25 Scroll Tuesday Night

Posted on May 31, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING. And don’t read the URLs of these two links, either, which also contain the spoiler.

Gizmodo asks “What the Hell Just Happened on ‘Doctor Who’?” – and then answers the question. No spoiler in the first paragraph, fortunately.

Doctor Who‘s latest season has just come to an end—and with it, we just got hit with an absolute shocker of a cliffhanger. Let’s discuss, shall we?

The Guardian’s storygoes even farther with a spoileriffic headline that I won’t quote fully: “Doctor Who finale sees…”

(2) LOCUS APPEAL NEARS END. The “Locus Mag 2025” fundraiser at Indiegogo ends today. With seven hours still to run it had taken in $80,375. How much does that help?

…With rising inflation, tariffs, and shipping costs, it now costs over $725,000 a year to publish the magazine, run the website, and present the awards each year. Through subscriptions, advertising, and existing donations and sponsors, we can count on $400,000 in anticipated revenue next year. That means we need to raise an additional $325,000 to make it all the way through 2025….

So there are probably more fundraising efforts to come.

(3) THE 20,000 LEAGUE MISSION. “Star Trek Alum Shazad Latif Captains the ‘Nautilus’ in First Trailer for Rescued Sci-Fi Series” – Collider profiles the show.

Star Trek: Discovery‘s Shazad Latif is going where no man has gone before… but this time, instead of outer space, he’s headed to the hidden depths of the ocean. Latif stars as Captain Nemo in Nautilus, AMC’s new reimagining of Jules Verne‘s classic science fiction novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The show’s new trailer sees him set sail in the titular super-submarine, even as he’s pursued to the ends of the Earth. The series premieres June 29 on AMC and AMC+.

In the new trailer for the 19th-century-set science fiction series, which serves as a prequel to Verne’s novel, Nemo is the prisoner of the East India Mercantile Company, a globe-spanning corporation that wields more power than any government. He and his fellow prisoners are put to work building the Nautilus, an advanced submarine that the Company hopes will further tighten its grip on the world’s seaways. However, Nemo foments a rebellion among his fellow prisoners and takes command of the ship, escaping into the depths with his fellow prisoners as his crew. The Mercantile Company is soon in hot pursuit, with a dogged mariner assigned to bring Nemo down; meanwhile, Nemo has an unwilling passenger on board. Will he have his revenge on his captors, or will the Company deep-six his ambitions?…

(4) NYT’S PETER DAVID TRIBUTE. The New York Times profile is terrific — “Peter David, Comic Book Writer Who Repopularized the Hulk, Dies at 68” – link bypasses the paywall. Here’s the very end of the piece:

…Mr. David, a gregarious soul who was befriended by movie stars and celebrities in the science-fiction realm, fondly remembered in his memoir the night he was watching the original “Star Wars” movie on television and its protagonist, Mark Hamill, called. A budding comic book writer himself, Mr. Hamill wanted to know: Could Mr. David write the introduction to a collection of his work?

“Uh, hey, Mark,” Mr. David said. “I’m watching you about to blow up the Death Star.”

“I can call back,” Mr. Hamill replied.

“No, that’s OK,” Mr. David told him. “I’ve seen this movie before. I know how it ends.”

(5) QUACKING UP. Scott Edelman is back with Episode 23 of the Why Not Say What Happened? podcast: “Why Howard the Duck Was the Silver Surfer of the ’70s”. (And here’s several dozen platforms where it can be found.)

Join me and Neil Ottenstein for a rambling panel about Howard the Duck in which I share the Marvel Comics chaos which caused me to be hired there in 1974, my regrets over having written an issue of Omega the Unknown, my ethical queasiness about owning original art, what it means when I say I knew Stan Lee before he had hair, my terrifying Bullpen encounters with “Jumbo” John Verpoorten, why Howard the Duck was the Silver Surfer of the ’70s, my Times Square street theater with Steve Gerber, the time Howard the Duck had to be hatched instead of laid, how immaturity cost me Captain Marvel, the only time I ever saw Stan Lee get flustered, and more.

Among other things, Edelman recalls the time Howard the Duck couldn’t get laid – see the relevant comics panel here, and read the whole story here.

(6) HOW WUDE! [Item by Steven French.] Ben Child, in the Guardian’s “Week in Geek”, ponders a galaxy full of hangovers rather than hope: “Ryan Reynolds has pitched an ‘R-rated’ Star Wars. What would that look like?”

Take all the essential ingredients of Star Wars – samurais in space, adventure among the wookiees, aliens with backward syntax, evil cyborgs with a penchant for murder by telekinesis – then imagine George Lucas hadn’t given us all of that through a PG prism. This, it appears, is what Ryan Reynolds did when pitching to Disney. “I said, ‘Why don’t we do an R-rated Star Wars property?’” Reynolds told The Box Office podcast. “‘It doesn’t have to be overt, A+ characters. There’s a wide range of characters you could use.’ And I don’t mean R-rated to be vulgar. R-rated as a Trojan horse for emotion. I always wonder why studios don’t want to just gamble on something like that.”

Let’s imagine the scene: a gaggle of studio execs are nervously cowering before the Hollywood A-lister’s megawatt smirk as he reveals his idea for a take on George Lucas’s space opera that doesn’t hold back. This is Star Wars Tarantino-style. Perhaps Mando’s got a drug problem, or Chewie really does rip people’s arms off – and beat them to death with the wet ends. Somewhere over in Coruscant a Jedi slices a corrupt senator into symmetrical chunks without ever unsheathing his saber. Or maybe Reynolds just thinks the galaxy far, far away could use a little more Deadpool & Wolverine-style sweary irreverence.

He’s wrong. Push Star Wars too far into the realm of self-aware snark, or nudge it to start laughing at itself before the audience does, and you undercut the very thing that keeps fans tethered to its dusty, big-hearted mythos. We already have umpteen animated takedowns – Robot Chicken’s fever-dream dismemberments, Family Guy’s fart-laced remakes – and they’re fine, in their way. But if Star Wars ever starts mimicking the shows that exist solely to mock it, then the circle will be complete….

(7) THE THING OF SHAPES TO COME. Rich Horton’s reviews of the finalists continue at Strange at Ecbatan: “Hugo Ballot Review: Someone You Can Build a Nest In, by John Wiswell”.

… The story is told from the point of view of Shesheshen, who is a shapeshifting monster, or wyrm, and who has threatened the population of the Isthmus for some time. As the novel opens, Shesheshen is awakened early from her yearly hibernation by a familiar menace — monster hunters….

(8) CONCURRENT SEATTLE. ConCurrent Seattle, a one-day alternate program created in protest of the use of ChatGPT by the Seattle Worldcon, had raised almost half of its $5,000 budget as of yesterday.

The use of ChatGPT at WorldCon has been a breach of trust in an industry of writers whose work has been stolen to train genAI. ConCurrent, a one-day event being held on Thursday, August 14, 2025, at the ACT Theatre in downtown Seattle, is an alternative for those who want a convention with no genAI involved.

ConCurrent is not a replacement for WorldCon and will be free of charge and open to all….

(9) JAYANT NARLIKAR (1938-2025). [Item by Steven French.] The science journal Nature has an obituary of Jayant Narlikar who was not only Fred Hoyle’s PhD student and collaborator (together they developed an alternative theory of gravitation which rejected any Big Bang) but also wrote science fiction himself (his novel The Comet is still on the syllabus in some Indian schools). “Jayant Narlikar, visionary astrophysicist and science populariser, dies at 86”. He died on May 20.

… Narlikar’s influence extended well beyond academic circles. He was a dedicated science communicator and one of India’s earliest and most prolific writers of science fiction. A story exploring black holes and time dilation, submitted anonymously, won him his first award and launched a writing career that brought scientific ideas to a wider audience. His accessible and engaging popular science books became fixtures in school curricula and earned him the UNESCO Kalinga Prize in 1996….

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 31, 1990 — Total Recall

By Paul Weimer: “Get your ass to Mars”.

Sure, I think as social satire The Running Man is probably better science fiction as a movie. But as a vehicle for 1980’s SF for Schwarzenegger that wasn’t Terminator, I think you can’t do better than one of my favorites, Total Recall. The excitement of a movie “based on a story by Philip K. Dick” (which I subsequently read and was confused by how little it actually had to do with it.)

But the movie is a corker from start to finish and so much of the movie is imprinted in my brain to this day. The movie’s insistence on keeping it very ambiguous, right to the end, if Quaid was dreaming or not , charmed me. I argued with my brother over this, who thought the “sweat drop” scene with Dr. Edgemar proved it was all real. I disagreed, and pointed out things like “Bluesky on Mars” being the name of his program, and how Melina resembled the woman programmed for his vacation. And if you listen to the commentary, Paul Verhoeven directed the movie with the point of view that it was all a dream, and Schwarzenegger acted with the point of view that it was reality. It makes for an interesting tension on screen and it works.

There are lots of little details that happen in the background. The change in geopolitical setup to a North-South Cold War. The Tokyo Samurai are trying to go for a fifth and deciding win in the World Series (so now the American Baseball leagues have teams in Japan…and the World Series is a best of nine affair). The movie is visually rich and generous like that, showing a lived in world that you can believe is real. Two worlds to be precise, both Earth and Mars. And the brutalist architecture pattern works for this authoritarian future.

And of course the movie is hideously violent. The body count is high.

The movie remains ever relevant with its critiques of colonialism, and authoritarianism. We are meant to side with the Free Mars movement, and maybe not until Cox’s Cohagen decides to kill everyone by asphyxiation does he really go from a tyrannical colonial figure who is vaguely understandable, to a true and undeniable monster that is irredeemable. But that steady revelation of just how horrible he can be starts with him looking sympathetic at first, and then unfurling his true nature and the extent of what he has done, and is willing to do. It’s a dive into authoritarian and colonialist mindsets, and in this day and age, even more relevant than ever.

And the movie follows through on the implications of its technology with the character beats. When Richter is told that Quaid/Hauser won’t remember anything, he just has to punch him hard, because of all what he’s put Richter through at this point. It’s a character beat that makes sense given the tech. And we have Chekov’s guns all over the place, which all fire, which propel us to the final confrontation. Sure, the “Ten second terraforming method of Mars” is bonkers and would not work. The movie doesn’t explain that there are more steps to the breathable atmosphere than melting the ice to get oxygen. I don’t care.

I read the novelization, done by Piers Anthony, because “I wanted to know more”. And I wish I hadn’t. I had not yet discovered how terrible Anthony was as a writer, but the novel’s insistence at each and every chance to say “yes this is real” over and over, was disappointing. Even at the end, when Quaid points out to Melina that she looks like the woman from Rekall, she casually says she used to do modeling for them. The book was determined to squash any ambiguity, and it was a major turn off. It did more solidly explain the terraforming, though and how it would work.

But the movie remains solid. Don’t bother with the remake. Watch the original. Don’t let me down, buddy, I’m counting on you.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee compares entertainments.
Wumo avoids a clichéd location.
xkcd says this is not an immediate concern.

(12) MURDERBOT SUITS UP. Alexander Skarsgård shows it’s a real challenge to pull on his costume in this TikTok video: “Discover the Morning Routines of Security Units in Murderbot”.

(13) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. “How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart” is a hooky headline, but the real topic of Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast (which is the source of the New York Times article) is the declining fertility rate in many countries. If the NYT article is paywalled, the podcast episode is available on YouTube under the title “Progressives Are Driving Themselves Into Extinction”.

…Douthat: What about culture apart from politics? Because, while it is the case that culture is determined to some degree by tech, the smartphone creates culture in its own way. It’s also the case that the issue of declining birthrates is not one that much of elite Western culture has taken seriously. It’s not something that’s entered into the mainstream cultural mind the way that the threat of climate change has done. So you could imagine if it became a more important part of the cultural imaginary — some kind of self-conscious attempt to treat this as an important issue.

Let’s say, right now people in Hollywood would feel bad if they were perceived to be not doing something to fight climate change or something. Hollywood used to make a lot of romantic comedies. It doesn’t really anymore. There’s still a few. But are there cultural scripts that could be written — whether in movies or TV or elsewhere — that you think could actually make a difference?

Evans: I think definitely, yes. And I think it would be wonderful if Hollywood promoted that and supported that. In fact, as a joke last year, I even wrote a comedy script about how Hollywood could support fertility and things like that.

Even though I’m totally on board with that — and I think that’s very important — there are several frictions. One, it’s very difficult to do cultural engineering today, because we have infinite options of entertainment at our fingertips — on Netflix and everything. So if you’re not that interested in a romantic comedy — you know, in China, a lot of the most popular films are about divorce. So it’s difficult to do cultural engineering. On top of that, as long as people are hooked on their smartphones, they might not have the social skills to do it.

I think another possible mechanism would be to use the tax system and to give massive tax incentives to people who have children, because that’s a positive externality….

(14) NUMBER NINE? NUMBER NINE? “Scientists Say They’ve Found a Dwarf Planet Very Far From the Sun” – this link bypasses the New York Times paywall. “The small world was found during a search for the hypothetical Planet Nine, and astronomers say the next time it will reach its closest point to the sun is in the year 26186.”

A sizable world has been found in a part of the solar system that astronomers once thought to be empty. It probably qualifies as a dwarf planet, the same classification as Pluto.

Temporarily named 2017 OF201, it takes more than 24,000 years to travel around the sun just once along a highly elliptical orbit, coming as close as 4.2 billion miles and moving as far out as 151 billion miles. (Neptune is just 2.8 billion miles from the sun.)

And 2017 OF201 may have implications for the hypothesis of an undiscovered planet, nicknamed Planet Nine, in the outer reaches of the solar system.

“We discovered a very large trans-Neptunian object in a very exotic orbit,” said Sihao Cheng, a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J….

(15) WHAT’S THAT SMELL? [Item by Steven French.]

“My space-dog has no nose!”

“How does he smell?”

“Like a poisonous marzipan cloud!”

“From cat urine to gunpowder: Exploring the peculiar smells of outer space” at the BBC.

Scientists are analysing the smells of space – from Earth’s nearest neighbours to planets hundreds of light years away – to learn about the make-up of the Universe.

Jupiter, says Marina Barcenilla, is “a bit like a stink bomb”.

The largest planet in the solar system, Jupiter has several layers of cloud, she explains, and each layer has a different chemical composition. The gas giant might tempt you in with the sweet aroma of its “poisonous marzipan clouds”, she says. Then the smell “would only get worse as you go deeper”.

“You would probably wish you were dead before you got to the point where you were crushed by the pressure,” she says.

“The top layer of cloud, we believe, is made of ammonia ice,” says Barcenilla, likening the stench to that of cat urine.” Then, as you get further down, you encounter ammonium sulphide. That’s when you have ammonia and sulphur together – a combination made in hell.” Sulphurous compounds are famously responsible for stinking of rotting eggs….

(16) RARA AVIS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Eat chicken — I have never really forgiven the dinosaurs for what they did to Raquel Welch. This is this week’s Nature cover story….

The cover shows an artist’s impression of Archaeopteryx, the oldest-known fossil bird, which lived some 150 million years ago. In this week’s issue, Jingmai O’Connor and colleagues describe the fourteenth known specimen of Archaeopteryx — colloquially known as the Chicago Archaeopteryx because it was acquired by the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois. This specimen is important because it is so well preserved: it is nearly complete and has not been crushed, which means it retains a remarkable level of detail. This, combined with painstaking preparation guided by micro-computed tomography, allowed the researchers to uncover fresh information about the skeleton, soft tissues and plumage of this iconic creature. Among the team’s findings are specialized inner secondary feathers called tertials on both wings, and an indication that creature’s foot pads were adapted for movement on the ground. The collection of newly identified features suggests that Archaeopteryx was adapted for some level of flight and was comfortable living both on the ground and in trees.

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

Pixel Scroll 5/29/25 They Came And Took Our Spindizzy Away From Us

Posted on May 29, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) THE BAR’S MY DESTINATION. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Another “distraction” for GRRM fans to complain about: “George R. R. Martin’s Cocktail Bar Brings Ancient Apothecary Vibes To Santa Fe’s Drink Scene” says Tasting Table.

Milk of the Poppy logo

…The legendary author, whose literary works have incited television shows, fervent fandoms, and plenty of food- and cocktail-related tributes (including “Game of Thrones”-inspired drinking games), has recently set his sights on a new form of creative expression.

Based in [George R.R.] Martin’s current home of New Mexico, Milk of the Poppy is a cocktail bar named for a medicinal liquid referred to in the “A Song of Ice and Fire” book series, on which HBO’s “Game of Thrones” is based. The bar boasts medieval-inspired decor with an apothecary theme, ideal for patrons to live out their fandom fantasies and responsibly partake in various libations and food offerings.

Though there have been “Game of Thrones” pop-up bars here and there over the years, one of the most unique things about this establishment is that it isn’t simply another fan-run one-off. Conceptualized by creative director Al LaFleur, the bar has been in the works for some time, even before LaFleur left Los Angeles for New Mexico. If anything, Martin’s investment in this craft cocktail bar indicates a sort of “seal of approval” from the author, whose writing heavily influenced the bar’s robust food and drink offerings.

The dungeon-like feel of the bar is reminiscent of popular “Game of Thrones” scenery, giving patrons enough reason to explore the space for a first-hand (or first-sip) experience of what it would truly be like to eat and drink as one of their favorite characters. Having opened its doors in March 2025, the bar is still relatively new to the Santa Fe bar scene, testing the potent waters of combining fantasy food and drink with real-world applications.

With a menu featuring specialty-themed, potion-like drinks, beer, wine, and a bevy of delicious appetizers, this pop culture bar will hopefully be much more than a flash in the pan, going on to thrive and connect with New Mexico locals and travelers seeking it out. Its namesake drink is a vibrant green cocktail called MOTP Milk Punch that features white armagnac, quebranta pisco, matcha, melon, calpico, and allspice that appears to be worth the visit in itself.

Although fans may be quick to criticize the author for taking longer to complete the long-anticipated “The Winds of Winter,” it’s worth remembering that true art cannot be rushed….

Website: “Milk Of The Poppy”. It’s located in Santa Fe adjacent to GRRM’s Jean Cocteau Cinema and Beastly Books.

(2) MOST PURGED BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE TO NAVAL CADETS AGAIN. AP News reports“Most books pulled from Naval Academy library are back on the shelves in latest DEI turn”.

All but a few of the nearly 400 books that the U.S. Naval Academy removed from its library because they dealt with anti-racism and gender issues are back on the shelves after the newest Pentagon-ordered review — the latest turn in a dizzying effort to rid the military of materials related to diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Based on the new review, about 20 books from the academy’s library are being pulled aside to be checked, but that number includes some that weren’t identified or removed in last month’s initial purge of 381 books, defense officials told The Associated Press….

…The purge led to the removal of books on the Holocaust, histories of feminism, civil rights and racism, and Maya Angelou’s famous autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”

Others included “Memorializing the Holocaust,” which deals with Holocaust memorials; “Half American,” about African Americans in World War II; “A Respectable Woman,” about the public roles of African American women in 19th century New York; and “Pursuing Trayvon Martin,” about the 2012 shooting of a Black 17-year-old in Florida that raised questions about racial profiling.

The Navy on Wednesday could not confirm which books have been returned to the library or if Angelou’s book or the others will remain pulled from shelves….

Three sff works on the original list of 381 were Light From Uncommon Stars / RykaAoki; Sorrowland / Rivers Solomon; and A Psalm For The Wild-Built / Becky Chambers.

(3) AN AUGUST PRESENCE. A Deep Look by Dave Hook continues scanning the 1949 sff offerings with “’The Other Side of the Moon’, August Derleth editor, 1949 Pellegrini & Cudahy”.

The Short: The Other Side of the Moon, August Derleth editor, 1949 Pellegrini & Cudahy, includes 20 stories and an introduction by August Derleth. While I think Derleth’s definition of science fiction is somewhat different than mine, it’s mostly SF and all speculative fiction. My favorites include “Something from Above“, a novelette by Donald Wandrei, Weird Tales December 1930, and “The Earth Men“, a Martian Chronicles short story by Ray Bradbury, Thrilling Wonder Stories August 1948. My overall average rating is 3.57/5, or just below “Very good”. I recommend the twelve stories that were rated “Great” or “Very good”, but I would recommend The Other Side of the Moon itself only to those with a real enthusiasm for stories of the period….

(4) MY PRECIOUS. “PHD Students Bear the Brunt of Science’s ‘Gollum Effect’” reports Nature.

Almost half of the scientists who responded to a survey have witnessed territorial and undermining behav[1]iours by colleagues — most commonly during their PhD studies. Of those affected, nearly half said the perpetrator was a high-profile researcher, and one-third said it was their own supervisor.

Most of the respondents were ecologists, but the organizers suspect that surveys focusing on other disciplines would be similar.

The gatekeeping behaviours that the study documents “damage careers, particularly of early-career and marginalized researchers”, says lead author Jose Valdez, an ecologist at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research in Leipzig. “Most alarming was that nearly one in five of those affected left academia or science entirely.”

Valdez and his colleagues call the possessiveness shown by many researchers the Gollum effect, after a character in the book The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), whose one goal in life is to hoard an object of power for himself. The study was published in One Earth ( J. W. Valdez et al. One Earth 8, 101314 (2025)….

… Respondents described data hoarding, ideas theft by supervisors and defamation at conferences. “Collaborator has ‘reserved’ important research avenues,” wrote one respondent, “and is actively withholding data from our entire research group”. Another wrote, “I was told I wouldn’t be able to publish anything until the collaborator published their study, which has been in prep for over six years now.”…

(5) DISPUTING THE NARRATIVE. In the view of ComicBook.com, “Sandman Showrunner Sets Record Straight on Netflix Cancellation & Neil Gaiman Accusations”.

The Sandman showrunner Allan Heinberg said on Wednesday that the show was not actually canceled over the sexual misconduct allegations against Neil Gaiman. Netflix announced that this series would end with Season 2 back in January, and at the time, the accusations against Gaiman were just beginning to impact many of his adaptations. However, Heinberg told Entertainment Weekly that the streamer, the studio, and the creative team had decided to end the show shortly before Season 1 even premiered. He said that Season 2 was already in post-production when the reports about Gaiman began to circulate, so he doesn’t think it had any impact on the story or content of the new episodes. Still, he said that the announcement of the show’s ending came at “unfortunate timing, for sure.”

“It was a decision we made three years ago,” Heinberg said of the show’s cancellation. The reason, he explained, was actually the content of the original comic book by Gaiman, Sam Kieth, and Mike Dringenberg. The book often goes off on tangents about other characters, where Dream (Tom Sturridge) is only distantly involved. “There are some volumes where he just appears in two scenes,” Heinberg pointed out….

(6) MISSION CONTROL. Kotaku brings us “Mission: Impossible’s Most Impossible Missions, Ranked”.

…This past week we’ve ranked everything from Tom Cruise’s hair in each movie to the franchise’s most irreplaceable characters. In honor of The Final Reckoning dominating the Memorial Day Weekend box offices, we decided to take a different look at the Mission: Impossible franchise by ranking the movies based on the impossibility of the mission. So, before you scream about Phillip Seymour Hoffman being a better villain than any other Mission: Impossible bad guy, or how Tom Cruise didn’t risk his life falling backwards off a helicopter for Fallout not to be the best movie ever, remember, it’s all about the mission, even if you don’t choose to accept it….

The slideshow begins with Mission:Impossible II in last place, and Kotaku’s frank comment —

Not only is it the worst Mission: Impossible, it’s also the least impossible mission.

(7) A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Yesterday’s BBC 4 Good Read saw its first 10 minutes devoted to Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. Panellist Adrian Chiles’ parents’ Croatian ancestry came in handy when it comes to the novel’s 21^st century youth slang….

This week broadcaster and writer Adrian Chiles and musician and sound artist Marty Ware join Harriett Gilbert with their reading suggestions. Martyn nominates A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess which he says has influenced his career as a musician. He even named his band Heaven 17 from a reference in the book. If you can get past the brutality and violence it’s a novel that throws up many moral questions about the nature of good and evil. Both he and Adrian Chiles are fascinated by the use of Russian language throughout the book.

You can download the programme from here.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

May 29, 2009 — 2081 film

So we have an interesting short film. And no, I had no idea it existed until now as one of my email newsletter had a note about a Kurt Vonnegut story being turned into a film, not completely unsurprising as one of his works did almost become an opera. So we have 2081 which is based off of his “Harrison Bergeron” story and which premiered on this date sixteen years ago at the Seattle International Film Festival.

The story was first published in the October 1961 in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and was in his Welcome to the Monkey House collection seven years later. Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition has drafts of many of stories there.

The cast is James Cosmo, Julie Hagerty, Patricia Clarkson, and Armie Hammer.

The story is one where a future polity is attempting by any means possible to ensure that everyone is absolutely equal. Ruthlessly as the rulers of the 1984 society were doing. That’s a bit of a SPOLER I know. It’s not quite in keeping of the Vonnegut story and that’s something I’ll not say why.

So what did the critics think of it. Well I didn’t find a lot of them who said anything but I really liked what Mike Massie at the Gone with The Twins site said about this half hour film cost that just a hundred thousand to produce: “’What are you thinking about?’ ‘I don’t know.’ The basic plot, adapted by Chandler Tuttle (who also directed and edited) from Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s short story, is sensational, serving as a warning and as pitch-black satire. The notion of equality taken to hyperbolic extremes is certainly worthy of cinematic translation, as are the various manifestations of crushing governmental control. True freedom requires disparity.”

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes really liked it giving it a seventy-five percent rating.

You can watch the trailer here.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Bizarro tries Little Free choices.
Brewer Rockit unwillingly attends an alien commencement ceremony.
Moderately Confused plays with pronunciation.
Strange Brew depicts pressure.
Wumo remembers Sauron’s Disco phase.

(10) KINGFISHER FOR THE ROCKET. Camestros Felapton’s Hugo reading / reviewing continues: “Hugo 2025 Novel: A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher”.

…Not unlike reading Alien Clay, I’m reading a book by an author I’ve read so often that I see her playing on repeated themes and elements in a new setting. Hester’s interest is the breeding of geese rather than gardening but she is very much a recurring kind of Kingfisher character, a smart, often wise, older woman who would like a peaceful life but circumstances prevent it. We are also in Kingfisher re-spinning a classic fairy tale, in this case the Brothers Grimm collected story The Goose Girl (Hester provides the connection to the geese but Cordelia is the titular girl)…

(11) ROBERT BLOCH IN THE FACE OF CHANGING TIMES. Keith Roysdon traces “The Evolution of Robert Bloch” at CrimeReads.

…Bloch, whose novel was the basis of one of the most classic of classic films, told the [Castle of Frankenstein] interviewer that he felt the same insecurities and frustrations of any writer. By the end of the 1960s, he confessed he had his struggles.

“Markets have changed. I will say quite candidly that in the past year, I’ve written five short stories – three of them haven’t been placed because the markets have changed for that sort of material. I would like to write a great deal more fiction, but there is the problem of market accountability. So I write to specification.” Bloch spoke about how things had changed since he wrote for Weird Tales and other magazines in the 1930s. “I feel the times have changed. And they change for every writer. There is no writer living who will end up 30 years later with the same market conditions and the same audience and the same media.”

Bloch was critical of himself: “I’ve always suffered from a shortage of talent. I’m very limited.” He cited his “inadequate” education and the challenge of keeping up with trends.

“Empathy is the only strength I have. The ability to put myself inside the characters and understand their motivations.”…

(12) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. “Film and TV model maker warns skill may disappear” reports the BBC.

A visual effects designer who worked on award-winning films and TV shows has warned the art of model-making is at risk of vanishing in the coming decades.

Mike Tucker has worked with Discover Bucks Museum in Aylesbury on an exhibition of original models and props from British science fiction shows, such as Doctor Who.

The artist, in his 60s, said he hoped the displays could inspire a future generation of visual effects artists.

“A lot of the companies, like myself, have either stopped because they’ve not been able to compete with the CGI guys, or just retired out of the business.”

“The number of us who know how to do it is getting smaller and smaller with every passing year,” he added….

…The Beyond the Stars exhibition includes models and props the Oxfordshire resident has worked on, including 1980s’ Daleks, Marvin the Paranoid Android and a model of Starbug from Red Dwarf.

Originally from Swansea, Mr Tucker entered the industry via the BBC’s in-house visual effects department in the 1980s, which closed in 2005.

He recalled: “It had over 100 members of staff when I joined. By the time we closed down we were down to 14 people, because the numbers of shows that required our particular expertise was getting smaller and smaller.

“It’s not dead completely yet. If left unchecked there is going to be a gap in about 10, 15, 20 years’ time of just finding people who know how to do it.”…

(13) MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE AUCTION. Heritage Auctions wants the world to know about the June 5 “Masters of the Universe featuring the Artwork of Mark Taylor Action Figures & Toys Showcase Auction”.

Item predicted to fetch the highest bids — *Savage/Wonder Bread He-Man Prototype First Shot*

Calling all He-Fans and She-Ravers! Whether you grew up shouting “I have the power!” or just recently fell down the rabbit hole of Eternian lore (blame that catchy theme song), now’s your chance to snag the treasures of a true toy titan.

Of the top three toy sellers in the resale market—He-Man and his colleagues in the Masters of the Universe are the toy that keeps on giving.The popularity of the brand—from a 1980s movie to the original cartoon and toy line, all the way to a new movie coming in 2026-speaks to the enduring appeal of these characters across pop culture, collectibles, and meme culture alike.

Our June 5 Masters of the Universe Showcase Auction is a love letter to the legacy of Mark Taylor—the visionary artist who gave us He-Man, Skeletor, Battle Cat, and a galaxy of unforgettable icons. This isn’t just a toy auction—it’s a trip through the nostalgia-fueled vortex of pop culture greatness.

Featured treasures include:

The Savage/Wonder Bread He-Man Prototype First Shot (AFA 80)—a brown-haired, rough-cut warrior straight from Mattel’s pre-launch experimental phase. With ties to a long-lost “Buy 3, Get 1 Free” mail-in offer and whispers of a doomed Conan toy line, this prototype is more than rare—it’s legendary. Graded AFA 80 NM and encased in a deluxe acrylic display with a COA from Tom Derby.

But the true magic? It’s in the art:

Original He-Man Concept Artwork by Mark Taylor – Before he became Eternia’s polished protector, He-Man was Torak, Hero of Prehistory—a barbarian bruiser in Viking armor. Taylor’s vision drew heavy inspiration from Frazetta’s fantasy epics, capturing He-Man’s raw, untamed beginnings.
Original Skeletor Concept Artwork – Inspired by a terrifying childhood encounter with what Taylor believed was a real corpse (seriously!), early Skeletor—also known as De-Man—was gaunt, ghostly, and haunting. With bare feet, shin guards, and echoes of a “King of Styx” motif, this is the villain as you’ve never seen him: straight from the sketchbook of madness.
Castle Grayskull Original Concept Sketch (1979) – The eerie, bone-like fortress came to life in pencil before it ever took plastic form. Signed and dated by Taylor, this haunting 24×19 inch sketch captures his dream of a fortress that wasn’t built—it grew. “I wanted it to be organic… like it’s starting to melt,” Taylor said. And you can own that vision.

Whether you’re a hardcore MOTU collector, a toy history buff, or just someone who knows a good barbarian-sorcerer rivalry when they see one, this auction is your portal to the past-and a future filled with bragging rights.

Explore the full catalog and preview all the epic lots: HA.com/49181

(14) RANKING ALL OF PHILIP K. DICK’S BOOKS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid over at Media Death Cult has set himself the Herculean task of ranking all of Philip K. Dick’s books….

It is not a competition but you can see whether or not you agree with him and how he tried to make some very difficult decisions….

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

Pixel Scroll 2/2/25 Don Simpson And The Escaped Typos

Posted on February 2, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) FANTASY TAKES CENTER STAGE. The Guardian’s “Bookmarks” newsletter says, “Fantasy appears to be having a ‘moment’ (quite a long one as it happens)”

“Increasingly fantasy has moved more from the fringes towards the centre”, with a rise in writers operating in the genre, says Irenosen Okojie, who founded the afrofuturist festival Black to the Future and whose books include Curandera.

Why is the genre thriving? Readers “need escapism right now in ways that truly speak to our imagination”, says Okojie, and they “like these richly imaginative worlds that explore our lived experiences in dynamic, transformative ways”. Fantasy is also “invested in projecting how worlds different from our own might flourish”, says Matthew Sangster, a professor of romantic studies, fantasy and cultural history at the University of Glasgow.

However, even though the “success of the likes of George RR Martin and Nnedi Okorafor” show fantasy is a “thriving space”, says Okojie, it “always has been”: look at the likes of Ursula K Le Guin and Samuel R Delany.

George Sandison, managing editor at Titan Books – which publishes VE Schwab and Veronica Roth – agrees. Though he often hears that a particular genre is “having a moment”, when it comes to fantasy, he feels as though “that moment has lasted my entire career in fiction, my entire life before that, and for the countless generations required to produce all the work that lit up my brain as a child!”

Fantasy “is arguably at the root of all literature”, he says – even Virginia Woolf. Every work of fiction “imagines a whole new reality”, fantasy “just has a lot more fun with those mental images, turning them into dragons and talking cats, giving them magic powers, and breaking them free of our planet’s geography”. He sees the publishing industry’s categorisations of fantasy as simply telling readers what metaphors and tropes to expect, “to try to sell more books”….

(2) CTHULHU IS ON THE LINE. Christopher Lockett, in “China Miéville and the Banality of Weird”, has a Lovecraft quote from almost a century ago that is still capable of launching discussions:

…Once again, the best articulation of this premise is the opening paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu,” which functions as about as perfect a Lovecraftian mission statement as you’ll find:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (139)”

To be fair to Lovecraft, he was writing in the 1920s and 30s, and he died before the outbreak of WWII. He wrote during the post-WWI crisis of spirit and the more general collapse of faith in such prewar verities as the invariably positive nature of scientific and technological progress. His work shares the alienation and disillusion present in the critical mass of modernism, alongside its often desperate pursuit of meaning in arcana.³ His fascination with and nominal devotion to science, along with his militant atheism, coexisted with his figurations of occultism in a manner entirely consonant with the historical moment: science and technology shorn of utopianism by the horrors of the Western Front, seeming to hint at vaster horrors beyond human ken.

In that respect he was not wrong: the war he didn’t live to see ended in the unthinkable. The Holocaust and Hiroshima would seem to represent the “terrifying vistas of reality” warned of in the passage above and allegorized by such Old Gods as Cthulhu and his monstrous kin. But if those unthinkable events have shown us anything, it’s the basic flaw of Lovecraft’s premise: far from going “mad from the revelation” or fleeing “from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age,” humanity has demonstrated instead an apparently bottomless capacity to make the unthinkable thinkable. Indeed—with the benefit of time, self-rationalization, mythologization, and a massive dose of delusional euphemism—to render the unthinkable banal….

(3) OLD SCAM, NEWLY HATCHED. Victoria Strauss warns about “USA Pen Press: The Ghostwriting Scam of a Thousand Websites” at Writer Beware.

… Ghostwriting scams pose as publishing service providers. Like the similar similar-seeming publishing/marketing scams from the Philippines, they are based overseas, primarily in Pakistan and India, and offer menus of publishing and marketing services designed to attract writers looking to self-publish or to market their books.

Also like the Philippine scams, they frequently take writers’ money and run, or deliver substandard quality, or treat whatever package or service the writer initially buys as a gateway to the writer’s bank account, relentlessly pressuring them to hand over more cash….

… It didn’t take long on USA Pen Press’s website for me to identify it as a ghostwriting scam. Many of the typical markers are there: the prominent advertising of ghostwriting services, of course, but also an array of trad-pubbed book covers to falsely imply USA Pen Press had something to do with them, a header image (see above) with even more false references to famous writers, “testimonials” that all sound alike and in one case reference a different company, awkward English (“How Do the USA Pen Press Work on the Book Covers?” “What the process of Ghostwriting includes?”), and false claims (they say 10+ years in business but as of this writing, their web domain is just 119 days old)….

(4) IT WAS THE WORST OF TIMES. [Item by Steven French.] Another day, another piece on Dick and dystopias: “The PKD Dystopia” by Henry Farrell at Programmable Mutter.

This is not the dystopia we were promised. We are not learning to love Big Brother, who lives, if he lives at all, on a cluster of server farms, cooled by environmentally friendly technologies. Nor have we been lulled by Soma and subliminal brain programming into a hazy acquiescence to pervasive social hierarchies.

Dystopias tend toward fantasies of absolute control, in which the system sees all, knows all, and controls all. And our world is indeed one of ubiquitous surveillance. Phones and household devices produce trails of data, like particles in a cloud chamber, indicating our wants and behaviors to companies such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Yet the information thus produced is imperfect and classified by machine-learning algorithms that themselves make mistakes. The efforts of these businesses to manipulate our wants leads to further complexity. It is becoming ever harder for companies to distinguish the behavior which they want to analyze from their own and others’ manipulations.

This does not look like totalitarianism unless you squint very hard indeed. As the sociologist Kieran Healy has suggested, sweeping political critiques of new technology often bear a strong family resemblance to the arguments of Silicon Valley boosters. Both assume that the technology works as advertised, which is not necessarily true at all.

Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure. Much of the world’s financial system is made out of bots—automated systems designed to continually probe markets for fleeting arbitrage opportunities. Less sophisticated programs plague online commerce systems such as eBay and Amazon, occasionally with extraordinary consequences, as when two warring bots bid the price of a biology book up to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping)….

(5) READING BINGO. If Reddit’s “OFFICIAL r/Fantasy 2024 Book Bingo Challenge!” ends up on the Hugo ballot, that will be because its creators are drumming up support in posts like this: “For Your Consideration: r/Fantasy’s 2024 Bingo Challenge is Eligible for a Hugo Nomination for Best Related Work”. Apparently, they’ve been doing these challenges for ten years. Everybody does eligibility posts now – and you might find the challenge an item of interest in its own right.

(6) ROBERT BLOCH RARITIES. Here’s “What’s New at the Robert Bloch Official Website.

Read the first two pages of an operatic Libretto Bloch wrote for Gaston Leroux’s novel, The Phantom of the Opera.
IN 1980, Bloch penned a script for the pilot of a proposed weekly TV spinoff series of the (Stephen King) Salem’s Lot TV movie that recounted the further adventures of Ben Mears and Mark Petrie. Sadly, what we have is not the complete script (of 54 pages), rather a random sampling, the only pages available, captured during an auction of the script. Still, an interesting find!

(7) TODAY’S DAY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Today in the UK is National Yorkshire Pudding Day. Learn more from the Yorkshire Post’s 2020 article “When is it, origins of the side dish, and the best Yorkshire Pudding recipe”. Note, the article includes a recipe.

Depending on who you ask, where you search, or how you feel about it, Yorkshire Pudding and popovers either are or aren’t the same thing, although they’re clearly related. Here’s some of those opinions (and more recipes):

(8) JAY SMITH OBITUARY. Costuming fan Jay Smith died January 27, 2025. The International Costumers Galley announced on Facebook:

Jay Smith was a costumer, attending conventions primarily in California, going back to Equicon. He was an actor and worked Renaissance Fairs and The Great Dickens Christmas Fair, where he was known for his portrayal of Father Christmas. He was beloved for his portrayal of the character for decades at many events.

At the link is a photo of Smith wearing a “Redesign of Superman” from Equicon 1985 by Civi Poth.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Buck Rogers serial (1939)

Eighty-six years ago, the Buck Rogers serial, produced by Universal Pictures, first was in the theaters. It starred Buster Crabbe (who had previously played the title character in two Flash Gordon serials and would return for a third.) Buster was sometimes billed as Larry Crabbe as well as you will note in the poster below.

I don’t think I need to say that it’s based on the Buck Rogers character as y’all know that as created by Philip Francis Nowlan but for the sake of the few Filers who will nitpick if I don’t I will.

It was directed by Ford Beebe was Saul A. Goodkind as written by Norman S. Hall, Ray Trampe and Dick Calkins. It would run for twelve chapters of roughly twenty minutes each.

As I said Buck Roger was Larry “Buster” Crabbe with Constance Moore as Wilma Deering, and Jackie Moran as “Buddy” Wade, an original character who was based on the Sunday strip character Buddy Deering.

It had a really small budget and re-used film footage from the futuristic Thirties musical Just Imagine.

In 1953, it was edited into the film Planet Outlaws and twelve years later it was edited again into Destination Saturn, and not to stop there, the late Seventies saw the latter release of the latter as Buck Rogers. All three were feature films.

Not surprisingly, you can watch it online as it’s public domain — here is the first chapter

(10) COMICS SECTION.

The Argyle Sweater makes a different sound of music.
Carpe Diem reveals there’s wi-fi in Mordor.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal wonders whether AI is the biggest threat. Maybe.

(11) HOLD YOUR BREATH FOR A COUPLE OF MONTHS, PLEASE. Popular Science learns that in Poland a “Fire-breathing dragon sculpture not allowed to breathe fire”.

A famous dragon sculpture that spits out real fire is going to be a little less dramatic this month. The Wawel Dragon–or Smok Wawelski–in Krakow, Poland will have to hold its fiery breath so that authorities can see why it has been guzzling too much fuel lately.

Krzysztof Wojdowski, spokesman for Krakow’s road infrastructure office, told the Associated Press that officials will inspect the gas lines and pipes that feed the 19-feet metal dragon to look for ways to reduce energy bills. The sculpture is expected to begin to breathe fire again by March, pending the investigation….

(12) PWNING THE LIBS? The New York Times reports “E.V. Owners Don’t Pay Gas Taxes. So, Many States Are Charging Them Fees.” (Behind a paywall.)

Owners of electric cars in Vermont recently got a letter from the Department of Motor Vehicles with some bad news. Starting Jan. 1 they would have to pay $178 a year to register their cars, twice as much as owners of vehicles with internal combustion engines.

In imposing the higher fee, Vermont became the latest state to make people pay a premium for driving electric. At least 39 states charge such annual fees, including $50 in Hawaii and $200 in Texas, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. That’s up from no states a few years ago.

Now, as President Trump rolls back Biden administration measures to promote electric vehicles, Republicans in Congress are considering imposing a national fee to bolster the fund used to finance roads and bridges, a fund that is in dire shape.

The fees are an attempt to make up for declining revenue from gasoline taxes that electric cars, for obvious reasons, don’t pay. They’re an example of how governments are struggling to adjust to technological upheaval in the auto industry.

Environmentalists and consumer groups agree that electric vehicle owners should help pay for road maintenance and construction. But they worry that Republicans, who control Congress, would set the fee at extremely high levels to punish electric vehicle owners, who tend to be liberals…

And yet somehow not all owners of companies that make electric cars are liberals….

(13) THIS IS THE DROID YOU’RE LOOKING FOR. Cool. And really expensive. “RoboCop – ED-209 1/3 Scale Statue”. Price tag: $3,100.

Wikipedia explains:

The Enforcement Droid Series 209, or ED-209, is a fictional heavily armed robot that appears in the RoboCop franchise. It serves as a foil for RoboCop, as well as a source of comic relief due to its lack of intelligence and tendency towards clumsy malfunctions.

The sales pitch says:

Premium Collectibles Studio presents their ED-209 1/3 Scale Statue. Hailing from the sci-fi classic RoboCop, this piece stands nearly 35 inches tall. Featuring every rivet, plate, and movie-accurate feature of the iconic Enforcement Droid, the finish is in a slate gray and matte black. Included is a pedestal base with the OCP logo, making it a striking addition for any RoboCop fan.

(14) I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU. Ryan George does a hilarious Tolkien-themed “When Your Friend Won’t Admit He’s Wrong” bit which some might say is NSFW, though really just for the last couple seconds, and not even then if you work for Frederick’s of Hollywood….

(15) FANGS FOR THE MEMORIES. Once upon a time actor Jonathan Frid, Dark Shadows’ Barnabas Collins, appeared as a celebrity guest on What’s My Line – vampire dentures and all.

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

Pixel Scroll 1/19/25 Also Spock Zarathustra

Posted on January 19, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) AND KEEPS ON TICKING. It didn’t need three days to rise again. “TikTok Starts Working Again After Trump Says He Will Stall a Ban” – New York Times link bypasses the paywall.

TikTok flickered back to life in the United States on Sunday after President-elect Donald J. Trump said that he would issue an executive order to stall a federal ban of the app.

The abrupt shift came just hours after major app stores removed the popular social media site and it stopped operating for U.S. users as a federal law took effect on Sunday. The company said in a post on X that in “agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service.”

Mr. Trump said in a Sunday morning post on Truth Social that he would “issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security.”

The ban stems from a 2024 law that requires app stores and cloud computing providers to stop distributing or hosting TikTok unless it is sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. Lawmakers passed the law over concerns that the Chinese government could use the app, which claims roughly 170 million United States users, to gather information about Americans or spread propaganda….

(2) IT’S TIME-WIMEY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Time travel is a major trope of SF. This week’s Radio 4 cinema programme Screenshot examined time travel…

Groundhog Day (1993) gets a mention but 12:01 (1993 film, “12:01 P.M.” 1973 story) ???

How does film and TV make time travel real? Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode take a quantum leap into the world of time travel and time loops on screen, from Back To The Future to Groundhog Day.

Mark speaks to theoretical physicist Sean Carroll about how films like Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Interstellar have handled the science of time travel – and whether it really is just the stuff of fantasy….

Personally speaking, I have been time travelling all my life. For most of it this has been at the rate of one second per second, but recently I have speeded things up to one minute per minute… That’s the way I roll!

You can download the Radio 4 programme here.

(3) IT’S QUANTUM TIME-WIMEY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Parallel universes and the multiverse are firmly established SFnal tropes. Younger fans not into science may be forgiven in thinking that multiverses were largely an invention of Marvel and even the ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’, but actually you can trace it way back to the ancient Greeks.

And of course even if there are multiverses, each with their own realities, what is real? Is reality real? In quantum physics, particles may not even be located in one space but smeared across a region of space until observed and then somehow they become fixed in one specific place: it is as if the act of observing is key to the nature of real reality. And can you even ‘shift’ between realities?

This week, BBC Radio 4’s Sideways programme takes a half-hour deep-dive into alternate realities and the multiverse…

You can download the programme here.

In 2020, a curious trend went viral on social media, especially among teenagers and young adults. As much of the world stayed at home to curb the spread of CoVID-19, Reality Shifters began claiming they could move from one reality to another, referencing multiverse theory.

Beyond the actual possibility of switching between realities, this craze raised intriguing questions about the fabric of the reality we experience. Philosophers and scientists have long speculated about the existence of multiple realities. Today, Matthew Syed explores the blurry line between what we perceive as reality and what may lie beyond it, inviting us to question the very nature of existence.

(4) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED? Episode 15 of Scott Edelman’s Why Not Say What Happened? podcast takes listeners back to “My Mysterious Mid-’70s Comic Con Meeting with Anthony Bourdain”.

Shredding hundreds of pages torn from notebooks filled by my teen and twentysomething self causes me to reminisce about my collaboration with artist P. Craig Russell which could have been, the poem 18-year-old me wrote about Action Comics #1, my mysterious mid-’70s New Jersey comic convention meeting with Anthony Bourdain, why when it comes to the process of writing I’m a voyeur but not an exhibitionist, the complete lyrics to a song I had Rick Jones sing way back in Captain Marvel #50, my joy upon seeing Superman co-creator Joe Shuster’s name in my old address book, how the Grim Reaper might have prevented my Scarecrow from being born, and much more.

And here’s where to find a dozen places where the episode can be heard, depending on taste.

(5) EATON FIRE AND JPL. The LA Times reports “NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory unscathed by Eaton fire, but not its workforce” (behind a paywall).

With its physical buildings and structures intact, the La Cañada Flintridge institution escaped the worst of the fire unscathed. The same can’t be said for its workforce.

At the height of the emergency, about 20% of the institution’s 5,500 employees were evacuated from their homes, director Laurie Leshin said.

About 210 employees lost their homes in the fire and an additional 100 — Leshin included — will likely be displaced long term by the extent of the damage to their house or neighborhood. Many more evacuees have yet to receive clearance to return home….

NASA has posted a satellite photo showing that “Eaton Fire Leaves California Landscape Charred”. (Click for larger image.)

On the afternoon of January 11, 2025, NASA’s AVIRIS-3 (Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer-3) flew aboard a B200 aircraft over Los Angeles County, where it captured images of several areas affected by wildland fires.

These false-color images show areas burned by the Eaton fire in Altadena and parts of Pasadena, Arcadia, and Sierra Madre. Charred trees and buildings in developed areas appear dark brown, whereas the burned wildland areas, particularly in Angeles National Forest, are shades of orange.

The Eaton fire ignited in the hills of Eaton Canyon, near Altadena, on the evening of January 7. By 10:30 a.m. the next day, the fire had quickly grown to cover more than 10,000 acres (40 square kilometers), according to Cal Fire. Around the time of this image on January 11, it had expanded to 14,117 acres (57 square kilometers), and the Los Angeles County Fire Department reported it was about 15 percent contained…

(6) WHY OCTAVIA BUTLER SEEMS PRESCIENT. “As California Burns, ‘Octavia Tried to Tell Us’ Has New Meaning” says New York Times contributor Veronica Chambers. (Link bypasses the NYT paywall.)

In the wake of the devastating fires in Los Angeles, many people are referencing the work of the science fiction writer Octavia Butler. Butler, who grew up in Pasadena, was the daughter of a housekeeper and a father who was a shoeshiner. She went on to become the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur “genius” award. Her book “Parable of the Sower,” published in 1993, paints a picture of a California ravished by the effects of climate change, income inequality, political divisiveness and centers on a young woman struggling to find faith and the community to build a new future.

The phrase “Octavia tried to tell us,” which began to gain momentum in 2020 during the pandemic, has once again resurfaced, in part because Butler studied science and history so deeply. The accuracy with which she read the shifts in America can, at times, seem eerily prophetic. One entry in “Parable of the Sower,” which is structured as a journal, dated on “February 1, 2025” begins, “We had a fire today.” It goes on to describe how the fear of fires plague Robledo, a fictional town that feels much like Altadena, a haven for the Black middle class for more than 50 years, where Butler lived in the late ’90s.

In 2000, Butler wrote a piece for Essence magazine titled, “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future.” She wrote: “Of course, writing novels about the future doesn’t give me any special ability to foretell the future. But it does encourage me to use our past and present behaviors as guides to the kind of world we seem to be creating. The past, for example, is filled with repeating cycles of strength and weakness, wisdom and stupidity, empire and ashes.”…

(7) DIDN’T PKD LIKE GRASS, TOO? [Item by Daniel Dern.] Not quite sure where androids would fit in here, and these would be either non-electric sheep, or perhaps hybrid electric/biofuel sheep… Perhaps: Do Android Farmers Dream Of Hybrid Electric/Biofuelled Sheep? “Large-Scale US Solar Farms Brings ‘Solar Grazing’ Work for Sheep” at Slashdot. (Clipped from ABC News.)

In Milam County, outside Austin [Texas], SB Energy operates the fifth-largest solar project in the country, capable of generating 900 megawatts of power across 4,000 acres (1,618 hectares). How do they manage all that grass? With the help of about 3,000 sheep, which are better suited than lawnmowers to fit between small crevices and chew away rain or shine. The proliferation of sheep on solar farms is part of a broader trend — solar grazing — that has exploded alongside the solar industry. Agrivoltaics, a method using land for both solar energy production and agriculture, is on the rise with more than 60 solar grazing projects in the U.S., according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Nineteen years ago, Pan’s Labyrinth premiered. In Spanish, it was called El laberinto del fauno which means The Labyrinth of the Faun. It was written, directed and co-produced by Mexican-born and raised Guillermo Del Toro.

Other producers were Bertha Navarro, Alfonso Cuarón, Frida Torresblanco and Álvaro Augustin.

It was narrated by Pablo Adán with a primary Spanish language cast (Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Ivana Baquero, Ariadna Gil and Álex Angulo) with the exception of Doug Jones as the Faun and the Pale Man who of course has a very long relationship with Del Toro going back to Mimic which was based on the Donald Wollheim story of the same name.

The “Mimic” story was nominated for a Retro Hugo at Worldcon 76.

Reception for it was excellent. It won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, at Nippon 2007 which had dual Toastmasters in the guise of George Takei and Nozomi Ohmori. Children of Men, The Prestige, V for Vendetta and A Scanner Darkly were also nominated for this Award.

Critics really liked it. Roger Ebert at the Chicago Sun Times said of it that “Nothing I am likely to see, however, is likely to change my conviction that the year’s best film was Pan’s Labyrinth.” And Mark Kermode writing in The Observer exclaimed that it is “an epic, poetic vision in which the grim realities of war are matched and mirrored by a descent into an underworld populated by fearsomely beautiful monsters.”

Box office was quite superb as it cost just under twenty million to produce and made over eighty million. Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give a near perfect ninety five percent rating.

Usually I don’t note the figures made for a film but the Faun got some great ones including the NECA eight inch version which you see here in all its nightmarish glory. The Pale Man got his own figure as well.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Brewster Rockit sees a disturbing pattern.
Frank and Ernest have a visit from Malaprop Man.
Free Range has doubts about Fred Flintstone’s day job.
Pearls Before Swine understand social media.
Rhymes with Orange thinks it’s time to define the relationship.

(10) YOU CONTROL THE HORIZONTAL. YOU CONTROL THE VERTICAL. THEY CONTROL THE OFF SWITCH. Inverse remembers“60 Years Ago, The Most Sneakily Influential Sci-Fi Series Came To An Inglorious End”.

…The Outer Limits was ahead of its time — and misunderstood accordingly.

By the time it went off the air, however, the show was a shadow of its former self. Its season-and-a-half, 49-episode run (can you imagine a modern genre show producing nearly 50 episodes in less than two years?) came to a close with “The Probe.” Directed by Felix Feist, who helmed the 1953 sci-fi B-movie classic Donovan’s Brain, the story concerned three men and a woman who survive a plane crash, only to find themselves aboard an automated alien laboratory.

The series had already been canceled, and writers and crewmembers were literally walking out the door as “The Probe” went into production. The episode reflected that with wooden acting, cheap-looking sets and effects, and an exposition-heavy plot, all sad aspects of the truncated second season that drag it dangerously close to Ed Wood levels of amateurishness. Even the episode’s monster, a microbe that grows to an alarming size, was a large, silvery blob of rubber pulled over a man who crawled around on the floor (the stuntman inside the costume, Janos Prohaska, pulled off a much more successful version of the same idea two years later as the Horta in the classic Star Trek episode “The Devil in the Dark”)….

(11) UNKNOWN INDY. ComicBook.com contends they can name “10 Indiana Jones Adventures You Didn’t Even Know About”. There are definitely some I hadn’t heard about before. Let’s start with –

Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead

Steve Perry’s 2009 novel Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead acts as a prequel to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and provides some backstory for Indy’s relationship with his friend George “Mac” McHale (Ray Winstone) in the movie. Taking place in 1943, Indy and Mac team up on an adventure to Haiti to find a mysterious voodoo artifact known as the Heart of Darkness. However, Indy and Mac must battle both Nazi and Japanese soldiers also pursuing the artifact.

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull provided an unexplored backstory of Indy’s military background when the United States officially entered World War II, revealing that he and Mac worked as double agents for the U.S. government during the war. Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead not only takes Indy on a gripping literary adventure but also fleshes out his relationship with Mac before the latter joins forces with Soviet military leader Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which makes the novel a great read for Indiana Jones fans.

(12) DEFENSE ADVICE FROM SF WRITERS. Reminiscent of Dr. Arlan Andrews’ Sigma Forum of the last decade, the Guardian takes note as “UK Ministry of Defence enlists sci-fi writers to prepare for dystopian futures”.

It’s a scenario that would make Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, shudder: a future where self-driving cars are the norm but a catastrophic electronic breakdown traps thousands of people inside them.

This dystopian vision of the future was one sketched out by science fiction writers at an event this week where experts were asked to prepare Britain for threats ranging from pandemics to cyber and nuclear attacks.

The writers joined researchers and policymakers working in crisis management and resilience at the gathering organised by RBOC (Resilience Beyond Observed Capabilities), a network of academics whose funders include the Ministry of Defence (MoD).’

Emma Newman, a sci-fi novelist who was at the event, said: “Taking a very character-based approach can help reveal aspects of future scenarios that you might not necessarily get from a more pulled-out approach.”…

(13) THE HEAT IS ON. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Hot stuff from the last edition of the Astronomical Journal of 2024. With dayside temperatures hot enough to sustain a magma ocean and a silicate atmosphere, lava planets are the best targets for studying the atmosphere of a rocky world. Some rocky exoplanets orbit so closely to their host star that the dayside temperature is high enough to melt rock!

Such planets are thought to have a magma ocean surface on their dayside, which is tidally locked to always face the star. Outgassing from the magma should produce an atmosphere on the dayside only, which freezes out on the nightside.

“Clouds in Partial Atmospheres of Lava Planets and Where to Find Them”, Nguyen et al have simulated cloud formation in the partial atmospheres of five previously observed lava planets. These simulations indicate that clouds of silicate vapour form on the dayside and they would cast shadows on the magma ocean, so cooling it slightly… Hal Clement’s Iceworld (1953) anyone?

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George takes us inside “Mufasa: The Lion King Pitch Meeting”.

(15) VIDEO OF AN EARLIER DAY. The Zombie Apache Trailer dropped in May 2024.

The story of ZOMBIE APACHE unfolds as a greedy real estate developer desecrates a sacred Viking burial ground, unleashing a comical nightmare upon the unsuspecting locals. This perfect blend of absurdity and horror, highlighted by the stellar performances of our lead actors, promises an unforgettable and wildly entertaining film. experience.”

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

Pixel Scroll 12/16/24 Baby Yoda Is Three

Posted on December 16, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) SOLVING FOR UNKNOWNS. Alec Nevala-Lee is editing a new bimonthly puzzle feature for Analog, called “Unknowns,” that will run original puzzles in every issue of the magazine. The inaugural installment features contributions from veteran puzzle constructors Scott Kim and Patrick Berry. Future issues will include crosswords, picture puzzles, math puzzles, and more. As Nevala-Lee writes in an editor’s note:

“If you’re a fan of Analog, there’s a good chance that you also like puzzles. At its best, hard science fiction—which often hinges on a clever idea that still plays by the rules of physics—appeals to the same part of the brain. With that in mind, we’re introducing a new feature, ‘Unknowns,’ that will offer a unique puzzle in every issue. (Our model is the puzzle column that the legendary Martin Gardner wrote for our sister magazine, Asimov’s Science Fiction, from 1977 through 1986.)”

(2) FATE OF THE SCIENCE FICTION BOOK CLUB? The Science Fiction Book Club (owned by Bookspan), has put up this notice:

“Tell me that 50 years of finding new SF every month is not coming to an end,” pleads Maria Markham Thompson, CPA, Treasurer of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society. “Some of my best months, back under Doubleday, were when I didn’t send a reply and a book I hadn’t ordered introduced a new author. This is a sad day in fandom. Please find out what has happened. What is happening?”

Unfortunately, File 770 isn’t been able to answer Maria’s question. Perhaps one of our readers knows more?

Thompson says, “I went on the site, where it’s business as usual to sign up new members, and read the agreement – my best guess is that my back credits will die, so all I can do is just get busy ordering books. Someone has found a way to joy out of even that activity!”

(3) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED? Episode 11 of Scott Edelman’s Why Not Say What Happened? podcast tackles “Stan Lee’s Problem with Iron Man’s Nose”.

Rummaging though a stack of mid-’70s memos has me remembering the time I attempted to convince Stan Lee to adapt Joseph Heller’s novel Something Happened, who was responsible for mutilating the contents of Marvel’s 1975 line of Giant-Size Annuals, how I repurposed a Winnie Winkle comic strip to resign from my staff job in the Bullpen, the day comic book fans ran a Baskin-Robbins out of ice cream, the meeting in which Stan Lee had a problem with Iron Man’s nose, Gerry Conway’s complaint to the Comics Code Authority about an Inhumans innuendo, and much more.

(4) IT’S A THEORY. CinemaBlend’s Dirk Libbey says, “I Just Found Out The Wild Reason Warner Bros. Reportedly Made That Anime Lord Of The Rings Film, And I Did Not See It Coming”.

It was a strange weekend at the box office considering that Moana 2 and Wicked continued to dominate theaters even though movies attached to major franchises like Spider-Man and Lord of the Rings debuted. Kraven The Hunter and The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, both bombed, which was not unexpected. For the former film, it reportedly spells the end of Sony’s Spider-Verse adjacent franchise. But it’s reportedly not a big deal for the anime-inspired Lord of the Rings movie.

You’d be forgiven for not even realizing that this past weekend saw an animated Lord of the Rings film release, set two centuries before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic. The movie wasn’t broadly promoted, and it only cost $30 million to make, a drop in the bucket when your average Disney or Pixar endeavor costs around $200 million. It’s claimed even the studio is only hoping the movie might break even. It feels like Warner Bros. didn’t care if anybody saw this movie, and actually, that may be the case….

…Peter Jackson is working on a pair of new live-action movies, with Andy Serkis set to star in and direct Lord of the Rings: The Hunt For Gollum. However, most deals between IP holders and studios have time limits and require that the IP be used regularly, or the rights revert to the original owner.

It’s been a decade since The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies opened in theaters and the new Gollum movie is at least two years away, likely more. While we don’t know exactly what the rights deal with WB is, it’s certainly possible that the time limit is close. Without a plan for more movies back when the anime movie was given the green light, one could see how a studio might spend a few million to get something out to have the opportunity to make millions, or billions, on something better later….

(5) STRIPES. “29 Years Later, Star Trek Just Fixed Its Most Insulting Oversight” huffs Inverse.

Throughout the entire seven-season run of Star Trek: Voyager, Ensign Harry Kim remained at the same rank. Yes in the alternate future of Endgame, Harry Kim was a captain, but that moment of ranking up is the exception that proves the rule; though he was a brave and innovative officer, Janeway (and the Voyager writers) never thought to give Kim a promotion beyond the basest of Star Trek ranks. And if Kim was given more overt authority on the show, it would sometimes be thanks to an alternate timeline.

And now, as Star Trek crosses the multiverse in the penultimate episode of Lower Decks with a slew of legacy character cameos, the most prominent returning character is none other than Harry Kim. And this time, one version of him is a full lieutenant.

“It is a bit of an apology,” Garrett Wang tells Inverse. “It’s a long time coming!”…

… In Lower Decks’ “Fissure Quest,” we quickly learn that Boimler’s covert multiverse ship, the Anaximander, is staffed by mostly alternate versions of Harry Kim, which they all refer to as “the Kim crew.” But when one Harry Kim arrives who has been promoted to lieutenant, the other Kims are totally freaked out. This leads to the basic conflict of the episode: The Harry Kim who has been promoted is suddenly mad with power, to the point where he nearly destroys everything. For Wang, this was a chance to do something that he almost never got to do on Voyager — go big with a certain kind of performance.

“In the beginning, we were told that as all the human characters, you need to stay as military, as two dimensional,” Wang says of the early days of Voyager. “The idea was that if we had flat line delivery, it would make the alien characters look more realistic. But in reality, when you’re that flat and that monotone, it just looks like you’re a bad actor! So, it’s nice to do something like Lower Decks where I felt free.”…

(6) HEROES WITH FEET OF CLAY. In “From hacked ‘smart gnomes’ to the revenge of Feathers McGraw: inside Wallace & Gromit’s joyous return”, the Guardian’s Tim Jonze chronicles his visit to Aardman’s studios.

…Aardman’s studios are a hive of productivity – down every corridor are little rooms in which people tinker away on replica canal boats or fiddle with tiny clay arms. I have to promise to be on my best behaviour. Apparently on one previous set visit a French journalist picked up a figure in a live scene meaning the whole thing had to be shot again from the start. “That was very upsetting,” says my guide.

… I’m whisked off to the art department, where “everything you see on screen that’s not puppets” is made. For Vengeance Most Fowl that means a scenic waterway designed for a high speed canal chase and an impressively ramshackle submarine made out of stolen garden items: bath planters, rakes, drain pipes for periscopes and so on. Part of the challenge is not to make anything too snazzy. “It shouldn’t distract from the characters,” says Matt Perry, the film’s production designer. When they first made the submarine it looked a little too fabulous for something supposedly compiled from garden detritus. So one member of the team got to work smacking dents into it, which alarmed passing visitors. “Weathering is also important,” adds Perry. “The police station’s desk has to have the right amount of rust for a desk of that era.”

As with all Wallace & Gromit films, eagle-eyed viewers are rewarded with all kinds of smart references. The submarine is a nod to Nautilus, Captain Nemo’s vehicle in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Seas. Elsewhere, lead graphic artist Gavin Lines entertains himself with all sorts of gags that might only flash on the screen for a second or two (Gromit’s record collection this time around contains Walkies on the Wildside). These days he follows strict rules – it has to be family friendly and it has to be legal. “I did get into trouble before,” he admits. Whereas Smeg have apparently always seen the funny side of their fridges being rebranded as Smug, Bosch were less than happy about Gromit using a “Botch” tool in Curse of the Were-Rabbit. “We weren’t allowed to use it on any promotional material,” says a chastened Lines…

(7) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born December 16, 1928 – Philip K. Dick. (Died 1982.)

By Paul Weimer: If any SF writers could have been said to have predicted our moment here in the 21st century, in all of its absurdity and weirdness, I’d pick two. The first would be John Brunner, whose novels like Stand on Zanzibar seem to all too well describe the madness of the second decade of the 21st century.

The other author is Philip K. Dick. Not the Philip K. Dick of The Man in the High Castle, the first PKD I read (because, well, alternate history). That might be his most accessible, his best work. It’s the one where he has his full powers, the energy and vibrance of his early novels, and not yet the spiraling into his ultimately tragic end.

But it is those later novels, and some of the earlier ones, that describe the worlds as it is today. A word of old technology and new, of people who you never thought in a rational world could or would occupy the White House, a world where technology seemingly has a half-mind of its own. Can anyone deny that Chat GPT or Generative AI feel like some of the strange and out of control technologies from Dick’s work? Or the creepiness of the panopticon that our modern world is as reflected in A Scanner Darkly?

This makes Dick’s work sometimes not comfortable, especially the later novels, where he becomes less and less coherent. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is at best disorienting and at worst, incomprehensible even to a deep reader of his work. There was a period where I was reading a PKD novel or story every month for over a year…and I still don’t “get” the Exegesis. Maybe it’s a metaphor for our modern world after all–confused, strange, contradictory and ultimately incomprehensible.

His early short novels and stories show is endless invention. If there is anyone who embodies the idea of a pulp SF writer, it was 1950’s era Philip K Dick. It was a time and place where an idea could get you 90% of the way to a sale…and Dick achieved that again and again and again with his mutants, psionics, aliens, time travel stories, and so much more. He did try to become a mimetic fiction writer, and I read the posthumously published Puttering About in a Small Land. It feels like a SF novelist trying to “go straight” and being frustrated by the effort.

So it seems that he may have lost his true power…somewhere in the early 1970’s. He was not the writer that he was. It is notable that Roger Zelazny co-wrote a novel with Dick, partly to help him out, called Deus Irae. That one does not entirely work as a story, but it is a novel with a fascinating end thesis, that may rather disturb readers if you think about it, and its relation to modern religions, too hard.

But I hate to leave out this note, so I will tell you about my favorite Dick work. It’s not Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, as brilliant as Blade Runner is (Blade Runner deserves a whole piece on its own, quite frankly but a few words here. The novel is not the movie. The movie is not the novel. The movie may be better than the novel in some ways (since we are dealing with late Dick here, this not surprising).

My favorite PKD would “Faith of Our Fathers”. It’s a world where communism won, but our protagonist, moving slowly toward the center of power, finds out there is something very strange and very odd about the ruling party. The revelation of just what is going on, and the ending of the story is strange, weird…and entirely everything that you want in a Philip K. Dick story. It’s perfect, perhaps even more so than The Man in the High Castle. And I think, in general, shorter PKD works are better than his novels.

Philip K. Dick. Photo by Anne Dick from his official website.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Carpe Diem asks the dino question everyone is thinking.
Eek! needs some good excuses.
Loose Parts is on the lookout.
Macanudo refuses to be reassured.
Off the Mark’s Christmas tree lacks nothing.
Red and Rover know the season’s classic tunes.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal knows every weakness hides a strength.

(10) THE SKY IS NOT THE LIMIT. Charlie Jane Anders’ “A Basket Full of Mini Rants!” at Happy Dancing includes this praise for cheap-looking productions.

It’s time for low-budget, DIY movies and TV

I just watched the first episode of a TV show called Davey and Jonesie’s Locker on Hulu, which I’ve been meaning to check out for ages. It’s an extremely silly comedy about female friendship and having an interdimensional portal in your high-school locker. It seriously looks like it was made for a tiny fraction of what an episode of House of the Dragon costs.

Lately, I just really crave TV and movies that look cheap. Bonus points if they’re silly and kind of outrageous. On the TV side, I’ve talked a lot about my love of Extraordinary and the Brazilian show Back to 15, and there are a handful of other low budget, goofy TV shows that I’ve loved lately. On the movie side, my two favorite films of the year are Hundreds of Beavers and The People’s Joker: they don’t have much in common, other than looking like they were made with sofa-cushion money and being completely off-the-chain. They both use virtual backgrounds that look amateurish as heck, and feature physical comedy in a surreal void.

Why do I love DIY-looking TV and movies? Part of it is just a reaction to the fact that most Hollywood entertainment these days looks ridiculously expensive and lavish, which a lot of people are starting to get tired of. With high budgets often comes a certain blandness. But also, this defiantly indie/cheap aesthetic feels subversive in this age of corporate domination: it’s the equivalent of those direct-to-VHS movies that I obsessively watched as a youngster. I predict that the next few years will see a flowering of micro-budget, maximally-ambitious, utterly ridiculous entertainment. And I am here for it.

(11) UP ALL NIGHT. The Guardian shares “Galaxies, auroras and a cosmic bat: Southern Sky astrophotography exhibition 2024 – in pictures”. Photo gallery at the link.

The Southern Sky Astrophotography 2024 exhibition displays the top entries from the 20th David Malin awards for Australian astronomers and photographers. The images are on display at the Sydney observatory until 1 February.

(12) CAPTAIN AMERICA IN BRITISH TRANSLATION? Marvel has dropped a trailer for Captain America: Brave New World. According to Gizmodo, the US and UK trailers differ slightly. Below is the UK version.

For whatever reason, Marvel UK has a longer, trailer-length version of the Brave New World video. We’ll got it here for you, and its key difference is a brief look at Sidewinder attacking Sam and no stinger teasing Joaquin becoming the Falcon, like in the shorter US version.

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

Pixel Scroll 12/1/24 Sitting On A Park Bench, Eyeing Pixel Scrolls With Bad Intent

Posted on December 1, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) THE LIFETIMES OF MOANA. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The OG Moana is going strong even as Moana 2 is setting box office records. “It’s Disney’s Biggest Surprise Hit—8 Years After Its Release” – in the Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall.) “We’ve now watched Moana for more than 1 billion hours. How did it become the No. 1 movie in streaming history?”

…“Moana” was released in 2016, but it’s much bigger on streaming than it ever was in theaters. It has been viewed for a total of more than 1 billion hours, according to Nielsen, which amounts to one person sitting through the movie 775 million times. Or watching “Moana” for 150,000 years straight.

And it’s somehow still getting bigger. It was one of the most-watched movies in 2020, 2021 and 2022 for U.S. audiences. Then we managed to watch more of “Moana” on Disney+ in 2023. It was both the No. 1 movie in all of streaming last year and the No. 1 movie over the past five years combined.

But it’s not just the biggest hit of Hollywood’s streaming age. It also happens to be the biggest surprise….

…Set in ancient Polynesia, “Moana” is the story of a brave teenage girl chosen by the ocean to save her island from a terrible blight. The daughter of the village chief, Moana hops on her boat and sets off on a voyage into the great unknown—the line where the sky meets the sea.

It was directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, who have decades of experience making some of Hollywood’s most successful movies, like Disney animated classics “The Little Mermaid” and “Aladdin.” Even they were stunned by the streaming success of their latest movie.

“I was like, ‘Whaaaaaaaat?’ ” [director John] Musker said. “I never would have guessed that.”

Nobody would have. This was a movie that finished 12th at the global box office in the year it came out, behind other animated movies like “Finding Dory,” “Zootopia” and “The Secret Life of Pets.” On the list of highest-grossing animated movies of all time, “Moana” is lower than “Kung Fu Panda 2” and “Big Hero 6.” It still won its opening weekend and made about $645 million worldwide, but “Frozen” and “Frozen 2” both made twice as much money….

… “The music can help keep the movie alive,” Musker said. “If it doesn’t have music, it’s harder to burn itself into your synapses.”

Especially when that music is a collection of bangers like the “Moana” soundtrack.

I f you have children under the age of 10, you’ve almost certainly heard “How Far I’ll Go,” “You’re Welcome” and the David Bowie-esque “Shiny.” Those earworms came from the mind of Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of “Hamilton,” who also wrote the catchy songs for “Encanto”—the No. 2 streaming movie in recent years behind “Moana.” (Miranda was not involved with “Moana 2,” which features music by the up-and-coming, Grammy-winning team of Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear.)…

(2) COUGHITO UPPO. “’Harry Potter’ star Rupert Grint faces $2.3 million tax bill” reports AP News.

Former “Harry Potter” film actor Rupert Grint faces a 1.8 million-pound ($2.3 million) bill after he lost a legal battle with the tax authorities.

Grint, who played Ron Weasley in the magical film franchise, was ordered to pay the money in 2019 after H.M. Revenue and Customs, the U.K. tax agency, investigated his tax return from seven years earlier.

The agency said Grint had wrongly classed 4.5 million pounds in residuals from the movies — money from DVD sales, TV syndication, streaming rights and other sources — as a capital asset rather than income, which is subject to a much higher tax rate.

Lawyers for Grint appealed, but after years of wrangling a tribunal judge ruled against the actor this week. Judge Harriet Morgan said the money “derived substantially the whole of its value from the activities of Mr. Grint” and “is taxable as income.”…

What would be an absurd claim under U.S. tax law dragged on in British courts for years before being ruled unallowable there, too. Of course, by now he’s had the use of the money for five or six years, and sometimes that deferral by itself amounts to a win for the taxpayer.

(3) A LAND BEHIND THE OVERCOATS. I guess there wasn’t any room left to dump on Narnia in the comments section here, so Alan Moore took his gripe to The Irish Times: “’The Chronicles of Narnia’ faces flak from legendary author”.

Alan Moore is the author of many hit books, including Watchmen, The Batman: The Killing Joke, V for Vendetta, etc. However, in his new novel, he takes aim at The Chronicles of Narnia.

During an interview with The Irish Times, the noted writer explains his fury toward the hit fable story while discussing his The Great When: A Long London Novel, which was how the characters adapted to the surroundings of the fantasy world they would end up in.

“I wanted the sections set in The Great When to feel as disorienting as it would do if you were suddenly in another world. One of the things I’m really tired of in current fantasy is how the kids go through the back of the wardrobe in Narnia and it’s not really a big deal,” the 71-year-old adds.

He continues, “People go into these worlds as if it was visiting Milton Keynes. No! You’d be booking yourself into psychiatric care! You’d have a complete mental breakdown!

(4) PKD VS. COLONIZERS. From an essay by Jonathan Lethem based on his talk at the Philip K. Dick Festival in Fort Morgan, Colorado, on June 15: “’Multiple Worlds Vying to Exist’: Philip K. Dick and Palestine” in The Paris Review.

…Dick’s use of the name New Israel in Martian Time-Slip is pretty stock. Dick traveled beyond North America only once, to a conference in Metz, France, where he delivered a legendary speech titled “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others”—baffling his French fans by opening an early window into the mystical, visionary search that would preoccupy him for the remainder of his life. Then he went home to Orange County, California. His impression of Israel may essentially be derived from Leon Uris’s Exodus, or from some other heroic fifties representation; he principally employs the Israelis in Martian Time-Slip as an anonymous and implacable counterpoint to the abject ineptitude of the U.S. colonists—to highlight the haplessness of their attempts to farm and irrigate the harsh Martian desertscape. As in the excerpt above, the Israelis present a mirror for shame. This matches, of course, a typical midcentury U.S. liberal’s reaction formation, after the discovery of the German and Polish death camps: the Jew as shame trigger, with the survivors idealized for their resilience and strength….

… Those stories of colonization that uncover political implications that might matter in thinking about Palestine are, of course, those in which an indigenous population exists before the arrival of Dick’s settler population. The most disturbingly relevant, by far, is Martian Time-Slip. This isn’t because of the presence of the Israeli settlement, though that does feel like a tell—a stray signifier that also functions as a kind of neon arrow directing us to pull off the road and pay attention. It’s because in this novel, the indigenous Martian population—they’re called Bleekmen—aren’t even aliens. They’re nomadic foragers capable of interactions with the settlers on a variety of human-to-human levels: linguistic, professional, and sexual. They are specifically defined as human; they arrived and naturalized to Mars at some unspecified earlier time. However, their marked cultural differences, and their deep acclimation to the conditions of Mars, allow the Earth settlers a margin for apartheid exclusion based on a muddling of the notion of the “alien” and the “human”—or, to be more precise, these qualities allow the settlers to affirm a population’s humanity while systematically violating their human rights….

(5) THE QUEEN. [By Steve Green.] British-Nigerian author Nuzo Onoh, who last year received a Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement, was profiled on the BBC World Service programme Outlook. You can listen to it here: “The rebel who became ‘Queen of African Horror’”.

British-Nigerian author Nuzo Onoh wasn’t good at school; she rebelled against her parents and was beaten often as a child. Her home in south-eastern Nigeria was believed to be haunted and during the civil war, she and her siblings were regaled with ghost stories to distract them from the violence. She toed the line as an adult, becoming a lawyer like her father, but when he died Nuzo’s passion for writing took hold. Stories inspired by Igbo rituals and the spooky happenings of her childhood began to flow vividly from her pen. But when Nuzo tried to sell her tales, she discovered no one had written anything quite like her. She was determined to carve a space for African horror writing, and went on to win the industry’s most prestigious award. Her new book is called Where the Dead Brides Gather.

Frenchman Joseph Redon also has a burning passion, in a very different niche. His love of Japanese video games led him to leave his native France for Tokyo, where he’s built one of the biggest collections of retro Japanese video games in the world. Outlook’s Emily Webb visited him at his home in Tokyo’s suburbs. This interview was first broadcast in 2016.

(6) TRENT ZELAZNY (1976-2024). Author Trent Zelazny, youngest son of Roger Zelazny, died November 28. His sister, Shannon, told Facebook readers he died of acute liver failure, at a time when he was already recovering from the effects of a stroke:

This past September, he had a cerebellar stroke which took away his ability to walk. Fortunately, his personality and memory remained intact, and he could still speak and eat. He was still “my brother” and was making remarkable progress learning how to walk again.

Unfortunately, he was struck down again with the separate condition of acute liver failure. He went to the hospital last night, and tonight, when he should’ve been blowing out the candles on his birthday cake, he made his way out of this world.

Trent Zelazny published his first short stories in 1999, “Hope Is an Inanimate Desire” and “Harold Asher and His Vomiting Dogs”. His work includes To Sleep Gently, Fractal Despondency, Destination Unknown, Butterfly Potion, Too Late to Call Texas, People Person, and Voiceless. His short story “The House of Happy Mayhem” received an honorable mention in Best Horror of the Year 2009, edited by Ellen Datlow. In 2009, his short stories were collected in The Day the Leash Gave Way and Other Stories.

In February 2012 Zelazny wrote his first short play, Not Any Little Girl, which premiered in Santa Fe, New Mexico in late April 2012. It later became an Australian bestseller.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary: December 1, 2003 — Lord of the Rings: Return of the King film (premiered in NZ today)

By Paul Weimer: By the time the Return of the King premiered in December 2003 I was no longer living in California, and so did not have access to the Imax screen where I had seen The Two Towers, much to the envy of my friend Scott. But, since I was now living in Minnesota, Scott, his wife and I went to see it together on opening weekend in the U.S (the weekend before Christmas). As an even bigger Tolkien fan than I, it was a moral imperative. But it premiered on December 1, 2003 in New Zealand.

You know the story (although with the extended editions, just what is in The Return of the King the original can be a bit fuzzy). But it is the last (sorry, Hobbit) of the three great Middle Earth movies, and I (as well as Scott) were eager to see how our favorite scenes from the books were to play out. We were not disappointed. From the fight against the Witch-King, to Shelob, to the gorgeous Byzantine look to Minas Tirith, we were entranced. Sure, we had seen Fellowship, and Two Towers (Scott’s favorite, with the March of the Ents a particularly happy sequence for him). Return of the King looks the best of the three, showing the full evolution of Jackson’s craft and the actors completely and finally in their roles.

Don’t get me wrong, Tolkien addict as he was, afterward, Scott had some nitpicks, much of which I agreed with. The way Gollum “frames” Sam is an unnecessary addition to the book that adds drama in a place that it doesn’t need it. The five seconds of Faramir meeting Eowyn in the Houses of Healing was disappointingly short. Although we saw it in the Mirror of Galadriel, the lack of a real Scouring of the Shire disappointed us. (Remember, Saruman’s death doesn’t actually happen in the original movie — Scott was convinced Saruman was going to come back by the end).

And the movie is a bit long, and suffers from the “false ending” bit over and over. It plays that hand way too much for its own good, with similar music every single time. But that is a lot of nitpicking over a fantastic end to a fantastic trio of films. In our lifetimes, Scott and I got to see a cinematic masterpiece of a trilogy of films based on Lord of the Rings completed in Return of the King. How could we not be deliriously happy with that? I am sure, someday, someone will take another crack at the Lord of the Rings and try to film them. I’d like to see them try to reach the heights of Return of the King and the first two films. Someday.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born December 1, 1942 — John Crowley, 82.

By Paul Weimer: John Crowley is an author I had heard about for a couple of decades before finally sitting down with his work. I had heard great things about his work, and how he was an underrated master of fantasy. I had gotten a very big picture of my head of a giant of literature that had not gotten the reading or accolades he had deserved.

There was a period where I took the reading lists and ideas of Harold Bloom seriously and with forethought. I since have seen the weaknesses of his work and viewpoint (and it turns out he was very much a broken step in his treatment of women and his female colleagues). But once upon a time, I was very interested in what he thought was in the Western Canon (again this is when I thought a Western Canon was an important singular monolithic thing– I got better, honest). I admired him, because he was such a prolific and wideranging reader, like I am. Anyway, I tell you all this because he once wrote that Little, Big was one of the top five novels by a contemporary author in print. So I had heard of Crowley and Little, Big, as noted above, but Bloom’s comment was the final push I needed. I went and got myself a copy of Little Big, and devoured the large tome in a few short days going to College on the subway.

From there I branched out to Aegypt, and Great Work of Time (one of the oddest and gentlest time travel/timeline novels I’ve ever read–and it more than a little reminds me of Asimov’s End of Eternity–the society that depends on time travel coming into being uses someone to try and ensure that timeline does-but it all goes so very wrong. The novel is also a good indictment of British colonialism and imperialism. But I’ve got to love me a timeline novel with paradoxes and time loops gone askew.

But back to Little, Big. It really is, even after all of the other work I’ve read, the one that still moves me, the one that I can quote from, the one that feels the most mythic and resonant. Faeries, trying to fight against the dying of the light, a King Arthur-like figure in Frederick the Great… It’s one of the books of my heart. Really, it is true that the deeper you go, the bigger it gets. It’s not a happy book in many ways, there is an elegiac sadness to it that reminds me of recent birthday celebrant Poul Anderson’s fantasy. But it is moving and memorable for it.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Alley Oop avoids euphemism. But does not eschew surplusage.
Animal Crackers makes another argument in favor of reading.
The Argyle Sweater knows all the superheroes’ weaknesses.
Rubes gets interrupted.
A Tom Gauld doubleheader:

The John Le Carré Advent Calendar – My cartoon for this week’s @theguardian.com Books. (with apologies to @realjohnlecarre.bsky.social and @harkaway.bsky.social)
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2024-11-30T10:10:31.545Z

My latest cartoon for @newscientist.bsky.social
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2024-12-01T11:05:55.435Z

(10) SFF/H AUTHOR TRADING CARDS. A second series of McSweeney’s Author Cards is available from The McSweeney’s Store.

Now up to the plate! Series two of the author trading cards you’ve always imagined were possible but never dared to dream.

You’ve seen athletes get the trading card treatment for years. Maybe you’re still hanging on to your dad’s dog-eared Mickey Mantle rookie card and have been wondering, “When will my favorite Afrofuturist, Octavia Butler, get her own trading card?” or “Do they make these cards for writers like Lauren Groff, Donald Barthelme, or Amy Tan?” The wait is over, friends. McSweeney’s has begun publishing tradeable, collectible author cards. Each pack includes fifteen cards printed on high-quality paper, each featuring bios, trivia, little-known publishing stats, original illustrated portraits, and huge fun. (No chewing gum included.)

[Click for larger image.]

(11) BOOKS TO READ BEFORE THE BOMBS FALL. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid over at Media Death Cult just loves the end of the world. This month he has a few book recommendations for us before the bombs fall. Some familiar reads are in the mix…

(12) ‘TIS THE SEASON TO WATCH. JustWatch, the world’s largest streaming guide, has used its internal data to determine the most loved holiday movies, and where you can stream them in the United States. They also determined the catalog size of the top streaming providers to see which has the most holiday themed titles.

Top 10 Most Streamed Holiday Movies: The most popular Holiday movie between 2023 and 2024 is Elf, followed by The Grinch, and Love Actually.

Catalog Size: Amazon Prime Video has the largest catalog of Christmas movies, with almost 40% of the total 631 available titles from streaming providers. Peacock has the second most Holiday titles, with 31%.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] While this Pitch Meeting is for a Netflix movie that I’d never heard of, I now feel that I know absolutely everything I will ever need to know about it. And more.

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

Pixel Scroll 11/17/24 Pixelbot Murderscrolls

Posted on November 17, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) DON’T FALL FOR IT. Writer Beware’s Victoria Strauss sends out a warning: “Dogging the Watchdog Redux: Someone Else is Impersonating Writer Beware”.

…A bit over a year ago, a scammer (I never was able to determine which one, but it’s highly likely it was someone on this list) sent out a large number of emails under my name, using a fake address (writerbewaree@gmail.com), offering to provide “guidance” to authors to protect them against scams and help them “connect with well-known traditional publishing houses”.

The aim, it turned out, wasn’t to rip anyone off, but to troll me. Since trolling isn’t any fun unless the trollee knows about it, the scammer also sent the emails directly to me (twice), with the subject line “Writer Beware, the Watchdog and Dog Victoria Strauss” (hence the title of my post about the episode, which also used the graphic above). Maybe because I didn’t respond, or maybe because I mocked them publicly, the troller never dogged me again and I never got any other reports of those particular fake Writer Beware emails.

Unfortunately, there’s now another Writer Beware/Victoria Strauss impersonation attempt. And this one seems designed not just to troll, but to defraud….

Strauss goes into detail about how this fraudster operates. The victim took things at face value, only suspecting they’d been deceived after forwarding the first thousand dollars requested. Then came another request for money.

…In this case, the writer avoided being fully poached. They simply didn’t have the extra cash, and told Fake Victoria so. That was the last they heard from her. Since they didn’t contact me about the scam until nearly two months later, I’m guessing that they held out hope for a while that Fake Victoria would deliver, but eventually became suspicious enough of her silence to google Writer Beware. At which point they realized they’d been hoodwinked….

Strauss has a hypothesis about the scammer’s identity, which you can read at the link. She concludes:

…Why wouldn’t a scammer decide to use my/Writer Beware’s good reputation to steal money from unsuspecting authors and give me the middle finger while they’re at it? Honestly I’m only surprised it hasn’t happened more often….

(2) PKD VS. HEGEMONY. [Item by Steven French.] In this provocative essay in The Paris Review, Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel, among others, discusses Philip K Dick, especially the latter’s Martian Time-Slip and its portrayal of the Bleekmen, current attitudes towards Palestinian people and the importance of considering alternative modes of existence: “’Multiple Worlds Vying to Exist’: Philip K. Dick and Palestine”.

…When Dick became my chosen writer, at age fourteen, in 1978, with Martian Time-Slip, one of my two or three favorites among his novels, the presence of the Israeli settlement on Mars didn’t resound in any particular way. My initial responsiveness to Dick’s work was to delight in his mordant surrealist onslaught against the drab prison of consensual reality—he was punk rock to me. It took me a while to grasp how Dick’s novels, those of the early sixties especially, function as a superb lens for critiquing the collective psychological binds of the postwar embrace of consumer capitalism. Yet to say that he seems to devise his critiques semiconsciously, by intuition, is an understatement. Dick thought he was bashing out pulp entertainment, and he sometimes despised himself for doing it. At other times—and Martian Time-Slip was one of those times—he injected his efforts with the aspiration to raise his output to the condition of literature, employing all the thwarted ambition of a young novelist with nine or ten literary novels (or, as an SF writer would put it, “mainstream” novels) in his trunk, which his agent had been unable to place with New York publishers.

Dick had an extrasensory power, however; he was a freaked-out supertaster of repressive and coercive elements lurking inside the seductive and banal surfaces of Cold War U.S. culture and politics. This meant that science fiction opened up his particular capacity for fusing ordinary experience—the emotional and ontological crises of his human characters—to the implications of the hegemonic power of the U.S., which coalesced in the period in which Dick wrote, and which defines our present century. Reality’s surface shimmers open beneath Dick’s gaze. It’s this that led Fredric Jameson to compare him to Shakespeare. This wouldn’t have happened had he stuck to the earnest social realism of his unpublished novels….

(3) ARTIST SAYS ONE THING, DISNEY SAYS ANOTHER. “Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur Episode Allegedly Scrubbed Over Trans Storyline” – Gizmodo has the details.

One of the remaining episodes of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur set to release in 2025 will now allegedly no longer make it to air, according to since-deleted comments on social media from crew who worked on the Marvel and Disney animated series, claiming concerns over the developing political climate in the U.S. in the wake of the 2024 presidential election.

The remaining episodes of Moon Girl‘s second and final season were set to air on the Disney Channel sometime in 2025, but now at least one episode produced for the Marvel series—adapting the titular young comics heroine, aka Luna Lafayette, and her adventures alongside the giant T-Rex-esque creature Devil Dinosaur—may not make it to air, supposedly due to revolving around a plotline involving the topic of trans kids involved in school sports.

“One of the projects (episode) I worked on is getting shelved because of which party that won the recent election,” Derrick Malik Johnson, a storyboard artist who worked on Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur said in a recent, since-deleted post on the social media platform Bluesky. “It breaks my heart knowing this impactful and amazing [episode] is now about to be consider a lost media episode.”

In a thread on the Moon Girl subreddit about Johnson’s post, someone claiming to have worked on the series alleged that the episode revolved around the character Brooklyn, a teen volleyball player who attends Luna’s school in the series. “If you put attention [sic] to details about the character, you can figure out about what theme [the episode was based on] and why it was canned,” the user wrote in a now-deleted comment thread.

io9 was not able to independently verify the veracity of the above posts on Bluesky and Reddit, but when reached out for comment, a Disney source familiar with the matter confirmed that while the episode had been pulled from release, the decision was made over a year ago, and unrelated to concerns over the current political climate.

The source further described the reason for the episode’s cancelation–specific to the episode itself, rather than Brooklyn as a character, who has appeared elsewhere in Moon Girl–as part of a regular review process the company makes with all of its kids content, with the intent to ensure material doesn’t potentially push ahead discussions around social issues before families can have them themselves….

(4) BRIAN ASMAN Q&A. The most recent episode of David Agranoff’s podcast Postcards from a Dying World is an “Interview with Brian Asman”.

On this episode I welcome Brian Asman author of Man, Fuck That House and his debut novel Good Dogs. It is hard for me to think of this as being the first novel for Brian Asman. I suppose you could say this is the first proper novel, published with an established publisher, but Asman has been publishing for a few years, but those have been novellas published in a DIY punk style have even produced a viral book release. I mean with a title like “Man, Fuck this House.” Asman already has a signature release. The novellas range from funny to weird and the last Our Black Hearts Beat as One could be argued is a short novel, or would have been considered a novel in the past.

We talk about Brian’s career path and Good Dogs without spoilers for about 40 minutes before a spoiler Warning and then we go under the hood.

(5) IMPERIALISTS IN MARTIAN DISGUISE. [Item by Steven French.] Richard Flanagan’s book Question 7 is up for both fiction and non-fiction awards and tracks the chain of events leading from Rebecca West kissing HG Wells to Hiroshima; here he recalls the first time he read War of the Worlds: “Richard Flanagan: ‘I’m not sure that I will write again’” in the Guardian.

Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds is pivotal to the narrative. Do you remember the first time you read it?

I thought I knew the story – yet when I first read it, perhaps 20 years ago, I was staggered to learn in Wells’s introduction that it was inspired by the extermination of Aboriginal Tasmanians. It isn’t a hokey Edwardian set piece. It’s an indictment of English imperialism.

If you read to the end you can also mourn for Flanagan’s hilarious parrot, Herb.

(6) FLAME ON. The New York Times tells about “One City’s Secret to Happiness: The Annual Burning of a 50-Foot Effigy”. “Every year, Santa Fe incinerates a giant puppet of Zozobra — a ritual meant to purge anxiety and promote a reset.” (Behind a paywall.)

For most of the millions of travelers who make the trek each year, there is no reason to go to Santa Fe except to go to Santa Fe. Just about everything that needs doing can and should be done somewhere else, someplace easier to get to than this tiny city 7,000 feet in the air, whose airport terminal is a fraction of the size of a typical American grocery store. But this town of 90,000 residents strives to ensure that its singularity is reason enough.

Which makes it remarkable that Santa Fe’s most distinctive motif is left inscrutable to outsiders. A towering ghoul points down from a mural on one of the city’s busiest streets with no context. At a local confectionery, a scowling white figure in a cummerbund is rendered in chocolate — why? Even if you clock that the big-eared goblin tattooed on the biceps of a local electrician is the same creature depicted (being consumed by flames) on the cab of a municipal fire truck, you will encounter nowhere an explanation of who or what this monster is — unless you happen to be in Santa Fe on the one evening a year when locals construct a building-size version of this thing and set it on fire.

The explanation is a touch nonsensical: This is Zozobra, a beast who lives in the mountains nearby. The people of Santa Fe invite him into town every year on the pretext of a party in his honor. He arrives at the party dressed in formal attire, thrusts the town into darkness and takes away “the hopes and dreams of Santa Fe’s children,” whom he also kidnaps. The townspeople try and fail to subdue him with torches. But then the Fire Spirit, summoned by an atmosphere of cooperation among the town’s citizens, appears and, flying high off the good vibes, battles Zozobra until he is consumed by fire.

If you are fortunate enough to be around on the exactly right night in late summer — the Friday before Labor Day — you may find yourself surrounded by, and even join in with, the screaming citizens of Santa Fe as they string up this enormous, writhing pale-faced humanoid on a pole on a hill overlooking their homes and burn him while he moans until dead.

“Burn him!” demand the children onstage. “BUUUURN HIIIIIM!” roar the adults from the crowd, a portion of whom are inebriated. Unseen, a local judge howls into a microphone, providing the voice of a gargantuan puppet being cooked alive. It is possible that, one century ago, the forebears of the current population discovered the violent secret to happiness in their high, dry town — and that it is annual, ritualized killing by flames. Just in case that’s right — in fact, proceeding on an assumption that it is — the local citizenry have recommitted the monstrous puppet’s murder every year for 100 years straight, so far. The aim is to incinerate their gloom….

… The monster is still stuffed with slips of paper bearing woes (“glooms” in event parlance). But these days there are virtually no limits to what the public may cram inside Zozobra’s body and set aflame: wedding albums; medical bills; report cards; loved ones’ ashes; parking tickets; pictures of Osama bin Laden (popular in 2002); a pristine guitar; many varieties of gown (wedding; hospital; according to local lore, a few belonging to Marilyn Monroe that an acquaintance was adamant would never go to auction); etc. The show still follows its original script….

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary, Justice League animated series (2001)

Twenty-three years ago on this evening, the Justice League animated series premiered on the Cartoon Network. It was the seventh series of the DC Animated Universe. The series ended after just two seasons, but was followed by the Justice League Unlimited, another series which aired for an additional three seasons. There really wasn’t any meaningful difference between the two series save a larger number of characters. Really there wasn’t.

It’s largely based off the Justice League created by editor Sheldon Mayer and writer Gardner Fox in the Sixties.

It has a stellar primary voice cast of George Newbern as Superman / Clark Kent, Kevin Conroy as Batman / Bruce Wayne, Michael Rosenbaum as The Flash / Wally West, Phil LaMarr as Green Lantern / John Stewart, Susan Eisenberg as Maria Canals-Barrera as Hawkgirl / Shayera Hol, Carl Lumbly as Martian Manhunter / John Jones and Susan Eisenberg as Wonder Woman / Princess Diana.

In a neat piece of later casting, Lumbly will be J’onn J’onnz’s father M’yrnn in the Arrowverse and on Supergirl. That changes the story as it was here, where John J’onnz was the very last Martian. No. I am not dealing with every fluid story in the comics. I am not.

It lasted for fifty-two episodes and featured scripts from such writers as John Ridley, Dwayne McDuffie, Pail Dini, Butch Lukic and Ernie Altbacker.

One of my favorite episodes, “Chaos at the Earth’s Core”, was written by Matt Wayne, a DCU writer of the time, with the world of Skytaris and its inhabitants are all taken from Mike Greil’s Warlord comics from the Seventies. Yes, he’s properly acknowledged as the source.

It received universal acclaim and IGN lists it among the best animated series ever done with its successor series being second. Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a near perfect ninety-nine percent rating.

Streaming on Amazon Prime.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal gets around the grawlix.
Thatababy chose the option package.
The Argyle Sweater can mash ‘em, boil ‘em, or stick ‘em in an Egyptian history book.
Cul de Sac provides negative inspiration.
Wumo shows an editor at work.
Tom Gauld shows what it means to work cheaper.

https://twitter.com/tomgauld/status/1858108931849240820

(9) EISNER ART ON THE BLOCK. Heritage Auctions will hold “The Art of Will Eisner Comic Showcase Auction” on December 12. View the artwork in all the lots at the link. Includes this back cover from The Spirit Coloring Book.

(10) ROCKY ROAD. Idolator says it’s time to deconstruct that well-known Stone Age family. “20 Things That Didn’t Make Sense In ‘The Flintstones’ That We’re Still Thinking About”.

Set in the stone age, The Flintstones follows a modern prehistoric family that always seems to get into unlikely situations. And while it was a popular animated sitcom when it premiered on ABC in 1960, there are many aspects of the series that don’t really make sense, and we’re not just talking about a pet dinosaur who’s allowed to hang around babies!

Tiny points such as Fred getting gas for his foot-powered car and how time-traveling has no butterfly effect on the Flintstones’ actual timeline leave people saying yabba dabba, huh? And those aren’t even the most confusing points!…

Here’s one of the nits they pick.

What Is Wilma’s Maiden Name?

When it comes to popular long-running shows, one would hope the screenwriters could keep their characters’ names in check. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen for one Mrs. Wilma Flintstone. If you recall, the show mentions Wilma’s maiden name a few times, but depending on which episode you’re watching, it could be one of two names.

Wilma’s maiden name flip-flops between Pebble and Slaghoople, in what most likely is nothing more than a continuity error on the writer’s part. And, to quote Tony Stark, “[they] didn’t think we’d notice; but we did.”…

(11) BIRD BRAIN COVER STORY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s Nature has as its cover story a paper reporting the discovery of a well-preserved (around 85–75 million years old), fossil skull of an early off-shoot of the dinosaurs that went on to become the birds we know today. Past fossils of early birds have not had such well-preserved skulls and so palaeontologists may have underestimated their brain size. Could these early-birds be nearly as bright as some birds are today?

The paper is Chiappe, L. M., et al. (2024) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08114-4 “Cretaceous bird from Brazil informs the evolution of the avian skull and brain” Nature, vol. 635, p376-381.

Now, the thing is that if early birds were brighter earlier than thought, what does this say about the rise of early intelligence that ultimately leads to full-blown intelligence capable of putting people on the Moon and returning them safely to Earth without the use of Cavorite? My personal musing is that if intelligence arises multiple times and in different ways, does this speak to it being an ‘easy’ evolutionary step? If so what are the prospects for intelligent life elsewhere in the Galaxy? And if so, will they serve decent beer? These are the important questions….

Of course, intelligence takes many forms. Let’s not forget the octopus or, for that matter, dolphins (so long and thanks for all the fish). I have always been wary of dinosaurs and have never really forgiven them for what they did to Raquel Welch…

(12) SSSSSSSSSSS. “NASA Believes International Space Station Leak Can Be ‘Catastrophic’” reports People.

NASA has growing concerns about an ongoing air leak on a Russian section of the International Space Station (ISS) that has been going on since 2019.

According to SpaceNews, Bob Cabana, a former NASA astronaut who now chairs the ISS Advisory Committee, raised the issue during a meeting on Wednesday, Nov. 13.

“While the Russian team continues to search for and seal the leaks, it does not believe catastrophic disintegration of the PrK [module] is realistic. NASA has expressed concerns about the structural integrity of the PrK and the possibility of a catastrophic failure,” said Cabana….

… The news comes after NASA identified an increase in the leak rate in February, per the report. The rate at which air was leaking peaked at 3.7 pounds per day in April but was reduced “by roughly a third” with repairs, according to Space.com.

The ISS Program and Roscosmos officially met in May and June to discuss heightened concerns, elevating the leak risk to the highest level in its risk management system, per the report….

(13) CHINESE SPACE SHUTTLE PLANNED. “China Shows Off Reusable Space Shuttle” – Futurism has a rundown.

China has shown off a reusable shuttle that it intends to use to ferry cargo to and from its Tiangong space station.

As Space.com reports, the project — dubbed Haolong — recently won the state-owned Chengdu Aircraft Design and Research Institute a government contract to develop a low-cost space station cargo spacecraft.

The country’s human spaceflight agency selected two proposals last month as part of its efforts to regularly resupply its three-year-old space station….

…Not unlike NASA’s retired Space Shuttle, the winged spacecraft would launch atop of a rocket and land much like an airplane on a runway. It measures 32 feet long and 26 feet wide.

“With a blunt-nosed fuselage and large, swept-back delta wings, it combines the characteristics of both spacecraft and aircraft, allowing it to be launched into orbit by a carrier rocket and land on an airport runway like a plane,” Haolong chief designer Fang Yuangpen explained in a video by state-owned broadcaster CCTV….

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

Pixel Scroll 7/4/24 Trigger Scrollfile – Pixelman

Posted on July 4, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) JULY 4, 1939: Julius Schwartz ditched the last day of the first World Science Fiction Convention and went with Mort Weisinger and Otto Binder to see a ballgame at Yankee Stadium. Here’s what happened next: “On This Day In History 7/4”.

Three AWOL Worldcon members were in Yankee Stadium when this picture was taken.

(2) ORAL HISTORY OF XENA. The Guardian talks to the people who made the show: “’I was attacked by a bloody rabbit’: how we made Xena: Warrior Princess”.

… Steven L Sears, writer and co-executive producer: …People called Xena a sword and sorcery show, even though our universe had swords but no magic. There were mythological creatures and entities with powers, but those powers had restrictions. Most of the gods echoed the pettiness of mankind, with all their egos and desires.

Back then, the studio was very hesitant about suggesting Xena and Gabrielle were in a romantic relationship. They even objected to a moment in the title sequence where Xena is seen walking seductively towards the warlord Draco, because he was shot from the back and had long hair, so could be mistaken for a woman. But as time went on, they decided to look the other way and just let us get on with it. Somebody once asked me if Xena and Gabrielle ever had sex. I said: “It’s none of my damn business. They do social and domestic duties together, they have fought for each other and died for each other. If you’re defining the relationship just on sex, you’re really missing the whole point.”…

(3) IN AND OUT OF DISGUISE. “Superman, Frodo and Star Wars: the stunning life of Kiran Shah – the world’s smallest stuntman” in the Guardian.

It was 1976 when Kiran Shah saw the advert that would change his life. “It was a sci-fi film looking for a little guy,” he says. Shah turned up at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire and was introduced to a nervous young man named George Lucas. “He said: ‘Can you get in that dustbin thing?’ I was a bit too tall for it but I got in, they put the lid on, and he said: ‘Can you look left, look right?’” Shah didn’t realise he was auditioning for the role of R2-D2 in Star Wars. He didn’t get the job – it went to Kenny Baker – but Lucas’s casting director liked Shah, and got him an agent, which set him on the path of an almost 50-year career as “the world’s shortest stuntman”…

There are very few blockbusters Shah has not been in. You might not recognise him – he is often doubling for another character or he’s disguised under prosthetics as a mythical creature. But he has played more Star Wars characters than he can count, doubled for every hobbit in The Lord of the Rings movies, did Christopher Reeve’s stunts in the Superman movies, and played every single child in Titanic (which is even more impressive given that he can’t swim)….

(4) THREE-BODY EFFECTS. “Imagine Engine Shares ‘3 Body Problem’ VFX Breakdown Reel” at Animation World Network.

Image Engine shared a VFX breakdown reel and case study for its work contributing 137 shots to Netflix’s sci-fi drama, 3 Body Problem. The studio’s attention to detail, from replicating the vastness of the Neutrino Observatory to breathing life into a photoreal chimpanzee animation, resulted in a world of remarkable visuals.

Beginning with the first episode, the studio’s craft is on display, when scientist Dr. Vera Ye enters the Cherenkov tank, walks out onto a platform, and jumps into a shallow pool of water below.

Compositing supervisor Matt Yeoman explained, “Vera’s plate element of her walking along a suspended walkway needed to be integrated into the Neutrino Observatory, which was a full CG environment render. The main objective of this shot was to create a sense of scale for her very unique and mysterious surroundings.”…

(5) OCTOTHORPE. In Episode 113 of Octothorpe, “I Realised Too Late What I Had Done” John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty discuss a variety of things, “including but not limited to: the country of Sweden; haggises; the processing of peaches; listener statistics; the way that Los Angeles is gearing up for the Olympics; and Scrabble. We also discuss something called a ‘Worldcon’, in a first for us.” An uncorrected transcript is available here.

Three stick figures run from Godzilla, who is depicted in the style of Godzilla Minus One. The words “Octothorpe 113” used to be at the top of the art, but Godzilla has knocked off the letters “O C T O”, is holding “H”, and is trying to eat “T”.

(6) DOCTOR WHO WILL TREAD THE BOARDS. Collider says watch the London stage in September: “Paul McGann’s ‘Doctor Who’ Is Making a Comeback — But Not the Way You’re Expecting”

Doctor Who is making its way to the stage for the first time in over 20 years. Last performed live in 1989, the Doctor will be appearing in front of a live audience in celebration of 25 years of audio adventures by Big Finish Productions. The live show will see Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor in a new live-recorded audio drama, titled “The Stuff of Legend,” written by Robert Valentine and directed by Barnaby Edwards. McGann will star alongside India Fisher as his companion Charley Pollard, who’s been around since the beginning of Big Finish’s Doctor Who dramas, in this exciting new venture for the Whoniverse. McGann and Fisher will be joined on stage by Alex Macqueen as the Master — who featured in the Eighth Doctor Adventures series Dark Eyes — and Nicholas Briggs as the voice of the Daleks.

The drama will be performed live to audiences for one night only, at London’s Cadogan Hall on Saturday, September 14, 2024, with a studio version of the same story releasing on the same day. Although this is not the first time that Doctor Who has been performed to a live audience, it is the very first time that one of the show’s audio plays will be performed on stage. The announcement comes just weeks after the end of Season 1 of Doctor Who’s Disney revamp, which saw Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor and Millie Gibson’s companion Ruby Sunday face off against classic Who villain Sutekh (Gabriel Woolf)….

(7) THE TARDIS RETURNS THE FAVOR. And Playbill lists “Thespians Turned Whovians: All the Broadway Stars in Disney’s Regeneration of Doctor Who”. Spoilers at the link.

Whovians and theatre fans, did you spot some familiar faces in this season of Doctor Who? The 14th season of Doctor Who has just concluded on Disney+, and a few Broadway stars made guest appearances. The BBC staple, which has been running for over 60 years, has always had a rich relationship with the stage.

Many stars and guest stars of Doctor Who have connections to the theatre, including The First Doctor, William Hartnel, who was a prolific Shakespearean actor before ever stepping into the TARDIS. The 10th (and 14th) Doctor (played by David Tennant, who has been in countless theatrical productions) once landed his TARDIS inside The Globe to fight off witches with Shakespeare himself. That episode was filmed at Shakespeare’s Globe in London—where the current 15th Doctor, played by Ncuti Gatwa, starred as Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2016….

(8) COMPREHENDING PKD. David Agranoff has written a highly interesting review of “Postcards from a Dying World: Philip K. Dick: Essays of the Here and Now David Sandner (Editor), Series Editors: Donald E. Palumbo, C.W. Sullivan III”. Here’s his comment about one of the articles.

…Umberto Rossi’s ‘From Soft Totalitarianism to TV: Philip Kindred Dick and The Tube,’ was of course an enlightening read. I am aware that David Gill believes Rossi’s writing on PKD to be some of, if not the most important analysis of the work. I admit I am late to get to his work, but this is an excellent piece. I also had the weird experience of reading Rossi writing about the bible hypertext in The Divine Invasion while a woman on the plane (I was taking to the PKD fest) was reading the bible on her phone….

(9) ROBERT TOWNE (1935-2024). Best known for his Oscar-winning Chinatown screenplay, Robert Towne died July 1 at the age of 89. There’s some genre work among the credits listed in Deadline’s tribute.

…Towne also earned BAFTA, Golden Globe and WGA awards for Chinatown, the L.A.-set 1974 thriller starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. It was one of three Writers Guild Awards he won during his career, along with Shampoo and the drama series Mad Men, on which he was a consulting producer during the final seventh season. He also was nominated for The Last Detail (1973) and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1985). He was honored with the guild’s Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement in 1997.

Born on November 23, 1934, Towne got his start with his screenplay for 1960’s Last Woman on Earth before writing for … early-’60s TV series The Outer Limits, [and] The Man from U.N.C.L.E. He went on to work with Roger Corman on films including The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)…

During the 1970s, Towne also did script-doctor work on Beatty’s directorial debut Heaven Can Wait.

Towne … wrote the screenplay for the 1984 Tarzan tale Greystoke, starring Christopher Lambert, with an eye to direct. But the poor financial showing of Personal Best led Warner Bros to hand the helming reins to Hugh Hudson, who was hot off Best Picture Oscar winner Chariots of Fire.

Towne was angered by the move and had his name taken off the Greystoke screenplay — opting instead to credit the script to P.H. Vazak, his sheepdog. It went on to score an Adapted Screenplay Oscar nom for Vazak, making him the only canine ever to be so honored. It also was the first Academy Award nom for any Tarzan film….

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

July 4, 1996 — Independence Day film. We’re celebrating Independence Day tonight. Now not that one, but the film of that name which premiered twenty-eight years ago this coming weekend, but I thought it should be written up on this day. (Indeed, sites think it premiered today with more than a few individuals remember seeing it today.)

So let’s talk about Independence Day. It came out twenty-eight years ago. Now it’s a franchise as Independence Day Resurgence would come twenty years later. Well, a franchise unlikely to see a third film, as Independence Day Resurgence was financial failure unlike Independence Day which, well, I’ll note later.

It was directed by Roland Emmerich, written by Emmerich and Dean Devlin. Now if you think that you know Emmerich and Devlin, that’s not at all surprising as both had a major success in a genre film as Emmerich directed Stargate and Devlin co-wrote that script with Emmerich.

Ok, any Filer who has not seen should, well, skip to the rest of of the Scroll as I cannot avoid spoilers. I really can’t. SPOILERS. INCREDIBLY LARGE SPOILERS HERE.

Emmerich wanted to write an alien invasion on a massive scale rather than on the personal scale of the Fifties films, wreaking destruction those didn’t, and having the aliens hidden until they get revealed late in the film.

Each ship is fifteen miles across! And he had those ships destroy entire cities, be it New York or London, though the destruction of the White House is one of my favorite scenes in the film. President Thomas J. Whitmore, the former fighter pilot and Gulf War veteran, as played Bill Pullman, is one of the best secondary characters here.

The primary cast is Will Smith as Captain Steven Hiller, a Marine F/A-18 pilot: Jeff Goldblum as David Levinson, an all-around technological expert; and Judd Hirsch as Julius Levinson, David Levinson’s father (the character was based on one of Dean Devlin’s uncles). All are stellar in their roles. Same applies to the many other characters such as Randy Quaid as Russell Casse, an, alcoholic former fighter pilot and Vietnam War veteran insists that he was abducted by the aliens, and Brent Spiner as Dr. Brackish Okun, the scientist in charge of research at Area 51.

Now let’s talk about creating the look at the film. I can’t possible cover everything that made this film look fantastic, and one might assume that since shows like Babylon 5 were made intensively using CGI that most of this film was likewise. There over five thousand special effects shots required to make this film but and over ninety-five percent were practical in nature. That’s a lot of models, a massive number, many of which are now in collectors hands. And they fetched very nice prices.

So they built an actual White House, as Vogel Engel, effects supervisor, said in an interview, “Our pyrotechnician, the late Joe Viskocil, and our miniature supervisor Mike Joyce did a fantastic job in preparing a 15-feet wide and 5-feet high miniature of the building — basically a plaster shell attached to a metal body, with individual floors and a lot of furniture and other details on the inside.” And then they blew it up in the desert outside Vegas with the press looking on with only one chance to get it right. And they absolutely did.

A outstanding script, a fantastic cast and special effects that are still considered cutting edge according to be among the best ever done.

Next let’s talk what the critics thought. They mostly really liked it and Duane Bryge of the Hollywood Reporter is typical: “20th Century Fox’s Independence Day is a blast — a sci-fi disaster film about an alien force that attacks Earth on Fourth of July weekend. A generic juggernaut, as well as a story of appealing human dimension, Independence Day should set off box-office fireworks worldwide.”

So, want to know about well it did? Well, it didn’t cost that much to make back then, just seventy-five million. Oh, that was a good investment considering that it would go in to gross eight hundred and seventeen million. One knows that it went well over a billion with a secondary run, cassette and DVD sales, television and streaming fees.

The sequel made as I note above half as much and Emmerich blamed that largely on the absence of Will Smith who declined to take part. Emmerich stated in an interview with Collider magazine that his originally intended script in which Steven Hiller was alive during the film was “much better” and that Smith’s absence from the film forced him to use an alternative script.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Close to Home shows zombies who love a party.
F Minus has a strange idea about faithfulness.
The Argyle Sweater knows what happened to a premature invention.
Tom Gauld would hate to interrupt:

My latest @newscientist cartoon #science pic.twitter.com/nPoribcwOI
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) June 30, 2024

(12) HOW MANY HOLES DOES IT TAKE TO FILL THE ALBERT HALL. “Researchers Make Breakthrough in Study of Mysterious 2000-Year-Old Computer Found in Shipwreck” – Futurism has an update about the Antikythera mechanism.

Well over a century after its discovery, researchers at the University of Glasgow say they’ve used statistical modeling techniques, originally designed to analyze gravitational waves — ripples in spacetime caused by major celestial events such as two black holes merging — to suggest that the Antikythera mechanism was likely used to track the Greek lunar year.

In short, it’s a fascinating collision between modern-day science and the mysteries of an ancient artifact.

In a 2021 paper, researchers found that previously discovered and regularly spaced holes in a “calendar ring” were marked to describe the “motions of the sun, Moon, and all five planets known in antiquity and how they were displayed at the front as an ancient Greek cosmos.”

Now, in a new study published in the Oficial Journal of the British Horological Institute, University of Glasgow gravitational wave researcher Graham Woan and research associate Joseph Bayley suggest that the ring was likely perforated with 354 holes, which happens to be the number of days in a lunar year.

The researchers ruled out the possibility of it measuring a solar year.

“A ring of 360 holes is strongly disfavoured, and one of 365 holes is not plausible, given our model assumptions,” their paper reads….

(13) CLIFF NOTES. A commenter on the Daytonian in Manhattan’s post“The Cliff Dwelling – 240-243 Riverside Drive” tells us: “L. Ron Hubbard lived here 1939–40, writing — with a radically customized, continuous-feed typewriter beneath a low-glare blue lightbulb — several of his most celebrated stories before moving to Washington, DC.”

…According to The New York Times columnist Christopher Gray…, [the building’s designer Herman Lee] Meader “was intensely interested in Mayan and Aztec architecture and made regular expeditions to Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán and other sites.” Meader’s fascination with South America melded with Palmer’s terra cotta interests to create a unique design. Completed in 1914, the Cliff Dwelling was 12 stories tall and faced in orange brick. Meader lavished his Arts & Crafts style structure with Western motifs like cattle skulls, spears, and mountain lions, and Aztec- or Mayan-inspired designs….

(14) SO, YOU WRITE SF. DO YOU GET WRITERS BLOCK? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] “Twelve Scientist-Endorsed Tips To Get Over Writer’s Block” in Nature gives tips to scientists facing writing block. Some of these may be transferable to fiction writers (?)….

Know thy enemy
Create routines
Clarify the message
Plan first
Eliminate the blank page
Visualise
Write out of order
Give yourself extra time
Embrace collaboration
Take the pressure off
It might get easier, but don’t expect it to get easy
Know you are not alone

(15) LOOKING FOR SOMEWHERE TO PARK. For those of you who feel your place needs more clutter, we recommend the “Optimus Prime Human-Size Statue” from the Spec Fiction Shop. Only $18,549!

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

Pixel Scroll 6/28/24 The Infinity Kidney And Gall Stones (Powers To Be Determined)

Posted on June 28, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) IS IT WORTH THE BILLABLE HOURS? Courtney Milan has written a long thread on X.com sharing her skepticism about the lawsuit by Lynne Freeman against Tracy Wolff (the author of the Crave series, a popular YA vampire series), Entangled Publishing and other defendants, a suit which covered here the other day in Pixel Scroll 6/26/24 item #3. Thread starts here. Here are several excerpts.

(2) I’VE BEEN CHEATED, BEEN MISTREATED, WHEN WILL I BE LOVED? Victoria Strauss takes up the question “Cheated, Swindled, or Scammed: What’s a Writer to Do?” at Writer Unboxed.

You’ve chosen a publishing service, engaged a marketing company, entered a writing contest, hired an editor, inked a representation agreement, or contracted with a publisher, hybrid or traditional.

You’re aware that there are no guarantees: your book won’t necessarily become a bestseller. Your story may not win the contest prize. Your agent may not find a home for your manuscript. But your expectation is that the person or company will keep their promises, adhere to timelines, deliver acceptable quality, and generally honor whatever contract or agreement you both have signed.

What if they don’t, though? What if, after paying out a lot of money and/or waiting in vain for a service to be completed and/or receiving a product too shoddy to use, you realize you’ve been conned? What are your options? What can you do?…

Strauss first considers “Getting Your Money Back”.

Scammers generally don’t do refunds (never mind the money-back guarantees that many promise). You can certainly ask: it’s a reasonable starting point. Just be prepared to be refused, or promised a refund that somehow never arrives.

A more direct method, if you paid with a credit or debit card or via PayPal, is to dispute the charges. This doesn’t always succeed: if some degree of service was delivered, even incomplete and/or of poor quality, the decision may go against you. However, I’ve heard from many writers who’ve been able to get some or all of their money back this way.

You do need to be prompt. There’s a limited window to file disputes–which rules out situations where the scam only becomes apparent over a longer period of time (although, from personal experience, credit card companies will sometimes honor disputes beyond their deadlines if you can make a strong enough case)…

(3) IA APPEAL HEARD IN PUBLISHER’S SUIT. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The Internet Archive is appealing the judgment of a lawsuit from publishers that recently forced IA to remove hundreds of thousands of books from their online library. The appeals court panel did not rule from the bench and listened to arguments for significantly longer than originally scheduled. Lawyers for IA have said they believe this is a good sign for the archive. “Appeals court seems lost on how Internet Archive harms publishers” at Ars Technica.

… “There is no deadline for them to make a decision,” Gratz said, but it “probably won’t happen until early fall” at the earliest. After that, whichever side loses will have an opportunity to appeal the case, which has already stretched on for four years, to the Supreme Court. Since neither side seems prepared to back down, the Supreme Court eventually weighing in seems inevitable…

(4) PUBLIC DOMAIN FORECAST. Voronoi has a clever infographic showing “Which Characters are Next to Enter the Public Domain?”

(5) MEDICAL UPDATE. Sharon Lee was visiting family when she collapsed: “Life Going On”.

I was scheduled to spend some time with family this week — and in fact did spend some time with family this week, just not as much and not in the way we all would have preferred to see the thing done….

…Once we made base, vacation things — TV, games, talk — commenced. It was while we were all standing around the kitchen, shooting bulls, as one does, when, in the middle of Making a Point, I — folded up. The next few minutes were exciting for everybody but me. From my perspective, one second I was talking, the next, I was looking at the floor tiles and asking, “What happened?”

That was when things got exciting for me. My prize for beeping out in the middle of a sentence was a ride in the ambulance to the island hospital, an overnight in ER, many tests, including CAT scan, MRI, blood tests, cognitive and physical/balance tests. When I was admitted to ER, the Operating Theory was that I had suffered a posterior stroke. By the time I was returned to the wild, on Tuesday afternoon, the thinking was divided between soft “stroke” and hard “stress.”

I also won both the coveted “no driving” and “no alcohol” awards which are mine at least until I can see my regular doctor, on July 9….

(6) STEVE MILLER MEMORIAM ON BAEN PODCAST. This week on the Baen Free Radio Hour, “Steve Miller, In Memoriam; and Tinker by Wen Spencer”.

Description: Celebrating the life and works of Steve Miller, coauthor of the Liaden Universe® series, with a collection of excerpts from past BFRH episodes; and Tinker by Wen Spencer, Part 58

For the audio-only podcast click here. For the video podcast click here.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born March 1, 1952 — Steven Barnes, 72.

By Paul Weimer. While Barnes often gets tied to his very talented wife Tananarive Due, he is a first class talent in his own right. I first came across his work, first with the Dream Park works he co-wrote with Larry Niven. Dream Park really deserves a post of its own in appreciation, and before (IMHO) it went south around book three, the idea of a LARPING RPG park was amazing and a “Why didn’t anyone think of this?” sort of idea. Barnes, with Niven, correctly predicted, back in the early 1980’s, just how popular RPGs and D&D would become and the Dream Park novels definitely ride that wave.

I followed Barnes into other collaborations…the Heorot series, Achilles Choice…but the novels that for me define Barnes and his work are Lion’s Blood and Zulu’s Heart. These novels, together are two of the finest examples of alternate history written. The turning point is never really said inside of the text itself (Barnes avoids the Turtledove technique of having characters think about alternate history). But the idea that the Global South turns out to come out on top in ancient history and then to the present means that we have Black Muslim estates across North America, and the backward island of Ireland is just good for slave raids for useful white men and women not suited for anything else.

While the novels are ostensibly about Aidan, a young Irish boy who winds up a slave in the household of Kai, a rich and powerful young scion of a noble house, the novels eventually put Kai and his story front and center. The novelsl provide a rich and unflinching look at a “19th century” where the Middle Passage is taking white slaves across the ocean (many dying on the voyage), where powerful aristocratic families squabble and scheme for political power. And oh yes, there is a looming war with the Aztecs. They remain today some of the best alternate history novels I’ve ever read.

Born June 28, 1946 — Robert Asprin. (Died 2008.)

By Paul Weimer. I started off with Robert Asprin, among other authors with the Thieves World anthologies. The 1980’s was a high water mark for shared world anthologies, sometimes more than a dozen authors contributing stories to the shared world. And while George R R Martin’s Wild Cards continues to this day, the second most successful of these shared worlds was Robert Asprin’s Thieves World. Set in the city of Sanctuary, an edge of the empire city under very uneasy rule, I came across Thieves World first as a RPG supplement for D&D, and then the actual books themselves. Asprin did a lot of the worldbuilding and scene setting in the anthology, and created The Vulgar Unicorn, the one true bar of which all fantasy bars are but shadows.

Eventually the series petered out, had side novels set far away from the city of Sanctuary, but Asprin’s initial idea helped color what a fantasy city, especially for roleplaying games, in a way only matched, I think, by Lankhmar. Lots of fantasy cities in SFF since clearly show inspiration, or acknowledge it as an inspiration. And why not? An edge of the empire city with a spare prince sent to rule it, a resentful native population, myth and magic around every street corner? What fantasy reader wouldn’t want to spend time there?

Bob Asprin in 1993. Photo by Sharon72015

I followed Asprin to other series of his, particularly the Myth series. The Myth series, featuring a callow untrained wizard and a demon who has lost his magic, was multiverse before Multiverse was cool, as Skeeve and Aahz have adventures across a number of worlds and dimensions. And the cover art by Phil Foglio (whose work I was enjoying in Dragon magazine) definitely was a selling point for me to pick them up and give them a try.

There are many clever bits within the series. For example, what are Demons, after all, but Dimensional Travelers? Deva, the dimension which is just a bazaar for making deals, is the home of Devils. The broad puns and humor of Asprin’s MYTH series would be the standard by which I would benchmark humor in SFF until I later encountered the likes of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. And yet, even given that, The Bazaar on Deva remains the standard for me for interdimensional bazaars. I can see how the Bazaar definitely influenced places in fantasy fiction like, for example, Sigil, the City of Doors.

It would be a mythstake not to celebrate his birthday today.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Eek! is a reminder to watch where one steps
F Minus demonstrates the dark side of badge collecting

(9) A LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO BOOP. “Betty Boop Time Travels to New York, and Broadway, Next Spring” promises the New York Times (article is unlocked.)

A long-in-the-works musical about Betty Boop, a curvy flapper first featured in animated films of the 1930s, will open on Broadway next spring following a run in Chicago last year.

“BOOP! The Betty Boop Musical” has some thematic echoes of last year’s “Barbie” movie, although it was in the works before that film came along. The stage production imagines that Boop leaves her early-20th-century film life to travel to present-day New York, where musical comedy ensues. (Her first stop: Comic-Con.)…

(10) PKD FEST IN COLORADO. David Agranoff’s latest Amazing Stories column is “25th Century Five and Dime #6: The Philip K. Dick Festival 2024 -My Recap”, where names are dropped.

…We ran into our podcast guest Jonathan Letham at the bar. He is a bestselling author, and very respected. I just finished reading his novel The Feral Detective. I realize many at the fest were a little star-struck meeting Letham. I told one of those star-struck not to be as he clearly is one of us. He sat in all the workshops listening and adapting his keynote speech, something I was impressed with. When we shook hands he said he was a listener to our podcast, I thought he was just being nice, but as we talked he mentioned something we talked about on a four-year episode of DHP about Vulcan’s Hammer. So the man is Legit….

(11) LEFT IN THE LURCH. “NASA’s ISS Spacesuit Situation Turns Grim” reports Gizmodo.

Two NASA astronauts were preparing to exit the International Space Station (ISS) for a second attempt at a spacewalk, but it was once again called off due to a concerning malfunction with the spacesuit.

NASA was forced to cancel a spacewalk on Monday due to a water leak in the service and cooling umbilical unit on astronaut Tracy Dyson’s spacesuit. “There’s water everywhere,” Dyson could be heard saying during the live feed from the ISS, pointing to an alarming malfunction with the space station’s aging suits that put other astronauts at risk in the past. NASA is in desperate need of new spacesuits for its astronauts, but in a troubling development, the company contracted to design the suits has just pulled out of the agreement….

(12) CATCHING FRESH WAVES. [Item by Steven French.] Personally I like the one that involves putting a diamond into a quantum superposition! “Five new ways to catch gravitational waves — and the secrets they’ll reveal” in Nature.

The detection of gravitational waves has provided new ways to explore the laws of nature and the history of the Universe, including clues about the life story of black holes and the large stars they originated from. For many physicists, the birth of gravitational-wave science was a rare bright spot in the past decade, says Chiara Caprini, a theoretical physicist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Other promising fields of exploration have disappointed: dark-matter searches have kept coming up empty handed; the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva has found nothing beyond the Higgs boson; and even some promising hints of new physics seem to be fading. “In this rather flat landscape, the arrival of gravitational waves was a breath of fresh air,” says Caprini.

That rare bright spot looks set to become brighter….

(13) NEW BATMAN SERIES. Animation Magazine is there when “Official ‘Batman: Caped Crusader’ Trailer Steps Out of the Shadows”.

…Welcome to Gotham City, where the corrupt outnumber the good, criminals run rampant and law-abiding citizens live in a constant state of fear. Forged in the fire of tragedy, wealthy socialite Bruce Wayne becomes something both more and less than human — the Batman. His one-man crusade attracts unexpected allies within the GCPD and City Hall, but his heroic actions spawn deadly, unforeseen ramifications.

The series is a reimagining of the Batman mythology through the visionary lens of executive producers J.J. Abrams, Matt Reeves and Bruce Timm….

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

Pixel Scroll 2/25/24 The Scroll Is Spinning. I’ll Try Again Tomorrow

Posted on February 25, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) NICHOLAS WHYTE TAKES UP 2024 HUGO ADMINISTRATOR DUTIES. Following the resignation of Kat Jones, Glasgow 2024 WSFS Division Head Nicholas Whyte announced this news in “The Hugos and me” at From the Heart of Europe:

I have now been appointed Hugo Administrator for Glasgow 2024: A Worldcon for our Futures, double-hatted with the role of Division Head for WSFS. (If the website hasn’t already been updated, it will be soon.) This is my comment on recent events, and my own commitment to future action.

I was not involved with organising the Chengdu Worldcon in any way, though it was a close call. Shortly before the Chengdu bid won the Site Selection vote in 2021, I was invited to become one of the Co-chairs of the convention if the bid won. (I have no idea if Ben Yalow was already on board at that stage.) I declined on the grounds that I really did not have time, but agreed to become a senior adviser, and was listed as such on their org chart presented in DC.

However, I was dismayed by Chengdu Worldcon’s choice of fascist writer Sergei Lukanyenko as a guest of honour, and by a general lack of communication. By summer 2022 I had heard very little from Chengdu Worldcon and it had become clear that they were not very interested in my advice, so I resigned as an advisor and heard no more from them for several months….

More follows about his trip to the Chengdu Worldcon. And about his past experience administering the 2017 and 2019 Hugos, and as part of the 2020, 2021, and 2022 Hugo teams.

(2) GLYER’S APOLOGY TO SHEPHERD. I apologize to Shepherd for comparing him to Vox Day in item #15 of the February 22 Scroll. It was unwarranted and wrong for me to do. I have now deleted the Vox Day quotes and replaced them with this:

“I apologize for drawing a comparison between Shepherd and Vox Day in the item that formerly appeared in this space. I was wrong to give into the impulse, which vented at Shepherd my emotional reaction to all the Hugo stuff I’ve had to write news about for the last month, something he has nothing to do with. (But if you want to ask why, then, is item #14 still here — Shepherd intended the needle, and I felt it. Ouch.)”

I also have corrected Shepherd’s name in item #14. The apology is repeated here in today’s Scroll because not many people are going to see the changes made in a three-day-old post.

(3) SHARON LEE UPDATE. Author Sharon Lee, who lost her husband Steve Miller earlier this week, answers four questions on her readers’ and friends’ minds in “Sunday in the new world”. Here’s an excerpt (questions 3 and 4 at the link).

So! The first question — Will I be continuing the Liaden series?
Yes, it is my intention to continue writing in the Liaden Universe®, at least to the point of finishing out the remaining three books contracted with Baen. There will be some changes in how things go forward, which are inevitable, given Circumstances. Trade Lanes is off the table, at least for now. It is possible that it will never be written, but — I’m new at this, so let’s just not say “never” and instead say “we’ll see.”

I’m about 1/3 of the way through the book following Ribbon Dance, and have Extensive Notes for the book after that. The sequel is due at Baen in September. The deadline may have to be renegotiated; I don’t know that yet — see “new at this,” above — and I’ll have to talk with Madames the Agent and the Publisher.

Question the Second: How am I doing?
I have no idea. I have moments of relative peace — work is going to be a refuge, I can already see that — moments of immobilizing terror, and breathtaking pain. I’m assuming these things are standard, but I’ve never lost my best friend, spouse, and creative partner before.

The cats have been a comfort, piling on whenever I land in a place and stay still long enough.

Local friends have also been keeping an eye on me, to the extent that I allow it; it’s hard to ask for help, and I’m not Steve, who loved people and made connections the way the rest of us breathe. I’m a more … private person, a fact that it will do us all good to remember, going forward. If I’m testy, sarcastic, or clueless — recall that I’ve always been that way, and that Steve always did the heavy interpersonal lifting.

(4) GWENDA BOND & JOHN SCALZI AT JOSEPH BETH BOOKSELLERS. [Item by Chris Barkley.] On Saturday evening, Ohio-based New York Times bestselling sf author John Scalzi interviewed Kentucky-based New York Times bestselling author Gwenda Bond at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cincinnati, Ohio.

For more than an hour, Mr. Scalzi quizzed Ms. Bond on what inspired her to write her latest novel, The Frame Up.

This new novel chronicles the adventures of Dani Poissant, an especially talented art thief who been approached for a special job. The problem? The crew hates her for turning in their former leader, her mother…

Be assured, it will be a magical journey for all involved and in more ways than one.

Mr. Scalzi also sold a few books as well.

(5) AGENT OF CHANGE. Victoria Strauss has advice for “Coping With Scams: Suggestions for Changing Your Mindset” at Writer Beware.

…My standard advice for how to cope with the prevalence of scams is to educate yourself: learn as much as possible about publishing and self-publishing–and do it before you start trying to snag an agent, or querying publishers, or assessing self-publishing platforms and service providers. The more you know about how things should work, the easier it will be to recognize bad practice when you encounter it. (The Writer Beware website is a good place to start.)

But it’s not just about being prepared with adequate knowledge. Mindset is also important: your default assumptions about, and responses to, the people and situations you encounter along your publication journey. Such expectations can help you, or they can hinder you–like my writer friend, whose bad experiences caused them to conclude, falsely, that no one can be trusted….

(6) MINORITY REPORT THE STAGE PLAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC’s Radio 4 Front Row the other day devoted over a third of the programme to a new stage play adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story Minority Report.

The new adaptation shifts the action to Brit Cit London and the play features special effects and illusions to convey the future tech and mind games. The show’s director said that when the Tom Cruise film (2002, Hugo short-listed in case you forgot) came out it was all pretty much science fiction. However, he opines, with recent advances in artificial intelligence and neurobiology it seems more plausible.

You can access the programme here. You will need to jump to about halfway through.

Minority report, the Sci-Fi classic by Philip K Dick, has already been adapted for film and television and now it’s a stage play that employs an innovative mix of technology, stagecraft and live performance. As it opens at the Nottingham Playhouse, Mark Burman talks to some of the creatives involved.

See also the Nottingham Playhouse website, “Minority Report”, the source of these photos.

(7) KENNETH MITCHELL (1974-2024). “Kenneth Mitchell, Star Trek and Captain Marvel actor, dies aged 49” — the Guardian pays tribute.

Canadian actor Kenneth Mitchell, known for roles in Star Trek: Discovery and the Marvel film Captain Marvel, has died following complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

Mitchell, who was 49-years-old, died on Saturday, according to a statement released by his verified Instagram account.

“With heavy hearts we announce the passing of Kenneth Alexander Mitchell, beloved father, husband, brother, uncle, son and dear friend to many,” the statement said.

“For five and a half years Ken faced a series of awful challenges from ALS. And in truest Ken fashion, he managed to rise above each one with grace and commitment to living a full and joyous life in each moment,” it added….

The Hollywood Reporter adds these details:

…Mitchell played four characters across three seasons of Paramount’s Star Trek: Discovery: Kol, Kol-Sha, Tenavik and Aurellio. He also portrayed a young Captain Marvel’s father in a flashback in Marvel’s Captain Marvel and World War II flyer Deke Slayton in ABC’s The Astronaut Wives Club….

(8) BRIAN STABLEFORD (1948-2024). British academic and critic Brian Stableford, author of over 70 novels, died February 24 at the age of 75. His Wikipedia article includes a long list of work by this prolific writer and editor.

He graduated with a degree in biology from the University of York in 1969 before going on to do postgraduate research in biology and later in sociology. In 1979 he received a PhD with a doctoral thesis on The Sociology of Science Fiction.

The Science Fiction Encyclopedia says he began his writing career in his teens, collaborating with a schoolfriend, Craig A Mackintosh (writing together as Brian Craig), on his first published story, “Beyond Time’s Aegis” for Science Fantasy #78 in 1965; much expanded, it was eventually published in book form as Firefly: A Novel of the Far Future (1994).

He won the IAFA Distinguished Scholarship Award in 1987, the Science Fiction Research Association Pilgrim Award for lifetime contributions to sff scholarship in 1999, and a SF&F Translations special award in 2011. He won a 1985 Eaton Award for best critical book with Scientific Romance in Britain: 1890-1950. His article “How Should a Science Fiction Story End?” (The New York Review of Science Fiction #78 Feb 1995) received SFRA’s Pioneer Award in 1996.

His book The Empire of Fear won a 1989 Lord Ruthven award for fiction about vampires. His short fiction “The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires” won a BSFA Award in 1996.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 25, 1971 — Sean Astin, 53. Let’s talk about Sean Astin who played Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of The Rings films. I’ll admit that he was one of my favorite hobbits in the trilogy and Sean did a sterling job of bringing his character to life here, didn’t he? I’ll also admit that I’d completely forgotten that he wasn’t in The Hobbit as in I tend to think that the hobbits that were there are all in the trilogy.

Before The Lord of The Rings, he showed in his first film playing Mikey Walsh in The Goonies. No, not genre (remember My Birthday Write-up, my rules what gets included here) but a really fine YA treasure hunt adventure in which everyone has fun. Well not everyone.

He has a lead role in Toy Soldiers, a film I still have an odd fond spot for, as William “Billy” Tepper. Damn I liked those toy soldiers. I even had some of the action figures a long time ago.

He was Stuart Conway in a film named after a time travel device called Slipstream that was stolen by a group of bank robbers. Might be interesting to see.

He voiced Shazam in a pair of animated DC films, Justice League: War and Justice League: Atlantis, almost proving there are too many DC animated films. Oops, they did prove that amply as there’s another one, a Lego one he did.

In the Department of Films That I Never Knew Existed Off Novels I Never Knew Were Written is Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic, which proves how prolific he was or how bad my memory is, at any rate Sean is Twoflower here.

Dorothy and the Witches of Oz is a 2012 series of a decade ago apparently covered The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Ozma of Oz, The Road to Oz and The Magic of Oz. Somewhere in there, he was Frack Muckadoo, a servant of Princess Langwidere.

I think the last thing I’ll mention is that he showed up in a brief recurring role on The Big Bang Theory as Dr. Greg Pemberton, one of a team of Fermi-Lab physicists who accidentally confirmed the Super-Asymmetry paper published by Sheldon and Amy. Wasn’t that an amazingly fantastic series?

Yes, there’s other kibbles and bits which I’m sure you’ll point out, but I need tea now.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Bizarro brings the litigious spirit to fairy tale land.

(11) AUCTION. Propstore’s “Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auction: Los Angeles 2024” runs March 12-14. Lots of stuff you’ll recognize in their online catalog. Here’s one example:

(12) THE 1982 LAWS OF ROBOTICS. “Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future in 1982: Computers Will Be ‘at the Center of Everything;’ Robots Will Take Human Jobs” at Open Culture.

…As for “the computer age,” asks Jim Lehrer; “have we crested on that one as well”? Asimov knew full well that the computer would be “at the center of everything.” Just as had happened with television over the previous generation, “computers are going to be necessary in the house to do a great many things, some in the way of entertainment, some in the way of making life a little easier, and everyone will want it.” There were many, even then, who could feel real excitement at the prospect of such a future. But what of robots, which, as even Asimov knew, would come to “replace human beings?”

“It’s not that they kill them, but they kill their jobs,” he explains, and those who lose the old jobs may not be equipped to take on any of the new ones. “We are going to have to accept an important role — society as a whole — in making sure that the transition period from the pre-robotic technology to the post-robotic technology is as painless as possible. We have to make sure that people aren’t treated as though they’re used up dishrags, that they have to be allowed to live and retain their self-respect.” Today, the technology of the moment is artificial intelligence, which the news media haven’t hesitated to pay near-obsessive attention to. (I’m traveling in Japan at the moment, and saw just such a broadcast on my hotel TV this morning.) Would that they still had an Asimov to discuss it with a level-headed, far-sighted perspective….

(13) THERE’S A LEGO SALE, STEP ON IT! “A rare LEGO piece found at PA Goodwill set to sell for over $18K” reports Yahoo!

Bidding on a rare 14-karat gold LEGO piece has come to a close and the item sold for much more than expected.

The piece called the Bionicle Golden Kanohi Hau Mask, which sold for $18,101, was found by workers at a warehouse in DuBois, Pennsylvania, and is believed to be only one of 30 that exist. In 2001, some were gifted to LEGO employees, while the rest were awarded through a contest.

When the rare LEGO was found no one really knew what it was, the item was posted on shopgoodwill.com for just $14.95. Little did they know what someone would pay for it.

“The final bid was $18,101. The second-highest bid was $18,100,” said Chad Smith, Vice President of E-commerce and Technology for Goodwill Industries of North Central PA….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “’Borderlands’ Trailer Sees Cate Blanchett Hunt For Treasure On Scorned Planet”. Deadline sets the frame:

…[The] Borderlands movie follows Lilith (Blanchett), an infamous outlaw with a mysterious past, who reluctantly returns to her home planet of Pandora to find the missing daughter of the universe’s most powerful S.O.B., Atlas (Edgar Ramirez).

Lilith forms an alliance with an unexpected team – Roland (Kevin Hart), a former elite mercenary, now desperate for redemption; Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), a feral pre-teen demolitionist; Tina’s musclebound, rhetorically challenged protector, Krieg; Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), the scientist with a tenuous grip on sanity; and Claptrap (Jack Black), a persistently wiseass robot. These unlikely heroes must then battle alien monsters and dangerous bandits to find and protect the missing girl, who may hold the key to unimaginable power….

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

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Tag Archives: Philip K. Dick

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