Tag Archives: Rotten Tomatoes

Pixel Scroll 8/23/24 Yippi-Ki-Yay, Pixel Scroller

Posted on by
19

(1) PARALLEL POPPING. [Item by Dann.] Rotten Tomatoes is updating its scoring system: “Introducing The Verified Hot Audience Badge”. They will keep the tomato-based system for professional reviewers.  Audience reviews will use a popcorn-based system.  Allegedly, only reviews from people who have purchased a verified ticket will count for the new system.  The Fandango app is going to be the means for validating a purchased ticket.

I say “allegedly” as that is what is asserted in the article linked below.  I was unable to access the details about the verified audience score at the other link below.

“Rotten Tomatoes Introduces a Popcorn Meter for Audience Reviews”; Comicbook.com explains it:

Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes today announced a new program to codify audience reviews — or at least “verified” audience reviews — into a more official score…. 

In addition to introducing Verified Hot, Rotten Tomatoes has clarified the “Popcornmeter” rating system for all their TV shows and movies. Starting today, fans will see a full, red popcorn bucket with a “Hot” label if 60% or more of the audience rates the title with 3.5 stars or higher. Otherwise, a green tipped-over popcorn bucket will be labeled “Stale,” when less than 60% of the audience provides a rating of 3.5 stars or higher….

…Verified purchases include users who have proven they bought tickets to the movie on Fandango, the movie ticketing platform. The move was made to prevent disgruntled users from going after movies or actors they don’t like with negative reviews — an issue that had divided audiences and put Rotten Tomatoes in the middle of a number of controversies.

Effectively, the same company that owns Rottentomatoes.com also owns Fandango.  NBCUniversal has a 75% stake and Warner Home Entertainment has a 25% stake.  So there is some self-interest involved in limiting audience reviews via a purchasing system owned by these entertainment companies.

(2) HIGH COMPRESSION. The Guardian suggests “’It’s like Game of Thrones!’ The return of India’s ancient superhero fantasy epic”. The Mahabharata will screen at the Venice film festival on September 5 and 6.

When Antonin Stahly was nine years old, his mother took him to the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris to see a production of the ancient Indian epic The Mahabharata, which translates loosely as “the great story of mankind”. More than 20 actors from 16 countries performed on a stage steeped in red earth and scarred by a water-filled trench; fire also played a leading role. Directed by Peter Brook, whom the RSC founder Peter Hall called “the greatest innovator of his generation”, and adapted by Luis Buñuel’s former co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière, this spectacular Mahabharata weighed in at nine hours, plus intervals. Even at that length, it represented a massive compression of its source text, which runs to 1.8m words. Brook and Carrière’s version has been likened to summarising the Bible in 40 minutes.

Audiences could devour The Mahabharata in three parts over successive evenings or as an all-day weekend marathon; in some outdoor venues, such as the limestone quarry in Avignon where the production premiered in 1985, it began at dusk and climaxed just as the dawn sun lit up the sky. Stahly saw it in a single noon-to-midnight sitting. “It was like a superhero fantasy,” he says, still sounding awestruck. “It had Bhima, the strongest man on Earth, and Bhishma, who has the power to live for ever. Arjuna was the best warrior. And then there were all the gods. It was amazing for me, because I’m half Indian, but I wasn’t brought up in an Indian context.”…

(3) EATING THE FANTASTIC.  Scott Edelman invites listeners to feast on burgers and fries with Cynthia Pelayo in Episode 234 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Scott Edelman and Cynthia Pelayo.

I invite you to join me at the table with the award-winning Cynthia Pelayo for burgers and fries at Hodad’s Downtown.

Pelayo is a Bram Stoker Award-winning and International Latino Book Award-winning author and poet. She’s the author of Loteria, Santa Muerte, The Missing, Poems of My Night, Into the Forest and All the Way Through, Children of Chicago, Crime Scene, The Shoemaker’s Magician, as well as dozens of short stories and poems. Loteria, which was her MFA in Writing thesis at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was re-released to much praise, with Esquire calling it one of the Best Horror Books of 2023. Santa Muerte and The Missing, her young adult horror novels, were each nominated for International Latino Book Awards. 

Poems of My Night was nominated for an Elgin Award, while Into the Forest and All the Way Through was nominated for an Elgin Award and was also nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection. Children of Chicago was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in Superior Achievement in a Novel and won an International Latino Book Award for Best Mystery. Crime Scene won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection. Her most recent novel, The Forgotten Sisters, was released in March and is a modern adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.”
 
We discussed the dead body she thought she saw which sparked The Forgotten Sisters, why she changed her mind about killing every character at the end of that newest novel, how growing up in a haunted house helped turn her into a horror writer, why she evolved from a pantser into a plotter, the importance of describing decaying bodies in extreme detail, which journalistic skills transferred easily to fiction writing and which didn’t, what makes Chicago great, the reason classic fairy tales survive, how reading Agatha Christie helped her learn how to plot, the way to write successful flash fiction, and much more.

(4) WORLDBUILDING WITH STEPHENSON. Variety is on hand when “’LOTR’ VFX Firm Weta Workshop, Neal Stephenson Launch Digital World”.

Prolific author Neal Stephenson‘s digital content platform Lamina1 and “The Lord of the Rings” film franchise special effects company Wētā Workshop are set to collaborate on a “participatory worldbuilding” experience titled “Artefact.”

The experience is expected to offer “a new blueprint for IP expansion through immersive experiences that incorporate fan action and input.”

Per Lamina1’s description for the project, “Stephenson and the Wētā team will begin engaging a global community of creators and fans on the Lamina1 platform this fall, inviting them to unravel the lore behind a mysterious set of ‘Artefacts’ that will build upon the themes and lore from Stephenson’s critically-acclaimed catalog of work. Next, the superfan will take on the new role of creator, utilizing their discoveries to contribute directly to the expansion of the universe.”

… “This is more than just a new virtual world—it’s a new way to build worlds. It’s a promising new way of looking at what we can offer to both creators and their communities,” Stephenson said. “By collaborating with Wētā Workshop, we’re forging a new path in digital worldbuilding. Lamina1’s commitment to a creator-driven economy and open metaverse provides a foundation that ensures long-term value and creative quality.”…

(5) KEEP IT GOING. “Petition to Save ‘The Acolyte’ Already Has Hundreds of Signatures” reports Collider. By the time this Scroll was being put together, the “Renew the Acolyte” petition at Change.org had over 26,000 signatures.

It’s only been a day since Disney canceled its latest Star Wars series, The Acolyte, but fans are already quickly mobilizing support for the polarizing show. Over at Change.org, a petition was created by a fan named Blue Smith to save Leslye Headland‘s High Republic-set series, and, in just 24 hours, it blew up with over 700 signatures. While the poor reception from some viewers, along with more malicious review-bombing, was evident throughout the show’s run, the swift and proactive reaction from fans shows a dedicated fanbase that was eager to see what Headland and company were ultimately cooking.

(6) AMERICAN MANGA AWARDS. Publishers Weekly is there when “Inaugural American Manga Award Winners Announced” at the first American Manga Awards ceremony, held on August 22 at the Japan Society in New York City.

  • Best New Manga: #DRCL midnight children by Shin’ichi Sakamoto (VIZ Media)
  • Best Continuing Manga Series: Delicious in Dungeon by Ryoko Kui (Yen Press)
  • Best New Edition of Classic Manga: Neighborhood Story by Ai Yazawa (VIZ Media)
  • Best Translation: Stephen Kohler for Witch Hat Atelier by Kamome Shirahama, (Kodansha)
  • Best Lettering: Lys Blakeslee for Witch Hat Atelier by Kamome Shirahama (Kodansha)
  • Best Publication Design: Adam Grano for My Name Is Shingo by Kazuo Umezz (VIZ Media)

The awards were launched this year by Anime NYC and the Japan Society to honor outstanding achievements in the world of Japanese comics, and celebrate the best manga published in North America in the past year. The ceremony was held on the eve of Anime NYC, the Japanese pop culture convention being happening at the Javits Center in New York City August 23–25,

(7) SILENCE WAS GOLDEN. Rowling broke her “silence” today, and tripled down, reports Out: “J.K. Rowling broke her social media silence… with more Imane Khelif transphobia”.

J.K. Rowling is back on the hate and ignorance train.

The disgraced Harry Potter author and famed transphobe has posted on X (formerly Twitter) for the first time since August 7. After a rare social media break, the outspoken transphobe is once again taking aim at cisgender boxer and Olympic gold medalist Imane Khelif.

Rowling was one of the leading online voices in the crusade against Khelif, a female boxer from Algeria who was targeted with transphobic and racist hate during the Paris 2024 Olympics after a discredited Russian boxing federation claimed she failed an unspecified “gender test.”

(8) JOHN GRAZIANO (1962-2024). Long-time Ripley’s Believe It Or Not cartoonist John Graziano passed away on August 17. The Daily Cartoonist paid tribute.

John Anthony Graziano, 62, a remarkably talented artist of Davenport, Florida, passed away at his residence on August 17, 2024.

…John majored in Illustration at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts in New Jersey. Following his graduation, he began his career as an illustrator for a T-shirt company. However, it wasn’t long before he landed his dream job, one he had envisioned since his teenage years. John applied as a youngster to Ripley’s Believe It or Not, only to receive an encouraging reply to reach out again in the future. He did. Several years later, John joined Ripley’s Believe It or Not, where he became only the seventh artist to take up the pen since Robert Ripley himself. He dedicated 17 years as an illustrator, retiring in 2021.

Before moving up to Ripley’s, he had a wide range of freelance assignments.

He has designed trading card sets and a portrait series based on the 1960s cult TV show “Dark Shadows.” John has also created comic strips for “Scream Queens” magazine, sculpted figures that have been made into wax museum pieces, provided book illustrations, plastic model kit box illustrations, designed t-shirt graphics and created storyboards and concept drawings for Hollywood films.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

August 23, 1931 – Barbara Eden, 93.

By Paul Weimer: I still DO dream of Jeannie, thank you very much.

It’s funny, though.  The reruns of I Dream of Jeannie I remember only when I was young and didn’t quite get it at the time (in other words, I was not yet a teenager).  I found the show funny and amusing, and years later, when Larry Hagman wound up on Dallas, I was amused at his return to my screens (and more on Dallas and Eden in a moment). 

But let’s go back to Barbara Eden and of course, Jeannie. Even young me could see that the story of Jeannie was meant to be a story of cultural assimilation to America. It was the “melting pot theory” taken literally with a 2000-year-old genie played by Barbara Eden. I was so compelled by Eden’s performance and characterization of Jeannie, that for a number of years afterwards, I thought Djinn WERE default female and the first times I came across male Djinn, I started to think of some very awkward questions about Djinn as a species.

Barbara Eden

But there is a tension in Jeannie (and come to think, Samantha in Bewitched) about the problems of assimilation. Maybe it’s my reading of the text, but Samantha, and especially Eden’s Jeannie, torn between the desire to assimilate, and the desire to remain as themselves (using magic, granting wishes, respectively) is a subtext that I can see in Eden’s performance. Eden’s Jeannie, even after getting married, never gives up her powers but she does hide them. She never fully becomes “American”.  

I enjoyed Eden in other roles besides Jeannie…oddly, in The Brass Bottle, she doesn’t play the Djinn, she plays the girlfriend of the guy who opens the Djinn bottle (and the Djinn is female…).  Eden is also great in The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao. Both those movies have her with Tony Randall, and for a bit, my focus on Eden meant that I confused Randall and Hagman a bit together until I properly watched The Odd Couple (and later, Dallas).  And oh yes, I was delighted when Eden showed up on Dallas for a few episodes. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) FOURTH WALL COMICS. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Some comics are notable for “breaking the fourth wall” like today’s Adam@Home.

Dern notes, “Possibly my favorite ‘fourth wall’ strip is from Walt Kelly’s Pogo: Pogo saying (to Churchy or Albert, probably), “These silhouettes sure save a mess of drawing.”

The Thatababy strip has frequent sf/superhero/other-geeky references; they appear to have been collected into a book, here’s the digital-free-from-participating-libraries link: Thatababy Geeks Out!

(12) WHAT TO EXPECT. According to series creator Charlie Brooker, “Black Mirror season 7 episodes will be like OG Black Mirror, gut punches and all”. JoBlo has the story.

A seventh season of the anthology series Black Mirror will be making its way to the Netflix streaming service sometime in 2025 – and while episodes of the show have branched out into different genres as it has gone along, during an interview with Deadline, series creator Charlie Brooker said that the episodes of Black Mirror season 7 will be like the “OG Black Mirror.”

Brooker said, “We’re doing some things we’ve not done before. People can expect quite a lot of emotion and, hopefully, a good mix of chills. We did a couple of horror stories in Season 6, which we label as Red Mirror. But this time around, the episodes are all, in a way, like OG Black Mirror. I wrote one script, and the general consensus was that it was one of the bleakest, heaviest gut punches yet. There’s also techy episodes and ones that are making people cry. So, hopefully, it’s a full emotional workout, but we shall see. The viewers will be the judge.“

Black Mirror season 7 will consist of six episodes, one of which will be a sequel to the popular season 4 episode USS Callister! We even have a short synopsis for that one: “Robert Daly is dead, but for the crew of the USS Callister, their problems are just beginning.” Directed by Toby Haynes from a script written by William Bridges and Brooker, the season 4 USS Callister episode told the story of a gaming company’s CTO. He is the mastermind behind a popular multiplayer game and has a private copy of it, which he uses to torment his colleagues who fail to show him respect in the office… 

(13) CROSSWORD SPOILER. [Item by Susan de Guardiola.] In the New York Times Crossword for Friday, August 23, 2024.

Clue for 49 down:

“Genre celebrated at the annual Worldcon”

Five-letter answer: SCIFI [obviously that is a spoiler]

(14) NAME THAT WRITER. Somebody set up a “Guess the Authors” quiz at IQuiz. Sixty questions. I got 56 right. It’s not a hard quiz. I only had to guess four times, and luckily two of the guesses were correct. One miss was a dumb mistake – The Sound of Music was based on a book, but that wasn’t the name of the book; although frankly, the lyricist isn’t the person who wrote the play’s book, so their answer is wrong, too. And once I was in a hurry, so despite knowing the right answer I put my cursor over the wrong name. Lesson learned!

(15) YOU’RE HIRED. “Marvel Sets James Spader to Return as Ultron for Vision Quest” – details in The Hollywood Reporter.

The Emmy-winning actor is set to reprise his role as the voice of robotic villain Ultron in Marvel Studios’ untitled Vision series, the follow-up series to its acclaimed WandaVision show. He first played the role in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Paul Bettany is reprising his role as Vision, the android who fell in love with the Scarlett Witch and then was destroyed by Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War. In WandaVision, he returned via magic and the power of grief but also as a rebuilt android, now ghostly white.

Terry Matalas, the much-heralded showrunner of Star Trek: Picard, is spearheading the new show, which has been referred to as Vision Quest, although that is not its official title, and which tackles white Vision’s search for a new purpose in life….

(16) NSFW, DID WE MENTION THAT? [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Blood. Tits. The Word Fuck. Repeatedly. You’ve been warned. It’s a great trailer. “’Twilight of the Gods’ Red Band Teaser Delivers Blood, Sex and Dragons” in Animation Magazine.

Netflix today unleashed a quite NSFW red band teaser for Zack Snyder’s highly anticipated adult animated saga Twilight of the Gods, arriving covered in blood (and other bodily fluids, judging from the footage) on September 19. The eight-episode, 2D-animated series is set in the brutal, carnal yet complex realm of Norse Mythology. (You can read more in our interview with executive producers Zack and Deborah Snyder in the upcoming September/October issue of Animation Magazine.)…

(17) CARD FLIPPING DOMINO VIDEO. [Item by Daniel Dern.] That’s a lotta decks of cards!

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Star Trek: Crew’s Logs – ‘Efficiency Officer’”. “You know none of this happens on other ships, right?”

The Crew’s Log series shows you what life is like for the crew members aboard Star Trek TNG’s USS Enterprise. In this episode, the Efficiency Officer goes over some suggestions on how the senior staff could better manage the ship.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Paul Weimer, Jon Meltzer, Susan de Guardiola, Steve Green, Andrew (not Werdna), Daniel Dern, Chris Barkley, 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 Bill.]

Pixel Scroll 9/8/23 Pixel? I Don’t Need A Pixel, My File Is On The Bandstand, My Scroll Is On The Floor

Posted on by

(1) ATTACKING THE KILLER TOMATOES. “The most overrated metric in movies is erratic, reductive, and easily hacked,” says Vulture, nevertheless, “Rotten Tomatoes Still Has Hollywood in Its Grip”.

…“The studios didn’t invent Rotten Tomatoes, and most of them don’t like it,” says the filmmaker Paul Schrader. “But the system is broken. Audiences are dumber. Normal people don’t go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do.”

In a recent interview, Quentin Tarantino, whose next film is reportedly called The Movie Critic, admitted that he no longer reads critics’ work. “Today, I don’t know anyone,” he said (in a translation of his remarks, first published in French). “I’m told, ‘Manohla Dargis, she’s excellent.’ But when I ask what are the three movies she loved and the three she hated in the last few years, no one can answer me. Because they don’t care!”

This is probably because Rotten Tomatoes — with help from Yelp, Goodreads, and countless other review aggregators — has desensitized us to the opinions of individual critics. Once upon a time, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert turned the no-budget documentary Hoop Dreams into a phenomenon using only their thumbs. But critical power like that has been replaced by the collective voice of the masses. A third of U.S. adults say they check Rotten Tomatoes before going to the multiplex, and while movie ads used to tout the blurbage of Jeffrey Lyons and Peter Travers, now they’re more likely to boast that a film has been “Certified Fresh.”…

(2) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to munch on a monstrous fish sandwich with Michael Bailey in Episode 206 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Michael Bailey

This might be my most horrific conversation yet! Not merely because of my guest — but because certain scenes from Night of the Living Dead were shot in the basement of our chosen venue, The Original Oyster House!

Michael Bailey is an award-winning writer and editor, having been nominated for a Bram Stoker Award nine times, winning once for the anthology The Library of the Dead, and a four-time Shirley Jackson Award nominee. His novels include Palindrome Hannah (2005) and Phoenix Rose (2009). His short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Birthing Monsters: Frankenstein’s Cabinet of Curiosities and Cruelties, Lost Highways: Dark Fictions from the Road, Canopic Jars: Tales of Mummies and Mummification, and most recently Hybrid: Misfits, Monsters and Other Phenomena.

Many of these stories have been gathered in the collections Scales and Petals (2010), Inkblots and Blood Spots (2014), Oversight (2018), and The Impossible Weight of Life (2020). He’s the owner of the small press Written Backwards, which has published many excellent anthologies, and I’m not calling them excellent simply because my own short stories have appeared in many of them. He’s currently the screenwriter for the documentary series Madness and Writers: The Untold Truth. Maybe?, which all of us in the horror community are looking forward to seeing.

We discussed his Stoker Award-nominated poetry collaboration with Marge Simon (and how they managed not to kill each other during the writing of it), how he knows when a poem is a poem and not a short story, what reading other anthologies taught him that made his own anthologies better, the economics of small press publishing, how to lose awards gracefully, the way getting an early story torn apart by Douglas E. Winter at Borderlands Boot Camp gave him the boost he needed, why his novel Psychotropic Dragon took 16 years to transform from an idea into a book, how one of the joys of writing is never knowing the end until you get there, his new obsession of making chocolate from fruit to bar, our shared love of revising continually, and so much more.

(3) SAAVIK JUSTICE WARRIOR. Charlie Jane Anders is back with “7 Hot Takes About Star Trek” at Happy Dancing. I second this motion:

4. We need a Saavik TV show or movie.

I understand why Jean-Luc Picard became the first Star Trek character to headline a TV series — because after all, Patrick Stewart is a beloved figure, even to extremely casual Trek fans. But when I think about Star Trek characters who both need and deserve to be explored further in long-form storytelling, my mind goes to Saavik. Even in a film as overstuffed with goodness as Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan, Saavik stands out as one of the most interesting characters: an ambitious young Vulcan who looks up to Spock while also striving to embody the Starfleet values that Kirk often overlooks (because they come in the form of regulations.) Later, there are hints that she’s half-Romulan. The treatment of Saavik after Wrath of Khan is one of the worst travesties in Star Trek history: first, she helps the rejuvenated but rapidly-aging Spock through a slew of pon-farrs, then she’s tossed aside. Saavik is basically transformed into one of many plot devices in a clunky movie that only exists to bring Leonard Nimoy back to the franchise he’d been so eager to escape. Saavik was supposed to return in Star Trek VI as a traitor to the Federation, but she was replaced by Valeris. I have so many questions about this character: Does she have Spock’s baby? Why didn’t she go with Kirk and the others in Star Trek IV? How does she approach her return to the Federation after everything she went through? Justice for Saavik!

(4) DRAWN THAT WAY. BBC Culture analyzes “The legacy of Star Trek: The Animated Series, 50 years on”.

On a remote planet, the Guardian of Forever sits, a passageway through time to other realities, locations, dimensions. All of a sudden, Captain Kirk comes through the portal, with Spock close behind him, fresh from an adventure observing the beginnings of the Orion civilisation. There’s just one problem: Dr Bones McCoy has no idea who Spock is – and neither does anyone else on the starship USS Enterprise.  

This scene, from an episode called Yesteryear, doesn’t feature in any of the five core Star Trek series. The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise are modern classics that contain unending nostalgia for fans, but there’s another early Star Trek show that many people overlook – Star Trek: The Animated Series. It ran for just 20 episodes. Its status, and specifically whether it’s considered part of the “canon”, is uncertain. But it has an important legacy, bringing animation in as a key part of the franchise as well as keeping Star Trek in people’s minds during an in-between era, much like the one we’re entering now….

(5) BAD REVIEWS. Mark Roth-Whitworth’s “Bad reviews, good and bad” is about what make a bad review poorly written — it’s not about the review, it’s about style and form.

…I’ve always heard that any publicity is good publicity, but that’s not always the case… and not all bad reviews are equal….

…A legitimate bad review follows the kind of review that most are, dealing with things like writing, worldbuilding, etc. The bad review I looked at violated two basic rules…

(6) DEEP DIVE ON AI AND COPYRIGHT. “Potential Supreme Court clash looms over copyright issues in generative AI training data” at VentureBeat.

… The question is: How did we get here? How did the trillions of data points at the core of generative AI become a toxin of sorts that, depending on your point of view and the decision of the highest judicial authority, could potentially hobble an industry destined for incredible innovation, or poison the well of human creativity and consent?…

… But whether AI researchers creating and using datasets for model training thought about it or not, there is no doubt that the data underpinning generative AI — which can arguably be described as its secret sauce — includes vast amounts of copyrighted material, from books and Reddit posts to YouTube videos, newspaper articles and photos. However, copyright critics and some legal experts insist this falls under what is known in legal parlance as “fair use” of the data — that is, U.S. copyright law “permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder.”… 

… However, the concept of “fair use” is based on a four-factor test — four measures that judges consider when evaluating whether a work is “transformative” or simply a copy: the purpose and character of the work, the nature of the work, the amount taken from the original work, and the effect of the new work on a potential market. That fourth factor is the key to how generative AI really differs, say experts, because it aims to assess whether the use of the copyrighted material has the potential to negatively impact the commercial value of the original work or impede opportunities for the copyright holder to exploit their work in the market — which is exactly what artists, authors, journalists and other creative professionals claim. 

“The Handmaid’s Tale” author Margaret Atwood, who discovered that 33 of her books were part of the Books3 dataset, explained this concern bluntly in a recent Atlantic essay: 

“Once fully trained, the bot may be given a command—’Write a Margaret Atwood novel’—and the thing will glurp forth 50,000 words, like soft ice cream spiraling out of its dispenser, that will be indistinguishable from something I might grind out. (But minus the typos.) I myself can then be dispensed with—murdered by my replica, as it were—because, to quote a vulgar saying of my youth, who needs the cow when the milk’s free?”…

(7) MISSION IMPERTURBABLE. Here are links to four more installments of Cass Morris’ diary from her adventures on Disney’s Star Wars-themed Starship Halcyon.

…Noah and I started at Weapons, which was simple but very satisfying: I was aiming, Noah was firing. I really can’t overstate how cool it is to play the game on that enormous viewport. It’s very easy to forget you’re not actually in space, firing lasers. From there we moved to Shields (I think; I may have steps 2 and 3 backwards in my brain), which is essentially playing Pong, but it’s also so satisfying. We both liked this station best — which apparently is an unusual choice? But we were very good at it. (This would be important later). Loaders was a bit like weapons, with one of us moving and the other grabbing cargo out of space. Then Systems was the hardest by far — but I think my second-favorite station. The display tosses up a sequence of positions that the console’s various dials, buttons, and toggles need to be in, and you have to match it as fast as possible to keep the ship in good repair. That station was manic. There are so many buttons. It was genuinely hard to keep track of them! But hard in a fun way….

Followed by —

(8) EXERTING A SPELL. The one book that makes the £50,000 Wolfson Prize Shortlist worth noting here is Portable Magic A History of Books and their Readers.

Portable Magic unfurls an exciting and iconoclastic new story of the book in human hands, exploring when, why and how it acquired its particular hold over us. Gathering together a millennium’s worth of pivotal encounters with volumes big and small, Smith reveals that, as much as their contents, it is books’ physical form – their ‘bookhood’ – that lends them their distinctive and sometimes dangerous magic. From the Diamond Sutra to Jilly Cooper’s Riders, to a book made of wrapped slices of cheese, this composite artisanal object has, for centuries, embodied and extended relationships between readers, nations, ideologies and cultures, in significant and unpredictable ways.

Exploring the unexpected and unseen consequences of our love affair with books, Portable Magic hails the rise of the mass-market paperback, and dismantles the myth that print began with Gutenberg; it reveals how our reading habits have been shaped by American soldiers, and proposes new definitions of a ‘classic’-and even of the book itself. Ultimately, it illuminates the ways in which our relationship with the written word is more reciprocal – and more turbulent – than we tend to imagine.

(9) BROOKLYN SCIFI FILM FESTIVAL. The 135 short and feature length films selected for screening at this year’s Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival are listed at the link above. The festival runs October 9 through the 15, and fans from around the world are welcome to join this one-of-a-kind event as all films will be made available online for streaming and rating through Brooklyn SciFi’s Netflix style festival platform. 

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 8, 1925 — Peter Sellers. Chief Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films which are genre. Of course, he had the tour de force acting experience of being Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley and Dr. Strangelove in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. He also took multiple roles (even the Queen) in The Mouse That Roared. Amusingly he was involved many folk tale productions in various mediums (film, radio, stage) including Cinderella, Tom Thumb, Mother Goose and Jack and The Beanstalk. (Died 1980.)
  • Born September 8, 1937 — Archie Goodwin. Comics writer and editor with a very long career. He was the writer and editor of the horror Creepy and Eerie anthologies, the first writer on the Iron Man series, wrote comic book adaptations for Marvel of the two Star Wars sequels and edited the Star Wars line for them. For DC, he edited Starman which Robinson said he was inspiration for. (Died 1998.)
  • Born September 8, 1945 — Willard Huyck, 78. He’s got a long relationship with Lucas, first writing American Graffiti and being the script doctor on Star Wars before writing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom before being the writer and director on Howard the Duck which, yes, is a Lucasfilm. It’s the lowest rated on Rotten Tomatos Lucasfilm production ever at 15% followed by Radioland Murders, the last script he’d write for Lucasfilm.  
  • Born September 8, 1952 — Linda D. Addison, 71. First Black winner of the Stoker Award which she has won five times which is rather amazing. Equally amazing, the first two awards were for her poetry collections Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes and Being Full of Light, Insubstantial. Indeed all five of her Awards were to be for poetry collections. She also is the author of the story “Shadow Dreams”, published in the Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda anthology.
  • Born September 8, 1954 — Mark Lindsay Chapman, 69. Sorry DCU but the best Swamp Thing series was done nearly thirty years ago and starred the late Dick Durock as Swamp Thing and this actor as his chief antagonist, Dr. Anton Arcane. Short on CGI, but the scripts were brilliant. Chapman has also shown up in Poltergeist: The Legacy, The New Adventures of Superman, The Langoliers and Max Headroom to name a few of his genre appearances.
  • Born September 8, 1965 — Matt Ruff, 58. I think that his Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy is his best work to date though I do like Fool on The Hill a lot. Any others of his I should think about reading? And of course there is the adaptation of Lovecraft Country which I’ve not seen as I don’t have HBO. He won an Otherwise Award for Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls, and an Endeavour Award for The Lovecraft Country.
  • Born September 8, 1975 — C. Robert Cargill, 48. He, along with Scott Derrickson and Jon Spaihts, worked on the script for Doctor Strange. More intriguingly they’re writing the script for The Outer Limits, a movie based on the television show. The film if ever happens, produced by MGM, will be adapted from just the “Demon with a Glass Hand” episode begging the question of what they’re writing for a script given that Ellison did write the Writers Guild of America Awards Outstanding Script for a Television Anthology script. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Flying McCoys shows the doctor is surprised by results of Dracula’s medical test.

(12) THREE PINTS OF PLOT IN A TEN GALLON HAT. The Guardian’s Stuart Heritage is not an Ahsoka fan: “Oh dear, George Lucas! Why the Star Wars universe is going from bad to worse”.

It must be very complicated being George Lucas. On the one hand, you get to wake up inside a vast Scrooge McDuck money vault every morning. On the other, you have to live with the absolute mess Disney has made of your life’s work. To be George Lucas must be to know that you are indirectly responsible for allowing something as soggy and aimless as Ahsoka to seep into the world.

Ahsoka has now reached its halfway point, with four of its eight episodes aired, and it’s fair to say that literally nothing has happened. We know what’s going to happen, because the characters won’t stop talking about it – they’re going to meet a new baddie who has been banished to a different galaxy and represents an enormous existential threat – but the show is plodding towards it so glacially that it feels as if we may never actually get there. It’s almost (almost!) as if Star Wars realises it has spread itself too thin and is doling out plot one measly quarter-portion at a time….

(13) FILL UP THE THIRD. Simultaneous Times Vol.3, a science fiction anthology, is now available from Space Cowboy Books. Edited by Jean-Paul L. Garnier, with cover art by Austin Hart (Critters Award Winner).

Sixteen wonderous stories of science fiction by authors from all over the world! From alien invasions to sentient plants to intergalactic travelers, this book has it all. Featuring stories from the 2023 Laureate Award winning, and two-time Hugo Award longlisted podcast Simultaneous Times, as well as stories appearing for the first time, this collection spans multiple generations of award-winning science fiction authors and covers a wide variety of SF styles and themes.

Stories by: Jonathan Nevair (Indie Ink Award Finalist); F. J. Bergmann (Writers of the Future Winner); Brent A. Harris (Sidewise Finalist); Gideon Marcus (Hugo Finalist); A. C. Wise (Sunburst Winner); Tara Campbell (Robert Gover Story Prize Winner); David Brin (Hugo Winner); Robin Rose Graves (Laureate Award Finalist); Renan Bernardo (Argos & Utopia Award Finalist); Christopher Ruocchio (Manly Wade Wellman Winner); Toshiya Kamei; Todd Sullivan; Susan Rukeyser; Ai Jiang (Nebula Finalist); Cora Buhlert (Hugo Winner); Michael Butterworth (Laureate Award Winner).

(14) THE TWO-EDGED SWORD OF TRUTH. Talya Zax introduces readers to “The Woman Who Reimagined the Dystopian Novel” in The New Yorker.

…The world of the Swedish writer Karin Boye’s little-known 1940 novel, “Kallocain,” is a close cousin to those depicted in “We” and “Brave New World.” Like Zamyatin’s and Huxley’s dystopias, Boye’s underground World State is a centralized authoritarian society whose inhabitants’ lives are tightly controlled. And, as in these earlier novels, Boye’s closed state is destabilized by the experience of awe. That wonder, however, is sparked by a contact not with the unpredictable and ungovernable external world but with the equally unpredictable and ungovernable reality of human experience—and, specifically, female experience. The women characters in many classic twentieth-century dystopias tend to be flat, mere foils to male protagonists. But in “Kallocain” it is the inner lives of women that come to illustrate both the state’s power over its citizens and their own power to resist….

… Dystopias weaponize what they fear. The World State of “Kallocain” fears truth, and therefore weaponizes truth. It fears familial bonds, so it weaponizes them, too. In her description of that process, Boye articulates a deceptively simple idea: when the state creates a weapon that requires human coöperation, it opens the door to that weapon being used against it….

(15) NOT JUST MOURNING COLORS. “To dye for: why Victorian Britain was more colourful than we think” explains the Guardian.

…A decade earlier, the flamboyant purple dresses made fashionable by the style leader Empress Eugénie of France were the preserve of the fabulously wealthy. Yet in just a few years, colours once made with expensive vegetable dyes were being industrially produced cheaply, thanks to an accidental discovery by an 18-year-old chemistry student William Henry Perkin. While attempting to synthesise quinine from aniline, a derivative of coal tar, Perkin realised the intense purples this colourless chemical produced could be used as a dye. He quickly established a factory for his new “mauveine”, as he called this early synthetic dye and chemists across Europe soon followed suit, expanding the synthetic colour palette. “The modern world of ubiquitous colour begins at this point,” says Winterbottom. “London’s streets and train stations are covered in brightly printed posters. People wear brightly coloured clothes. Everything from books to postage stamps becomes colourful.”

This rainbow transformation affected the entire social spectrum, from a working class who were now able to afford bright colours to members of the social elite rethinking their wardrobes. “Women asserted a more emboldened identity through colour,” says Winterbottom. In addition to loud dresses, ankles sporting coloured and striped stockings could be flashed thanks to newly swinging steel-hooped crinoline petticoats, which replaced the layers of fabric that previously helped to fill out skirts….

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Francis Hamit, Jeff Smith, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jeff Smith.]

Pixel Scroll 10/31/19 The World of Scroll-A

Posted on by

(1) CUTTING CAPERS. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures picked a highly suitable day to announce they have added an important item to their collection.

(2) KNIVES OUT AT JPL. No gourd is safe when “NASA-JPL Holds Its Annual Pumpkin-Carving Contest”.

In a dark conference room, a pumpkin gently landed on the Moon, its retrorockets smoldering, while across the room, a flying saucer pumpkin hovered above Area 51 as a pumpkin alien wreaked havoc.

Suffice to say that when the scientists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, compete in a pumpkin-carving contest, the solar system’s the limit. Now in its ninth year, the contest gives teams only one hour to carve (off the clock, on their lunch break), though they can prepare non-pumpkin materials – like backgrounds, sound effects and motorized parts – ahead of time….

(3) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to devour Cthulhu with World Horror Grandmaster Ramsey Campbell – serving is in progress in Episode 108 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Ramsey published his H. P. Lovecraft-inspired first book of stories The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants in 1964 when he was only 18, and hasn’t stopped since. He’s a two-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, a four-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, and a TWELVE-time winner of the British Fantasy Award. He’s also received lifetime achievement World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Awards, and was named a World Horror Grandmaster. Previous guest of the podcast T. E. D. Klein called his collection Demons by Daylight “perhaps the most important book of horror fiction since Lovecraft’s The Outsider and Others.” High praise indeed!

We got together on the final day of Worldcon, long after the 4:30 p.m. closing ceremonies had ended. So instead of traipsing around to the usual dead dog parties, we had dinner at Rosa Madre, which I found via Eater’s list of the 38 Essential Dublin restaurants — where at one point as I looked across the table, it seemed as if he was nibbling on Cthulhu! (And sure, I know it was only baby octopus, and not the the Great Old One … but we horror writers like to dream.)

We discussed his early relationship with Arkham House editor and publisher August Derleth, who he might have been had he never discovered H. P. Lovecraft, how this master of unease is able to keep the sense of dread going for the length of a novel (hint: he’s not entirely sure himself), why he loves The Blair Witch Project, what it was like writing novels in the Universal monsters universe, how he felt when The Times listed The Doll That Ate its Mother as one of the silliest titles of 1987, how Twilight Zone editor T. E. D. Klein changed his life, our shared memories of the 1979 World Fantasy Convention, why he feels his attempts to write science fiction have been “clumsy,” the way he was made speechless on his first meeting with J. G. Ballard, why he admires Vladimir Nabokov, and much more.

(4) DO THE POSTER MASH. Space.com points to some free downloads: “‘Galaxy of Horrors!’ NASA Posters Highlight Spooky Alien Planets”.

This Halloween season, NASA wants to open your eyes to the glorious spookiness all around us in the Milky Way galaxy.

The space agency has just released two new “Galaxy of Horrors” posters, which highlight a few of the most bizarre and inhospitable alien planets that scientists have discovered. And NASA created a fun 2-minute video, styled like a trailer for a 1950s horror movie, to promote the posters. 

You can download the posters for free here.

(5) PAST TOMORROWS. Barbara Kiser’s book reviews for Nature touch on Sarah Cole’s study of H.G. Wells, Inventing Tomorrow.

H. G. Wells was, asserts scholar Sarah Cole, a pioneer adept at “rescaling the cosmos and humanity’s place in it”. He straddled the border between science and literature, but not all his complexities were benign: he both repudiated racism and for some time shamefully ascribed to ideas on eugenics. Cole adroitly captures Wells, from his mould-breaking books (such as the 1895 science-fiction classic The Time Machine and 1920 Outline of History) to his unlikely intellectual kinship with subtle modernists such as Virginia Woolf.

(6) GRADE INFLATION. Morning Consult attempts to answer the question: “Rotten Tomatoes Scores Continue to Freshen. What Does This Mean for Movies?”

In recent years, Rotten Tomatoes has been ripe for the picking by movie marketers that want to tout a film’s high critics score from the website in their advertising. But as the Tomatometer’s average score continues to increase, experts are divided on why this is happening and how the industry will harvest Rotten Tomatoes’ ratings going forward.

David A. Gross, a movie consultant that runs Franchise Entertainment Research Inc., found that scores for wide-release films have been fluctuating since 1998’s recorded average of 46. However, averages have been increasing every year since 2014, with this year’s average coming in at 59.3, as of Oct. 28, 1.4 points higher than 2018’s 57.9.

(7) MORE REACTIONS TO SCORSESE, COPPOLA. Michael Ordoña asks “If comic-book movies aren’t emotional and psychological cinema, why are we crying?” in the Los Angeles Times.

… The director of “The Godfather” and “Captain EO” added: “Martin was kind when he said it’s not cinema. He didn’t say it’s despicable, which I just say it is.”

Andrea Letamendi, associate director of mental health training, intervention and response at UCLA, sees more in the best of these films than these giants of cinema do.

“Superhero films are giving us a way to practice and explore really important emotional processes that we may not be able to examine in our everyday lives. In ‘Endgame,’ the more fantastical, the better, because that gives us the supportive safety net to be open and vulnerable and curious about these things,” she says.

“Not to pat ourselves on the back,” says Christopher Markus, co-writer (with Stephen McFeely) of six MCU movies including the three-hour “Endgame,” “but we snuck an hourlong movie about loss and grief into the [start of the] biggest movie of all time. That’s a lot of people who sat with that issue in their heads for an hour.”

He says of villain Thanos’ cataclysmic action, “We wanted the Snap to be as profound as we could make it. The way to do that was to have all the characters sit with the impact, the unfixability of it, rather than scrambling around. We were interested in seeing what happens to these people whose sole purpose in life is solving problems, faced with a problem they did not solve.”

… Clinical psychologist Letamendi agrees. ”It’s a truly sophisticated portrayal. … How different characters cope with that loss really matters in terms of how we relate to them and how we might relate to our own losses.

“The term for that is ‘parasocial relationships’ — non-delusional emotional connections with fictional characters. I know Tony Stark isn’t real, but I’ve formed a long-lasting relationship with his character, so when we see him go through these difficult changes: the adversity, his self-doubt and, ultimately, his death, this is, in our world, difficult to deal with. The grief, the confusion, sometimes the anger — those feelings are real. I think there’s some value to that.

(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • October 31, 1962 — First Spaceship On Venus premiered In the Eastern Bloc. It’s a 1960 East German/Polish film based on the 1951 Stanis?aw Lem novel The Astronauts. Lem did not like it at all and ask his name to be removed as he hated the strident politicization of the story. IMDB still lists him as the story source. Mystery Science Theater 3000 would lampoon it in 2008. 
  • October 31, 1964 — Doctor Who returned to BBC with the premiere of its second season.  The first arc was titled “Planet of Giants.” William Hartnell Was the First Doctor with three companions present: Carole Ann Ford (Susan Foreman), Jacqueline Hill (Barbara Wright) and William Russell (Ian Chesterton). Episodes 3 and 4 are for the most part missing in the Great BBC Purge. 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born October 31, 1923 — Arthur W. Saha. A member of the Futurians and First Fandom who was an editor at Wollheim’s DAW Books including editing the Annual World’s Best SF from 1972 to 1990 and Year’s Best Fantasy Stories from 1975 to 1988. And he’s credited with coming up with the term “Trekkie” in 1967. (Died 1999.)
  • Born October 31, 1936 — Michael Landon. Tony Rivers inI Was a Teenage Werewolf. (That film made two million on an eighty thousand dollar budget. Nice.) That and playing the lead as Jonathan Smith in Highway to Heaven are I think his only genre roles. (Died 1991.)
  • Born October 31, 1946 — Stephen Rea, 73. An extensive genre history including V for Vendetta, Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles, Underworld Waking, The Werewolf Among Us and Counterpart.
  • Born October 31, 1950 — John Candy. Best known in genre circles for playing Barf in Mel Brook’s Spaceballs but he also played Wink Wilkinson in Frank Oz’s  Little Shop of Horrors, Kalishak in Boris and Natasha: The Movie, and was the narrator of the “Blumpoe the Grumpoe Meets Arnold the Cat/Millions of Cats” of Shelley Duvall’s Bedtime Stories. (Died 1994.)
  • Born October 31, 1959 — Neal Stephenson, 60. Some years back, one of the local bookstores had an sf book reading group. One of the staff who was a member of that group (as was I) took extreme dislike to The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. I don’t remember now why but it made re-read that (which was good) and Snow Crash (equally good). My favorite novel by him is The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. 
  • Born October 31, 1961 — Peter Jackson, 58. I’m going to confess that I watched and liked the first of the Lord of The Rings films but got no further than that. I was never fond of The Two Towers as a novel so it wasn’t something I wanted to see as a film, and I like The Hobbit just fine as a novel thank you much. Now the Adventures of Tintin is quite nice indeed. 
  • Born October 31, 1979 — Erica Cerra, 40. Best known as Deputy Jo Lupo on Eureka, certainly one of the best SF series ever done. She had a brief recurring role as Maya in Battlestar Galactica, plus one-offs in pretty much anything you’d care to mention in roles such as Pretty Girl. 
  • Born October 31, 1993 — Letitia Wright,  26. She co-starred in Black Panther playing Shuri, King T’Challa’s sister and princess of Wakanda.  (Yes, she is in both Avengers films.) Before that, she was Anahson in “Face the Raven”, a Twelfth Doctor story, and was in the Black Mirror’s “Black Museum” episode. 
  • Born October 31, 1999 — Danielle Russell, 20. She played Hope Mikaelson in The Originals, a spin-off of The Vampire Dairies. In something I’ve never seen before, she went on to portray that character in Legacies, a spin-off of The Originals which makes it a spin-off of a spin-off!  

(10) FAN FICTION BLOSSOMS. The Washington Post’s Avi Selk profiles the horror fan fiction site Nosleep, whose alumni have sold novels and gotten writing gigs on the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House: “Inside the horror website that’s freaking out millions of people”.

…Druga is the top administrator on Nosleep, whose indistinguishable mixture of the real and merely realistic (weighed heavily toward the latter, most likely) has helped it grow into the Internet’s main source of amateur horror stories — with more than 13 million subscribers and hundreds of thousands of posts along the lines of “My neighbor has been mowing his lawn for 12 hours straight” and “My granddad used to come to my room at night wearing a mask. Now I know why.”

(11) MORE JEOPARDY! WRONGNESS. Andrew Porter would hate for you to miss another fabulously bad guess by a Jeopardy! contestant.

Category: Fictional Flags Flying.

Answer: After arriving by submarine, this character claims the South Pole with a black flag baring a gold “N”.

Wrong question: “Who is Bugs Bunny?”

Right question: “Who is Nemo?”

(12) THE DEATH OF FRANCHISES? [Item by Olav Rokne.] Dueling articles in today’s Guardian offer arguments against two major franchises, as Ben Child argues that it’s no longer possible to make a ‘good’ Star Wars movie, and Stuart Heritage proclaims bluntly that Game of Thrones should die. While each of them makes some good points about the flaws that seem to be plaguing the subjects of their respective ire, they might go a little far. 

Ben Child challenges: “Spent force: why is making a good Star Wars film so hard?”  

Star Wars’s directors must feel like the Hollywood equivalent of all those unfortunate Imperial admirals in the original trilogy. One misplaced Rebel fleet and it’s instant death by studio chokehold.

Stuart Heritage says “It’s time for the Game of Thrones universe to die”.  

Television is littered with the corpses of unnecessary spinoffs, from Caprica to AfterMASH, Baywatch Nights to Joey. … At this point, with a tainted brand, an irritated fanbase and a pilot that’s proved a colossal waste of effort,perhaps the sensible thing would be for HBO to ditch Game of Thrones altogether.

Overall, the articles do beg the question: under what circumstances should a franchise be left to die, or at least be abandoned to lie fallow before they can be rediscovered by a new generation? It’s a question that’s worth discussing in an era of nonstop franchise maintenance. 

(13) ION STORM AHEAD CAPTAIN. Nature tells of “A 100-kiloparsec wind feeding the circumgalactic medium of a massive compact galaxy”. From the abstract —

…Theory points to galactic winds as the primary source of the enriched and massive circumgalactic medium3,4,5,6. Winds from compact starbursts have been observed to flow to distances somewhat greater than ten kiloparsecs7,8,9,10, but the circumgalactic medium typically extends beyond a hundred kiloparsecs3,4. Here are observations of the massive but compact galaxy SDSS J211824.06+001729.4 of a 100-kiloparsec wind.

(14) JAVA IN WESTEROS. BBC delves into “Game of Thrones’ coffee cup and 6 other TV and film bloopers”.

Game of Thrones actress Emilia Clarke has revealed who was responsible for the show’s infamous coffee cup scene.

In one episode of the eighth season, eagle-eyed viewers spotted a coffee cup on the table in the great hall, as Mother of Dragons Daenerys Targaryen sat, more appropriately, with goblet in hand.

Now, Clarke has revealed her co-star Conleth Hill, who portrayed master of spies Lord Varys, admitted to being responsible for the error during a pre-awards show party in September.

(15) DEAD PERFECT. Google Nest was holding auditions for its Nest doorbell, you see….

She was born to die to play this role. Obvi. It wasn’t easy, but we found an actual ghost to record spooky, Halloween sounds for the Nest Hello doorbell.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvs1koDRgLI

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, JJ, John King Tarpinian, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Olav Rokne, Mike Kennedy, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Niall McAuley.]

Pixel Scroll 8/29/19 Come A Little Bit Closer, You’re My Kind of Pixel And The Scroll Title Is So Long

Posted on by

(1) FAREWELL. Martin Hoare’s funeral was held today. Pete Young shared a photo of the casket (posted here with permission.)

Yes, it was used for Martin. He was inside, then Martin + Tardis were cremated. I could not get any closer but I believe the Tardis was painted on it; I think it was Hazel Langford who told me it was Martin’s girlfriend’s idea. Needless to say the coffin was bigger on the inside…

(2) SURVIVABILITY OF SHORT SFF. Neil Clarke speaks again about the problems with the current economic model of short fiction in the sff field. Thread starts here.

(3) STRETCHING…THE IMAGINATION. The Irish Times’ Karlin Lillington kicks off a multi-installment report about Dublin 2019 in “Net Results: Sci-fi, spandex and the wonders of WorldCon”. Yes, there is a paragraph about Spandex, but there is much more…

…I hadn’t realised how apparently old-school I was until I discovered that one panel at WorldCon was entitled Continuing Relevance of older SF, which questioned whether 20th-century writing was still relevant in the 21st (answer: yes). Among the writers it listed as older and of a past era were Isaac Asimov, Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood – yikes, really?

 The discussion was lively and intense and intelligent – and this was the real joy, for me, of this entire colossal event, alongside the surprising (and vast) range of the hundreds upon hundreds of sessions over five days.

My assumptions were immediately and happily demolished. I’d looked forward to learning about some new writers and had thought there might also be some intriguing overlap with technology. But the science element was just as high-profile as the fiction….

(4) LOTS MORE WORLDCON REPORTS.

(5) RESNICK. The GoFundMe to “Help Mike Resnick pay off a near-death experience” surpassed its $15,000 goal overnight — and a new goal of $30,000 has been set. Contribute at the link.

Mike and Carol Rensick are at a loss for words about how successful this GoFundMe campaign has become. (Which says a lot, since as a storyteller Mike is well known for his words.) They cannot thank everyone enough–there are not the words to say how much all of you have changed a very bad year for the better.

Many people have asked them why, with so many weeks in ICU and bills much surpassing any modest number, we had only set the fundraiser goal to $15;000. But in Mike’s mind, $100 is a lot to ask for, let alone $15,000. He had not realised how beloved in the field he is, and how much we all love the opportunity to “pay it back” for all he has given to the science fiction and fantasy community.

Mike is composing and thank you message as we speak–once he can pick up his jaw up from the ground and find the words–but in the meantime we have been encouraged to increase the GoFundMe goal, and so we have! We have doubled the number to $30,000.

(6) LIBRARIES AND DIGITAL BOOKS. Tom Mercer, Senior Vice President of cloudLibrary, has written an email about the many changes impacting libraries and their ability to offer high-quality digital lending services to library users. He discusses why these shifts are happening, how libraries can respond, and what bibliotheca is doing to support libraries — “bibliotheca leadership responds to publisher model changes”.

…Now, fast-forward to the digital library lending market today, where we’re seeing a shift from several of the major publishing companies. Blackstone Audio is embargoing audiobook titles for 90 days, Hachette has changed from perpetual access to two-year expirations (also implemented by Penguin Random House last October), and Macmillan will limit the quantity of frontlist titles effective November 1. It’s unlikely that all of these publishers would be changing their terms without external pressures. So, where is the pressure coming from? ?There is evidence to suggest that in recent years, authors and agents have come to feel that the library market is eroding their revenue. I think it’s telling that Macmillan CEO John Sargent addressed his letter about the library model change to “Macmillan Authors, Macmillan Illustrators and Agents.” 

This begs the next question: if authors and agents are voicing concerns about library lending, where are they getting their data from? I doubt it’s publishers, since a report on library lending is not part of an author’s royalty statement. There is only one company that has access to readers’ digital retail purchases as well as users’ digital library borrowing habits, and that is Amazon.

In 2009, Amazon created a publishing division, Amazon Publishing, which doesn’t sell any of its eBooks or audiobooks to libraries. They have teams of people talking with authors and agents trying to secure rights and make them as exclusive as possible to the Amazon ecosystem. It’s highly probable that they use the data provided by library users to argue that library lending is undercutting retail sales. This is a major concern that we need to understand and to face together as an industry.

(7) MARVEL 1000 ISSUE HAS AN ISSUE. “Marvel Revises Comic in Which Captain America Called U.S. ‘Deeply Flawed’” – the New York Times has the story.

…Captain America reflects on the symbolism of his costume in a newly published essay by Mark Waid, which was changed from an earlier version in which he called his country “deeply flawed.”Marvel Entertainment

Marvel Comics No. 1000, a special issue in honor of 80 years of storytelling, was supposed to be a cause for celebration. But revisions to one page of the comic, which came out Wednesday, are casting a pall over the festivities.

The page, written by Mark Waid and drawn by John Cassady, is narrated by Captain America. In earlier versions of the page that comic-book retailers received in July, the star-spangled hero opened with: “I’m asked how it is possible to love a country that’s deeply flawed. It’s hard sometimes. The system isn’t just. We’ve treated some of our own abominably.”

He went on to say that fixing America’s system is “hard and bloody work” but that it could be done when enough people take to the streets, call for revolution and say, “Injustice will not stand.”

Captain America concludes: “That’s what you can love about America.”

The version that arrived in stores and online, however, has new text, also written by Waid, in which Captain America ruminates on his own image, not the United States: “Captain America isn’t a man. It’s an idea. It’s a commitment to fight every day for justice, for acceptance and equality, for the rights of everyone in this nation.” The hero says that those qualities — “not hatred, not bigotry, not exclusion” — are the values of true patriotism.

Marvel and Waid declined to say why the page was changed. But in an email message, Waid expressed frustration at how his original text was being presented. “I’m disappointed that the cherry-picked quotes circulated by the media severely mischaracterize what was actually written,” he wrote. While the essay was critical, he added, “As written, Cap is supportive of America as a whole.”

(8) A WORD FROM OUR WILDLIFE. The Red Panda Fraction asks that I remind everyone there is only a little more than 24 hours remaining to vote in the Dragon Awards. Request a ballot at the link.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 29, 1854 — Joseph Jacobs. Australian folklorist, translator, literary critic and historian who became a notable collector and publisher of English folklore. Many of our genre writers have use of his material. “Jack the Giant Killer” becomes Charles de Lint’s Jack Of Kinrowan series!  Jack the Giant Killer and Drink Down the Moon to give an example. (Lecture mode off.) Excellent books by the way. (Died 1916.)
  • Born August 29, 1904 — Leslyn M. Heinlein. She was born Leslyn MacDonald. She was married to Robert A. Heinlein between 1932 and 1947. Her only genre writing on ISFDB is “Rocket’s Red Glare“ which was published in The Nonfiction of Robert Heinlein: Volume I.  There’s an interesting article on her and Heinlein here. (Died 1981.)
  • Born August 29, 1939 — Joel Schumacher, 80. Director of The Lost Boys and Flatliners, not mention Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. Ok, so those might not be the highlights of his career… However his Blood Creek vampirefilm starring Michael Fassbender is said to be very good. Oh, and his The Incredible Shrinking Woman is a very funny riff the original The Incredible Shrinking Man. 
  • Born August 29, 1942 — Dian Crayne. A member of LASFS, when she and Bruce Pelz divorced the party they threw inspired Larry Niven’s “What Can You Say about Chocolate-Covered Manhole Covers?” She published mystery novels under the name J.D. Crayne. A full rememberence post is here. (Died 2017.)
  • Born August 29, 1942 — Gottfried John. He’s likely best known as General Arkady Orumov on GoldenEye but I actually best remember him as Colonel Erich Weiss on the short-lived Space Rangers. He was Josef Heim in the “The Hand of Saint Sebastian” episode of the Millennium series, and played König Gustav in the German version of Rumpelstilzchen as written as collected by the Brothers Grimm. (Died 2014.)
  • Born August 29, 1945 — Robert Weinberg. Author, editor, publisher, and collector of science fiction. At Chicon 7, he received a Special Committee Award for his service to science fiction, fantasy, and horror. During the Seventies, he was the genius behind Pulp which featured interviews with pulp writers such as Walter B. Gibson and Frederick C. Davis. (Died 2016.)
  • Born August 29, 1951 — Janeen Webb, 68. Dreaming Down-Under which she co-edited with Jack Dann is an amazing anthology of Australian genre fiction, winner of a World Fantasy Award. If you’ve not read it, go do so. The Silken Road to Samarkand by her isa wonderful novel that I do also wholeheartedly recommend. Death at the Blue Elephant, the first collection of her short stories, is available at iBooks and Kindle. 
  • Born August 29, 1953 — Nancy Holder,  66. She’s an impressive four-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award. I’m not a horror fan so I can’t judge her horror novels for you, but I’ve read a number of her Buffyverse novels and I must say that she’s captured the feel of the series quite well. If you are to read but one, make it Halloween Rain. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Today’s pop culture figure, tomorrow’s museum exhibit — Bizarro.
  • Grimmy makes a monstrous theological pun.

(11) NG IN NYT. The New York Times found the name change newsworthy: “John W. Campbell Award Is Renamed After Winner Criticizes Him”.

…[Jeannette] Ng, who wrote the fantasy novel “Under the Pendulum Sun,” said in an interview on Wednesday that she was delighted by the decision. “It’s a good move away from honoring a completely obnoxious man who kept a lot of people out of the genre, who kept a lot of people from writing, who shaped the genre to his own image.” Thanks to the change, she added, “we’re now celebrating a little more neutrally a piece of history that’s not attached to his name.”

(12) ABOUT THOSE EDITORIALS. A tweet highlights one problematic view – the Wikipedia article covers this one and many more.

(13) FRESHER TOMATOES. Or is that a contradiction? “Rotten Tomatoes Adds 600 Critics After Initiative to Increase Inclusion”: Variety has the story.

A year after Rotten Tomatoes announced plans to boost diversity among its approved critics, the review aggregation site revealed it has added 600 new film commentators.

In an effort to increase representation and inclusion across the industry, the company also renewed $100,000 in grants for 2020 to assist critics from underrepresented groups to attend film festivals and industry events. In 2018 and 2019, Rotten Tomatoes has helped over 160 journalists attend film festivals by donating grant money to festivals like Toronto, Sundance and SXSW.

Last August, Rotten Tomatoes refurbished its criteria to look at an individual’s qualifications, rather than just their employer when it comes to verifying critics. The initiative also expanded its pool to newer media platforms like digital videos or podcasts. Of the new critics added this year, 55% are women, 60% are freelancers and 10% publish reviews on more modern platforms like YouTube.

(14) JEDI DRINK TRICK. TSA will treat this as a “no fly” souvenir: “Disney Coke Bottles From Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge Banned by TSA”.

The containers look too much like hand grenades, it seems.

Visitors to Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resort will not be able to take one unique item sold in the land on an airplane.

It was recently discovered that the TSA told one fan that the “thermal detonator” Coke and Sprite bottles would not be allowed in any luggage.

(15) OH NOES! A File 770 field reporter has discovered White Pumpkin M&Ms are back!

(16) RIGHT TO ASSEMBLE. BBC is there when the “James Webb Space Telescope comes together”

The successor to the Hubble observatory has reached a key milestone in its construction.

All the elements that make up the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have been brought together for the first time.

It sets the stage for some critical tests that will hopefully lead to a launch to orbit sometime in 2021.

JWST will use a colossal mirror and state-of-the-art instruments to try to see the glow from the very first stars to shine in the Universe.

It will also have the power to resolve the atmospheres of many of the new planets now being discovered beyond our Solar System, and to analyse their atmospheres for the potential for life.

(17) AIRBORNE ON MARS. CNN reports “NASA is sending a helicopter to Mars. It’ll be the first aircraft to fly on another planet”.

Before humans make it to Mars, NASA will send a helicopter to scope out the terrain.

Engineers attached a helicopter to the Mars 2020 rover ahead of its launch next summer. And if it flies successfully, it’ll be the first aircraft to fly on another planet, NASA said.

The solar-powered Mars Helicopter will be safely stowed underneath the rover until it lands at the Jezero Crater, where scientists believe water once flowed. The craft will detach from the rover and explore Mars from the air while the rover collects samples on the ground, NASA said.

If the helicopter flies, it can provide a unique vantage point for scientists to observe Mars.

If all goes well, the autonomous aircraft will snapshot aerial views of Martian cliffs, caves and craters that the land-bound rover can’t explore. And even if it doesn’t take flight, the rover can still gather important data from the surface.

(18) TECH SOLUTION. Viable strategy? BBC tells how it works: “Anti-groping stamp lets victims mark assailants”.

An anti-groping device aimed at tackling sexual harassment on public transport has been launched in Japan.

It allows victims to mark their assailants with an invisible ink stamp in the shape of a hand.

People can then use the device’s black light to identify those who have been marked.

The firm involved says it wants to help tackle the crime. But one sex abuse charity is concerned that the tech could place an added burden on victims.

Japanese firm Shachihata says it developed the stamp to help deter groping on trains in the country.

The company first announced it was developing the stamp in May after a video showing a pair of Japanese schoolgirls chasing down a suspected groper on a station platform went viral.

(19) A VISIT TO HMS TERROR. A short video on BBC about the ill-fated Franklin expedition (1845) to chart the NW Passage.  The ship, HMS Terror was found in Terror Bay, near King William Island. Video: “Franklin Expedition: New footage of wreck of HMS Terror”. (Wikipedia entry: HMS Terror (1813).)

(20) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “I Wrote A Song Using Only Hate Comments” on YouTube, Madilyn Bailey provides a song where all the lyrics come from comments made by trolls.

[Thanks to Standback, John King Tarpinain, JJ, Lis Carey, James Bacon, mlex, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, StephenfromOttawa, Hampus Eckerman, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Trey.]

Pixel Scroll 5/24/19 Timeo Filers Et Dona Pixeles

Posted on by

(1) NIXING BREXIT. In a letter to The Guardian, “John le Carré and Neil Gaiman join writers warning Brexit is ‘choosing to lose'”.

Dozens of writers have put their names to a letter to the Guardian that urges UK voters taking part in Thursday’s European parliament elections to use their franchise to support the European Union, “unless they know what they are choosing to lose, for themselves and everyone they know, and are happy with that”.

The authors, who also include Neil Gaiman, Nikesh Shukla, Kate Williams and Laurie Penny, go on to say: “It seems to us that the same question is facing every industry and every person in the UK: what will you choose to lose? Because we used to hear about advantages in Brexit. We used to hear about the bright future, the extra money, the opportunities. Now the advocates of Brexit just assure us that it won’t be as bad as the last world war.”

(2) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Episode 96 of Scott Edelman’s podcast let you listen to him crunch into a crab cake sandwich with leading Aussie author Kaaron Warren.

Kaaron Warren

We met at the Freer Gallery, and then wandered over for lunch at the Capitol Hill branch of Hank’s Oyster Bar, which opened in 2012.

I first met Kaaron slightly less than 10 years ago, at the 2009 Montreal Worldcon, where her novel Slights was one of the inaugural titles from Angry Robot Books. The publisher even had a robot rolling around the launch party! (It was not angry, however.) She’s published many more novels and stories since then, with one novel, The Grief Hole, winning all three of Australia’s genre awards — the Aurealis Award, the Ditmar Award, and the Australian Shadows Award. Her most recent novel is Tide of Stone. She’s published seven short story collections, the most recent being A Primer to Kaaron Warren.

We discussed how her recent Rebecca reread totally changed her sympathies for its characters, the disturbing real-life crime related to the first time she ever saw The Shining, the catalyst that gave birth to her award-winning novel Tide of Stone, how she came up with new angles for tackling stories about such classic characters as Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein, the way flea market bric-a-brac has led to some of her best ideas, the only correct method for preparing fairy bread, her go-to karaoke song, and much, much more.

(3) TAKING A BITE OUT OF SONIC’S SCHEDULE. ComicsBeat explains why “Character design changes push SONIC THE HEDGEHOG movie release date to 2020”.

…The first trailer for the upcoming Sonic the Hedgehog movie definitely got people talking…just probably not the way the studio intended. Reaction to Sonic’s design—his muscular legs, his regularly-proportioned head, his teeth—was swift, loud, and overwhelmingly negative. The filmmakers heard the cries of the masses, and they responded with action, as director Jeff Fowler tweeted a few days after the trailer’s release that they would be working to tweak the design of the character…

(4) DRAGON RECOMMENDATIONS. Red Panda has created a “Dragon Awards 2019 Eligible Work” based on Renay’s Hugo recommendation’s spreadsheet. She says, “We’re trying to get folks to pay attention to the Dragon Awards to prevent them from becoming puppy awards by default. Here is a spreadsheet of eligible works – and people are welcome to add to it as long as works fit the Dragon award rules.”

(5) AFTERMATH. Cora Buhlert wrote a blog post about the Nebula Awards kerfuffle involving 20Booksto50K: “Some Reactions to the 2018 Nebula Award Winners and a Post-mortem on the 20Booksto50K Issue”.

…Most of [Craig] Martelle’s post seems to be extolling the virtues of the 20Booksto50K group and the idea behind it which was developed by Martelle’s business partner and occasional collaborator Michael Anderle. For those who don’t know, the basic idea behind 20Booksto50K is  is basically “write fast, publish fast and create a ‘minimum viable product’ in highly commercial genres”. For more information, you can also read their manifesto or watch videos of their conferences. They also have a Wiki with more background information here.

Now I don’t have a problem with either the 20Booksto50K group or their system. I don’t doubt that the group or their conferences help a lot of indie writers. And while their approach to writing and publishing isn’t mine, there are a nuggets of useful information in there.

Alas, the rest of the Martelle’s post engages in same tired “indie versus traditional publishing” rheotric that we’ve been hearing since 2010. “Traditional publishing is slow” – yes, it is, because their model is different, but that doesn’t make it bad. “Awards don’t matter, but whether stories resonate with readers does” – okay, so why are you so desperate to win an award then?

(6) ROTTEN TOMATOES REVAMP. The movie ratings site makes changes in the wake of their experience with people who lowballed Captain Marvel’s pre-release score: “We’re Introducing Verified Ratings and Reviews To Help You Make Your Viewing Decsions”.

In February we ditched our pre-release “Want to See” percentage in favor of a more straightforward Want to See tally (kind of like the “likes” you see on social media). We also removed the function that allowed users to write comments about a movie prior to seeing it. You can read about these changes here.

What’s next? Today, we’re excited to introduce new features to our Audience Score and user reviews with the addition of Verified Ratings and Reviews.

So, let’s get to it.

Rotten Tomatoes now features an Audience Score made up of ratings from users we’ve confirmed bought tickets to the movie – we’re calling them “Verified Ratings.” We’re also tagging written reviews from users we can confirm purchased tickets to a movie as “Verified” reviews.

… The first Audience Score you see on a movie page – that’s it next to the popcorn bucket just to the right of the Tomatometer – will be the score made up of Verified Ratings. As with the current Audience Score, when the score is Fresh (that is, above 60%), you’ll see a red popcorn bucket; when it is Rotten (59% and below), the bucket will be green and tipped over (you can read more about that here). If you want to see a score that incorporates all included ratings – both verified and non-verified – simply click “more info” where you can toggle between the two….

(7) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. Amazing Stories’ Steve Davidson says “The trouble with streaming: It could fragment fandom”.

…All this is a reminder that genre tales now dominate the entertainment landscape. The people behind all these platforms are fighting to attract the attention of us, the SF, fantasy and horror fandom.

But they are also fighting for our wallets. And while is is technically possible for one household to receive all these services, it is unlikely that very many households could afford to.

Once, producers essentially had two ways of monetising their entertainment. They could charge for it – for movie tickets, videotapes or discs; or they could give it to us via free-to-air television and sell our eyeballs to advertisers.

Now, we have a new eco-system where the producers are charging us, not for individual works, but for whole bundles of content. So we can get the Netflix package, the HBO package or the Hulu package, but not everything….

What is this in contrast to? Sure, things are different than when all TV was free, however, not so different from periods when there were five or eight or ten printed prozines coming out that you could only get by subscription, unless you were lucky enough that your local library subscribed to some (never all) of them.

(8) KERR OBIT. British children’s book writer and illustrator Judith Kerr died May 22 aged 95. Cora Buhlert comments —

In spite of the title, her most famous work (at least in Germany) When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit is not genre, but about the Kerr family’s escape from the Nazis in the 1930s. The pink rabbit of the title was young Judith Kerr’s beloved toy, which she lost en route. But a lot of her children’s picture books are at least genre-adjacent and several feature SJW credentials. Besides, she was married to Nigel Kneale, British TV writer and creator of Professor Quatermass:

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born May 24, 1925 — Carmine Infantino. Comics artist and editor, mostly for DC Comics, during the late 1950s know as the Silver Age of Comics. He created the Silver Age version of the Flash (with writer Robert Kanigher) and the Elongated Man (with John Broome). He also introduced Barbara Gordon as a new version of Batgirl. Infantino wrote or contributed to two books about his life and career: The Amazing World of Carmine Infantino and Carmine Infantino: Penciler, Publisher, Provocateur. (Died 2013.)
  • Born May 24, 1945 — Graham Williams. Producer and script editor. He produced three seasons of Doctor Who during the era of the Fourth Doctor. He went to be one of the producers of Rould Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected. (Died 1990.)
  • Born May 24, 1946 — Jeremy Treglown, 63. Author of Roald Dahl: A Biography and Roald Dahl: Collected Stories. Amateur actor who met his first wife while both were performing Romeo and Juliet at University. 
  • Born May 24, 1949 — Jim Broadbent, 70. He played Horace Slughorn in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2. He joined the cast of A Game of Thrones, playing a role of Archmaester Ebrose, in the seventh season. His genre credits include Time Bandits, Brazil, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, The Borrowers, The Avengers, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (well somebody had to be in it). 
  • Born May 24, 1952 — Sybil Danning, 67. Her rise to fame began with her role in Roger Corman’s space opera cult classic, Battle Beyond the Stars. She went on to star in Hercules, Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf (which bears the charming alternative title of Howling II: Stirba – Werewolf Bitch), a faux trailer directed by Rob Zombie titled Werewolf Women of the SS for Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse (I couldn’t make this stuff up!), the Halloween remake and finally she as in a horror film called Virus X. Series, She  appeared in recurring roles of the The Lair as a vampire out for revenge.
  • Born May 24, 1953 — Alfred Molina, 66. His film debut was on Raiders of The Lost Ark as Satipo. He was an amazing Doctor Octopus on Spider-Man 2, and he also provided the voice of the villain Ares on the  outstanding 2009 animated  Wonder Woman. Oh and he was a most excellent Hercule Poirot on Murder on the Orient Express. I know, not genre, but one of my favorite films no matter who’s playing the character.
  • Born May 24, 1960 — Doug Jones, 59. Among his roles, I’ll single out as Abe Sapien in the Hellboy films, the Faun and the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth, the ghosts of Edith’s Mother and Beatrice Sharpe in Crimson Peak, and the Amphibian Manin The Shape of Water. 
  • Born May 24, 1965 — Michael Chabon, 54. Author of one of the great baseball novels ever, Summerland. Then there’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay which is the best look I know of at the comics industry during the Golden Age. And The Final Solution: A Story of Detection may be an awesome home to the Greatest Beekeeper Ever.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Wondermark takes fan disappointment about Game of Throne’s final season in a hilarious new direction.

(11) REVISITING THE ENCHANTED DUPLICATOR. The highlights from February’s two-day conference on The Art of the Mimeograph at the University of Westminster include an appearance by fanhistorian Rob Hansen beginning around the 8:54 mark.

(12) OVERFLOWING LID. Alasdair Stuart says his Full Lid for May 24 2019 “takes a look at DJ Kirkbride and team’s excellent SF/crime/comedy comic series Errand Boys. I’ve also got a breakdown of the 2014 Godzilla in the first of two briefings in the run up to Godzilla: King of the Monsters. There’s a look at the excellent documentary Knock Down The House and the one thing about its structure that bothered me. Finally, special guest Sarah Gailey drops by to do the Hugo Spotlight feature, which, this week, features me.”

…The creative team behind Errand Boys is a who’s who of people whose work I pick up, sight unseen. DJ Kirkbride and Adam P Knave are two of the best writers and editors in the business and Frank Cvetkovic is one of the best letterers. They’re joined by a raft of artists whose work is unfamiliar to me but is all massively impressive, kinetic and fun.

(13) RETRO REVIEWS. The link takes you to Evelyn C. Leeper’s Comments on the 1944 Retro Hugo Finalists and to her Retro Hugo Novel Reviews Part 1 and Part 2.

I am pretty sure this is the first time someone has been a finalist both in a fiction category and in an art category (Antoine de Saint-Exupery). It is also the first time a father and son appeared on the same ballot–well, sort of. Fritz Leiber, Jr., is a finalist for three works of fiction; Fritz Leiber, Sr., (the actor) appeared as Franz Liszt in PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1943), a Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) finalist.

(14) ALADDIN’S LAMP DOES NOT SHINE BRIGHTLY. NPR’s scott Tobias finds  “Aladdin to be A CGI World, Neither Whole Nor New”.

As Disney plunders its archives for live-action remakes of animated classics, the question of “Why?” continues to be less evident on the screen than it is on the company ledger. The one quiet exception was Pete’s Dragon, which succeeded because it had no fidelity to the second-rate slapstick and songcraft of the original, and could re-imagine the premise from the ground up. When the catalog titles get as massive as Aladdin, however, the mission becomes to replicate it as closely as possible, which inevitably leads to stilted facsimile. No matter how sophisticated CGI gets, the speed and fluidity of animation is hard to reproduce.

The new Aladdin mostly has the beat-for-beat quality of the live-action Beauty and the Beast, the current standard-bearer for pointlessness, but there are elements of it that really pop, even for being bizarre missteps. Foremost among them is Will Smith’s Genie, whose entire look is a Violet Beauregarde nightmare of bright blue and CGI-inflated swole, with a top-knot/goatee combination that suggests 10,000 years away from the fashion pages. Yet Smith is the only member of the cast who’s bothered to rethink the original character: He doesn’t bother to imitate Robin Williams’ manic schtick, but draws on his own ingratiating silliness and kid-friendly hip-hop flavor instead. If everyone else had followed suit, this Aladdin wouldn’t necessarily be any better, but at least it would be its own thing….

Chip Hitchcock notes: “My local paper wasn’t quite so harsh, but did give it just 2.5 stars.”

(15) EINSTEIN? NEVER HEARD OF HIM. BBC remembers “The man who made Einstein world-famous”.

It is hard to imagine a time when Albert Einstein’s name was not recognised around the world.

But even after he finished his theory of relativity in 1915, he was nearly unknown outside Germany – until British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington became involved.

Einstein’s ideas were trapped by the blockades of the Great War, and even more by the vicious nationalism that made “enemy” science unwelcome in the UK.

But Einstein, a socialist, and Eddington, a Quaker, both believed that science should transcend the divisions of the war.

It was their partnership that allowed relativity to leap the trenches and make Einstein one of the most famous people on the globe.

Einstein and Eddington did not meet during the war, or even send direct messages. Instead, a mutual friend in the neutral Netherlands decided to spread the new theory of relativity to Britain.

Einstein was very, very lucky that it was Eddington, the Plumian Professor at Cambridge and officer of the Royal Astronomical Society, who received that letter.

Not only did he understand the theory’s complicated mathematics, as a pacifist he was one of the few British scientists willing to even think about German science.

(16) FAKEBOOK. According to NPR, “Facebook Removed Nearly 3.4 Billion Fake Accounts In Last Six Months”. Over half a century ago, Clarke suggested what’s now become a truism: that the Internet would be a haven for porn. But he didn’t foresee the other abuses….

Facebook says it removed 3.39 billion fake accounts from October to March. That’s twice the number of fraudulent accounts deleted in the previous six-month period.

In the company’s latest Community Standards Enforcement Report, released Thursday, Facebook said nearly all of the fake accounts were caught by artificial intelligence and more human monitoring. They also attributed the skyrocketing number to “automated attacks by bad actors who attempt to create large volumes of accounts at one time.”

The fake accounts are roughly a billion more than the 2.4 billion actual people on Facebook worldwide, according to the company’s own count.

(17) SPIKING THE CANON. James Davis Nicoll diagnoses the waning popularity of once-beloved works in “The Sad But Inevitable Trend Toward Forgotten SF” at Tor.com.

Love your beloved classics now—because even now, few people read them, for the most part, and fewer still love them. In a century, they’ll probably be forgotten by all but a few eccentrics.

If it makes you feel any better, all fiction, even the books people love and rush to buy in droves, is subject to entropy. Consider, for example, the bestselling fiction novels of the week I was born, which was not so long ago. I’ve bolded the ones my local library currently has in stock.

[Thanks to Cora Buhlert, Daniel Dern, John King Tarpinian, JJ,. Mike Kennedy Cat Eldridge, Standback, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Rob Hansen, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor Peer.]

Pixel Scroll 3/8/19 Happy As The Day When The Pixels Scroll Away

Posted on by

(1) STRAHAN’S NEXT PROJECT. The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi Fantasy Blog caught everyone’s attention by “Announcing Year’s Best Science Fiction, a New Annual Anthology from Saga Press”:

In 2020, Jonathan Strahan and Simon & Schuster’s Saga Press will launch Year’s Best Science Fiction: The Saga Annual Anthology of SF.

That will fill the gap left when Strahan’s current annual from Solaris ends with The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Vol. 13.

(2) LE GUIN DOCUMENTARY. Screenings are happening all over the world in the next few weeks. See the schedule in Arwen Curry’s Kickstarter update “Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin premieres in China!”

I wanted to let you know about upcoming March and April screenings of Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin.

February was a busy month for the film. We’re honored to have been awarded Best of Fest at the Boston SciFi Film Festival and made the cover story of the National Endowment for the Humanities magazine, written by Ursula’s biographer Julie Phillips. As always, we are grateful for the support of the NEH.

The list includes showings all over the West Coast.

(3) ENDEAVORING TO IMPROVE ON STAR TREK. [Item by Dann.] It has taken 10 year’s worth of effort, but Ron “AAlgar” Watt and Matt Rowbotham have created the most comprehensive Star Trek-focused podcast in history.  They have watched and reviewed every episode of every professional Star Trek franchise on their Post Atomic Horror podcast.

Along the way, they have invited friends to the party to broaden the number of perspectives on Star Trek.And along the way, they have pointed out episodes that they could have written better.

It is one thing to say you can do something better than the professionals.  It is quite another thing to put your money and/or ego where your mouth is.

To that end, the duo has created the Endeavor podcast.  This is the story of the Endeavor; a Federation starship exploring the Andromeda galaxy with crew members ranging from Klingons to Romulans to Cardassians to an assortment of people from the United Federation of Planets.  The first episode of fanfiction dropped on March 1 on iTunes and Stitcher.  Matt and Al hope to create radio theater that compares favorably with more professional efforts.  They have assembled an outstanding stable of vocal performers to aid them in their attempt.

Their efforts can also be followed via Facebook.

(4) THE LONG CON. Scott Edelman urges you to binge on brisket benedict with Michael J. Walsh in episode 90 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.

It’s time to join me at the table with someone who’s been part of the community of the fantastic even longer than I have — Michael J. Walsh. Over the past half century, he’s been a fan, a book dealer, a convention chair, and a publisher. He’s attended every World Fantasy Convention since the first in 1975, including the last one, where he and I were two of the Guests of Honor. Through his small press, Old Earth Books, he’s published Avram Davidson, Christopher Priest, Allen Steele and many others, plus two Howard Waldrop collections, which won him a special award from the World Fantasy Convention in 2009. 

We got together for lunch last month the same day I attended the Midwinter Midway fundraising function put on at the Peale Museum by Submersive Productions, the immersive theatrical troupe I adore, four of whose members were my guests in Episode 86 of the podcast, where we discussed the science fictional nature of their diverse happenings.

Michael and I met at Ida B’s Table on the same block in Baltmore as the Peale. Ida B’s is perhaps my favorite recent restaurant discovery, one I try to visit whenever I’m in that city for great fried chicken, or shrimp and grits, or in this case, brisket benedict.

We discussed what it is about the annual World Fantasy Conventions that drew him to attend all 44 of them, how a generous teacher’s gift of an Ace Double led to his first exposure to true science fiction, the big score which induced him to become a book dealer, the way Ted White was able to do so much with so little when he edited Amazing Stories in the ’70s, what witnessing Anne McCaffrey and Isaac Asimov singing Gilbert and Sullivan tunes made him realize about writers, what his time in fandom taught him which made him realize he could make it as a publisher, the time he was left speechless by Robert Heinlein offering him a drink, why it would have been wrong for a certain book he published to have won a Hugo, what con-goers most misunderstand about con runners, and much more.

(5) DESCRIBING DISABILITIES. Ben Mattlin in the Washington Post, who has spinal muscular atrophy, was hired to be a sensitivity reader for a book on the subject and wants people to know he is disabled, and does not “have a disease” — “Disability and disease aren’t interchangeable”.

Disability is the more inclusive choice.  A disability can result from illness, injury, accident, genetics and more.  That broad base gives it power.  If ‘my disease’ refers to a specific condition within my body, ‘my disability’ connects me with a diverse array of other people, a common cause….

To my ears, though, “disease” will always be troubling. I’m okay with “disorder,” “impairment” and other neutral, science-y sounding terms. I’m not a stickler for politically correct language either. Call me a “disabled man” (#SayTheWord) or a “man with a disability” (#PersonFirstLanguage) — I honestly don’t care which. Growing up, I was called handicapped, and that’s still fine with me in most contexts (especially because it doesn’t come from a begging reference, contrary to popular belief, but from an advantage that’s forfeited to make a game fair). I was also taught that “cripple” is a dirty word, yet many of us have reclaimed it with pride.

(6) THE RIGHT MENTOR. Sandra M. Odell found a connection made through SFWA’s mentorship program helped her to cope with the effects of mental illness on her productivity: “More Writerly Than Thou” at the SFWA Blog.

I have struggled with the titanic highs and crushing lows of severe mental illness and PTSD most of my life, yet nothing quite prepared me for the psyche shitstorm that followed the release of my second collection, Godfall & Other Stories. 

The collection got a good response; however, Odell experienced a months-long period of being unable to resume writing, and when she was finally brave enough to reach out to other authors, rather than getting understanding and support, she was frequently reminded that she should just be thankful for the success of her collection:

…The after book blahs had become tangled in the web of my mental illness.  So many writers, some my closest friends, sought to help by applying the panacea of one-word-then-the-next that I nearly suffocated beneath the weight of my own failure and self-loathing because I couldn’t keep up.  I would never write again, the success of my collection was a fluke, I’d failed my agent and my friends, the stories were worthless, and no one would miss me when I was gone.  I almost missed the voices I needed to hear most.  “Are you okay?  How can I help?”

Almost.

Help came from an unexpected source.  I applied for the SFWA mentorship program, certain I was too broken to find a match.  To my surprise, I was paired with a mentor familiar with the bitter trials of writing and mental illness.  My mentor allowed me to lead the conversation, asked gentle, non-judgemental questions, and shared their own struggles with post-publication depression and tips on what had worked for them to set priorities and reclaim their words.  The idea that more experienced writers could be paired with those seeking to learn more about how to manage their craft had proven itself.  After our first email exchange, I cried for an hour.  I was no longer alone….

(7) MESSAGE FICTION? A BBC writer delves into “The surprisingly radical politics of Dr. Seuss”.

“Step with care and great tact
and remember that Life’s
a Great Balancing Act.
Just never forget to be dexterous and deft.
And never mix up your right foot with your left.”
– Oh, The Places You’ll Go! (1960)

There’s a healthy dollop of wisdom percolating through the slapstick silliness and anarchic absurdity of Dr Seuss. More perhaps than any other children’s author, the musings of US writer and illustrator Theodor Seuss Geisel – who adopted the pen name Dr Seuss while at college – amount to a kind of philosophy. It’s one that has entered popular consciousness, contributing to pop song lyrics and even being cited by a Supreme Court judge. Yet there’s also a political edge to Dr Seuss that is often overlooked.

… “Dr Seuss, beloved purveyor of genial rhyming nonsense for beginning readers, stuff about cats in hats and foxes in socks, started as a feisty political cartoonist who exhorted America to do battle with Hitler? Yeah, right!” exclaims Art Spiegelman, the graphic novelist who created Maus, in the foreword to a 1999 book. Historian Richard Minear’s Dr Seuss Goes to War features nearly 200 cartoons that were left unseen for half a century –  cartoons that help redraw the beloved king of the kooky.

(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • March 8, 1994 — Wheeled suitcase with collapsible towing handle patented…and every CON goer is forever grateful.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born March 8, 1859 — Kenneth Grahame. The Wind in the Willows  of course which to my surprise has but only two film adaptations, one animated and one live. Did you know A.A. Milne dramatized it for BBC Radio 4 back in the Seventies? Oh, and he did write one other fantasy, The Reluctant Dragon. (Died 1932.)
  • Born March 8, 1921 — Alan Hale Jr. The Skipper on Gilligan’s Island which most likely isn’t genre but he did show up in such films as Captain Kidd and the Slave Girl, The Fifth Musketeer and The Giant Spider Invasion which is most decidedly SF if of a pulpish variety. Series wise, I see he was on The Wild Wild West and Fantasy Island. (Died 1990.)
  • Born March 8, 1934 — Kurt Mahr. One of the first writers of the Perry Rhodan series, considered the largest SF series of the world. He also edited a Perry Rhodan magazine, wrote Perry Rhodan chapbooks and yes wrote many, many short stories about Perry Rhodan.  He did write several other SF series. Ok what’s the appeal of Perry Rhodan? He runs through SF as a genre but I’ve not read anything concerning him. (Died 1993.)
  • Born March 8, 1939 — Peter Nicholls. Writer and editor. Creator and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction with John Clute. His other publications were Science Fiction at Large, The Science in Science Fiction edited by Nicholls and written by him and David Langford, and Fantastic Cinema. (Died 2018.) He became the first Administrator of the United Kingdom-based Science Fiction Foundation. He was editor of its journal, Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction, from 1974 to 1978.
  • Born March 8, 1945 — Micky Dolenz, 74. Voiced the Min Max character in the two part “Two Face” episode of Batman: The Animated Series. Voiced Ralph on The Secret Files of the SpyDogs, an animated where Adam West voiced the Dog Zero character and Robert Culp provided additional voices. He also voiced, and I kid you not, Wendell the Love Grub on Mighty Magiswords. [Editor’s note: Maybe Cat can keep himself from mentioning Circus Boy and The Monkees, but I can’t!]
  • Born March 8, 1950 — Peter McCauley, 69. Best known I’d say for being on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World in which he played Professor George Challenger. Lovely show which I’ll really like. Running for three three seasons, it’s his only major genre role to date though he’s shown up on The Ray Bradbury Theater, Mysterious Island (a New-Zealand television series based on Jules Verne’s novel L’Île mystérieuse), Xena: Warrior Princess, Tales of the South Seas and Legend of the Seeker. 
  • Born March 8, 1959 — Aidan Quinn, 60. Ok, I really l liked him in Practical Magic, but will admit that I’ve not seen nor plan on seeing The Handmaid’s Tale which he was in. Yes, he was in Jonah Hex but let’s not hold that against him. He also had the title role in Crusoe, and was Cpt. Robert Walton in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. He was in The Eclipse as Nicholas Holden, and showed up in The Last Keepers playing John Carver. He was in a production of Scheherazade produced in Chicago, and played in Prince Hamlet in a Promenade Theatre, NYC production of that play.  Series wise, he’s currently in the Elementary series as Captain Thomas ‘Tommy’ Gregson. 
  • Born March 8, 1976 — Freddie Prinze Jr., 43. I’m fairly sure his genre role was in Wing Commander as Lt. Christopher Blair followed by the animated Mass Effect: Paragon Lost in which he voiced Lieutenant James Vega. Speaking of animated endeavours, I’ve got him in Kim Possible: A Sitch In Time voicing Future Jim / Future Tim followed by being in all in all four seasons of the animated Star Wars Rebels as Kanan Jarrus. And that series I highly recommend. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Frank and Ernest shows when walking while looking at your phone is actually safer!

(11) MORE TO BE SAID. The Humanist posted a tribute to the late author and nontheist: “In Memoriam: Janet Jeppson Asimov, 1926 – 2019”.

Janet Opal Jeppson Asimov died on Monday, February 25, 2019. She was ninety-two years old. Janet is remembered for her significant contributions to psychiatry, psychoanalysis, science fiction, and her dedication to humanism. AHA Executive Director Roy Speckhardt, who was in regular communication with her for years, recalled, “Janet was a whirlwind well into her eighties, racing from place to place but taking time to engage in lifelong learning, to write in her unique and compelling style, and to appreciate the arts and culture. Her direct approach, generous demeanor, and clever humor will be sorely missed.”

(12) WALLS GO UP IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR. Escape Artists’ Alasdair Stuart has dropped The Full Lid for March (I really need a better action verb there), which features a look inside the business, “Podcasting Does A Thing II: Welcome to the Montage.”

Podcasting is doing a thing again. Last time it did a thing that thing was ‘Be partially absorbed by Hard Drive Galactus’. This time round it’s Luminary, a major new podcast developer, announcing their launch line up. 40 shows, including Cameron Mitchell’s follow-up to legendary musical Hedwig and The Angry Inch, podcasts from Conan O’Brien, Malcolm Gladwell, Trevor Noah and the sequel to beloved superhuman audio drama The Bright Sessions.

All of them behind an $8 a month paywall, apparently intended as the ‘Netflix of podcasting’.

…That paywall though and what it means is much more interesting not to mention complex. Whether we like it or not, and that’s a nuanced answer that we’re all working on, paywalls are going to be a thing in podcasting for a while. As my partner in all things pointed out, this is the exact same thinking behind the plethora of streaming platforms we’re all about to be expected to pay for. Everyone’s seen Netflix’s money. Everyone wants some of it and the attempt to replicate that model is already spilling into other media with podcasting. Witness the Disney streaming platform, the conclusion of the Netflix/Marvel relationship, the Spotify assimilation of Anchor and Gimlet Media and the astonishing amount of money Himalaya just threw at their podcasting slate. That’s not cash anyone spends lightly.

(13) LEST DARKNESS FALL. Did social media cause this neighborhood to be overrun? “Paris street to ‘shut out Instagrammers'”. Chip Hitchcock adds, “One is reminded that in the Niven story there were, deliberately, no teleport booths on Rapa Nui — a choice that wouldn’t help this site.”

A pretty cobbled street in Paris has become a huge hit on Instagram, with thousands of pictures and “likes”.

But residents of Rue Cremieux have now had enough and are calling on the city council to restrict access at certain times.

One has even launched an Instagram account logging all the unwanted activity on the street.

It illustrated how the search for the perfect picture could become a problem, said travel blogger Kris Morton.

Residents have asked the city council to provide a gate that can be closed at peak times – evenings, weekends and at sunrise and sunset, when good light attracts people searching for a perfect Instagram picture.

(14) HE’S SEEN THE CAPTAIN. Camestros Felapton provides a spoiler-free review of Captain Marvel:

…Three years ago, I’d have said this was a particularly good entry in the Marvel film series but Captain Marvel has the tough act of following up Thor Ragnarok, Infinity War and the frankly deliciously good Black Panther. There’s certainly enough feminism in the film to wind up the worst sections of society but I sometimes feel they pulled some of those punches and maybe dialled things back a notch when turning it up to 11 might have been smarter.

(15) WHAT EFFECT DOES TROLLING HAVE? In the Washington Post, Steven Zeitchik says that while trolls “can have a highly scarring effect on individual targets” such as Leslie Jones, the success of targeted films shows that “there’s actually little evidence that trolling accomplishes its primary objective” of depressing movie attendance. “Captain Marvel: How the trolls always win — until they don’t”.

In fact, if one looks at previous movies with significant trolling campaigns — the 2016 “Ghostbusters” reboot, “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” and “Black Panther” — it’s clear how ineffective they can be. “Ghostbusters” performed somewhat underwhelmingly with $128 million domestically. But “Last Jedi” was the highest-grossing movie of 2017, with $620 million in the United States. And “Black Panther” is the third-highest-grossing domestic film in history.

(16) ROTTEN TROLLMATOE. Meantime, Rotten Tomatoes is taking steps of its own to control the trollbot population. There’s an article in The Hollywood Reporter but this is more succinct —

(17) NOT A BOT. Ever seen a 1-star review by a genuine human? Here’s one by Bonnie McDaniel, “Review: How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler”, at the Red Headed Femme.

This is basically a gimmick book, and for me, the gimmick wore thin real fast….

(18) FREE ON EARTH. Almost 50 years after a comparable achievement: “Watch: SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down In Atlantic Ocean”.

The SpaceX Crew Dragon hit its splashdown time of 8:45 a.m. ET right on target Friday, landing in the Atlantic Ocean after undocking from the International Space Station and re-entering Earth’s atmosphere.

The successful test and splashdown is “an amazing achievement in American history,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who called the SpaceX flight the “dawning of a new era in American human space flight.”

The Atlantic Ocean landing is the first in nearly 50 years for a capsule that was designed for humans, NASA says. The last such incident: the Apollo 9 splashdown on March 13, 1969.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, Dann, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anna Nimmhaus.]

Pixel Scroll 2/26/19 Two Pixels Were Approaching, And The File Began To Scroll

Posted on by

(1) KELLEY OBIT. An acknowledged leader of Doctor Who fandom in the U.S., Jennifer Adams Kelley, died today. LA’s Gallifrey One con committee paid tribute on Facebook:

All of us at Gallifrey One today are mourning the loss of our dear friend, and our long-time Masquerade director, Jennifer Adams Kelley, who passed away early this morning at home after a short but fierce battle with cancer.

Jennifer was a titan of American Doctor Who fandom, both locally in the Chicago area and across the country: as former program director & stage manager of our sister events Visions and ChicagoTARDIS; her decades-long involvement in Chicago area Doctor Who fandom, including her participation in the local fan group The Federation since the 1980s (where they created many well-known fan videos such as “Doctor Who and Holy Grail” and “S-A-V-E-W-H-O”); co-author of ATB Publishing’s landmark tome “Red White and Who: The Story of Doctor Who in America”; staff member of the Outpost Gallifrey and Gallifrey Base fan forums (the latter of which she co-founded); and countless contributions to fan communities and publications across America. She was also very active in costuming fandom, participating in and running masquerades and convention events nationwide. She was unable to join us to run our Masquerade this year due to her illness, leading to a last-minute group effort she actively contributed to, to make certain the show would go on.

Our entire fan community has been enriched by Jennifer, and her loss is devastating to so many of us who have called her friend for so long. We will be dedicating next year’s Gallifrey One convention to her memory. Our thoughts and sympathies are with her husband Philip, her daughter Valerie, and their family today.

(2) AMAZONIAN CRITIQUES. Authors continue raising issues about Amazon’s business practices and those who abuse its revenue model.

  • Courtney Milan. Thread starts here.
https://twitter.com/courtneymilan/status/1100538581733556225
  • Courtney Milan again. Thread starts here.
https://twitter.com/courtneymilan/status/1100427525329547264
  • Tessa Dare. Some interesting data from her, and from the additions and corrections in responding tweets. Thread starts here.

(3) BOMBS AWAY. The Verge, in “Rotten Tomatoes tackles review-bombing by eliminating pre-release comments”, tells about site changes being made in response to the negative campaign against Captain Marvel.

The film-rating aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes has announced it will no longer allow users to comment on or register early anticipation for movies, following a series of coordinated attempts to sabotage the ratings on a few select upcoming films.

The Rotten Tomatoes blog details those changes:  

Starting this week, Rotten Tomatoes will launch the first of several phases of updates that will refresh and modernize our Audience Rating System. We’re doing it to more accurately and authentically represent the voice of fans, while protecting our data and public forums from bad actors.

As of February 25, we will no longer show the ‘Want to See’ percentage score for a movie during its pre-release period. Why you might ask?  We’ve found that the ‘Want to See’ percentage score is often times confused with the ‘Audience Score’ percentage number. (The ‘Audience Score’ percentage, for those who haven’t been following, is the percentage of all users who have rated the movie or TV show positively – that is, given it a star rating of 3.5 or higher – and is only shown once the movie or TV show is released.)

… What else are we doing? We are disabling the comment function prior to a movie’s release date. Unfortunately, we have seen an uptick in non-constructive input, sometimes bordering on trolling, which we believe is a disservice to our general readership. We have decided that turning off this feature for now is the best course of action. Don’t worry though, fans will still get to have their say: Once a movie is released, audiences can leave a user rating and comments as they always have.

(4) SAYING NO. Emma Thompson quit a movie she wanted to do with a director she loves to work with – the LA Times has the reasons: “Emma Thompson’s letter to Skydance: Why I can’t work for John Lasseter”. Skydance had hired Lasseter just months after he left Pixar and parent company Disney in the face of multiple allegations of inappropriate behavior.

In mid-February, it was reported that the two-time Oscar winner had pulled out of Skydance’s highly touted animation feature “Luck,” citing her concerns about Lasseter’s hiring. According to her representatives, from the moment the hire was announced, Thompson began conversations about extricating herself from the project; she officially withdrew Jan. 20.

In a letter she sent to Skydance management three days later, she acknowledged the complications caused by a star withdrawing from a project, including the effect her decision would have on the director, the rest of the cast and the crew. But in the end, she wrote, the questions raised by the Lasseter hire made it impossible for her to remain in the film.

The full text of the letter is at the linked article. It ends:

I am well aware that centuries of entitlement to women’s bodies whether they like it or not is not going to change overnight. Or in a year. But I am also aware that if people who have spoken out — like me — do not take this sort of a stand then things are very unlikely to change at anything like the pace required to protect my daughter’s generation.

(5) MELON. Hong Kong’s Melon Sci-Fi event, to be held March 23, describes itself as —

An international gathering of leading science fiction writers, acclaimed scientists, media industry experts and fans to discuss what’s next in science fiction, entrepreneurship and the most compelling trends facing our future.

The program boasts a stellar list of talents from East and West, including Jo Walton, Bao Shu, Jeanette Ng, Aliette de Bodard, Rebecca Kuang, Tade Thompson, Regina Wang, Lisa (SL) Huang, and many others.

(6) NOT FAR AT ALL. C.E. Murphy, who lives in Ireland, gives a kindly warning in “A note about Irish distances” —

This is especially for people coming to Dublin 2019:

If an Irish person (or website, for that matter) tells you something is a 10 minute walk, they are almost certainly lying to you.

It’s a well-intentioned lie. They reckon anybody can walk for ten minutes, I think, so if they say it’s ten minutes, well, that sounds grand and not a bother and you can manage that. But if it is actually a ten minute walk, that is a matter of sheer coincidence and should not be used as a measuring stick for other times you’re told something is a ten minute walk.

Usually a ten minute walk is really about 20 minutes. Sometimes it’s 85.

Everything in Dublin is, according to rental ads, no more than a 15 minute walk from city centre or St Stephen’s Green. Everything in Ireland is no more than a comfortable 10 minute walk from a train station.

Honestly, we’d been here for years, trying to figure this and other similar phenomenon out, when it finally dawned on us that broadly speaking, the Irish people, who love a good story, would rather lie to you than disappoint you….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born February 26, 1918 — Theodore Sturgeon. Damn, I hadn’t realised that he’d only written six novels! More Than Human is brilliant and I assumed that he’d written a lot more long for fiction but it was short form where excelled with more than two hundred stories. I did read over the years a number of his reviews — he was quite good at it.  (Died 1985.)
  • Born February 26, 1945 — Marta Kristen, 74. Kristen is best known for her role as Judy Robinson, one of Professor John and Maureen Robinson’s daughters, in Lost in Space. And yes, I watched the entire series. Good stuff it was. She has a cameo in the Lost in Space film as Reporter Number One. None of her other genre credits are really that interesting, just the standard stuff you’d expect such as an appearance on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Oh, and she’s still damn sexy. 
  • Born February 26, 1948 — Sharyn McCrumb, 71. ISFDB lists all of her Ballad novels as genre but that’s a wee bit deceptive as how genre strong they are depends upon the novel. Oh, Nora Bonesteel, she who sees Death, is in every novel but only some novels such as the Ghost Riders explicitly contain fantasy elements.  If you like mysteries, highly recommended.  Now the Jay Omega novels, Bimbos of the Death Sun and Zombies of the Gene Pool are genre, are great fun and well worth reading. They are in print which is interesting as I know she took them out of print for awhile.
  • Born February 26, 1957 — John Jude Palencar, 62. Illustrator whose artwork graces over a hundred covers. In my personal collection, he’s on the covers of de lint’s The Onion Girl and Forests of the Heart, Priest’s Four & Twenty Blackbirds and le Guin’s Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea.
  • Born February 26, 1963 — Chase Masterson, 56. Fans are fond of saying that spent five years portraying the Bajoran Dabo entertainer Leeta on Deep Space Nine which means she was in the background of Quark’s bar a lot. Her post-DS9 genre career is pretty much non-existent save one-off appearances on Sliders, the current incarnation of The Flash and Star Trek: Of Gods and Men, a very unofficial Tim Russ project. She has done some voice work for Big Finish Productions as of late. 
  • Born February 26, 1965 — Liz Williams, 54. For my money, her best writing by far is her Detective Inspector Chen series about the futuristic Chinese city Singapore Three, its favorite paranormal police officer Chen and his squabbles with Heaven and Hell. I’ve read most of them and recommend them highly. I’m curious to see what else y’all have read of her and suggest that I read.
  • Born February 26, 1977 — James Wan, 42. He’s known originally for directing the Saw horror film franchise, but more recently for Aquaman. He’s been picked to develop the Swamp Thing series on the DC Universe streaming service. He also rebooted the MacGyver franchise. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Free Range thinks it will cost plenty to commute in outer space.
  • AI loosely defined, in Brewster Rockit.
  • Arriving aliens famously make this request. Over the Hedge offers a good example of when the right answer is “No.”
  • Please, Monty, do not use the eggplant emoji to ask for baba ghanoush.

(9) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. BBC asks “Is Japan losing its umami?” (gallery and video; not viewable on small screens.)

Soy sauce is one of the most important ingredients in Japanese cooking, but chances are you’ve never tasted the real thing.

Yasuo Yamamoto has a secret – or more precisely, 68 of them. On a recent morning on the Japanese island of Shodoshima, the fifth-generation soy sauce brewer slid open the door to his family’s wooden storehouse to reveal 68 massive cedar barrels caked in a fungus-filled crust. As he climbed up a creaky staircase into his dark, cobwebbed loft, every inch of the planked walkway, beams and ceiling was covered in centuries’ worth of black bacteria, causing the thick brown goo inside the barrels to bubble. The entire building was alive.

“This is what gives our soy sauce its unique taste,” Yamamoto said, pointing to a 150-year-old wooden barrel. “Today, less than 1% of soy sauce in Japan is still made this way.”

Until 70 years ago, all Japanese soy sauce was made this way, and it tasted completely different to what the world knows today. But despite a government ordinance to modernise production after World War Two, a few traditional brewers continue to make soy sauce the old-fashioned way, and Yamamoto is the most important of them all. Not only has he made it his mission to show the world how real soy sauce is supposed to taste, but he’s leading a nationwide effort to preserve the secret ingredient in a 750-year-old recipe before it disappears.

(10) IF YOU CAN MAKE IT THERE. Joseph Hurtgen reviews “Famous Men Who Never Lived by K Chess” at Rapid Transmission.

Reminiscent of Philip K. Dick’s metafictional The Grasshopper Lies Heavy within The Man in the High Castle, Chess’s Vikram holds his copy of Pyronauts dear. It is the one item of cultural significance that grounds him to his former identity. What are pyronauts? They are those that set fire to things, that destroy the archive. So, then, it is ironic that the item Vikram holds dear is a story about those that destroy artifacts. The immigrants from a different New York City experience a complete cultural dislocation. The entire archive, the background to their lives, is gone as if incinerated in a fire. Though their New York City appears the same as the new one they find at the other side of the trans-dimensional gate, in the new city, they have no history, and with no history, no future.

(11) ARE YOU THAT AUDIENCE? Adri Joy says this flawed book is still a good choice for the right audience: “Microreview [Book]: Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh” at Nerds of a Feather.

By opening the action around the Terra-Two mission, and the tiny complement of students who get onto it from the academic pressure cooker of Dalton academy, Oh sets up an interesting moment to start the story. By this point, all of the characters have spent years in each others’ company to some extent, and while some clearly know each other better than others – there’s a notable divide between Jesse and the crew who were originally selected – we are still reading about relationships that have a great deal of baggage behind them, and the whole that’s handled quite well. At the same time, setting the action at the start of the crew’s 23-year journey makes the distance to the planet insurmountable. I suspect it’s no accident that the title frames Terra-two as a “dream”: a planet that will somehow provide all the answers to an overcrowded, dying earth, packed with natural beauty and already habitable for humans, somehow becoming more and more unreal with every detail we learn that conforms to the way things are on Earth. The fact that this mission seems so dreamlike, and the protagonists feel so underequipped, may be frustrating for readers seeking a more Seveneves-esque tale of human ingenuity in the face of interstellar adversity, but that’s sort of the point: there’s a subtle but increasingly clear message that we are supposed to question the design and realism of this mission, even while the teenagers themselves are fixated on their own destinies and, more practically, surviving long enough to arrive with them.

(12) BRANCHING OUT. This time around Vicky Who Reads connects young readers to works aimed at adults: “If You Liked… #13: Adult Science-Fiction & Fantasy by Women!”

…I picked this specific subset because oftentimes, these books are miscategorized as YA, for numerous reasons. A lot of it is definitely misogyny in both the YA and adult SFF communities, believing that women writing SFF are YA because in these people’s minds, YA is also “lesser” and “less intense” (Which is not true. YA is very valid, and includes a different writing style.)

So anyways, I wanted to both boost some adult fiction work (that have crossover appeal, but are still not YA) by women, and also to maybe provide suggestions for readers who want to transition from YA SFF to adult, but don’t know where to start!

The first comparison is:

If you liked The Wrath and The Dawn, you’ll love Uprooted!

Uprooted honestly feels very 1001 Nights to me–women needing to be handed over to an overlord of sorts as payment, and then something interesting happens!

(13) MOONWALKERS. There’s a day left to bid on a “Rare Apollo Reunion Poster Signed by 18 Apollo Astronauts, Including 8 Moonwalkers” at the Nate D. Sanders Auctions site.

Apollo astronauts signed poster, from their 6 July 1986 reunion in Washington, DC. Poster of three children gazing upward at the moon is commemorated by the autographs of 18 Apollo astronauts including 8 moonwalkers: Charles Conrad, Ron Evans, Stu Roosa, Dick Gordon, Charlie Duke, Michael Collins, Walt Cunningham, Jim Lovell, Buzz Aldrin, Don Eisele, Bill Anders, Alan Bean, Jim Irwin, Al Worden, Rusty Schweickart, Alan Shepard, Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt.

(14) OGH WISHES HE LOOKED THIS GOOD. The Chibify site is fun, and I can hardly complain that the results aren’t too close to reality when they are as flattering as this.

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Xylophone by Jennifer Levonian on Vimeo explains what happens when a pregnant woman steals a goat from a petting zoo.

[Thanks to JJ, rcade, John King Tarpinian, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, Martin Morse Wooster, Mike Kennedy, Errolwi, Andrew Porter, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Ken Richards.]

Golden Tomato Awards 2018

Posted on by

Rotten Tomatoes, the review aggregation site, has announced the 20th Annual Golden Tomato Awards which honor the best-reviewed movies and TV shows of 2018.

Best Movies/TV

Wide Release: Black Panther
Limited Release: Roma
Directorial Debut: A Star Is Born
Spanish-Language: Roma
Australia: Sweet Country
United Kingdom: Paddington 2
Best New TV Show: Homecoming
Best Returning TV Show: Atlanta

Movies by Genre

Best Action/Adventure Movie 2018: Mission: Impossible -Fallout
Best Animated Movie 2018: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Best Comedy 2018: Eighth Grade
Best Comic Book/Graphic Novel Movie 2018: Black Panther
Best Documentary 2018: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
Best Drama 2018: BlacKkKlansman
Best Foreign-Language Movie 2018: Roma
Best Horror Movie 2018: A Quiet Place
Best Kids & Family Movie 2018: Paddington 2
Best Musical/Music Movie 2018: A Star Is Born
Best Romance Movie 2018: Crazy Rich Asians
Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy Movie 2018: Sorry to Bother You
Best Thriller 2018: Widows
Best Western 2018: The Rider

TV by Genre

Best TV Comedy 2018: Barry
Best Comedy Special 2018: Hannah Gadsby: Nanette
Best Docuseries 2018: America to Me
Best TV Drama 2018: Cobra Kai
Best TV Horror 2018: The Terror
Best Miniseries, Limited Series & Anthology TV Show 2018: Sharp Objects
Best TV Sci-Fi/Fantasy 2018: Doctor Who
Best Superhero TV Show 2018: Daredevil
Best TV Thriller, Mystery & Suspense 2018: Homecoming
Best TV Movie 2018: The Tale