, apparently is the beginning of a study, not an action in response to a law violation.

…The FTC issued its orders under Section 6(b) of the FTC Act, which authorizes the Commission to conduct studies that allow enforcers to gain a deeper understanding of market trends and business practices. Findings stemming from such orders can help inform future Commission actions.

Companies are deploying a range of strategies in developing and using AI, including pursuing partnerships and direct investments with AI developers to get access to key technologies and inputs needed for AI development. The orders issued today were sent to companies involved in three separate multi-billion-dollar investments: Microsoft and OpenAI, Amazon and Anthropic, and Google and Anthropic. The FTC’s inquiry will help the agency deepen enforcers understanding of the investments and partnerships formed between generative AI developers and cloud service providers….

(3) TOC OF ELLISON COLLECTION. J. Michael Straczynski had announced the table of contents for Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits.

  • “Repent, Harlequin,” Said the TickTockman
  • I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
  • The Deathbird
  • Chatting with Anubis
  • The Whimper of Whipped Dogs
  • Jeffty is Five
  • Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes
  • Shatterday
  • Mefisto in Onyx
  • On the Downhill Side
  • Paladin of the Lost Hour
  • The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World
  • I’m Looking for Kadak
  • How Interesting: A Tiny Man
  • Djinn, No Chaser
  • How’s the Night Life on Cissalda?
  • From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet
  • Eidolons All the Lies That Are My Life
  • With a Preface by me.
  • Foreword by Neil Gaiman
  • Intro by Cassandra Khaw

Straczynski also drew attention to a Barnes & Noble Exclusive Edition of the book.

(4) ANOTHER SFF FILM SHELVED. “Netflix Axes Halle Berry’s Sci-Fi Film ‘The Mothership’” reports Variety.

Netflix has scrapped the release of “The Mothership,” a science-fiction film starring Halle Berry.

The movie finished filming in 2021, but it couldn’t be completed after multiple delays in post-production, Variety has confirmed.

“The Mothership” is the latest Hollywood movie to disappear even though filming had wrapped. Since 2022, Warner Bros. has axed three movies — John Cena’s “Coyote vs. Acme,” the $90 million budgeted DC adventure “Batgirl” and the animated “Scoob! Holiday Haunt” — for the purpose of tax write-offs….

(5) LOVECRAFT’S MAIL. Bobby Derie explores “Her Letters To Lovecraft: Edith May Dowe Miniter” at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein.

The details of Mrs. Miniter’s long career—a career inseparable from amateur journalism after her sixteenth year—will doubtless be covered by writers well qualified to treat of them. Reared in Worcester, taught by her poet-mother and at a private school, and given to solid reading and literary attempts from early childhood onward, the erstwhile Edith May Dowe entered amateurdom in 1883 and was almost immediately famous in our small world as a fictional realist. Controversies raged over her stories—so different from the saccharine froth of the period—but very few failed to recognize her importance. After 1890 she was engaged in newspaper and magazine work in the larger outside world, though her interest in amateur matters increased rather than diminished.

H. P. Lovecraft, “Mrs. Miniter—Estimates and Recollections” (written 1934) in Collected Essays 1.380

(6) REASONS TO READ. “25th Century Five and Dime #2: You Should Be Reading Judith Merril!” says columnist David Agranoff at Amazing Stories.

…One of the reasons I started this column is to share these discoveries. Early in the process of doing the show, I discovered the book The Future is Female edited by one of our most popular guests Lisa Yaszek. A few stories into the anthology I knew I had to have her on the show. That book has a similar mission to this column. While women like Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Leguin are famous now but The Future is Female as a book more importantly will introduce you to more obscure authors like Katherine Maclean and well known in her day Judith Merril. Her name was always a respected one in SF.

In that collection which collected the best of the pulp era SF ranging from the 20s to the end of the 60s was a story from the 40s by Merril that really stood out for me. “That Only a Mother.” The story of fall-out sickened children of atomic wars was a brutal and powerful stand-out. When Lisa gave us background on the story and author it was clear that JM was an important figure in the community and I needed to know more.

Since then, reading several histories from Fredrik Pohl, Damon Knight, Boucher, and Malzberg further made the point Judith Merril is an important voice in SF. Her role as a founding member of two major NYC clubs The Futurians and the Hydra club predates her publishing that began in 1948…. 

(7) RUBY SUNDAY MAYBE NOT GONE? RadioTimes’ Louise Griffin claims “Millie Gibson’s future on Doctor Who is still very bright”. Gibson plays Doctor Who companion Ruby Sunday.

Emotions have, understandably, been high as reports about Millie Gibson ‘being replaced’ in Doctor Who have rolled in.

First, let’s get the facts right. It’s been reported that Varada Sethu has been cast as the companion in season 15. Great news! Millie Gibson has not been “dropped” or “axed” – actually, the opposite as she’ll still be in season 15, just in a smaller role. But I think this is actually incredibly exciting….

(8) IN THE BEGINNING.  He wasn’t in it, he’s just telling the story: “Sylvester McCoy reminisces about first ever Doctor Who broadcast” in RadioTimes.

Sylvester McCoy has spoken of his fond memories of Doctor Who and reflected on the sci-fi’s first ever episode….

…He said: “It’s been 60 years now. I know where I was when it first came out, partly because I know where I was when John F Kennedy was shot, which happened the day before Doctor Who was broadcast.

“The BBC had to repeat the first episode of Doctor Who the following week because no one had watched it. They were all glued to the news about the Kennedy assassination and Doctor Who got pushed out. But when Doctor Who started, we had no concept it would go on forever and ever and ever.”…

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 25, 1926 — Bob Clarke. (Died 2013.) Stepping not quite outside of genre, or maybe not at all, we have Bob Clarke. 

Clarke started at the age of seventeen according to the stories he tells as an uncredited assistant on the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! comic strip. Ripley himself traveled the world collecting his fantastic trivia tidbits and sent them back to Clarke who drew them, captioned them and circulated them. There’s no way to prove or disprove this story.

(It’s most likely true because years later, he illustrated MAD‘s occasional “Believe It or Nuts!” parody in that style.) 

Quite a few sources, briefly and without attribution, say he designed the label of the Cutty Sark bottle.

After two years with Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, Clarke joined the army, where he worked for the European edition of Stars and Stripes and met his wife. Clarke remained with Stars and Stripes after being discharged as a civilian contributor, before eventually returning to America and joining the Geyer, Newell, and Ganger (GNG) advertising firm. He was among the artists there who designed the box for the children’s game Candyland. 

Now to MAD Magazine. Clarke was one of the artists who took up the slack he after original MAD editor Harvey Kurtzman left MAD in an absolute rage, taking two of its three main artists Will Elder and Jack Davis, with him. He claimed working at GNG with its design needs was his best training for this endeavor —“I learned about typefaces and layouts, how to prepare comps in the styles of many artists and cartoonists.” 

In his first year alone there, he illustrated twenty-four separate articles; he would eventually draw more than six hundred. Yes, six hundred.  Here’s one of those illustrations from MAD magazine # 156.

And that doesn’t count myriad covers such as the one below. He was a principal artist of the magazine as it rose fast in circulation, being one of four general-purpose artists who took MAD through the late Fifties and early Sixties, arguably the best years of the magazine. 

(10) OH NO! File 770 contributor Steve Vertlieb had a close call but fortunately sustained just a small injury. He explained what happened on Facebook.

This has been a week from Hell. At approximately two o’clock in the afternoon on Monday, January 22nd, the proverbial “Kracken” was released onto the highway. I was driving to the post office, going North on Bustleton Avenue in Northeast Philadelphia, on “a wing and a prayer,” when an elderly woman of Russian descent, driving her car going South, took a dangerous left hand turn into opposing traffic in order to gain entrance to her apartment complex.

I was on the inside lane, and so my vision was obstructed by cars to my left. Suddenly, out of nowhere, her vehicle appeared directly in front of me, less than a car length ahead. I screamed in panic, and jammed my foot on the brakes, but it was too late. I crashed into the side of her vehicle with a sickening crunch that I’ll not soon forget.

My vehicle’s airbags deployed upon impact, hitting me in the chest, and grazing my right hand which was clutched on the steering wheel. Smoke filled my car, and fluid drained onto the street all around me.

It could have been worse, I suppose. I could have been seriously injured or killed. A bloody gash adorns the torn skin of my injured hand. My car was totaled. It was paid off, and running in fine condition. I’d taken it in for a four thousand mile checkup only several days earlier.

Now I’m facing an expensive search for a replacement vehicle, while literally stranded in my apartment for the better part of a week. I’m picking up a rental on Friday.

I’m grateful to be alive, yet wondering why my recent mini-stroke, or T.I.A., was followed in rapid succession with a nearly deadly car crash. I seem to be on a roll of late in health threatening catastrophies.

(11) ECHO OVERCOMES. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Prepare for the cries that “wokeness is out of control.“ This despite the fact that the Marvel character’s description (female, indigenous, deaf) is pretty darn well matched by the actor’s description (female, indigenous, deaf, amputee). Echo, starring Alaqua Cox, is on Disney+ and Hulu. “Alaqua Cox Was Bullied for Being Deaf and an Amputee, Now the Marvel Star Is ‘Proud’ to Prove She ‘Can Do Anything’” in People.

Preparing to play a formidable Marvel character is a notoriously demanding process that pushes actors to the pinnacle of physical fitness.

For Alaqua Cox, who’s making history as the first Native American star to lead a Marvel series in the new Disney+ show Echo, it meant training five days a week with a stunt team to learn a slew of butt-kicking moves.

“I grew up playing different kinds of sports — I would play one-on-one basketball with my older brother — so I love doing those kinds of physical things,” the actress, who, like her character Maya Lopez, is an amputee and has been deaf all her life, tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue.

Cox, 26, originated the ruthless role with her breakthrough performance opposite Jeremy Renner in the series Hawkeye. Echo, who debuted in Marvel comics in 1999, is a gifted fighter with superhuman strength and a thirst for vengeance.

(12) CALLING WOLF. Sam Sykes on X. I laughed.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. 2023 Hugo Award finalist O. Westin has started a MicroSFF YouTube channel where a selection of their stories are read and presented in a simple format. For example:

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

Pixel Scroll 1/1/24 All These Pixels Are Someone Else’s Fault

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(1) SOME PEOPLE SHINE. Let Looper introduce you to “Stephen King’s Harry Potter: The Fan-Made Concept That’s Too Weird To Be Real”. This is quite something.

When it comes to accomplished fiction writers, you don’t get much more prodigious than Stephen King. So iconic is his work that the YouTube channel Yellow Medusa created an artificial intelligence-driven video that hypothesizes how the “Harry Potter” films would look like if King — and not J.K. Rowling — created the franchise. This is one of several videos where the channel reimagines the “Harry Potter” movies if they were directed or written by other famous creators….

(2) SFPA MEMBERS NOMINATE FOR AWARDS. The Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association reminded members today of the deadlines to submit nominees for three annual awards.

RHYSLING AWARD NOMINATIONS The 2024 Rhysling Chairs are Brian U. Garrison & David C. Kopaska-Merkel. Nominations are open until February 15 for the Rhysling Awards for the best poems published in 2023. Only SFPA members may nominate one short poem and/or one long poem for the award. Poets may not nominate their own work. All genres of speculative poetry are eligible. Short poems must be 11–49 lines (101–499 words for prose poems); Long poems are 50–1,199 lines, not including title or stanza breaks, and first published in 2023; include publication and issue, or press if from a book or anthology. Online nomination form: bit.ly/2024RhyslingNom. Or nominate by mail to: SFPA, PO Box 6688, Portland OR 97228, USA.

DWARF STARS AWARD NOMINATIONS The 2024 Dwarf Stars Chair is Brittany Hause. Nominations due by May 1, but poems may be suggested year-round. Enter title, author, and publisher of speculative micro poems published in 2023 at https://bit.ly/ dwarfstars or by mail to: SFPA, PO Box 6688, Portland OR 97228, USA. Anyone may suggest poems, their own or others’; there is no limit.

ELGIN AWARD NOMINATIONS The 2024 Elgin Chair is Felicia Martínez. Nominations due by June 15; more info will come by MailChimp. Send title, author, and publisher of speculative poetry books and chapbooks published in 2022 or 2023 to elgin@sfpoetry.com or by mail to: SFPA, PO Box 6688, Portland OR 97228, USA. Only SFPA members may nominate; there is no limit to nominations, but you may not nominate your own work. Books and chapbooks that placed 1st, 2nd or 3rd in last year’s Elgin Awards are not eligible.

(3) BE ON THE LOOKOUT. [Item by Steven French.] “Fiction to look out for in 2024” in the Guardian includes an SF novel tipped for the Booker:

…in September, there’s my early pick for this year’s Booker: Creation Lake (Jonathan Cape) by Rachel Kushner. It’s a wild and brilliantly plotted piece of science fiction. This is the story of a secret agent, the redoubtable Sadie Smith, sent to infiltrate and disrupt a group of “anti-civvers” – eco-terrorists – in a France of the near future where industrial agriculture and sinister corporations dominate the landscape. Think Kill Bill written by John le Carré: smart, funny and compulsively readable….

(4) NO MCU? REALLY? Rolling Stone calls these “The 150 Best Sci-Fi Movies of All Time”.

…So when it came time to rank the greatest sci-fi movies of all time, we couldn’t stop at 100. Instead, we went bigger and bulked it up with an extra 50 entries, all the better to pay lip service to more of the pulpy, the poppy and the perverse entries — not to mention some of our personal favorites — that don’t normally get shout-outs in these kinds of lists. There were more than a few arguments when it came to the picks. (It was also decided early on that superhero movies as a whole usually fall out the parameters of science fiction, so you won’t the MCU, et al., canon on this list — with one very notable exception.) Here are our picks for the best the genre has to offer. Live long and prosper. May the force be with you….

At the bottom:

150 ‘Tank Girl’ (1995)

What would the post-apocalyptic world look like if the hero was a riot grrrl and the soundtrack was curated by Courtney Love? Behold the adventures of Tank Girl (Lorri Petty), as our hero roams through the decimated Outback, years after a comet hit earth and an evil corporation seized control. It’s got some of the hallmarks of a traditional sci-fi adventure — a jet-flying sidekick played by Naomi Watts; an army of half-kangaroo, half-man beings, including one played by Ice-T — but Rachel Talalay’s adaptaion of the cult British comic diverges from the typical dystopia formula by layering everything over a very 1990s alt aesthetic, all bright colors and snappy, sexualized wisecracks. “No celebrities, no cable TV, no water — it hasn’t rained in 11 years,” Tank Girl explains early on in the film. “Now 20 people gotta squeeze inside the same bathtub — so it ain’t all bad.” —Elisabeth Garber-Paul

Rated number one:

1 ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968)

It begins at the Dawn of Man and ends with the rebirth of humanity, with Homo sapiens having finally been granted one last evolutionary level-up. In between those two poles of the human experience — one in our prehistoric past, the other light years into our future (hope springs eternal) — Stanley Kubrick give us what still feels like the benchmark for science fiction cinema that engages you in mind, body, and soul. It’s not just that his adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel” has become part of our collective consciousness, enough that Barbie could kick off with an extended riff on one of its most famous scenes and everyone got the joke. Or that 2001 contains what may be the single best example of film editing as a communicative art form unto itself. Or that the closest the film has to an antagonist, the self-aware HAL 9000 supercomputer who discovers that machines are no more immune from neurosis and malice than its flesh-and-blood programmers are, is the character we end up feeling the most sympathy towards. “Daissss-yyyy… daisssss-yyyyy…”….

…The wisecrack was always that 2001: A Space Odyssey was exactly like the big, black monolith that connected its eon-spanning chapters: gorgeous, meticulously constructed, inhuman in its perfection and inscrutable in terms of concrete meaning. Conventional wisdom is that it’s actually closer to the Star Child — something that takes the entirety of the universe in and stares at it in awe, reflecting back how far we have come and how far we still have to go. —DF

(5) LAWYERS ASSEMBLE! We know this, but it’s a new year so let’s pretend it’s news: “Mickey Mouse Hits Public Domain With Disney’s ‘Steamboat Willie’” at Deadline.

As of today, the traditionally protective Walt Disney Co will have to deal with an onslaught of Mickey Mouse parodies, mockeries and likely rather explicit variations as the iconic character slips into the public domain.

Sorta.

In the sober light of 2024, Steamboat Willie, the 1928 short that effectively launched the empire that Walt built, can now be used by anyone and everyone. The legal status of Mickey and Minnie Mouse from Steamboat Willie and Plane Crazy, from earlier that same year, has been long fought over and probably not something to which Disney was looking forward. Yet, in a new year that also sees Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking Orlando, Peter Pan, Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus, Buster Keaton‘s The Cameraman and Tigger from AA Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner now in the public domain, if you are anticipating a Steamboat Willie free-for-all, think again.

Besides Disney being notoriously litigious, the color version of Mickey that came into being in 1935’s The Band Concert, is a lot different in 2024 than the non-speaking Mickey of Steamboat Willie in 1928. Evolving over the decades, the brand icon that is today’s Mickey has a lot more meat on his bones, is full of many more smiles, has that chirpy voice and a far less rough disposition, wears white gloves, and clearly looks a lot less a rat than the Steamboat Willie Mickey – and, to paraphrase MC Hammer: you can’t touch that.

“More modern versions of Mickey will remain unaffected by the expiration of the Steamboat Willie copyright, and Mickey will continue to play a leading role as a global ambassador for the Walt Disney Company in our storytelling, theme park attractions, and merchandise,” a Disney spokesperson said of the dos and don’ts of the sound-synched film entering the public domain today….

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 1, 1954 — Midori Snyder, 70. This first novel by Midori Snyder that I read was The Flight of Michael McBride, a three decades old work by her set in the old American West blending aspects of  First Folk, Irish-American and Mexican folklore. A most excellent read. 

Like Pamela Dean with her Tam Lin novel, she’s delved in Scottish myth as her first novel, Soulstring, was inspired by the Scottish legend of Tam Lin. 

Midori Snyder

It was however not her first published work as that was “Demon” in the Bordertown anthology, the second of the Bordertown series.  She would later do two more Bordertown stories, “Alison Gross” that’d be in Life on the Border, and “Dragon Child” in The Essential Bordertown.

Now don’t go looking for any of these as ePubs as, like the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror series which I noted in Ellen Datlow’s Birthday a few days ago, ePub rights weren’t written into the publication contracts. 

The newest Bordertown anthology, Welcome to Bordertown, is available as an ePub.

Next up is a trilogy of books that remind me of Jane Yolen’s The Great Altar Saga in tone  — New Moon, Sadar’s Keep, and Beldan’s Fire. They were published as adult fantasy by Tor Books starting thirty four years ago where they were The Queens’ Quarter Series. Interestingly they would be reprinted as young adult fantasy by Firebird Books just eighteen years ago as The Oran Trilogy. I see that Firebird is no longer the domain of Sharyn November which it was explicitly related for.

Now I positively adore The Innamorati which draws off the the Commedia dell’Arte theatre and the Roman legends as well. This stellar novel gained her Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. It is without doubt her best novel – great characters, fascinating setting and a wonderful story.

Hannah’s Garden was supposed to be one of the novels inspired by a painting by Brian Froud. (I remember de Lint’s The Wild Wood and Windling’s The Wood Wife are two of the others but I forget the fourth. I know they got their novels with his art but I don’t if she or the fourth writer did.) It’s a more personal novel, more scary in tone I think than her other work is. 

Except the Queen was written by her and Yolen. It’s a contemporary fantasy featuring two fey who are banished here in the guise of old women. I’ll not spoil what happened next. That was her last novel and it was published thirteen years ago. 

She wrote the title short story for Windling The Armless Maiden and Other Tales for Childhood’s Survivors anthology anthology about child abuse survivors. Grim reading but recommended. It was nominated for an Otherwise Award.

It’s one of a not deep number of short stories she’s written, none collected so far. 

She did the text to the “Barbara Allen” graphic story Charles Vess illustrated and first published in his Ballads chapbook in 1997 which I’ve got here somewhere. Let me go see… yes, it’s also in the autographed copy of The Book of Ballads that he sent me. That came out on Tor seventeen years ago. God, time goes by fast! 

Though not about her fiction writing, she would win a World Fantasy Award for her editorial work on Windling’s Endincott Studio website. It is a fascinating site covering what Terri, Midori and others think is interesting in fairy tales, myth, folklore, and the oral storytelling tradition. It is here now.

(7) EASING A BARRIER TO CHINA TOURISM. For the next wave of fans who may be thinking about the trip: “China to simplify visa applications for US tourists as both countries seek to improve relations” at the South China Morning Post.

China will simplify the visa application process for tourists from the United States as part of its efforts to step up interactions between people from the two countries.

Beijing has also been seeking to woo more international visitors as part of its wider efforts to boost its sluggish economic recovery.

Starting from January 1, those applying for tourist visas within the US will no longer need to submit proof they have a round-trip air ticket and hotel reservation, as well as their itinerary or a letter of invitation, according to a notice published on the website of the Chinese embassy in Washington on Friday.

The measure aims to “further facilitate people-to-people exchanges between China and the United States”, it said.

It added that “since visa applications are processed on a case-by-case basis”, applicants should still refer to the Chinese embassy and consulates-general for specifics….

The move follows a cut in visa fees for US applicants of around 25 per cent until December 31, 2024 announced earlier this month, and a previous decision to allow walk-in visa applications.

(8) WHAT, ME WARP? Currently open for bids at the Heritage Auctions site is “Jack Rickard MAD #186 Star Trek Cover Original Art”. It was up to $1,950 when I last checked.

Jack Rickard MAD #186 Star Trek Cover Original Art (EC, 1976). Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) join Vulcan officer Alfred E. Neuman (who will likely soon meet a terrible fate, hinted at by his red shirt) tap dance their way across the cover of the parody magazine to promote the “Star Trek” Musical buried within its pages. Spock looks surprised to see Neuman sporting a pair of pointy Vulcan ears, with the adage “Keep on Trekin'” printed on his uniform. A fun poke at the beloved sci-fi TV series painted in gouache on illustration board with an image area of 16″ x 16.75″, matted and Plexiglas-front framed to 27″ x 28.5″. Light frame wear. Signed by Rickard in the lower right corner and in Excellent condition.

(9) TROLLING WITH A MAGNET. “He Has Fished Out Grenades, Bikes and Guns. Can Fame Be Far Behind?” He couldn’t make a living streaming himself playing video games – but people want to see what his powerful magnet retrieves from the waters around New York.  

… The grenade was not without precedent. Two months before, Mr. Kane managed to pull a gun out of a lake near where he lives. It might have been used in a murder, he suggested, and he was told there was a chance he might be subpoenaed. He was eager to avoid that entanglement.

On that unseasonably warm November afternoon, Mr. Kane, who is 39 and looks a bit like the actor Seth Rogen playing a deckhand, just yanked the thing right off his magnet. It took quite a bit of effort, given that the magnet (from Kratos Magnetics, for $140) was advertised as having a “pull force” of 3,800 pounds. The gunpowder had been emptied out of the bottom, so he figured the corroded explosive was something that would put him on the map, rather than blow him off it. Still, he put it on the ground and covered it with a plastic bucket — just in case.

As he dialed 911, he paused to wonder: Would the operator remember him? Was he something of a known quantity by now? Just the week before, he’d found a top-loading Smith & Wesson in Prospect Park Lake. And he’d also found a completely different grenade about a month ago, which he said led the police to evacuate a restaurant near the United Nations. But to his disappointment, that day’s dispatcher didn’t react.

“You’re gonna know Let’s Get Magnetic,” Mr. Kane told the operator, referencing the name of his YouTube channel. “I’m getting famous.”

His partner, Barbie Agostini, continued filming as the police arrived. Two beat cops who showed up took some pictures of the grenade on their phones. Meanwhile, a woman pushed a baby carriage inches away from it. More cops eventually came to cordon off the area, but the content creation did not stop there. Another officer squatted on the ground to take more close-ups. Wanting a wider-angle view of the ruckus he’d wrought, Mr. Kane moved slightly down the sidewalk and kept fishing.

It wasn’t long before a well-put-together young woman in a pinned-on hat stopped and stared as Mr. Kane pulled a hunk of junk out of the water with his magnet.

“What are you guys fishing for?” she asked.

“Anything metal,” he told her. “This is a bed frame from the 1900s.”

The woman looked astounded at this dubious bit of history.

“God bless you,” she said….

…After lunch, Mr. Kane, Ms. Agostini and Jose returned to their duplex. Mr. Kane pulled out a Styrofoam chest full of his favorite finds. They included the magazines from four guns, the barrel of a sniper rifle and two tiny cannonballs that might predate the city itself, which he plans on giving to the American Museum of Natural History.

Evidence of a collector’s lifestyle exists throughout the apartment — unopened retro video games and hand-painted Japanese anime figurines covered nearly every spare inch of wall space. Mr. Kane pulled out some tiny pieces of metal from the cooler, one in the shape of a bow and arrow, and another that looked like a ball-peen hammer.

“This is black magic,” he said. “One hundred percent.” Then came a key fob for an Audi that still lit up when he pressed a button. “This unlocks a car,” he said. “We just don’t know where the car is.” Then came his collection of iPhones, which he proudly displayed on his purple couch. All of them worked. Well, all but one. “It smokes if you turn it on,” he said. “But that’s the only problem.”…

(10) BUT IF HE TELLS – THEN WE’LL KNOW! No, content moderation is not supposed to be a big secret. “Elon Musk’s X Loses Bid To Change California Content Moderation Law” reports Deadline.

Elon Musk‘s X on Thursday has lost its bid to change a California law on content moderation disclosure by social media companies.

X sued California in September to undo the state’s content moderation law, saying it violated free speech rights under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and California’s state constitution.

Today, U.S. District Judge William Shubb dismissed the social media company’s request in an eight-page decision .

The law requires large social media companies to issue semiannual reports that describe their content moderation practices. They must also provide data on the number of objectionable posts and how they were addressed.

“While the reporting requirement does appear to place a substantial compliance burden on social medial companies, it does not appear that the requirement is unjustified or unduly burdensome within the context of First Amendment law,” Shubb wrote.

X did not immediately respond. The company’s content moderation policies have long been contentious, dating to before Musk bought the company.

(11) ANOTHER INKLING NAMED LEWIS. This postcard ad for The Major and the Missionary edited by Diana Pavlac Glyer caught my eye and reminded me to kick off the new year by mentioning this collection of letters of interest to Inklings fans.

After the death of his brother, Warren Lewis lived at The Kilns in Oxford, spent time with friends, edited his famous brother’s letters, and did a little writing of his own. Then, out of the blue, he got a letter from a stranger on the far side of the world. Over the years that followed, he and Blanche Biggs, a missionary in Papua New Guinea, shared a vibrant correspondence. These conversations encompassed their views on faith, their politics, their humor, the legacy of C. S. Lewis, and their own trials and longings.

Taken as a whole, these collected letters paint a colorful portrait that illuminates not only the particulars of distant times and places but the intimate contours of a rare friendship.

Edited and introduced by Bandersnatch author Diana Pavlac Glyer.

[Thanks to Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Scott Edelman, Mark Roth-Whitworth, 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 Peer.]

Pixel Scroll 4/13/21 The Fan Who Scrolled Tropes To Gnoles

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(1) F&SF. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction’s May/June 2021 cover art is by David A. Hardy. Thanks to Publisher Gordon Van Gelder for the advance look.

(2) VICTORY LAP. “Charlie Jane Anders On New Book Victories Greater Than Death” is a Nerdist Q&A with the author.

Charlie Jane Anders has long been a vocal presence within the sci-fi fandom at large. Her prose writing has earned her multiple Hugo Awards as well as a Nebula award for her novel All The Birds In The Sky. With her upcoming book, Victories Greater Than Death, Anders kicks off a planned trilogy within the YA space. A tale reminiscent of the big flashy space opera adventures she grew up adoring. Nerdist recently had the chance to speak with Anders about her newest work….

A common theme in your novels is characters moving towards a destiny that they’re only vaguely aware of.  Is there something about this particular trope that you feel drawn to explore?

Yes! One of my obsessions as a writer is the “quest that people don’t necessarily know is a quest.” I hate writing characters who just go where the plot needs them to go, because I start to get bored if the characters don’t have a more personal stake in what’s going on. I just feel like this is more real and grounded. We usually don’t know where all of our searching is going to end up, until we get there.

I also feel like a quest needs to be spiritual as much as logistical, so I try to write characters who are searching for fulfillment as much as trying to accomplish a plot-driven goal. I read a ton of medieval texts like Piers Plowman and Pilgrim’s Progress back in college, and they left me with an enduring love for the quest for “what does it mean to be a good person?”

(3) NOT JUST A LABEL. In the Washington Post, Charlie Jane Anders has an op-ed where she discusses her own experiences as a transgender person and says that some bills (like North Carolina’s)”subject young people to extraordinary scrutiny and intervention when they need time to explore their interests and personalities.” “We should celebrate trans kids, not crack down on them”.

…Figuring out your own gender identity is hard work, requiring large amounts of self-awareness and vulnerability. Your gender isn’t just a label: It’s a matter of how your inner conception of yourself meets everyone else’s perceptions.

My own experience of finding myself as a transgender person involved a lot of false starts and soul-searching, as I tried to reconcile the person I’d been told I was with everything I felt inside. Often, it may appear that trans kids and adults emerge fully formed, like Athena from the brow of Zeus, when in reality we’ve spent endless hours trying to make sense of our selves. The moment we reveal the end result of our self-discovery to the world, we face microaggressions, outright hostility and discrimination.

For anyone, of any age, this can feel like riding a unicycle across a muddy field while bystanders shout unhelpful advice….

(4) THE ART OF VILLAINY. And we complete our Charlie Jane Anders trifecta with “Six Sinister Secrets to Creating a Truly Scary Villain”, a guest post at Stone Soup.

We’re facing a real shortage of pants-wetting villains in pop culture these days. I’ve gotten used to seeing a lot of villains, especially in movies and TV shows, who feel like a bit of an afterthought, or just a nasty copy of the hero. Or else they’re so sympathetic that they end up becoming more of an anti-hero, and usually get redeemed.

Villains should be able to commit almost any sin – except for the cardinal sin of being forgettable. Every time they show up, we should get scared and excited, because some shit is about to go down.

When I set out to write Victories Greater Than Death, my young adult space opera novel about heroic queer teens who save all the worlds, I really wanted to include an old-school, capital-v Villain. For my previous novels, I had tried to keep the morality of all my characters ambiguous, so that everybody got to make terrible decisions but also be pretty decent at times. But when it came to writing a swash-buckling, trash-talking adventure story with space battles and narrow escapes, I was determined to cook up a really monstrous baddie, like the ones who unnerved me when I was a kid.

(5) ALMOST AN ALT-HIST DOCUMENTARY. The Space Review’s Dwayne A. Day compliments an ambitious series: “It is very cold in space: Season 2 of ‘For All Mankind’”.

…So often, Hollywood demonstrates only a thin understanding of the subject matter of the shows it produces. Real doctors, lawyers, police officers, theologians, scientists, psychologists, teachers, engineers, and astronauts watch programs about their professions and scoff at how little they get right. TV writers quite often seem to get their knowledge of complex subjects from Wikipedia. But “For All Mankind” is different. It is almost as if the show has dropped its cameras into the time period (the late 1960s and early 1970s in season one, 1983 in season two) and filmed what actually happened, even though it didn’t… but could have.

The show’s strengths go beyond its level of verisimilitude. This is one of the few shows on television that is about something, that has questions to ask and answers to pose and ideas to explore. The show’s second season is mostly successful at doing that, although it stumbles a bit at the finish line….

(6) JACOBS OBIT. In the Washington Post, Michael Cavna remembers Frank Jacobs, who died on April 5 at 92.  His song parodies inspired Weird Al Yankovic, who is interviewed in the piece, and earned him the name of MAD’s “Poet Lauridiot.” “Remembering Frank Jacobs, the ‘poet lauridiot’ of Mad magazine who inspired comics like ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic”.

…He was best known for cutting lyrics set to standards from the great American songbook — including such tuneful spoofs as “East Side Story,” “Flawrence of Arabia” and “Keep On Trekin’ ” — and his musical parodies were even at the center of a landmark copyright-law case.

Music publishers and named plaintiff Irving Berlin sued Mad over a 1961 special edition that featured more than 50 parody lyrics to such songs as Berlin’s “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” which Jacobs turned into “Louella Schwartz Describes Her Malady.” In 1964, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled in Mad’s favor, with Circuit Court Judge Irving Kaufman writing in his decision: “We doubt that even so eminent a composer as plaintiff Irving Berlin should be permitted to claim a property interest in iambic pentameter.”

Jacobs began writing for Mad in 1957, crafting early pieces such as “Why I Left the Army and Became a Civilian,” which humorously contrasted the discipline of military life with the demands of being an everyday married commuter. He also liked to spoof other cartoons, including in works such as “Obituaries for Comic Strip Characters” and “If the Characters in ‘Peanuts’ Aged Like Ordinary People”; the latter spoof was published in 1972, when Mad was at its pop cultural peak, reaching millions of readers each month.

“What is really amazing to me today is that there still are people who can sing all the words to some of his parodies,” says his son, Alex Jacobs….

(7) FRANCES OBIT. In “Myra Frances obituary”, The Guardian pays tribute to an actor with a notable genre resume who died April 13.

The actor Myra Frances, who has died aged 78 of cancer, broke a British screen taboo when she and Alison Steadman shared television’s first lesbian kiss in 1974. 

… her other standout screen role, as the selfish, self-obsessed Anne Tranter in the first series of Survivors (1975), a post-apocalyptic drama devised by Terry Nation, best known as the creator of the Daleks in Doctor Who.

Tranter, who has enjoyed a privileged upbringing, is one of less than 1% of the world’s population not wiped out by a plague, and Frances gives an intensely powerful portrayal of her as a screen villain, dumping her disabled partner and refusing to help others, having regard for only her self-preservation – the qualities of a true survivor.

The drama ran for a further two series with regularly changing characters, and in 1979 Frances appeared in another cult screen hit, Doctor Who. In The Creature From the Pit adventure, she played Lady Adrasta, doomed ruler of Chloris, who controls the valuable metals on her verdant planet of foggy forests until her people turn against her.

(8) HUGHES OBIT. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] Guardian journalist and TV critic Sarah Hughes, who did their episode-by-episode reviews of Game of Thrones among others, has died of cancer at the aged only 48. I was shocked to read this, because I had seen her final article, a review of an episode of the UK crime drama Line of Duty, only a day before her death, so she was literally still reviewing TV episodes on her deathbed. There’s also a lovely tribute by a fellow Guardian journalist: “’My TV bellwether, my wonderful friend’: a tribute to Sarah Hughes”.

…Over the past 10 years, Sarah Hughes cultivated the most wonderful and witty community for fans of the cultural juggernaut Game of Thrones. Readers flocked to her weekly recaps to share in her great love and knowledge of television. With boundless energy and absolutely no spoilers, she gave telly addicts a home and she always made them feel loved and listened to.

I had the honour of editing my TV bellwether, my wonderful friend, who died of cancer on Monday after outliving by years the prognosis doctors dared to give her. I put her longevity down to her passion for life, telly, trashy books, Tottenham Hotspur and Cheltenham races – plus, of course, the depth of her love for her husband, Kris, and their two children, Ruby and Oisín….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born April 13, 1893 – Harold Sheldon, Ph.D.  Physics professor, Prentice-Hall science editor, pioneer in conduction of electricity through crystals (basis of electronic integrated circuits) and ultra-high-frequency radio.  Third Ph.D. member of the American Interplanetary Society.  Introduction to Lasser’s The Conquest of Space.  Television (1929!).  Space, Time & Relativity.  Light Waves and Their Uses.  Okay, okay, these weren’t fiction.  (Died 1964) [JH]
  • Born April 13, 1931 — Beverley Cross. English screenwriter responsible for an amazing trio of films, to wit namely Jason And The Argonauts, Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger and Clash Of The Titans. He also wrote the screenplay for The Long Ships which is at genre adjacent. (Died 1998.) (CE) 
  • Born April 13, 1937 — Terry Carr. Well-known and loved fan, author, editor, and writing instructor. I usually don’t list awards both won and nominated for but his are damned impressive so I will. He was nominated five times for Hugos for Best Fanzine (1959–1961, 1967–1968), winning in 1959, was nominated three times for Best Fan Writer (1971–1973), winning in 1973, and he was Fan Guest of Honor at ConFederation in 1986. Wow. He worked at Ace Books before going freelance where he edited an original story anthology series called Universe, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies that ran from 1972 until his early death in 1987. Back to awards again. He was nominated for the Hugo for Best Editor thirteen times (1973–1975, 1977–1979, 1981–1987), winning twice (1985 and 1987). His win in 1985 was the first time a freelance editor had won. Wow indeed. Novelist as well. Just three novels but all are still in print today though I don’t think his collections are and none of his anthologies seem to be currently either. A final note. An original anthology of science fiction, Terry’s Universe, was published the year after his death and all proceeds went to his widow. (Died 1987.) (CE) 
  • Born April 13, 1941 – John Foyster.  Mainspring of the 7th Australian SF Con; Fan Guest of Honour at 8th, 12th, 20th.  Instigated Aussiecon I the 33rd Worldcon.  Co-founded DUFF (Down Under Fan Fund).  First GUFF (Get Up and over Fan Fund northbound, Going Under Fan Fund south) delegate, report Stranger in Stranger Lands.  Australian SF Review.  Australian Fan History 1953-1966.  Journal of Omphalistic Epistemology (with Bruce Gillespie).  Contributor & correspondent, Chunga, Izzard, NY Rev SF, SF Commentary, SF Review, Vision of Tomorrow.  Chandler Award.  Three Ditmars.  More here.   (Died 2003) [JH]
  • Born April 13, 1949 – Teddy Harvia, age 72.  Four Hugos as Best Fanartist.  Fan Guest of Honor at Minicon 25, DeepSouthCon 35, ArmadilloCon 23, Loscon 30, ConQuesT 38; Special Guest (with wife Diana Thayer), Boskone 36 (Boskone has no Fan Guest of Honor; the Special Guest need not be a fan).  Rebel Award.  Rotsler Award.  See my note here.  [JH]
  • Born April 13, 1951 — Peter Davison, 70. The Fifth Doctor and one that I came to be very fond of unlike the one that followed him. And he put a lot of gravitas into the voice of Mole he did for The Wind in the Willows animated special Mole’s Christmas. For twenty years now, he has reprised his role as the Fifth Doctor in myriad Doctor Who audio dramas for Big Finish. (CE)
  • Born April 13, 1953 – Helen Hollick, age 68. Eight novels, two shorter stories.  Historical fiction “not to include Merlin…. no magic…. no Holy Grail quest…. not a fantasy” about Arthur, Harold II, Emma of Normandy; also “pirate-based nautical adventures … part fantasy … intended for adult reading.”  Website.  [JH]
  • Born April 13, 1954 — Michael Cassutt, 67. Producer, screenwriter, and author. His notable TV work includes work for the animated Dungeons & Dragons, Max Headroom, The Outer Limits, Beauty and The Beast, SeaQuest, Farscape and The Twilight Zone. He’s also written a number of genre works including the Heaven’s Shadow series that was co-written with David S. Goyer. (VE) 
  • Born April 13, 1950 — Ron Perlman, 71. Hellboy in a total of five films including three animated films (Hellboy: Sword of Storms, Hellboy: Blood and Iron and the Redcap short). He’s got a very long association with the genre as his very first film was Quest for Fire in which he was Amoukar. The Ice Pirates and being Zeno was followed quickly By being Captain Soames in Sleepwalkers and Angel  De La Guardia in the Mexican horror film Cronos.  Several years later, I see he’s Boltar in Prince Valiant, followed by the hard SF of being Johnher in Alien Resurrection and Reman Viceroy in Star Trek: Nemesis. And I should note he was in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them as Gnarlack, a goblin gangster if I read the Cliff notes to that correctly. No, I’m not forgetting about his most amazing role of all, Vincent in Beauty and The Beast. (Having not rewatched for fear of the Suck Fairy having come down hard on it.) At the time, I thought it was the most awesome practical makeup I’d ever seen. And the costume just made look him even still more amazing.  (CE) 
  • Born April 13, 1967 – Mayra Calvani, age 54.  Some work under Zoe Kalo may have to be sought that way; three novels as MC, five as ZK.  Also MC nonfiction e.g. anthology Latina Authors and Their Muses (Int’l Latina Book Award).  [JH]
  • Born April 13, 1985 – Karsten Knight, age 36.  Six novels, three shorter stories. “Favorite song: ‘The Very Thought of You’ by Billie Holiday…. I performed as a beatboxer in various a cappella groups for almost a decade.” [JH]

(10) SOLE MAN. “’Rocky Horror’ played to an empty theater for 54 weeks. Now, audiences return to Portland’s longest-running movie” – OregonLive interviews the audience. Almost every one of him.

Some things are constants in a chaotic world: Death, taxes and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” which has played at Portland’s Clinton Street Theater every Saturday night for 43 years.

So, on March 15, 2020, when the theater was forced to close due to coronavirus restrictions, one man was determined not to break the streak.

For the next 54 Saturdays, Nathan Williams came to an empty theater to screen the film, sometimes with a friend, sometimes by himself.

“I watched it alone. I watched it during the snowstorm,” said Williams, who serves as emcee for the theater’s “Rocky” nights. “I was in a position to keep a flame burning, to keep a torch lit.

“I’m just a guy holding a torch for the city of Portland, for all the weirdos, for all the people who don’t have a safe place to call home, we’re home.”

Lani Jo Leigh, owner of Clinton Street Theater since 2012, said it was important for the community to know that the theater was still waiting for them…

(11) SPACE ON THE SHELVES. Delish reports “Lucky Charms Galactic Is Coming To Cereal Aisles Soon”.

…Announcing the release of Lucky Charms Galactic, General Mills is clearly keeping the cereal game on lock as well as keeping cereal lovers on their toes. Delivering an intergalactic twist on the beloved Lucky Charms brand, the new limited-edition offering still hosts the traditional frosted toasted oat cereal with marshmallow pieces that we love, but now includes three additional new magic charms. How lucky are we?!

The new charms—which are said to have “special powers”—include two colorful planet charms that can duplicate and a rocket charm that has the power to race through space…. 

(12) LAST IN SPACE. UPI brings you into the picture as “Astronaut breaks Guinness record for longest time between spacewalks”.

A Japanese astronaut was awarded a Guinness World Record when he took two spacewalks 15 years and 214 days apart.

Soichi Noguchi, an astronaut with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, went for a spacewalk March 5 as part of the ISS Expedition 64, a record-breaking amount of time after his Aug. 3, 2005, spacewalk.

(13) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. AI cats are already a thing – The Verge worries that “Soon, the internet will make its own cat photos and then it won’t need us”.

These are computer-generated images from This Cat Does Not Exist, and folks: I think we are in trouble.

I understand this is going to sound crackpot, but hear me out. What if our computers are already smarter than us, and the only reason they’re pretending they aren’t is so we’ll continue feeding them their favorite thing, photos of our cats? I understand that in isolation this sounds ridiculous, but I don’t think it’s any sillier than the Singularity.

Under this theory, Skynet has already happened, but Skynet is benign because one of the first things we taught it was that cats were cute. And Skynet doesn’t have cats. We do. This is our major structural advantage: we can feed the internet fresh cat photos. It’s why the internet — thus far, anyway — has remained willing to continue human life as we know it: for our cats…

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Honest Game Trailers: Monster Hunter Rise” on YouTube, Fandom Games says this game is “another entry in the turning monsters into fashion accessories genre” which should appeal to gamers who enjoy “whacking dinosaurs with comically oversize weapons.”

[Thanks to Cora Buhlert, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Gordon Van Gelder, Dann, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Michael Toman, John Hertz, Andrew Porter, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day jayn.]

Pixel Scroll 6/6/20 You Get A File, I’ll Get A Troll, We’ll Head Down
To The Pixel Scroll, Honey, Enemy Mine

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(1) CUTTING OFF THEIR AIR. Connie Willis starts her Facebook post by comparing recent tragedies with the Salem witch trials: “On The Surreal Situation We Find Ourselves In”.

The first thing I thought of when I saw the horrific police murder of George Floyd was the Salem witch trials. Most people think the innocent victims of those monstrous trials were burned at the stake, but they weren’t–they were hanged. Mostly. Fourteen women, five men, and two dogs were executed by hanging. And one, an eighty-one-year-old farmer named Giles Corey, was pressed to death by putting a large flat stone on his chest and then piling more stones on top of it till they crushed the life out of him.

Basically the same thing happened to George Floyd. The policeman kneeling on his neck cut off his airway, and the other two holding him down pressed him flat against the ground so that his rib cage couldn’t inflate, and he suffocated to death.

The atrocities in Salem were precipitated by a belief that Evil was loose in their community.

It was, but it didn’t reside in the helpless slaves and old women and religious dissenters (and people who dared to speak out against what was happening) who were “tried” for witchcraft and executed.

The terrible irony of Salem is that the evil they were trying so hard to stamp out resided in the pious Christian town folk who accused them and the self-righteous judges who presided over their mock trials– “spectral evidence” was allowed, and they were pronounced guilty of crimes they had supposedly committed in the town even though they were locked up in jail at the time–and sentenced them to death.

The crimes brought to light by the death of George Floyd haven’t just been the murders of other African-Americans killed by the police, but other crimes the police have committed and are committing: the brutalizing of people exercising their First Amendment rights, the calling out of troops against the citizens they’re supposed to protect, and administration officials directing them to do so, calling for violence against their own people. Crimes by so-called law-abiding citizens and the officials they’ve put in office to “serve and protect” the public….

(2) YES, THIS AUGUST. Inverse fills readers in: “Everything We Know About Lovecraft Country, HBO’s Timely New Horror Series”.

In what just might be your next obsession from HBO, the weird fiction of H.P. Lovecraft finally does what the famed author never dared to do: Tell stories about Black people.

In August, HBO will premiere the television series Lovecraft Country, a road trip horror fantasy set in Jim Crow era America. It tells the story of an Army veteran and science fiction geek embarking on a cross-country trip to find his missing father, only to encounter otherworldly — and some very familiar — horrors along the way….

(3) LESS CYBER, MORE FILLING. “The New AP Stylebook Gets Technical. Really Technical” – Slate explains how.

On Wednesday, the Associated Press released the 55th edition of its official Stylebook, complete with a new chapter on digital security practices for journalists. It also comes with a slew of new entries on technology that reinforce the importance of online advertising and cybersecurity in everyday life—and journalism.

For most journalists, the advice in the AP guide on how to secure their communications—through strong passwords, multifactor authentication, and the use of virtual private networks and encrypted messaging apps—will probably not come as a surprise. Still, for those tools to have made their way into the Associated Press Stylebook seems like a landmark of some kind for measuring how mainstream digital security concerns have become for journalists.

The new and revised technology-related entries in the Stylebook also reflect some interesting shifts in what the Associated Press believes journalists can expect general audiences to know. In general, many of the recommendations tend to urge journalists in the direction of greater specificity about the technologies they are describing and away from more generic, dated terms. For instance, the Stylebook endorses the terms digital wallets and mobile wallets, but it recommends avoiding e-wallet. In a similar vein, journalists are advised to use the prefix cyber– and the terms cyberspace and cyber sparingly, and instead substitute words like internet or digital…. 

(4) THE POSITIVE POWER OF BOREDOM. Eh, maybe. “What type of ‘bored’ are you? Find out and master the art of boredom”—Body+Soul tells you how.

Lockdown got you climbing the walls? Are you over feeling bored? While it’s certainly an unpleasant feeling, experts say boredom isn’t always a bad thing. Some say that ‘blah’ feeling can even spur you on to greatness.

“There’s a real misconception that boredom is a sign of laziness and associated with apathy — actually, it’s the opposite,” says Professor James Danckert, who studies boredom. “It’s motivating — and, if we listen to it, we can learn a lot.”

Other experts agree that being bored can be a good thing. “Most of the time our minds are constantly occupied by external stimuli like smartphones,” says psychologist Dr Joann Lukins. “But boredom gives us a space to pause, reflect and then, often out of necessity, sees us create our next opportunity. I find it interesting that we use negative phrases like ‘bored to tears’ to discuss boredom when we can be ‘bored to brilliance’.’’

In fact, when researchers at the UK’s University of Central Lancashire asked people to do a boring task for 15 minutes and then asked them to come up with a list of things they could do with a plastic cup, they came up with more creative ideas than those in the control group who weren’t bored….

(5) WRITING FOR TEENS. The Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination is promoting the SDFutures online writing courses, along with UCSD and other supporters.

Imagining fantastic worlds and the future has never been more important.

It’s how we expand our sense of what is possible. It’s how we change our culture, save our planet, and make stories that create better futures for our loved ones and ourselves. This summer, we’re inviting San Diego–area teens to join us in exploring the power and potential of one of our most powerful human capacities: imagination.

SDFutures is series of online courses to help young people write science fiction and fantasy stories by developing their skills, meeting other young writers, and stretching their imagination with incredible professional writers of speculative fiction as guides. 

Our instructors include: Rebecca Roanhorse, Minh Lê, Kali Wallace, Lilliam Rivera, Patrick Coleman, Leah Thomas, Jeanelle Horcasitas, and Olivia Quintanilla.

If you know a community group, teacher, or young person who would benefit from this opportunity, please feel free to share.

More information, including how to register, at sd-futures.org.

(6) COMING ATTRACTIONS. Rich Horton put together a list of recommended books on his TBR pile. Many well-known titles here, but being TBR, he said his own score is zero. I’ve read 7. You have probably read multiples of my score.

Recently I posted a list of 100 books that was full of crap … it claimed to be a BBC list (it wasn’t) and it claimed that the average person had read only 6 (who knows?) and it was shoddily curated (multiple weird duplicates, etc.)

Here is what I believe to be a far better list. There are no duplicates (not even duplicate authors.) It is very English-language-centric — I can’t help that, English is all I can read…

(7) WITCHER WATCHER. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Behind a paywall in the May 30 Financial Times, Nilanjana Roy says she misses browsing bookstores in Delhi but has found some consolation watching TV shows adapted from novels, including The Witcher.

The hugely popular Netflix series, The Witcher, is a dark fantasy based on five novels written by Andrzej Sapkowski in the 1990s, following Geralt of Rivia, a lone monster killer who plies his trade across time jumps in the Continent, a place where monsters, humans, and creatures from Slavic fantasy battle it out with one another. Sapkowski, now 71, lives in Lodz and is as big a star in Polang as Terry Pratchett was in the UK. In one of his interviews, he dismissed critics of the fantasy genre:  ‘All literature is fantastic in its own way because it tells what wasn’t on paper before and it doesn’t matter whether you write about hobbits or love.’  Over the years, the community of Witcher fans has grown larger, drawn in by three wildly successful video games based on Geralt’s adventures, but it’s only now that the books have become a hit, propelled by the Netflix show.

What drew me in was not just the lure of a fantasy world peopled by vedmaks (sorcerers) or strigas (a flying witch who sucks the blood of infants at night); it’s that many of the characters are depicted as outsiders and outcasts.  It’s refreshing to watch fantasy that has a subtle echo of this last century’s swirl of xenophobia and politics about who belongs and who lives in the periphery, and that seeps into Geralt’s bloody exploits.

(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • June 6, 1980 — The decidedly low-budget Galaxina premiered. Starring the 1980 Playboy Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten as the android Galaxina and a cast too large to detail here, it was written and directed by William Sachs. Marilyn Jacobs Tenser was the producer. She did work for Crown International which did low-budget genre films such as horror cinema, biker films, exploitation films, and B-movie drive-in fare. Critics thought it was a failure at spoofing it’s intended victims of Star Trek, Stars Wars and Aliens.  Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it a not so generous 24% rating. 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born June 6, 1799 – Alexander Pushkin.  Sometimes after a surprise you re-examine and think “Oh.  Of course.”  When Ravi Shankar first visited Russia, people cried “Pushkin!  Pushkin!”  They loved Pushkin and there is a resemblance.  I’d like to call Mozart and Salieri a fantasy but, as my father used to say, not within the normal meaning of that term.  Anyway, we get Ruslan and Lyudmila and “The Queen of Spades” and The Bronze Horseman and “The Golden Cockerel” and The Stone Guest and “The Shot”.  Speaking of which –  (Died 1837) [JH]
  • Born June 6, 1918 — Richard Crane. In the Fifties, he would be cast in two of the series that largely defined the look and feel of televised SF for a decade. First, he was the dashing lead in Rocky Jones, Space Ranger which lasted for thirty-nine thrilling episodes; second, he’s Dick Preston in nine of the twelve episodes of the wonderfully titled Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe. He was also the lead in the fifteen-chapter serial Mysterious Island which was a very loose adaption of the Jules Verne novel. (Died 1969.) (CE) 
  • Born June 6, 1921 – Milton Charles.  Artist and art director in and out of our field; Art Director for Jaguar (New York), later for Pocket Books; five hundred awards from Amer. Inst. Graphic Arts (AIGA), Society of Illustrators, Amer. Book Publishers, and like that.  Here is his cover for Tucker’s Wild Talent; here is Vonnegut’s Mother Night; here is a study of his V.C. Andrews covers.  (Died 2002) [JH]
  • Born June 6, 1924 — Robert Abernathy. Writer during the 1940s and 1950s. He’s remembered mostly for his short stories which were published in many of the pulp magazines that existed during the Golden Age of Science Fiction such as Planet Stories, Galaxy, F&SF, Astounding and Fantastic Universe. He did around forty stories in total, and apparently wrote no novels that I can locate. There’s no collection of his works currently available in digital form but some of his stories are up at the usual digital suspects. (Died 1990.) (CE)
  • Born June 6, 1942 — Dorothy Heydt, 78. She was the creator and first editor of the Star Trek Concordance, first published in March of 1969. (Yes, I owned a copy.) A linguist, she credited with creating one of the first widely used Vulcan languages in 1967 for a Trek fan fiction series. Though most of her short fiction is set in her own Cynthia, Daughter of Euelpides series, some was set in Bradley’s Darkover series. (CE)
  • Born June 6, 1945 – Vivian French.  Libraries in the United Kingdom say she is borrowed – that’s a metaphor, folks – shall we call it a Thing Contained for the Container? – half a million times a year; the Tiara Club books have sold three million copies.  Three dozen novels for us, some shorter stories, not least “I Wish I Were an Alien” in which the extraterrestrial boy, for his part, wishes –  [JH]
  • Born June 6, 1947 – Robert Englund, 73. I think his best performance was as Blackie on the very short-lived Nightmare Cafe. Short-lived as in six episodes. Of course most will remember him playing Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. He actually appeared in a couple of now forgotten horror films, Dead & Buried and Galaxy of Terror, before landing that role. And he’s continued to do myriad horror films down to the years ranging from CHUD to Strippers vs Werewolves. Versatile man, our Robert.  (CE)
  • Born June 6, 1948 – Ron Salomon.  Hey Ron, I saw you had a Supporting Membership in last year’s Worldcon; thanks!  If CoNZealand has published a list I haven’t got one yet.  [JH]
  • Born June 6, 1959 – Amanda Pays, 61. I first encountered her as Thero Jones on Max Headroom, a series I think should be considered one of the best SF series ever made. She appeared as Dawn in the Spacejacked film. She also had a guest role as Phoebe Green in the episode “Fire” of The X-Files, and was cast as Christina “Tina” McGee in The Flash of  the 1990 series, and she has a recurring role on the present Flash series as the same character.(CE)
  • Born June 6, 1964 – Jay Lake.  Born on Taiwan, lived in Nigeria, Dahomey (as it then was), Canada, and the U.S.  Won the Campbell Best New Writer award (as it then was); anyway, he was astounding.  Endeavour Award, also appropriate.  A dozen novels, two hundred seventy shorter stories, some co-authored.  Here is a cover he did for Polyphony – also appropriate.  (Died 2014) [JH]
  • Born June 6, 1973 – Anne Ursu.  Teaches at Hamline, first university in Minnesota.  She’s given us eight novels, for children, adults, both.  The Lost Girl is told from the viewpoint of a crow.  In The Cronus Chronicles – three so far – two cousins find they’re in Greek myths; the first cousin we meet is Charlotte Mielswetzki, and if I say so myself it’s about time we did.  Breadcrumbs retells The Snow Queen; creatures from Hans Andersen’s tales keep showing up; and Jack, Hazel’s only friend in 5th Grade, may not want to be saved.  [JH]
  • Born June 6, 1973 — Guy Haley, 57. British author of the Richards & Klein Investigations series, a cyberpunk noir series where the partners are an android and an AI. His regular paycheck comes from his Warhammer 40,000 work where he’s written a baker’s dozen novels so far. Not surprisingly, he’s got a novel coming out in the their just announced Warhammer Crime imprint which, though I’ve read no other Warhammer 40.000 fiction, I’m interested in seeing how they do it. (CE)

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) MAD, I TELL YOU. The Washington Post’s Michael Cavna throws a party when “Mad magazine legend Al Jaffee retires at age 99 after a record-breaking career”.

Mad magazine’s iconic back-page Fold-In is about to fold it in. Finito after 56 years. Because Al Jaffee, officially the longest-working comic artist ever, has decided to retire at age 99.

So to mark his farewell, Mad’s “Usual Gang of Idiots” will salute Jaffee with a tribute issue next week. It will be the magazine’s final regular issue to offer new material, including Jaffee’s final Fold-In, 65 years after he made his Mad debut.“He deserves some spotlight outside our industry,” Mad caricature artist Tom Richmond said of the magazine’s beloved elder statesman, who broke into the business during World War II.

One of the most heartfelt features in the send-off issue will be by Sergio Aragones, a fellow Mad legend who befriended Jaffee in 1962 upon joining the staff. They formed a mutual admiration society — both deeply steeped in the craft of the pantomime cartoon — and were occasional roommates on the Mad staff’s storied annual trips to far-flung vacation spots….

(12) TOUGH AUDIENCE. ScreenRant has surprisingly demanding standards: “”Up, Up & Away”: Every Superman Actor, Ranked By Comic Book Accuracy”.

5. Christopher Reeve: Superman The Movie (1978)

There is so much that this movie does right. Superman’s strength, powers, and heroic optimism are fully realized, while Christopher Reeve gives a performance as strong as his character’s steely muscles. In his civilian life as Clark Kent, he is bumbling and shy, but sweet and a skilled reporter.

The biggest problem working against this movie is the famous scene in which Superman turns back time by flying around the Earth and reversing its rotation. This is not how time works, and it is certainly not how Superman’s powers work. If not for this scene, Christopher Reeve would top this list (at least in his first two films).

(13) READY FOR YOUR MT. TBR. The Little Red Reviewer has high praise for ”A Sinister Quartet, with fiction by Cooney, Wick, McGee, and Allen”.

…Part of me wants to tell you to read this collection in the order the stories are presented, so that you can move from least dark and scary to most dark and scary: Start with Cooney’s beautifully rendered fantasy “The Twice Drowned Saint”;  then go to Jessia P. Wick’s “An Unkindness”, a dark fantasy of a sister trying to save her brother from the fae;  from there go to Amanda J. McGee’s “Viridian”, a contemporary gothic horror of isolation and obsession;  and from there go to Mike Allen’s absolutely horrifying and terrifying “The Comforter”.  If you go that path, you’ll slowly ramp up from “fun, sorta creepy” to “not sure I should be reading this before bed”.

(14) AND IN THIS CORNER. The Little Red Reviewer also gives this irresistible description about “Gods of Jade and Shadow, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia”.

…one day,  when the family is on an outing, having left Caseopea at home, as a punishment,  she takes special notice of an old trunk in her grandfather’s bedroom.  And she opens the trunk.

What’s in the trunk?   oh, only the bones and soul of Hun-Kame,  Lord of Xibalba, and one of his bone shards gets lodged in Casiopea’s hand.  no biggie, right?  He can just, remove the shard, and then he can go back to Xibalba to dethrone his brother, and then Casiopea can pretend none of this ever happened, right?

hahahaha, NO.

(15) MOUTHPIECE. “Facebook Begins Labeling ‘State-Controlled’ Media”.

Facebook has begun labeling content produced by media outlets it says are under state control, enacting a policy the social network first announced in October.

Pages and posts from at least 18 outlets including Russia Today, China’s People’s Daily and Iran’s Press TV now carry notices to users that they are “state-controlled media.” Ads from state-controlled publishers will also be labeled starting later this year. The labels will initially be shown to U.S. Facebook users and roll out to other countries over time.

“We’re providing greater transparency into these publishers because they combine the influence of a media organization with the strategic backing of a state, and we believe people should know if the news they read is coming from a publication that may be under the influence of a government,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, wrote in a blog post.

Facebook will also begin barring state-controlled outlets from buying advertising in the U.S. later this summer. Gleicher said that decision was “out of an abundance of caution to provide an extra layer of protection against various types of foreign influence in the public debate” ahead of the 2020 presidential election. He noted that these outlets “rarely” advertise in the U.S.

(16) I’M THINKING IT OVER. “Facebook Will Review Policies On Posts About State Violence, Voting” reports NPR.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Facebook employees on Friday that the social network will review how it handles some of the most incendiary posts on its platform, including those by President Trump. His announcement follows a revolt by employees over his decision to do nothing about messages the president posted about violence toward protesters and mail-in voting.

In a memo to staff, Zuckerberg said he wanted “to acknowledge that the decision I made last week has left many of you angry, disappointed and hurt.”

Zuckerberg said Facebook will consider labeling posts that violate its rules, a more nuanced approach than the company’s current policy, which states that posts should either be removed or left alone. It will also review its policies allowing “discussion and threats of state use of force” and its policies on voter suppression.

(17) FACING UP. “Coronavirus face mask lights up with moving mouth shapes” – video. (At least it’s not as creepy as the Syncro Vox they tried on Clutch Cargo.)

A light-up face mask that responds to the sound of the wearer’s voice has been developed by a games developer in California.

The BBC’s Chris Fox spoke to designer Tyler Glaiel and had a go at making the mask himself – although he keeping his purely as a novelty.

(18) CONZEALAND CHAIRS Q&A. Norman Cates and Kelly Buehler held a video Q&A session this afternoon. Bottom line: Hugo voting is only being done with paper ballots right now. Site selection voting won’t start until the online advanced memberships fee token payment system is available — perhaps next week.

[Thanks to JJ, Cat Eldridge, Andrew Porter, John Hertz, Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, Michael Toman, Mike Kennedy, Soon Lee, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit goes o File 770 contributing editor of the day John A Arkansawyer.]

Pixel Scroll 4/9/20 I Had Too Much To Stream Last Night

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(1) UNDERESTIMATED CRISIS. Kristine Kathryn Rusch sounds overwhelmed in “Business Musings: A Crisis Like No Other (A Process Blog)” where she discusses her daily challenges and struggles as a writer.

Well, I was wrong. A month or so ago, I warned that what we’re going through is a black swan event, that it would have an economic impact, and we as business owners needed to be braced. Then, as things got even worse, I decided this was a double black swan—a crisis without good leadership to carry us through to the other side.

And it seems that, in both cases, I underestimated this thing.  On April 3, Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, called this “a crisis like no other.”

In a speech before the World Health Organization, she added, “Never in the history of the IMF have we witnessed the world economy coming to a standstill. It is way worse than the global financial crisis.”

A crisis like no other. Yeah, that was my sense as well over these past two weeks as I tried over and over again to find some kind of historic precedent to guide us forward. I couldn’t find one—not an analogous one, on that hit the global economy all at once, and forced people around the world to behave in the same way.

It’s breathtaking and shocking and hard to fathom. As you can tell from my many blog posts, I’m wrestling with this change. I know we’ll come out the other side, but for the first time—maybe in my adult life—I have no idea what kind of world we will emerge into. Usually I can predict both worst case and best case scenarios….

(2) SETTING THE TONE. Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book is where I first read John Clyn’s famous quote, written in 1349 at the height of the Black Plague:

“So that notable deeds should not perish with time, and be lost from the memory of future generations, I, seeing these many ills, and that the whole world encompassed by evil, waiting among the dead for death to come, have committed to writing what I have truly heard and examined; and so that the writing does not perish with the writer, or the work fail with the workman, I leave parchment for continuing the work, in case anyone should still be alive in the future and any son of Adam can escape this pestilence and continue the work thus begun.”

(3) APOLLO 13. At least the astronauts came out the other side of this disaster all right — “‘Houston, we’ve had a problem’: Remembering Apollo 13 at 50”.

…A half-century later, Apollo 13 is still considered Mission Control’s finest hour.

Lovell calls it “a miraculous recovery.”

Haise, like so many others, regards it as NASA’s most successful failure.

“It was a great mission,” Haise, 86, said. It showed “what can be done if people use their minds and a little ingenuity.”

As the lunar module pilot, Haise would have become the sixth man to walk on the moon, following Lovell onto the dusty gray surface. The oxygen tank explosion robbed them of the moon landing, which would have been NASA’s third, nine months after Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took humanity’s first footsteps on the moon.

Now the coronavirus pandemic has robbed them of their anniversary celebrations. Festivities are on hold, including at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the mission began on April 11, 1970, a Saturday just like this year.

(4) WHO TWO. ScreenRant offers their opinion — “Doctor Who: Every Doctor’s TRUE Companion”. For example:

Fourth Doctor: Sarah Jane Smith

Often considered the best companion of Doctor Who‘s classic run, Elizabeth Sladen made a lasting impression as Sarah Jane Smith, evolving the template set by Jo Grant previously. More so than her predecessors, Sarah Jane naturally grew into a second main character and although she debuted alongside the Third Doctor, her wits were slightly better suited to the eccentric ramblings of Tom Baker’s Time Lord. The Fourth Doctor would struggle to find an equally fitting companion, treating Leela with occasional contempt and burning through several regenerations of Romana.

(5) IMPOSSIBLE TIME. The Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination’s podcast Into the Impossible has posted Episode 38: “Giving the Devil His Due: a conversation with Michael Shermer & Brian Keating”.

Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the host of the Science Salon Podcast, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University where he teaches Skepticism 101. For 18 years he was a monthly columnist for Scientific American. He is the author of New York Times bestsellers Why People Believe Weird Things and The Believing Brain, Why Darwin Matters, The Science of Good and Evil, The Moral Arc, and Heavens on Earth. His new book is Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist.

(6) HOW’S YOUR EYESIGHT? “Smithsonian seeks public’s help with Sally Ride’s astronaut training notes”.

Before she became the first American woman to fly into space, Sally Ride needed to learn how to be an astronaut. Now, 30 years later, the public can help expand access to Ride’s training experience by volunteering to transcribe her extensive handwritten notes.

The National Air and Space Museum has begun the process of converting the 23 cubic feet of material it obtained from Ride’s estate in 2015 to be available for research and study. Archivists have scanned and indexed the entire collection, but more can be done to make the papers fully searchable.

(7) DRUCKER OBIT. MAD Magazine artist Mort Drucker died April 8 at the age of 91. Mark Evanier paid tribute at News From Me: “Mort Drucker, R.I.P.”

He found his way to MAD magazine in 1956 at a precarious moment in that publication’s history. Founding editor Harvey Kurtzman had departed and taken most of the art crew with him. Replacement editor Al Feldstein was assembling a new team and with no idea how valuable the new applicant would be to MAD, he took a shot with Drucker.

Mort had never thought of himself as a caricaturist but when called upon to draw the comedy team of Bob & Ray for some pieces, he displayed a flair that surprised even him. Before long, Mort was the illustrator of movie and TV parodies in every issue of MAD…an association that lasted some 55 years. Big stars would say that you didn’t feel you’d made it in Hollywood until Mort Drucker had drawn you in MAD.

The New York Times obituary is here.

…“No one saw Drucker’s talent,” Mr. Hendrix wrote, until he illustrated “The Night That Perry Masonmint Lost a Case,” a takeoff on the television courtroom drama “Perry Mason,” in 1959. It was then, Mr. Hendrix maintained, that “the basic movie parody format for the next 44 years was born.”

From the early 1960s on, nearly every issue of Mad included a movie parody, and before Mr. Ducker retired he had illustrated 238, more than half of them. The last one, “The Chronic-Ills of Yawnia: Prince Thespian,” appeared in 2008.

Mr. Drucker compared his method to creating a movie storyboard: “I become the ‘camera,’” he once said, “and look for angles, lighting, close-ups, wide angles, long shots — just as a director does to tell the story in the most visually interesting way he can.”

Mr. Hendrix called Mr. Drucker “the cartoonist’s equivalent of an actor’s director” and “a master of drawing hands, faces and body language.” Mr. Friedman praised Mr. Drucker’s restraint: “He wasn’t really hung up on exaggerating. He was far more subtle and nuanced — interested in how people stood and so on.”

(8) WILLNER OBIT. Most recently known as Saturday Night Live’s sketch music producer. Hal Willner died April 7. The LA Times tribute is here. He had a long career in film, and produced several record albums, including these genre-adjacent projects –

…Most striking was Willner’s ode to the music of Walt Disney’s animated films. Called “Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films,” he enlisted artists including cosmic jazz traveler Sun Ra, experimental vocalist Yma Sumac, Los Angeles group Los Lobos and rock band the Replacements to re-imagine such songs as “Cruella De Ville,” “Whistle While You Work” and “Someday My Prince Will Come.” Tom Waits turned “Heigh Ho (The Dwarves Marching Song)” into a forced-labor dirge.

As the compiler of “The Carl Stalling Project: Music From Warner Bros. Cartoons 1936-1958,” Willner resurrected the reputation of the frantic, inventive composer Stalling and his scores for “Bugs Bunny” and “Road Runner” cartoons….

(9) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • April 9, 1953 — Invaders From Mars premiered. It was produced by Edward L. Alperson Jr. and directed by William Cameron Menzies. It starred  a large cast of Jimmy Hunt, Helena Carter, Arthur Franz, Morris Ankrum, Leif Erickson, and Hillary Brooke. Made a shoestring budget of three hundred thousand, it got amazingly good reviews though a few critics thought it it was too frightening for younger children, did a great box office and currently has a rating of fifty six percent among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. You can see it here.
  • April 9, 1955 — Science Fiction Theatre first aired in syndication. It was produced by Ivan Tors and Maurice Ziv.  It ran for seventy-eight episodes over two years and was hosted by Truman Bradley who was the announcer for Red Skelton’s program. The first episode “Beyond” had the story of a test pilot travelling at much faster than the speed of sound who bails out and tells his superiors that another craft was about to collide with his. It starred William Lundigan, Ellen Drew and Bruce Bennett. You can watch it here.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born April 9, 1911 — George O. Smith. His early prolific writings on Astounding Science Fiction in the 1940s which ended when Campbell’s wife left him for Smith Whom she married. Later stories were on Thrilling Wonder Stories, Galaxy, Super Science Stories and Fantastic To name but four such outlets. He was given First Fandom Hall of Fame Award just before he passed on. Interestingly his novels are available from the usual digital sources but his short stories are not. (Died 1981.)
  • Born April 9, 1913 — George F. Lowther. He was writer, producer, director in the earliest days of radio and television. He wrote scripts for both Captain Video and His Video Rangers and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet.  You can see the first show “The Birth of The Galaxy” which he scripted here. (Died 1975.)
  • Born April 9, 1921 — Frankie Thomas. He was best remembered for his starring role in Tom Corbett, Space Cadet which ran from 1950 to 1955. Though definitely not genre or genre adjacent, he was in the Nancy Drew film franchise that ran in the late Thirties. (Died 2006.)
  • Born April 9, 1935 — Avery Schreiber. He’s had a long history with genre fiction starting with Get Smart! and going from there to include More Wild Wild West!, Fantasy Island, Faerie Tale Theatre: Pinocchio, Shadow Chasers, Caveman, Galaxina, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, Animainiacs in which he voiced Beanie the Brain-Dead Bisonand, of course, The Muppet Show. (Died 2002.)
  • Born April 9, 1937 — Marty Krofft, 83. Along with with Sid, a Canadian sibling team of television creators and puppeteers. Through Sid & Marty Krofft Pictures, they have made numerous series including the superb H.R. Pufnstuf which I still remember fondly all these years later not to forget Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, Land of the Lost and Electra Woman and Dyna Girl.
  • Born April 9,1949 — Stephen Hickman, 71. Illustrator who has done over three hundred and fifty genre covers such as Manly Wade Wellman’s John the Balladeer and Nancy Springer’s Rowan Hood, Outlaw Girl of Sherwood Forest. His most widely known effort is his space fantasy postage stamps done for the U.S. Postal Service which won a Hugo for Best Original Artwork at ConAndian in 1994.
  • Born April 9, 1954 — Dennis Quaid, 66. I’m reasonably sure that he first genre role was in Dreamscape as Alex Gardner followed immediately by the superb role of Willis Davidge in Enemy Mine followed by completing a trifecta with Innerspace and the character of Lt. Tuck Pendleton. And then there’s the sweet film of Dragonheart and him as Bowen. Anyone hear of The Day After Tomorrow in which he was Jack Hall? I hadn’t a clue about it.
  • Born April 9, 1955 — Earl Terry Kemp, 65. Author of The Anthem Series: A Guide to the Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Weird Specialty Publishers of the Golden Age and The Anthem Series Companion: A Companion to The Guide to the Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Weird Specialty Publishers of the Golden Age. He also maintains several databases devoted to the same including The Golden Age of Pulps: SF Magazine Database: Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror (1890-2009).
  • Born April 9, 1972 — Neve McIntosh, 48. During time of the Eleventh Doctor, she played Alaya and Restac, two Silurian reptilian sisters who have been disturbed under the earth, one captured by humans and the other demanding vengeance. Her second appearance on Doctor Who is Madame Vastra, in “A Good Man Goes to War”. Also a Silurian, she’s a Victorian crime fighter.  She’s back in the 2012 Christmas special, and in the episodes “The Crimson Horror” and “The Name of the Doctor”. She reprises her role as Madame Vastra, who along with her wife, Jenny Flint, and Strax, a former Sontaran warrior, form a private investigator team. 
  • Born April 9, 1998 — Elle Fanning, 22. Yes she’s from that acting family. And she’s certainly been busy with roles in over forty films! Her first genre film is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button followed by Astro Boy, Super 8, Maleficent, The Boxtrolls, The Neon Demon, the upcoming Maleficent: Mistress of Evil and a recurring role on The Lost Room, a Cursed Objects miniseries that aired on Syfy. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Candorville encounters a social media slipup.
  • Free Range shows why even superheroes must keep in mind “the right tool for the right job.”

(12) TEMPORARILY FREE COMICS. Dark Horse Comics is releasing the first issue of more than 80 comics series for free, as well as a few volumes of graphics novels, available to read via DARK HORSE DIGITAL from now until April 30. The series include such titles as Umbrella Academy, American Gods, & Disney’s Frozen, as well as graphic novels such as Empowered Vol. 1, and Hellboy Vol. 1.

(13) CAN COMICS RESUSCITATE THE CASH REGISTER? CBR.com investigates “DC vs Marvel: Possible Storylines for a New Big Two Crossover”.

As the effects of the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic continue to reverberate around the world, one of the many industries severely impacted by the global health crisis is the American comic book market. With major publishers refraining from distributing new comics either digitally or in print and comic retailers shuttering normal operations to prevent the virus’ spread, the future of the industry is currently in a state of limbo. Led by acclaimed writer Gail Simone, comic creators have since suggested the possibility of an intercompany crossover between DC and Marvel Comics’ respective superhero universes as a means to revitalize the industry.

(14) PICARD SPECIAL ISSUE. Titan Comics has Star Trek: Picard – The Official Collector’s Edition on sale now.

A behind-the-scenes guide to the smash hit new Star Trek TV Show, showcasing the further adventures of fan-favorite captain of the Enterprise-D, Jean Luc Picard!

A deluxe collector’s edition offering a behind-the-scenes guide to the brand new Star Trek: Picard TV show, featuring interviews with Star Trek legends Sir Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner (Data), Jonathan Frakes (Riker), Martin Sirtis (Troi), plus the new cast members Isa Briones (Dahj/Soji), Michelle Herd (Raffi), Harry Treadaway (Narke) and many more. Plus, Showrunners Alex Kurtzman and Michael Chabon, and Director Hanelle Culpepper reveal behind-the-scenes secrets.

(15) OLAF SCENES. “Fun With Snow” | At Home With Olaf on YouTube is the first of 20 micro-sized Olaf stories coming from Disney. Find others as they post on the Walt Disney Animation Studios YouTube channel.

(16) MAD AS HELL. In “Suing Hollywood” at CrimeReads, Tess Gerritsen looks at her long series of lawsuits about whether Gravity was stolen from her 1999 space thriller Gravity.

…Most writers who work in the industry understand that suing a studio, no matter how justified their lawsuit, is a losing proposition—and it’s the writer who almost always loses. Knowing this, why would any writer risk everything to charge into battle as David against Goliath? 

I’ll tell you why: because we’re angry and refuse to let them get away with it. I know, because I’ve been there and done that. I’ve seen the dark side of Hollywood.

(17) STATION BREAK. And making a smooth segue between topics, did you know NASA has available a virtual “International Space Station Tour”?

(18) NEXT SPACE STATION SHIFT ARRIVES. And for a news trifecta — “ISS crew blast off after long quarantine”.

Three new crew members have arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) after a launch carried out under tight restrictions due to the coronavirus.

The Russian Soyuz rocket carrying cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner and Nasa astronaut Chris Cassidy took off from Kazakhstan on Thursday.

Pre-launch protocols were changed to prevent the virus being taken to the ISS.

Only essential personnel were allowed at the launch site for the blast-off.

Support workers wore masks and kept their distance as the crew walked to the bus to take them to the spacecraft.

Earlier, Chris Cassidy said not having their families in Baikonur to cheer them on for the launch had affected the crew, but he added: “We understand that the whole world is also impacted by the same crisis.

(19) WAVE BYE-BYE. “BepiColombo: Mercury mission set to wave goodbye to Earth” – BBC supplies lots of details on the instruments being sent.

The joint European-Japanese mission to Mercury reaches a key milestone on Friday when it swings past the Earth.

The two-in-one BepiColombo space probe is using the gravity of its home world to bend a path towards the inner Solar System.

It will also bleed off some speed.

The mission needs to make sure it isn’t travelling too fast when it arrives at Mercury in 2025 or it won’t be able to go into orbit around the diminutive world.

(20) POTTERING ABOUT. “Harry Potter hospital rooms get JK Rowling approval”.

Doctors dealing with coronavirus said they were “uplifted” to have a message of support from JK Rowling when they named areas of their hospital after Harry Potter school houses.

Meeting rooms at the Royal Bournemouth Hospital were named Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff and Ravensclaw.

The hospital said the idea was “a bit of fun amongst all the significant issues”.

The author tweeted to say she had “rarely felt prouder”.

The hospital’s medical team decided to name meeting rooms after the Hogwarts houses when redesigning systems to be better prepared for the coronavirus outbreak.

Senior house officer Alex Maslen said: “The house names are familiar to many junior doctors who grew up with the Harry Potter stories, and the awareness has provided some reassurance during these difficult times.”

(21) YOUNG MAN MULLIGAN ATE HERE. BBC tells us “Crops were cultivated in regions of the Amazon ‘10,000 years ago'”.

Far from being a pristine wilderness, some regions of the Amazon have been profoundly altered by humans dating back 10,000 years, say researchers.

An international team found that during this period, crops were being cultivated in a remote location in what is now northern Bolivia.

The scientists believe that the humans who lived here were planting squash, cassava and maize.

The inhabitants also created thousands of artificial islands in the forest.

FYI, “Young Man Mulligan” is the filk answer to ”The Great Historical Bum” song (“Bum” lyrics here). It opens “I was born about ten thousand years from now.”

(22) BEFORE FABERGÉ. “Mysteries of decorated ostrich eggs in British Museum revealed”.

If you wanted to give an extravagant gift 5,000 years ago, you might have chosen an ostrich egg.

Now some of these beautiful Easter egg-sized objects are in London’s British Museum.

The eggs were found in Italy but their origins have long been a mystery – ostriches are not indigenous to Europe.

Now, research into the museum’s collection by an international team of archaeologists reveals new insights into their history.

People across Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa traded ostrich eggs up to 5,000 years ago, in the Bronze and Iron Ages.

Eggs were decorated in many ways – painted, adorned with ivory or precious metals, or covered in small glazed stones or other materials.

The five eggs in the British Museum’s collection are embellished with animals, flowers, geometric patterns, soldiers and chariots.

(23) DON’T STOP. Rebooted – on YouTube.

It’s not easy for a movie-star to age – especially when you’re a stop motion animated skeleton monster. Phil, once a terrifying villain of the silver-screen, struggles to find work in modern Hollywood due to being an out-of-date special effect.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Michael Toman, Daniel Dern, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 8/14/19 I Pixel Things That Never Were; And I Scroll, ‘Why not?’

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(1) DUBLIN 2019 PARAPHERNALIA. A Filers shows what she received upon checking in at the Worldcon:

(2) DUELING SFF. Crooked Timber takes Fred Hoyle’s novel “Ossian’s Ride” as the jumping-off point for a discussion of modern Ireland.  

…Hoyle was really responding to the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, who regularly denounced Hoyle as a secular atheist on radio and had written his own science fiction novel, That Hideous Strength, a decade before. The villain of Lewis’s book was a sinister institute called NICE, which Satanic aliens wanted to impose contraception, lesbianism, secularism and surrealist art on an unsuspecting Britain. Lewis wanted to preserve old Britain against the filthy tide of modernity.

Hoyle riposted with a novel where rational and benevolently ruthless aliens used an organization called ICE to pull the priest ridden republic next door into the technological age. His satirical portrait of Ireland told British readers that the world was being transformed around them, and that even their most backwards seeming neighbor would outstrip them if they didn’t embrace modernity.

The irony of history is that Hoyle’s parody is now the truth….

(3) THEY’RE SMOKIN’. NASA’s Universe Unplugged teaches about exoplanets with the help of a couple of familiar actors: “The Habitable Zone: Scorched Earth Enigma”. If you like it, there are several previous installments in the series.

This new episode follows explorers Cas Anvar & Cara Gee (“The Expanse”) into a planetary danger zone in their quest for another Earth. Can their computer (Parry Shen of “General Hospital”) save them from a nasty fate?

(4) SCORING SHORT FICTION. Rocket Stack Rank’s monthly ratings for August 2019 have been posted with 10 RSR-recommended stories out of 45 reviewed. 

Here are some quick observations from pivoting the list on story length, new writers, and authors. (Click links to see the different views.)

  • Length: 4 novellas (2 recommended), 11 novelettes (4 recommended, 3 free online), 30 short stories (4 recommended, 1 free online).
  • New Writers: 4 stories by Campbell-eligible writers (none recommended).
  • Authors: 45 writers, none with more than one story in the list this month.

(5) SPIDER-GWEN. “Seanan McGuire talks Spider-Gwen’s name change, evil Peter Parker, and representation in the Spider-Verse” in an interview at AiPT!

AiPT!: Gwen has really blown up in the time since you have started writing her, too, with Into The Spider-Verse‘s massive success and Oscar win. Did you see the movie? Did it impact how you felt about the character or how you might approach her at all?

McGuire: I hadn’t seen the movie when I got the job, and I chose not to after I got the job, because that’s a different version of Gwen.  I didn’t want her seeping in where she didn’t belong.  But wow, is it nice seeing all the cosplayers.  I keep wanting to tell them “You’re dressed as my girl!” and have to hold myself back from getting creepy.

AiPT!: What do you think sets Gwen apart from Peter or Miles or any of the other Spiders?

McGuire: Death loves Gwen Stacy.  She lacks the “with great power…” motivator; hers is “only the right hands.”  She has a calling, but it’s not the same as the calling most of the others have shared.  She’s also better on the drums than they are.

(6) SF DIDN’T FORESEE THIS EITHER. A lot of stories involve faking just one but “Biostar security software ‘leaked a million fingerprints'” – BBC has the story.

More than a million fingerprints and other sensitive data have been exposed online by a biometric security firm, researchers say.

Researchers working with cyber-security firm VPNMentor say they accessed data from a security tool called Biostar 2.

It is used by thousands of companies worldwide, including the UK’s Metropolitan Police, to control access to specific parts of secure facilities.

Suprema, the firm that offers Biostar 2, said it was addressing the issue.

“If there has been any definite threat on our products and/or services, we will take immediate actions and make appropriate announcements to protect our customers’ valuable businesses and assets,” a company spokesman told the Guardian.

According to VPNMentor, the exposed data, discovered on 5 August, was made private on 13 August.

It is not clear how long it was accessible.

(7) STICK A FORK IN IT. SYFY WIRE says this series is done: “Star Wars Resistance will end with Season 2: Watch the new trailer featuring Kylo Ren”

The journey to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker makes a stop on the Disney Channel this October. Lucasfilm has announced that the upcoming second season of Star Wars Resistance will be its last, and we now have our first trailer.

Taking place during the events of The Last Jedi, and leading up to The Rise of Skywalker, Season 2 finds our Resistance characters still on the run from the First Order, much like their movie counterparts. But now Supreme Leader Kylo Ren is seemingly taking a hands-on approach in their capture. […]

Check out the new trailer below for a preview of what’s to come:

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 14, 1910 — Herta Herzog. At the Radio Project, she was part of the team of that conducted the groundbreaking research on Orson Welles’ 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds in the study The Invasion from Mars. The Radio Research Project was founded in 1937 as a social research project and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to look into the effects of mass media on society. (Died 2010.)
  • Born August 14, 1929 — Richard Carpenter. Responsible for the simply superb Robin of Sherwood series. He also created Catweazle, the children’s series about an unfortunate wizard from the 11th century who is accidentally transported to the present day. And he was an actor who appeared in such shows as the Sixties Sherlock Holmes series, The Terrornauts film and the Out of the Unknown series as well. (Died 2012.)
  • Born August 14, 1932 — Lee Hoffman. In the early Fifties, she edited and published the Quandry fanzine. At the same time, she began publication of Science-Fiction Five-Yearly which appeared regularly until ‘til 2006. The latter won the fanzine Hugo after her death. She wrote four novels and a handful of short fiction, none of which are in-print. (Died 2007.)
  • Born August 14, 1940 — Alexei Panshin, 79. He has written multiple critical works along with several novels, including the Nebula Award-winning Rite of Passage and the Hugo Award-winning study of SF, The World Beyond the Hill which he co-wrote with his wife, Cory Panshin. He also wrote the first serious study of Heinlein, Heinlein in Dimension: A Critical Analysis.
  • Born August 14, 1953 — James Roy Horner. Composer, conductor and orchestrator of film scores whose work on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is what he’s best remembered for. He also worked on Avatar, Alien, Field of Dreams and Cocoon. (Died 2015.)
  • Born August 14, 1962 — Tim Earls, 57. Set designer who stated out at Babylonian Productions on Babylon 5 and Crusade. Later worked on the Voyager seriesandBrannon Braga’s short-lived Threshold series as well. Designed sets for the Serenity film, and worked on Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. 
  • Born August 14, 1965 — Brannon Braga, 54. Writer, producer and creator for the Next Gen, Voyager, Enterprise, as well as on the Star Trek Generations and Star Trek: First Contact films. He has written more episodes than anyone else has with one hundred and nine to date. He was responsible for the Next Gen series finale “All Good Things…” which won him a Hugo Award for excellence in SF writing, along with Ronald D. Moore. He’s one of the producers of The Orville. 
  • Born August 14, 1966 — Halle Berry, 53. Her first genre was Sharon Stone in The Flintstones followed by being Storm in the X- Men franchiseand Giacinta “Jinx” Johnson in Die Another Day, the twentieth Bond film. She then shows up as the deservedly much maligned lead in Catwoman. She has myriad roles in Cloud Atlas. 

(9) JUST WONDERING. The tour of Christ Church Cathedral left certain questions unanswered:

(10) I’M STILL MAD. Retro Report has a mini-documentary on Al Jaffee, memorable for his contributions to Mad Magazine – particularly his “fold-in” work — “Legendary Cartoonist Al Jaffee Recalls Comic Book Censorship”.

(11) TUMBLR’S NEW LANDLORD. Vox speculates that “WordPress could give Tumblr the thing it needs most: stability”.

Automattic, the company behind the longstanding blog platform WordPress, just bought Tumblr from Verizon for a pittance — leaving many of the quirky, beloved social network’s users wondering what comes next.

Axios reported that Automattic purchased Tumblr, which launched in 2007, for “well below” $20 million; Axios business editor Dan Primack added in a tweet that the sale price was in fact below $3 million, and Recode’s Peter Kafka tells Vox that sources say the actual figure is closer to $2 million. That’s a very long way down from Yahoo’s infamous $1.1 billion purchase of the website in 2013. (Verizon subsumed Tumblr when it acquired Yahoo in 2017.)

… At the time that the Yahoo purchase of Tumblr from its CEO and founder David Karp was completed, it was clear that the ancient internet company was looking for something to revitalize it. Cue a community awash in GIFs, memes, fandom, and all other manners of contemporary online culture — a seemingly perfect answer to Yahoo’s question of how to combat its near-irrelevance. But reports soon began to emerge that Tumblr was floundering financially, as Yahoo tried and failed to wrangle the freewheeling blogging platform into a profitable, advertising-friendly brand….

(12) MONSTROUS ISSUES. A Noise Within theater in Pasadena, CA is producing Nick Dear’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Dissect the story of Frankenstein with director Michael Michetti, as well as Michael Manuel (The Creature) and Kasey Mahaffy (Victor Frankenstein), as they talk about the characters of Mary Shelley’s most famous novel.

“The Creature represents anyone who feels like they have been disenfranchised… It’s a really compelling human story that people connect to in a way that is surprising to them.”

(13) THE FAILURE MODE OF CLEVER. Facebook gave Larry Correia a 24-hour time-out. Larry wants you to know how silly it was.  

So I just got a 24 hour ban from Facebook for Violating Community Standards, because I insulted the imaginary people of an imaginary country….  

My 24 hour Facebook ban is over. Luckily Big Brother was there to protect us from such dangerous violations of community standards as pretending to be one imaginary country while talking trash about another completely imaginary country….

(14) THE MAN WHO TRAVELED IN CAT PICTURES. BBC includes lots of pictures – just none with books: “Purrfect shots: The man who took 90,000 photos of cats”.

Long before cats ruled the internet, marketing student Walter Chandoha became a pioneer of feline photography. Not only did Chandoha’s images appear on over 300 magazine covers and thousands of adverts, he elevated feline portraiture to an art form.

In New York in 1949 young marketing student Walter Chandoha found a stray kitten in the snow. Tucking the cat into his coat, he brought it home to his wife. The cat’s wild antics earned it the name Loco, and Chandoha, who had been a combat photographer during the Second World War, began to take pictures of his new subject.

Rather than get a job in marketing Chandoha turned to freelance photography. He considered cats ideal subjects because they were “just naturally expressive”. His images of cats appeared on advertisements, greetings cards, jigsaw puzzles, T-shirts, posters, calendars and pet food packages. They even featured on the giant 18×60-foot Kodak Colorama display in New York’s Grand Central Terminal.

His images combine a genuine affection for the animals with flawless technique. They range from colour studio photography to black and white street photography, images from vintage cat shows and tender pictures of his children with cats.

He published several books, including Walter Chandoha’s Book of Kittens and Cats (1963) and the seminal text How to Shoot and Sell Animal Photos (1986). Before his death in January 2019 at the age of 98, Chandoha had been working on a retrospective book of 300 of his cat photographs.

(15) SIDE GIG. He doesn’t let his day job interfere with his show biz aspirations: “Astronaut Luca Parmitano plays DJ set from International Space Station” (short video).

Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano has become the first DJ in orbit, after playing a set from the International Space Station to a cruise ship of clubbers in the Mediterranean Sea.

(16) POWER TO BURN. NPR reports “U.S. Air Regulators Ban MacBook Pros With Recalled Batteries From Flights”.

“The FAA is aware of the recalled batteries that are used in some Apple MacBook Pro laptops. In early July, we alerted airlines about the recall, and we informed the public,” the FAA said in an emailed statement.

“We issued reminders to continue to follow instructions about recalls outlined in the 2016 FAA Safety Alert for Operators (SAFO) 16011, and provided information provided to the public on FAA’s Packsafe website: https://www.faa.gov/hazmat/packsafe/,” it added.

Apple announced in June “a voluntary recall of a limited number of older generation 15-inch MacBook Pro units which contain a battery that may overheat and pose a safety risk.”

The laptops were sold between September 2015 and February 2017 and can be identified by their product serial number, according to the company’s notice: https://support.apple.com/15-inch-macbook-pro-battery-recall

(17) THEY’RE EVERYWHERE. Don’t inhale: “Plastic particles falling out of sky with snow in Arctic”.

Even in the Arctic, microscopic particles of plastic are falling out of the sky with snow, a study has found.

The scientists said they were shocked by the sheer number of particles they found: more than 10,000 of them per litre in the Arctic.

It means that even there, people are likely to be breathing in microplastics from the air – though the health implications remain unclear.

The region is often seen as one of the world’s last pristine environments.

A German-Swiss team of researchers has published the work in the journal Science Advances.

The scientists also found rubber particles and fibres in the snow

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY.  “Date With Duke –1947” on Vimeo is a George Pal Puppetoon, restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, featuring Duke Ellington performing the “Perfume Suite.”

https://vimeo.com/137509581

[Thanks to Hampus Eckerman, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Eric Wong, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Rich Lynch, Chip Hitchcock, Alan Baumler, Michael Toman, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew.]