Tag Archives: Star Trek

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

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(1) DIAGRAM PRIZE. The Bookseller today announced the Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year went to The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire in the closest race of the past quarter century.

The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire earned 27% of the public vote, just ahead of How to Dungeon Master Parenting, which itself was a hair in front of Looking through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement. With just five percentage points separating the top three, it is the closest Diagram race since the selection of the winner for the 46-year-old prize went to an online public vote 25 years ago….

(2) PIRACY? DON’T BE RUDE. 404 Media spoke to someone behind “The Unauthorized Effort to Archive Netflix’s Disappeared Interactive Shows”.

Last month, Matt Lyzell, the creator of the Netflix interactive series Battle Kitty announced on his personal Instagram account that Netflix was going to remove his show from the streaming service just two years after its debut. By the end of the day, Netflix confirmed that not only Battle Kitty was being removed, but that all 24 Netflix interactive series were to be removed on December 1, with the exception of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. the Reverend, Ranveer vs. Wild with Bear Grylls, and You vs. Wild.

“The technology served its purpose, but is now limiting as we focus on technological efforts in other areas,” a Netflix spokesperson told 404 Media at the time. 

It is normal for Netflix and other streaming services to rotate titles in and out of their catalogue depending on what they cost to license and host and how many subscriptions they drive to the platform, but Netflix removing its interactive series means that, as original Netflix creations, once they are removed from Netflix they will not be available anywhere else, and they are a new and unique format that dozens of producers, animators, voice actors, and other creatives have finished work on very recently. 

Unwilling to accept Netflix’s decision to make all these interactive shows totally inaccessible, a group of fans—and, in a few cases, people who worked on the interactive shows—are finding ways to archive and make them available for free. 

“I couldn’t let this work go to waste. We’re talking about over 100 hours of video and ~ one thousand hours of dubbing,” Pixel, one of the archivists in a Discord channel archiving Netflix interactive shows, told me.

On Discord, dozens of users have collaborated on capturing all the videos from Netflix before they were removed, as well as reverse engineering how the platform handled their interactive elements. Some shows are already fully emulated and can be streamed in bespoke, alternative players, others are uploaded to YouTube in a series of daisy-chained, interlinked videos that recreate a very similar interactive experience, while some others have been uploaded as non-interactive videos. 

404 Media agreed not to name the Discord channel and some of the places where the Netflix interactive archives are being hosted so Pixel could talk about the archiving effort. While Netflix has made it so there is no way to view Netflix interactive shows without basically pirating them, the archivists worry that the company will still try to take down any alternative method for viewing them.    

“While I can’t disclose fully how we are archiving these, I can say that they pull directly from Netflix’s servers, so no re-encoding or loss of quality,” Pixel said. “I would love to talk more about how it works, but it risks Netflix patching out the tool entirely.”

Netflix interactives, in case you are unfamiliar, are choose-your-own-adventure videos where the viewer can make choices at the end of a scene that determine how the story unfolds….

(3) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 124 of the Octothorpe podcast, “The Third D Isn’t What You Think”, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty –

…Discuss your comments and also go into detail on upcoming conventions in the UK and worldwide, before talking about some Hugo-eligible things. (They’re games. Sorry, Mark.)

And there’s an uncorrected transcript at the link.

The Glasgow 2024 logo drawn in pencils and crayon, but across the middle there is a segmented creature with eight eyes and mandibles. At the top, the words “Octothorpe 124” appear in blue.

(4) TALKING ABOUT GALAXY QUEST. [Item by N.] For RedLetterMedia, noted Star Trek superfan Mike Stoklasa and noted Star Trek actor Jack Quaid look back on and dissect the 1999 Hugo-winning cult classic: “Galaxy Quest Review”.

Mike and Jack sit down to talk about the cult classic film “Galaxy Quest” starring Tim Allen and many others. A film that has gained popularity over the years and days since it was released. Mike and Jack come at this film with different perspectives, while both appreciating it as the wonderful magical fun adventure film it is with fantastic visual FX and monsters, Jack sees the film as the memorable movie he grew up with and helped to mold his love for cinema and acting. Mike (being 37 years older than Jack) sees the film as a magical what-could-have-been kind of thing. He smells the studio meddling like a wet fart from afar. The potential for a PG-13 or R rated dry, vulgar comedy was there, but watered down by a spineless studio that wanted to G-rated Tim Allen comedy. Would it have flopped as a more adult film? Would it have been better if they went full kids tale? Don’t ya know no one will ever know! It’s a slippery pig that’s been oiled up with K-Y jelly. Mike tries to grab a hold of that piggy to see what it done be. Jack is happy with what the movie is. Mike can’t see the forest through the trees. He loves all the moments in the film. So many good moments and character choices and fun gags. But at what cost? Who done they make this movie for?

(5) OLD PEOPLE WATCH OLD SF. (Hey, this title was Mark’s own suggestion!) at Mark Roth-Whitworth’s blog, he asks people to “Just for fun, compare and contrast”.

Back in the mid-eighties, two films came out about three years apart. One was a box office wonder, and the other was a bomb.

Unfortunately, the Hollywood smash, War Games, was written by Hollywood writers without a clue. Manhattan Project, on the other hand, was dead on… but wasn’t set in California, and the plot didn’t have an utterly unrealistic storyline….

(6) PLONK YOUR COSMIC TWANGER. [Item by Steven French.] If anyone fancies some acoustic gothic blues inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, well, here’s your jam: “’The Lighthouse’ by Half Deaf Clatch” at Bandcamp.

‘The Lighthouse’ is a musical work of fiction, inspired by the writing of H.P Lovecraft. A Gothic, Acoustic type thing, played on a nylon strung folk guitar with some percussion, vocals and other bits and pieces thrown in for good measure.

(7) TONY MEADOWS (1948-2024). [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I have only just found out. Tony was part of the NW England fandom and interacted with MaD SF (Manchester & District – not to be confused with BaD SF – Bolton down devil’s highway A666). He lived in northwest England all his life, though did once make it to the US and visit his friend, one Forrest J Ackerman.

Picture of him as he should be remembered, in the dark screening fantastic films.

Tony was a stalwart of the Festival of Fantastic Films which he helped found (with the legendary Harry Nadler also now sadly gone) and up to late 2000s ran a programme stream screening celluloid films (the only way to see a film with the whirrr of a projector going…). He had a huge film collection.  Also, back in the day when Eastercons weren’t wall-to-wall fan panels and actually had pros giving talks and a film programme (remember them?), Tony would contribute.

Part of the hippy generation of Brit fandom. Another sad loss.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary: December 6, 1979 — Star Trek: The Motion Picture

By Paul Weimer: Star Trek: The Motion Picture was, as it so happened, the fourth Star Trek movie I saw. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (and when the time comes, I will tell that story) came first, followed by Star Trek IV, Wrath of Khan and finally Star Trek: The Motion Picture. 

I had the disadvantage of having read and learned about the movie before I ever saw it, and it colored my perception of it, and to a real sense, colors it today. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was described to me as a movie with a painfully glacial pace, a movie that takes forever to get to its point, a movie that really is just a two-hour version of a one-hour television show. It was with all of this baggage that I saw the movie, on VHS. 

I found all of this true, and yet not true. Yes, the movie has pacing issues. Yes, there really is just a one-hour plot in a two-hour movie. Yes, there are some extremely weird choices (why are Klingon warships firing Federation photon torpedoes?  Star Fleet Battles had to have a whole supplement to explain that). I still don’t get Ilia as a character but I do kind of like having Decker tell Kirk that he has to be the one who merges with V’Ger, not him. Kirk was once again be ready to be a ballhog…but gets shut down. It does nicely set us up for the Admiral Kirk in Star Trek II, I think. 

And the movie is gorgeous. It gave us an idea of what Star Trek could look like if it had a real budget. It gave us sense of wonder and allowed the imagination of taking cardboard sets from the 1960’s and making them substantial, and realer for it. And without Star Trek: The Motion Picture, there would be no Wrath of Khan, or probably any further TV series. So for all of its issues and problems, Star Trek: The Motion Picture made modern Star Trek possible… and kept Star Trek from just being something you watched on New Year’s Eve like Twilight Zone reruns and see at small conventions.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Baldo reports on a new scam.
  • Birdbrains doesn’t realize how easy it is to be overlooked.
  • Bizarro gets stuck with this joke.
  • Dinosaur Comics gives arts career counseling.
  • Ink Pen has a crossover.
  • Zits follows a Science article (check the days before and after as well)

(10) STRACZYNSKI DOING CAPTAIN AMERICA & COLLEAGUES. “Patton Oswalt on J. Michael Straczynski’s Return to Spider-Man” at Bleeding Cool. Oswalt doesn’t have that much to say, the post is mostly sample interiors from the comic – which are pretty entertaining.

J. Michael Straczynski is coming to the end of his run on Captain America, and he has used that fact to bring in a couple of other characters he is best known for writing at Marvel; Thor and Spider-Man. He is taking advantage of that fact to remind readers of what he used to be best known for at Marvel Comics back in the day, drawn by stellar Marvel artist Jesus Saiz….

(11) BIG HAMMER! [Item by Steven French.] You not only have to be worthy to lift this, but pretty tall as well! (Spotted outside the exhibition ‘Movie Icons: Hollywood Props’  in Turin, Italy).

(12) I RECOGNIZE THIS ONE. “How do you save a dying mobile game? Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp has the answer” says the Guardian. My daughter used to play this game!

At some point, most mobile games die. Apple’s iOS software updates have killed thousands of App Store games over the years: older games simply disappear, unless their developers make them compatible with every new device or software. (Most don’t, or can’t, devote such resources to that.) And for live mobile games, which encourage users to log in every day, the game’s popularity inevitably wanes and its developer stops updating it, leaving it inert and unplayable. Sometimes there is no warning. A game is there one day and gone the next. A bleak fate indeed.

The mortality rate for mobile games is high: 83% of them fail within their first three years, according to one survey. But perhaps there’s another way. In 2017, Nintendo released a mobile version of its bestselling chill life-simulation game Animal Crossing. Named Pocket Camp, it ran for seven years before Nintendo ended support for it last month. But instead of letting the game die, the company has released a complete version for £8.99, packaging up years of content and letting players either transfer their data and keep their memories, or start fresh. The game lives on.’

(13) SURF’S UP! A tsunami warning followed a 7.0 earthquake in Northern California the other day. Not everyone got excited for the same reason.

(14) CHINESE SPACEPLANE?  “Mysterious Object Appears At Remote Chinese Airfield Linked To Spaceplane Program” is TWZ’s analysis.

Recent satellite imagery shows a curious white-colored object at the end of the runway at a remote airstrip in northwestern China. The airfield, which is situated near the Lop Nur nuclear test site, has been tied to Chinese reusable space plane developments in the past.

A satellite image taken on Nov. 29 that The War Zone obtained from Planet Labs shows the white-colored object, along with several smaller ones, that look to be vehicles and support equipment, at the southwestern end of the desert airstrip’s runway. The runway itself is more than 16,400 feet in total length, or more than 3 miles long, which makes it one of the longest anywhere in the world. A row of vehicles is also visible at the facility’s main apron, which has been significantly expanded in recent years, including with the addition of a new large hangar.

What the larger object on the runway might be, or even its exact shape, is unclear. Though it looks broadly cylindrical from above, its body is also seen casting a distinctly wedge-shaped shadow. Some obscuration of markings on the runway may point to the presence of short stubby wings at one end. It has an overall length of around 32 feet.

As already noted, the remote Chinese airfield and its extremely long runway have previously been linked to work on reusable spaceplanes with potential military applications, including ones believed to be roughly akin in form and function to the X-37B. The War Zone‘s first report on this facility came after it appeared that one of these crafts touched down there following the end of a mission in space in September 2020. The recently observed object is comparable length-wise to the U.S. Space Force’s two secretive X-37B mini-shuttles (just over 29 feet long), though that alone does not mean there is a relationship between the two….

(15) NOT MUCH TO ‘EM. “James Webb Space Telescope discovers 4th exoplanet in sweet triple ‘super puff’ star system” – Space.com has the story.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered a fourth world in a strange system of ultralight “super puff” planets.

The new extrasolar planet or “exoplanet” was discovered around the sun-like star Kepler-51, located around 2,615 light-years away in the constellation of Cygnus (the Swan).Remarkably, the new world, designated Kepler-51e, isn’t just the fourth exoplanet found orbiting this star; all these other worlds are cotton-candy-like planets. That means this could be a whole system of some of the lightest planets ever discovered.

“Super puff planets are very unusual in that they have very low mass and low density,” team member Jessica Libby-Roberts of Penn State’s Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds said in a statement. “The three previously known planets that orbit the star, Kepler-51, are about the size of Saturn but only a few times the mass of Earth, resulting in a density like cotton candy.”

Libby-Roberts added that the team theorizes that these cotton-candy planets have tiny cores and huge, puffy atmospheres of hydrogen or helium….

(16) SECOND ARTEMIS MISSION DELAYED. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Am amazed at what you Yanks do without Cavorite: “Artemis: Nasa delays mission to send astronauts around Moon” reports BBC.

US space agency Nasa has announced a further delay to its plans to send astronauts back to the Moon.

The agency’s chief, Bill Nelson, said the second mission in the Artemis programme was now due for launch in April 2026.

The plan had been to send astronauts around the Moon but not land in September 2025. The date had already slipped once before, from November of this year.

That will mean that a Moon landing will not take place until at least 2027, a year later than originally planned.

The delay is needed to fix an issue with the capsule’s heat shield, which returned from the previous test flight excessively charred and eroded, with cracks and some fragments broken off.

Mr Nelson told a news conference that “the safety of our astronauts is our North Star”.

“We do not fly until we are ready. We need to do the next test flight, and we need to do it right. And that’s how the Artemis programme proceeds.”

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Disney+ has posted the Doctor Who Christmas 2024 trailer.

The Doctor brings Joy to the world(s)! The eagerly awaited Doctor Who Christmas Special, “Joy to the World,” premieres December 25. When Joy checks into a London hotel in 2024, she opens a secret doorway to the Time Hotel — discovering danger, dinosaurs, and the Doctor. But a deadly plan is unfolding across the Earth, just in time for Christmas. The Doctor Who Christmas special beings streaming December 25 on Disney+.

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

Pixel Scroll 11/19/24 Six Impixelable Things Before Breakfast

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(1) PORTENT OF ELECTRONIC DOOM. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s BBC Radio 4 The Infinite Monkey Cage looked at the personal digital landscape, the threats from hacking, digital theft, cyber war and the coming quantum day.

Invited to discuss this were experts in cyber crime and cyber warfare with the show’s regular hosts: physicist Brian Cox and comedian Robin Ince.

The show concluded somewhat grimly that we are all doomed…

I have been saying for years that the machines are taking over the world but no-one ever listens… well, it now seems, hardly anyone.

Brian Cox and Robin Ince head to Bletchley Park with comedian Alan Davies, and cyber experts Victoria Baines and Richard Benham to decode cyberwarfare and discuss its future.

As computers have shrunk from the size of rooms to fitting in our jacket pockets, our cyber sleuths explore the changing nature of cyber-attacks and defence. They decipher the fancy jargon abounding in cyber land, from trojan horses to phishing scams and reveal how prolific these attacks are on nation states, businesses and the public. From digital army battalions to teenage freelance hackers, the cyber-villains are multiple and varied. Our panel discusses the aims of these malevolent forces; from extorting money and holding valuable commercial data hostage to influencing people’s electoral intent.

The panel explores how AI and quantum computing are supercharging cyberwarfare – but in good news, also cyber-defence. Alan Davies shares his susceptibility to being tricked online whilst our experts give some tips for staying safe online, and finally, Alan comes up with his surprising alter-ego hacking name.

The show can be downloaded from here.

(2) GILLER PRIZE. The Giller Prize 2024 winner – Held by Anne Michaels — was announced on November 18. The Prize is a celebration of Canadian literary talent.

Held may be a work of genre interest – or a historical novel that jumps around in time (even into 2025). It’s not easy to decide based on what the Penguin Random House Canada’s website says. Is this a literal description, or a poetic analogy?

…1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river—alive, but not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts whose messages he cannot understand.

…From its opening lines, Held is alive with seeking: “We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?”

If anyone here has read it, please help us decide whether this is a work of sff!

(3) THE NITTY GRITTY. Bidding starts at Christie’s in nine days for “Dune: an early study of Arrakis by John Schoenherr”, which is estimated to bring £5,000-£7,000 at auction.

‘I can envision no more perfect visual representation of my Dune world than John Schoenherr’s careful and accurate illustrations.’ -Frank Herbert.

An early painted landscape of the Dune universe, one of only six known Dune studies by Schoenherr from the 1960s. The others are the three cover artworks for Analog magazine (one of which was used on the hardcover first edition), the first paperback cover, and an unused Analog cover.

To visualize his world, Herbert worked alongside the Hugo award winning artist, Schoenherr, who produced the illustrations for the original magazine serial, as well as the cover art for the original hardcover and paperback editions of the trilogy. Indeed, the present work bears certain similarities to the cover art for the 1965 first paperback edition published by Ace Books, particularly the angle of the large rocky outcrop in the foreground. Schoenherr’s work for Dune laid the visual foundations for every cinematic and artistic interpretation of the world that would follow, his barren and emotive landscapes helping bring to life the otherworldly spice fields and kingdoms laid out in Herbert’s iconic text. So fitting were Schoenherr’s illustrations that the author declared him ‘the only man to ever visit Dune’.

Ragged and sharp in its visualization of an arid desertscape, the present work captures the hostile and unforgiving environment of Arrakis. It appears to be unpublished and was perhaps intended as an early experimental adventure into the vast world of Dune.

(4) AND THAT’S NOT ALL. Heritage Auction also has artwork of sff genre interest in their forthcoming 2024 December 9 Illustration Art Showcase Auction 15236. See lots at the link. Includes artists Emsh, John Schoenherr, Virgil Finlay, Jack Gaughan, and Richard M. Powers.

Here’s one example: “Away Team” by Edmund (Emsh) Emshwiller.

(5) NEW SHORT FROM RODDENBERRY ARCHIVE AND OTOY. “William Shatner’s Captain Kirk Faces a Long Goodbye in This Stunning Star Trek Anniversary Short” – Gizmodo sets the scene.

Thirty years ago today [November 18], Star Trek‘s cinematic legacy boldly stepped forward as the heroes of the original series and The Next Generation teamed up on the silver screen in Star Trek: Generations. The Enterprise-D met her end, the Star Trek movie franchise passed the torch to a new age, and, of course, William Shatner’s Captain Kirk gave it all to save the Veridian system from the sinister Dr. Soran. And now, to celebrate, the Roddenberry Archive has once again teamed up with OTOY to create a fitting, fond farewell to not one, but two of Trek‘s original heroes….

…There’s some fascinating connections to a whole gamut of Star Trek lore here, from OTOY and the Roddenberry Archive’s previous use of Mahé Thaissa as Yeoman Colt from “The Cage” all the way up to the inclusion of Yor, a Betelgeusian Starfleet officer from the Kelvin Timeline who briefly appeared during the events of Star Trek: Discovery season three. But you’re mostly here for the uncanny valley being overridden by tugs at your heart strings to give Kirk and Spock alike one last shared farewell….

(6) LOSCON 50 SUPPORTS THE AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY/RELAY FOR LIFE TEAM. Loscon 50, taking place November 29-December 1 at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport Hotel, has announced their support for a charity, and three ways you can help: knit or crochet a hat; donate funds; donate to an auction. Details in the following press release:

Loscon 50 is honored to support the mission of the American Cancer Society during the 2024 convention weekend as “Loscon Gives Back”. Many of our community members have been affected by various forms of cancer, we have survivors and losses from this devastating disease. We have teamed up with the Relay for Life fundraiser with one of our staff, Julia Ree who is part of the Riverside team and a cancer survivor herself. Here is Julia’s direct Relay for Life link.

We have put out a call for knit hats to be crafted by those who knit or crochet in our Loscon community. These hats are gifted to cancer patients during their treatment and will be presented to Julia Ree during the convention. The hats can be brought to Loscon 50 and dropped off in the Office or they can be mailed in, please use the contact form on the loscon.org website.

Loscon will have an auction during the convention to raise funds to donate directly to the American Cancer Society Relay for Life team. We welcome donations to the auction by our community, our dealers, our authors and others who would like to support this worthy cause. Please use the contact form on our website at this link: https://loscon.org/contact/

Loscon is excited to welcome attendees to our three day weekend of Science Fiction and Fantasy fun. We celebrate Larry Niven as our Writer Guest of Honor, Kathy Mar our Musical Guest of Honor, Dr Laura Brodian Freas Beraha our Artist Guest of Honor and the late Kelly Freas as our Artist Ghost of Honor and our Fan Guests of Honor, Genny Dazzo and Craig Miller. Please see https://loscon.lineupr.com/loscon-50/ for programming details.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Let’s talk about my favorite Star Wars film. No, not the first one, The Empire Strikes Back. Released forty-four years ago but please note not on this date. I think it’s the best written, best performed and simply most interesting of the trilogy.

It was as you know the sequel to the original film which Leigh Brackett was hired to write before she died way too soon, just several weeks after turning in her script, so Lucas hired Lawrence Kasdan to write but gave Leigh Brackett co-writing credit on it as much of script is still in the final script. 

Now they did met several times in late 1977 to hash out an outline for what was called then Star Wars II. They figured out the framework of plot, which remained pretty much intact in later drafts, although there were some differences such as Darth Vader wasn’t Luke’s father in their outline.

Den of Geek has this quote, “Writing has never been something I have enjoyed, and so, ultimately, on the second film I hired Leigh Brackett. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out; she turned in the first draft, and then she passed away, I didn’t like the first script, but I gave Leigh credit because I liked her a lot. She was sick at the time she wrote the script, and she really tried her best.”

Does her script exist for reading? I’ve seen it referred to in articles over and but can’t find it online. 

Now the co-written script is quite fine and the performance here by everyone I think far outshines the first film. The addition of Darth Vader makes Luke Skywalker into a more interesting character, and the expansion of the cast and setting in general makes this a more believe story. Yes, it’s far darker, more sinister, but a galactic empire would be so.

Even Yoda who could be cute isn’t. (That sentence structure is deliberate.) Look it’s a muppet! It’s voiced by Frank Oz! Perfectly designed to sell lots of plushies! 

Lucas had intended to have a new mentor character for Luke who in his original design was a diminutive frog-like creature named Minch Yoda. No, I’m not kidding. 

Side-note: I still find our two droids far too irritating. They just always come off as being that for me, particularly the C-3PO. I like my droids darker which I why I prefer the ones in Neal Asher’s polity series. Aren’t they darker in The Culture series as well? 

Is there anything I dont like here? No. I’ve watched it a half dozen times and I think it well deserves generally positive reviews, the half billion box office on a budget of under fifty million dollars, and the audience rating at Rotten Tomatoes of 97%. 

It of course, like everything Star Wars, is streaming on Disney +. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) TIMESTAMPS FOR A SET OF EASTER EGGS. Collider says “This Haunted Object Has a Cameo in Nearly Every Flanagan Project” – and brings receipts.

Oculus was Mike Flanagan’s second feature-length film and arguably the one that first made people sit up and take notice of the new director. The Lasser Glass is the haunted mirror at the center of the movie that causes so much trauma for Karen Gillan’s and Brenton Thwaites’ sibling characters, but for eagle-eyed viewers, it also haunts the backgrounds of the majority of Flanagan’s other works….

… It took four years for Mike Flanagan to release another movie after Oculus, but he returned with not one, but three movies in one year. Although 2016’s Hush and Before I Wake don’t include the Lasser Glass, Flanagan included the mirror in the background of Ouija: Origin of Evil — it can be spotted precisely at 1:07:00 when Doris (Lulu Wilson) walks through the basement. This kicked off Flanagan’s habit of including some variation of the mirror in every one of his projects since then. In total, the mirror from Oculus appears in nine of Flanagan’s works (10 if you count the short film on which Oculus is based). Let’s take a look at where, and when, you can see each other reference to the horrifying mirror….

(10) WAS WINNING A GOOD OR BAD THING? [Item by Steven French.] Some of the winners of the Ig Nobel prize share their stories, which include homosexual necrophiliac ducks, levitating frogs and mammals that can breathe through their anus: “How a silly science prize changed my career” in Nature.

…Eleanor Maguire wasn’t too thrilled when she was first offered an Ig Nobel Prize. The neuroscientist at University College London was being honoured for her study showing that London taxi drivers have larger hippocampi in their brains than do people in other professions1. But she worried that accepting the prize would be a disaster for her career. So, she quietly turned it down.

Three years later, the prize’s founder, Marc Abrahams, contacted Maguire again with the same offer. This time, she knew more about the satirical award that bills itself as honouring achievements that “make people laugh, then think”. She decided to accept. On the way to the ceremony, her taxi driver was so delighted to learn about his enlarged hippocampus that he refused to accept a fee from her.

Maguire credits the prize with bringing more attention to her work. “It was useful for my career because people wanted to talk about it,” she says, adding that “it was on the front pages of newspapers when it came out and struck a chord with people.”…

(11) HEAVY, MAN. Interesting Engineering stands by as “China activates world’s most advanced hypergravity research facility”.

China has activated the world’s most advanced hypergravity machine, aiming to deepen scientific understanding.

The system, featuring the largest hypergravity centrifuge, will be able to produce forces thousands of times stronger than Earth’s gravity.

The Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinary Experiment Facility (CHIEF) is located in Hangzhou, the capital of eastern China’s Zhejiang province….

… The facility will house three primary hypergravity centrifuges and 18 onboard units. These centrifuges, machines designed to spin containers rapidly, force heavier materials to the edges or bottom by creating hypergravity conditions, as reported by the South China Morning Post (SCMP)….

… CHIEF’s hypergravity centrifuges are considered groundbreaking tools for creating extreme physical conditions not typically encountered in everyday environments.

These capabilities are expected to advance research across multiple disciplines, enabling scientists to simulate and analyze phenomena such as geological processes, material behaviors, and engineering challenges….

(12) WELL, THIS LOOKS BAD. PROBABLY DOESN’T SMELL TOO GOOD, EITHER. “A mythical harbinger of doom washes up on a California beach” and NBC News didn’t need long to sniff out the story.

The legendary “doom fish” has returned to California.

A long, ribbon-shaped oarfish, rarely seen and believed to signal disaster, has washed up on California’s shores for the second time this year.

PhD candidate Alison Laferriere from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego discovered the nearly 10-foot-long oarfish on a beach in Encinitas, in southern California, last week.

Oarfish are elusive creatures that dwell in the deep ocean — often as far as 3,300 feet below the surface — in the mesopelagic zone, a dark region beyond the reach of sunlight….

Rare, monstrously-proportioned and strangely-shaped, oarfish have sparked myths and legends for centuries and are sometimes referred to as the “doomsday fish” due to their reputation as predictors of natural disasters or earthquakes.

In 2011, the largely forgotten “earthquake fish” legend resurfaced after 20 oarfish washed ashore in the months leading up to Japan’s most powerful recorded earthquake….

(13) BUSINESS IS BOOMING. VERY. “SpaceX Starship’s Sonic Boom Creates Risk of Structural Damage, Test Finds” – story in the New York Times (behind a paywall).

SpaceX’s new Starship rocket far exceeds projected maximum noise levels, generating a sonic boom so powerful it risks property damage in the densely populated residential community near its South Texas launch site, new data suggests.

The measurements — of the actual sound and air pressure generated by the rocket during its fifth test launch last month — are the most comprehensive publicly released to date for Elon Musk’s Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever constructed.

Starship, as tall as a 30-story building, is so large that it generates 10 times as much noise as the Falcon 9 rocket that SpaceX now uses to get cargo and astronauts to orbit, the new data shows. SpaceX plans another test this week.

For residents of South Padre Island and Port Isabel, which are about six miles from SpaceX’s launch site in South Texas, the noise during the October test flight was the equivalent of standing 200 feet from a Boeing 747 plane during its takeoff, said Kent L. Gee, an independent acoustics engineer who conducted the monitoring.

Dr. Gee is the chairman of the physics and astronomy department at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, as well as a researcher helping NASA study ways to reduce noise impacts generated by supersonic planes. The test results were published on Friday in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

The Federal Aviation Administration and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.

When supersonic Concorde jets were still in service, the United States banned them from flying over domestic land “so their resulting sonic booms won’t startle the public below or concern them about potential property damage,” according to NASA.

The Starship flight test in October was about 1.5 times as loud on the ground as the Concorde sonic boom, the test results showed….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. The Dickensian Christmas season is coming. Fortunately, Ryan George knows what to do “When Ghosts Try To Teach You Lessons”.

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

Pixel Scroll 11/15/24 If I Said You Had A Beautiful Pixel, Would You Scroll It Against Me?

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(1) KING JOINS RUSH FOR THE X-IT. “Stephen King leaves X, describing atmosphere as ‘too toxic’” reports the Guardian.

Stephen King has announced he is quitting X after describing the platform as “too toxic”.

In a post on X on Thursday, the author of The Shining and Shawshank Redemption wrote: “I’m leaving Twitter. Tried to stay, but the atmosphere has just become too toxic.” Referring to the rival platform launched by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, he added: “Follow me on Threads, if you like.”

This week, the Guardian said it would stop posting on X, citing concerns over toxic content on the platform. The German football club St Pauli, the actor Jamie Lee Curtis, the US TV journalist Don Lemon and Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia have also announced they will no longer post on the site.

On Wednesday, King denied he had called X’s owner, Elon Musk, “Trump’s new first lady” or that the world’s richest person, a staunch Donald Trump supporter, had kicked him off the platform – drawing a reply of “Hi Steve!” from Musk’s own account.

The Guardian left ahead of King:

…On Wednesday, the Guardian said it would no longer post from its official accounts because the benefits of being on the site were outweighed by the negatives, citing the “often disturbing content” found on it….

Since the election there’s been a mass X-odus. Bluesky has been one of the beneficiaries. File 770, which honestly has never had a big following at X.com, has lost 150 readers there — while gaining over 400 at Bluesky. We’re probably in somebody’s Starter Pack. Once people discover what they’ve signed up for I predict there will be a market correction…

(2) B&N BOOK OF THE YEAR. Barnes & Noble has announced James by Percival Everett as the 2024 Book of the Year reports Publishers Weekly. Filers soundly rejected my efforts to label James as being of genre interest. However, the bookseller has specially recognized two additional books, naming Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell (definitely genre) as its inaugural Children’s Book of the Year, and The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan as its first-ever Gift Book of the Year. The entire list of “2024 Book of the Year Finalists” is here at B&N Reads.

(3) DARK HORSE FOR AWARDS CONSIDERATION? “You probably haven’t heard of Meanwhile on Earth. It’s only 2024’s best sci-fi movie” according to Digital Trends. A lot is revealed about the plot at the link, and there are more clips.

… Meanwhile on Earth ends the way it should end, which is to say not all is revealed, and it’s up to you to decide what happens. Remember, this isn’t a big-budget sci-fi movie, so there’s no need to satisfy a mass audience who desperately need all questions answered and all mysteries revealed.

This film doesn’t do that, and it’s better for it. The ending is either happy or sad depending on how you interpret it. I’m leaning more to the former, although like everything else in the film, happiness comes at a cost, and you’re still left asking the film’s central question: Was everything Elsa did worth it?…

(4) BEFORE THERE WAS AI. Paul O’Connor reminds us about “The Wisdom of Wally Wood”.

One particular saying of comics arts genius Wally Wood has always stuck with me:

“Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up.”

I worked in comics for several years, and then — as in Wally Wood’s day — creators were mostly paid by the page. There was a minimum quality bar you needed to hit, but quantity was the thing. As a writer, I could manage about eight finished script pages per day. That meant I wrote a comic in three days. To make my rent, I needed to write four or five comics a month. It’s largely because of those days that I still think of myself as a pulp writer at heart.

(I envied writers who went faster — still do).

In that kind of environment, you need outlines, structures, reliable starting places, formulas. And you need to work fast.

Wood’s quote hits to the heart of those requirements. If it worked before, it should work again. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use your tools to tell the story, then tell the next story, and the next. Most of all, don’t worry about starting with a copy. By the time you finish the work, it will be your own.

One of the artists Wally Wood copied … was himself. His “22 Panels That Always Work” was a toolkit of poses and composition for injecting variety into boring panels from “some dumb writer (who) has a bunch of lame characters sitting around and talking for page after page!” (Ahem)….

(5) FORBIDDEN AGAIN. Deadline tells us: “’Forbidden Planet’ Remake Set; Brian K. Vaughan To Adapt Sci-Fi Classic”. Of course, Hugo voters know who Vaughan is. But are we excited?

Warner Bros has made a deal to mount a new version of the 1956 science fiction classic Forbidden Planet. The film will be written by comic book and screenwriter Brian K. Vaughan, and it will be produced by Emma Watts.

For its forward-thinking themes, the film is considered a north star for science fiction writing and cinema that came after it. It has never had a big-screen remake — though James Cameron reportedly once considered it — partly because the rights were complicated and difficult to untangle. The studio and Watts finally got that major obstacle out of the way….

… Vaughan is the Hugo- and Eisner Award-winning comic book writer and screenwriter whose comic creations include Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, Runaways, Pride of Baghdad, Saga and Paper Girls. He also wrote on such comics as X-Men, Spider-Man and Captain America — and his TV work includes serving as writer, story editor and producer of three seasons of Lost, after being tapped by Damon Lindelof. Vaughan was then handpicked by Steven Spielberg to adapt Stephen King’s novel Under the Dome. He has the sci-fi bona fides….

(6) WIN THE STOKER AWARD IN HALF AN HOUR. The Horror Writers Association debuted its “official tabletop game” at StokerCon 2024 – Sudden Acts of Horror! Available from the Stop The Killer online store.  Takes 30 minutes to play.

In this fun party charades game, teams invent fake horror novel titles on-the-spot to score points and win their very own mini Bram Stoker Award®!

The game comes packaged in a box that looks and opens like a novel, and includes:

  • 460 words printed on 230 double-sided tiles
  • 1 velvety black drawstring bag with gold cord to hold the tiles
  • 1 mini (2.5″) Bram Stoker Award®
  • 3 Dice
  • 1 Sand timer
  • 1 Score pad with pencil
  • 1 Rule Book

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary: — Star Trek’s “The Tholian Web”

Untold years ago this evening, Star Trek’s “The Tholian Web” first aired.

It was written by Judy Burns, her first professional script. She would later write scripts for myriad genre series including Mission: Impossible, The Six Million Dollar Man and Fantasy Island. Her co-writer was Chet Richards, this would be his only script. 

Primary guest cast was Sean Morgan as Lt. O’Neil, Barbara Babcock as the voice of Loskene who was the Tholian commander (she was Mea 3 in “A Taste of Armagedon” and Philana in “Plato’s Stepchildren” plus four voice roles), and Paul Baxley (uncredited in the episode) as the Captain of the Defiant. Baxley was the stunt coordinator for the series, and the stunt double for Shatner. 

RED ALERT, ERR, SPOILER ALERT. GO DRINK SOME KLINGON BLOOD WINE IF YOU CAN STOMACH IT. NOT ALL CAN. 

The Defiant has gone missing. Everyone can see the faintly green glowing ship, and the Enterprise is not picking up on any sensor readings. “Fascinating!” says Spock. (How many times did we hear those words in the final season?)  

Kirk decides Chekov, Bones, Spock and himself will beam over and check it out. They beam aboard the Defiant, each wearing a special suit. Everyone there is dead. Are you surprised? A Red Shirt murdered the Captain. Again, are we supposed to be surprised? This is a season three episode. I consider that season by far the weakest season. 

Then transporter seriously acts out. Scotty manages to get it almost behave but says he can take only three at a time. (Plot device!) Kirk says he’ll beam last. He vanishes. Errr, no surprise. And they can’t get a fix on him. No, I won’t say that again. 

As Chekov observes, the Defiant disappeared and took the captain with her. Shortly thereafter, aliens called the Tholians demand that the Enterprise go away. Spock, who is now in command, insists that they will not leave until Kirk is rescued.  

The Tholians decide to trap the crew there inside an energy web, and reveal that this is a part of space where people tend to go insane as if we need to be told that by now. The crew begins to go insane, again no surprise. 

Kirk is declared dead after attempts to save him have failed. Will it be any surprise that then Kirk is rescued? I think not. Will all be well in the end? What do you think? 

In a two-part episode of Enterprise, “In a Mirror, Darkly”, written by Michael Sussman, it is told that the Defiant has reappeared in the Mirror Universe of Archer’s time, where it is salvaged by the Tholians and later stolen from them by Jonathan Archer of the Terran Empire who tries but fails to become Emperor of that Empire when he is murdered by his lover so becomes Empress. All of this happening because the Defiant is the most technologically advanced starship in the Empire.

Yes, I very much like the latter story and think those episodes were very well told. Each of the regular cast here got to do something they didn’t usually get to do, actually really act. 

ENJOY THE WINE? OR NOT? EITHER WAY DO COME BACK BACK NOW. 

This is the first appearance of a Tholian in Star Trek — in this case, Commander Loskene. For this appearance, Loskene appeared only on the Enterprise’s viewscreen and was portrayed simply by a puppet created by Mike Minor. 

They would be a recurring presence in the Trek verse with three appearances in Star Trek Next Generation, seven in Deep Space Nine, Star Trek Nemesis and Enterprise twice. 

It is well worth noting as Memory Alpha says, “The approximately two dozen crew members who attend Kirk’s memorial service appear to constitute the largest assemblage of Enterprise personnel in the original series.” Having seen the rest of the various Trek series, I don’t think there’s another scene where there’s that many crew members assembled. Anyone remember one?

It is considered by most critics and a lot of fans alike to be one of the best Trek episodes done though it did not get a Hugo nomination unlike a lot of other Trek episodes. It appears we were more picky than they were. 

Need I say that both are on Paramount+?

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) VIDEO GAME CELEBRATES 20TH ANNIVERSARY. “’We don’t go to Ravenholm’: the story behind Half-Life 2’s most iconic level” as told in the Guardian.

At the start of Valve’s Half-Life 2, the seminal first-person shooter game that turns 20 this month, taciturn scientist Gordon Freeman is trapped within a dystopian cityscape. Armed soldiers patrol the streets, and innocent citizens wander around in a daze, bereft of purpose and future. Dr Wallace Breen, Freeman’s former boss at the scientific “research centre” Black Mesa, looks down from giant video screens, espousing the virtues of humankind’s benefactors, an alien race known as The Combine.

As Freeman stumbles through these first few levels of Half-Life 2, the player acclimatises to the horrible future laid out before them. It’s hardly the most cheerful setting, but there are some friendly faces (security guard Barney, Alyx and Eli Vance) and even moments of humour, as Dr Isaac Kleiner’s pet, a debeaked face-eating alien called Lamarr, runs amok in his laboratory. It feels safe. It feels fun. It feels familiar. There’s even a crowbar! And then, the foreshadowing. “That’s the old passage to Ravenholm,” mutters Alyx Vance during Freeman’s chapter five tour of the Black Mesa East facility. “We don’t go there any more.” You feel a shiver down your spine; you know you will end up going there.

“[Ravenholm] was a totally different environment from what the player had been in until that point,” says Dario Casali, level designer and member of the informal City 17 Cabal, a group within Valve that worked on Half-Life 2’s most famous level. “It was an outlier of a map set that survived from a pretty early build of the game, borne from a need to give the newly introduced Gravity Gun a place to shine.”

(10) STOCKHOLDER SUES HASBRO. “Hasbro sued in investor suit for allegedly lying about overpurchased inventory after pandemic demand” – Polygon analyzes the claims.

A self-described “investor rights law firm” filed a lawsuit Wednesday alleging that Hasbro, the tabletop gaming and toy company, misrepresented its excessive inventory to investors, something the firm says is a violation of federal securities laws. Polygon reached out to Hasbro for comment and has yet to hear back.

Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann (the law firm) filed a complaint in a New York court on behalf of the West Palm Beach Firefighters’ Pension Fund, asking the court to grant the case class action status — meaning other investors and stock purchasers can participate. Hasbro, like other gaming companies, saw a boost in interest and sales during the pandemic, when people were looking for things to do in their homes; games were an obvious choice. The lawsuit alleges Hasbro purchased inventory to meet that demand — but ended up buying too much. Hasbro allegedly told investors the high purchasing was necessary to “mitigate supply chain risk and meet consumer demand” ahead of the 2022 holiday season, according to the lawsuit. When that inventory sat, Hasbro said the stock “reflected outstanding and anticipated demand” and not a decreased demand. The lawsuit alleges Hasbro was intentionally misleading investors and knew it “overpurchased inventory to an extend that significantly outpaced customer demand.” The timeline makes sense: 2022 is when the world started opening up more broadly, and people were eager to get out of their houses….

…Because of all this — especially the October 2023 financial disclosures — stock prices declined and investors lost money, the lawsuit alleges, to the tune of a loss of $831 million in shareholder value. The stock value Hasbro previously had, according to the lawsuit’s claims, was due to inflated prices due to the lack of disclosures….

(11) LATE REPORT FROM THE EARLY NO-WARNING SYSTEM. Space.com tells readers: “An asteroid hit Earth just hours after being detected. It was the 3rd ‘imminent impactor’ of 2024”. “By the time the astrometry reached the impact monitoring systems, the impact had already happened.”

Last month, an asteroid impacted Earth’s atmosphere just hours after being detected —  somehow, it managed to circumvent impact monitoring systems during its approach to our planet. However, on the bright side, the object measured just 3 feet (1 meter) in diameter and posed very little threat to anything on Earth’s surface. 

This asteroid, designated 2024 UQ, was first discovered on Oct. 22 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey in Hawaii, a network of four telescopes that scan the sky for moving objects that might be space rocks on a collision course with Earth. Two hours later, the asteroid burned up over the Pacific Ocean near California, making it an “imminent impactor.”The small amount of time between detection and impact means impact monitoring systems, operated by the European Space Agency’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Center, didn’t receive tracking data about the incoming asteroid until after it struck Earth, according to the center’s November 2024 newsletter….

(13) SPACEWOMAN DOCUMENTARY. “Trailblazer: astronaut Eileen Collins reflects on space, adventure, and the power of lifelong learning” at Physics World (registration required).

In this episode of Physics World Stories, astronaut Eileen Collins shares her extraordinary journey as the first woman to pilot and command a spacecraft. Collins broke barriers in space exploration, inspiring generations with her courage and commitment to discovery. Reflecting on her career, she discusses not only her time in space but also her lifelong sense of adventure and her recent passion for reading history books. Today, Collins frequently shares her experiences with audiences around the world, encouraging curiosity and inspiring others to pursue their dreams.

Joining the conversation is Hannah Berryman, director of the new documentary SPACEWOMAN, which is based on Collins’ memoir Through the Glass Ceiling to the Stars, co-written with Jonathan H Ward. The British filmmaker describes what attracted her to Collins’ story and the universal messages it reveals. Hosted by science communicator Andrew Glester, this episode offers a glimpse into the life of a true explorer – one whose spirit of adventure knows no bounds….

(14) HOW RADIO TELESCOPE BECAME PERMANENTLY UNPLUGGED. “Unprecedented failure led to the collapse of the world-renowned radio telescope in Puerto Rico, report shows” – NBC News has the story.

Four years after the radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico collapsed, a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine is shining a light on the unprecedented failures that caused its destruction.

The steel cables holding up the telescope’s 900-ton receiver platform became loose because the zinc-filled sockets built to support them failed, according to the report published Oct. 25.

The failure was due to excessive “zinc creep,” a process in which the metal used to prevent corrosion or rusting on the sockets deforms and loses it grip over time, the report said.

The zinc gradually lost its hold on the cables suspending the telescope’s main platform over the reflector dish. This allowed several cables to pull out of the sockets, ultimately causing the platform to plummet into the reflector more than 400 feet below, according to the report…

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

Pixel Scroll 11/10/24 A Pixel A Day Keeps The Doctor Away. But Who Wants That?

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(1) WHALE OF A TALE. Sam Weller recalls Ray Bradbury’s work scripting Moby Dick (1956) in “I … Am Herman Melville!” at Los Angeles Review of Books.

…The next night, Bradbury met Huston in his suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The fateful encounter was one of Bradbury’s favorite stories to tell. 

“I walked into his room.” Bradbury recalled. “He put a drink in my hand. He sat me down and he leaned over and said, ‘Ray, what are you doing during the next year?’” When Bradbury imitated Huston, he assumed a rough, throaty baritone.

I said, “Not much, Mr. Huston. Not much.” And he said, “Well, Ray, how would you like to come live in Ireland and write the screenplay of Moby Dick?” And I said, “Gee, Mr. Huston, I’ve never been able to read the damn thing.”

He’d never heard that before and he thought for a moment and then he said, “Well, I’ll tell you what, Ray. Why don’t you go [home] tonight, read as much as you can, and come back tomorrow and then tell me if you’ll help me kill a white whale.”

Bradbury was stunned. He went home and told his wife, “Pray for me.” Maggie Bradbury, accustomed to her husband’s hyperbole, responded, “Why?” And he said: “Because I’ve got to read a book tonight and do a book report tomorrow.”…

…The next day, Bradbury agreed to write the screenplay. It had been quite a run. In just over a week, he had finished Fahrenheit 451 and agreed to work with his movie hero, adapting one of the most challenging works of American literature into a two-hour film. Bradbury signed a 17-week contract earning $650 a week plus living expenses, a king’s ransom for a man who, less than a decade earlier, had earned his stripes writing for pulp magazines that paid $40 or $50 per story…

(2) SEATTLE WORLDCON 2025 FABRICS. Next year’s Worldcon is taking a page from Glasgow 2024’s playbook. Glasgow had a custom tartan that was designed, registered, and woven just for them. Now Seattle Worldcon 2025 has a Spoonflower shop with a selection of fabrics in their colors and using their logos, motifs, and characters. Below is an example of one of the patterns available.

(3) SEVENTIES TREK CON: KNOW ANYBODY? The BBC has posted a collection of Neil Slavin photographs: “Trekkies to twins: Eight photos of the quirkiest groups in 70s and 80s US”. Image can be viewed at the link.

The Star Trek Convention (1972-5)

The Star Trek convention, in Brooklyn, New York, was a trickier affair. “I don’t think it has heart,” says Slavin, typically forthright. With the wrestlers, “the pulse is very obvious,” he maintains, but this group, which met annually to exchange memorabilia and keep the memory of the original series of Star Trek alive, was much harder to penetrate. “It was [just] people dressing up,” he shrugs. “They don’t really know each other. They didn’t come together and have the kind of energy that would have changed the dynamic. Their concern is purely looking at the camera and being some character that they weren’t.” He nevertheless considers the photograph a success. “It shows the sociological cracks,” he says. “They need to be together, but they’re together apart.”

(4) TIM BURTON EXHIBIT. [Item by Steve French.] If folk happen to be in London: “What Makes the Dark, Whimsical World of Tim Burton So Compelling?” in Smithsonian Magazine.

An immersive ode to Hollywood’s goth king has arrived in London. In a new exhibition at the Design Museum, visitors can view Tim Burton’s early artworks, as well as sketches and costumes from Corpse Bride(2005), Beetlejuice (1988), Edward Scissorhands (1990) and more.

“It’s a strange thing, to put 50 years of art and your life on view for everyone to see, especially when that was never the original purpose,” says Burton in a statement.

(5) LEADING STREAMERS. JustWatch has shared their Top 10 sf streaming lists for October 2024. Not what I would have predicted!

(6) DEATH WILL NOT RELEASE YOU – IF YOU’RE PROFITABLE. “Peter Cushing Becomes Latest Icon To Be Given AI Resurrection In Sky Hammer Films Doc” reports Deadline.

Fans of Peter Cushing are in for a Halloween treat, with the iconic Frankenstein star the latest to be resurrected by AI.

In Hammer: Heroes, Legends and Monsters, a Sky doc airing [on Halloween], viewers will be treated to a “powerful and poignant reveal of Hammer royalty,” Sky said, with what is being described as a “special homage” to Cushing.

Cushing, who died in 1994, played Doctor Van Helsing in five Dracula films and Baron Frankenstein in six movies from that franchise. He will be the latest celebrity given the AI resurrection treatment. Yesterday, the doc’s producer Deep Fusion Films unveiled a “world first” podcast hosted by a replica of the late chat show presenter Michael Parkinson….

…This isn’t the first time Cushing has been resurrected. His likeness was revived as Grand Moff Tarkin for 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and a high court legal battle over the use of the image was recently ruled by a judge to go to trial.

Ben Field, who runs Deep Fusion, said the Hammer doc resurrection has secured all necessary permissions. The decision to resurrect Cushing is “tied to his significance to the Hammer legacy,” he added. “As a figure central to Hammer’s success, Cushing’s presence is crucial to telling the story authentically,” he added….

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary, November 10, 1966 — Star Trek’s “The Corbomite Maneuver”

Fifty-eight years ago this evening, “The Corbomite Maneuver” first aired.

It was the tenth episode of the first season, and it was written by Jerry Sohl who had previously written for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits, The Invaders, and The Twilight Zone. (His other Trek scripts were “Whom Gods Destroy” and “This Side of Paradise”.)

It was the first episode filmed in which Kelley played Dr. Leonard McCoy, Nichols played Lt. Uhura and Whitney played Yeoman Rand, though we first saw them on the air in “The Man Trap”.  

Clint Howard, brother of Ron Howard, played the alien Balok but he didn’t voice him — Walker Edmiston provided that. Ted Cassidy, who was the Gorn in “Arena” and the android Ruk in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” voiced the Balok puppet. 

The Balok puppet itself was designed by Wah Chang, who, among other things, shared an academy award for the Time Machine prop in Pal’s movie of the same name. Cool fact: Chang is responsible for the Pillsbury dough boy. Any resemblance to Balok is probably accidental. 

So did critics like it at the time? No idea as I can’t find any contemporary reviews of it anywhere even on Rotten Tomatoes though media critics now love it as most put it in their top twenty of all of the Trek series episodes. 

It was nominated for a Hugo at NyCon 3, the year that “The Menagerie” won. “The Naked Time” was also nominated that year. 

It is, of course, streaming on Paramount+. 

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

November 10, 1982 — Aliette de Bodard, 42. Let’s start with Aliette de Bodard’s oh-so-excellent Xuya Universe series which is my go-to fiction by her. It started with “The Lost Xuyan Bride”, which you can read on her website. I can’t begin to even count the number of shorter stories here, I say shorter as isn’t everything a story, but she’s written a very large number of them.

Aliette de Bodard

My favorites? “The Shipmaker” which garnered a BSFA; Hugo-nominated “On a Red Station, Drifting” which I’ve reread at least three times because it’s so good; “The Citadel of Weeping Pearls” for its look at a ship mind; “The Tea Master and the Detective” which I adore; “Red Scholar’s Wake”, another one well worth rereading; and finally “The Mausoleum’s Children”, another much-deserved Hugo nominee.

I not read as deep in the Dominion of The Fallen series which leads off with the BSFA-winning House of the Shattered Wings novels, but the story of Paris in ruins because of a War between apparently Heaven and Hell is a tale worth its time. I’ve only listened to the next two, both are excellent, The House of Binding Thorns and The House of Sundering Flames, so I cannot advise on later novels. 

The last series doesn’t reflect her French Vietnamese culture unlike the first two. The third is Obsidian & Blood. She has the Mexica Empire teetering on the brink of destruction as the horrors the flesh-eating demons, or something they think are demons, from the stars, along with their might be goddess only held in check by the Protector God’s power. So has anyone read these? I haven’t.

I admit that the Xuya Universe series is the only series here that I follow. The characters, the setting and the story all make for a wonderful ongoing piece of fiction that I look forward to seeing her continue as long as she cares to.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) TRUE GRIT. [Item by Steven French.] And here’s another Dune: Prophecy actress answering questions: “Emily Watson: ‘You have to be a bit of an idiot to be an actor’” in the Guardian.

You are also about to star in Dune: Prophecy, the female-led TV prequel to the Denis Villeneuve movies. It’s set 10,000 years before the films and you play the leader of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, Valya Harkonnen. How would you describe her?

It becomes revealed through the series that she and her family have a really messed-up background. And that she is driven by a sense of vengeance about having been very deeply wronged. But she’s recognisably human, and, as a young woman, you’re rooting for her, because she’s strong-willed and free. And Dune is a very complex moral universe, where there are no goodies and baddies, which I like. It’s not standing around in spandex looking dumb.

(11) HERBERT ANALYZED. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian also has an interview with Olivia Williams, who was in The Postman and The Sixth Sense and stars in Dune: Prophecy, where talks about living with cancer and the use of AI in movies: “’Watch out, I’m even less inhibited’: Olivia Williams on movies, misogyny and living with cancer”.

…We are here to talk about her latest role, in Dune: Prophecy, a big-budget series that is a prequel to the recent films. Williams’s old friend Emily Watson stars with her, as leader of a nascent, nunlike sect of women, who have supernatural, sometimes violent abilities and world-conquering ambitions. It sounds as if Williams was not immediately wowed by the prospect of joining the Dune juggernaut.

“I had my suspicions about feminist TV based on a novel written by a bloke in the 60s,” she says. “And there are some elements that are very based in the patriarchy. There’s this fascination of, what do women get up to when men aren’t around, and what kind of wisdom is it that men are frightened of? They seem frightened we can read their minds, or know when they’re telling the truth or lying.”…

(12) OPEN TO SUGGESTION. “A Game Designer Who Wants to See Ideas He’ll Hate” in the New York Times (behind a paywall).

Ian Dallas, the founder and creative director of the video game studio Giant Sparrow, happened to be talking about food, but his gastronomical tastes are similar to his design philosophy. “I’m always interested,” he said, “in what’s the strangest, new intense experience that I can have.”

Giant Sparrow’s most recent release, What Remains of Edith Finch, is one of the more piquant fusions of narrative and game design of the past decade. What became a collection of short stories about a cursed family of storytellers living in the Pacific Northwest began as a scuba diving simulator.

From the rough prototype to the finished game, Dallas strove to evoke the rush of the sublime; while searching for ways to conjure that feeling, he made one prototype after another. By the alchemy of art, he and his small team ended up with a game that uses a different mechanic for each of the stories it tells about the last day of a character’s life. In one scenario, a little girl turns into a cat, an owl, a shark and a man-eating sea monster; in another, a man working at a cannery becomes lost in an internal fantasy while working over a fish-slicing machine.

Dallas’s approach to a project can be summed up as experimentation within a given set of parameters. He likes to tell new colleagues that he wants to see things he will hate.

“If I don’t see ideas that include some that are just like really out there, then we’re not trying hard enough,” he said. What might not seem promising early on can plant the seed for inspired creativity down the line….

…Dallas wants his new game to help people reflect on the vastly different ways that other species experience the world. He is also interested in “how many bizarre things are going on around us all the time that we aren’t really aware of or thinking about.”…

(13) SCARECROW REPRISE. “Ray Bolger sings ‘If I Only Had A Brain’ to Judy Garland”. Live on the Judy Garland Show, Episode 10, October 11, 1963. You’ve seen the movie in color. So for variety, watch them sing here in black & white!

(14) WORST INTRO. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] What is the worst introduction to an SF/F book ever? Grammaticus Books thinks he has found it with the introduction to an edition collecting Robert Howard Conan stories.  The introduction slams Howard and those close to him.  Why?  Well Grammaticus Books thinks he has the answer… It was the collection’s publisher’s doing…. “The World’s WORST Book FOREWORD!!!”

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

Pixel Scroll 11/3/24 Never Scroll In Against A Pixelian When Death Is On The Line

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(1) BOWERS MUSEUM FANTASY EXHIBITION. [Item by Matthew Sangster.] A touring version of the British Library’s Fantasy: Realms of Imagination (which was reviewed on File 770 last year) has now opened at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, CA. (It opened October 26 and runs to February 16, 2025).  A small number of the more fragile manuscripts haven’t travelled, but there are a number of new inclusions, including original concept art from Labyrinth by Brian and Wendy Froude.

Sleeping Beauty (1968) © Royal Ballet and Opera. Tunic worn by Rudolf Nureyev as Prince Florimund in Act III of The Royal Ballet production of The Sleeping Beauty (1968) © Royal Ballet and Opera

Let our landmark exhibition cast its spell as we explore the beautiful, uncanny and sometimes monstrous makings of fantasy. From epic visions to intricately envisaged details, Fantasy: Realms of Imagination celebrates some of the finest fantasy creators, reveals how their imagined lands, languages and creatures came into being, and delves into the traditions of a genre that has created some of the most passionate and enduring fandoms.

Journey from fairy tales and folklore to the fantastical worlds of Studio Ghibli. Venture into lands occupied by goblins and go down the rabbit hole. Explore the realms of the one ring and travel into the depths of Pan’s Labyrinth. And discover how the oldest forms of literature continue to inspire fantasy authors today.

Presented in partnership with the British Library, Bowers Museum invites visitors to discover 160 fantastical items that include costumes, historical manuscripts, rare first editions, drafts of iconic novels, scripts, maps, original artwork, film props, and immersive multimedia experiences.

Gather your fellow adventurers and step into the realms of fantasy as they have never been chronicled before. Who knows where your journey will lead…

(2) TREK MEMORABILIA. Julien’s “Bid Long & Prosper Auction” will take place November 11. Among all the Star Trek costumes, props, and documentation going under the hammer, this “William Shatner Captain James T. Kirk Hero Screen-Matched Communicator Prop” is expected to fetch one of the highest prices, in the six-figure range. (I assume the stopwatch is for scale, not to measure whether Kirk was fastest on the draw.)

(3) GODZILLA AT SEVENTY. LAist recalls “The little-known connection between LA and Japanese monster masterpiece, ‘Godzilla’” — which may or may not have been a good thing, but did mean I got to watch this version on local TV when I was a kid.

Today marks a very special day for a timeless Japanese icon.

On Nov. 3, 1954, the first Godzilla film was released in Japan. The monster flick, which many people saw as an allegory for the Atomic bomb, was a box office hit in the country, and would go on to become a global sensation.

But, “unbeknownst to many people, Godzilla’s international stardom actually began right here in Los Angeles,” said Steve Ryfle, who co-authored the book, Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film, from Godzilla to Kurosawa.

That’s because for five decades, according to Ryfle, pretty much the only way audiences in the U.S. and other parts of the Western world could see the film was through a highly altered version of the 1954 Japanese original.

And that re-edited version, titled Godzilla King of the Monsters! contained added scenes that were all shot in Los Angeles.

… The studio behind Godzilla — the renowned Toho Studios — was looking to expand into foreign markets, and set up a small export office in L.A.

One of the films they offered up for sale was the monster film, said Ryfle. The people who bought it were not your typical Hollywood execs….

What these American producers did to the original Japanese version was write in an entirely new character named Steve Martin, who is an American wire service reporter stationed in Japan, played by character actor Raymond Burr of Perry Mason fame….

(4) EDEL RODRIGUEZ Q&A. Steven Heller interviews Edel Rodriguez about “Cuban Sci-Fi and Hope for the Future” at PRINT Magazine.

What exactly does this niche of fiction mean?
Some of these stories reflect on what is happening in Cuban culture and politics under the cover of science fiction. It gives writers a way to be social critics in an indirect manner. They can tell stories about corruption, migration, shortages and other social ills in a dystopian setting that is not directly tied to Cuba.

Are the books produced in Cuba for Cuban readers?
The books are written in Cuba by Cuban writers but have mostly been published in Spain. Some of them have been published in Cuba; it just depends on the nature of the writing. The books by the author Yoss are not printed on the island, though they do make their way back to readers there.

Are the writers dissidents?
I don’t think they are dissidents per se, but some have been looked at in a negative light by the establishment. This is why some of their books are often published overseas. I believe that the writer Agustín de Rojas was embraced by Cuban institutions while the writer Yoss was not.

What do you feel is a smart sci-fi scenario? And is there a Cuban narrative?
My favorite thing about these stories is seeing the references to Cuban culture, the conversation style and scenarios which mirror what is happening in the Cuban society. A Cuban narrative is when all goes to hell and the characters are desperately trying to right the ship, whether it be a boat, a country or a spaceship.

(5) FREE READ. Sunday Morning Transport starts the month with a free read: “Margeaux Poppins, Monster Hunter”. As the editor say –

Bringing out great short fiction each Sunday depends on the support of our readers. Our first story each month is free. We hope that you will subscribe to receive all our stories, and support the work of our authors. If you already subscribe — thank you!

(6) EVERYTHING ROMERO. You can explore the George A. Romero Archival Collection at Digital Pitt.

What’s online?

The online collection contains selections from the George A. Romero Archival Collection including behind the scenes and premiere photos from Night of the Living Dead, as well as posters spanning Romero’s filmography.

What’s in the entire collection?

The George A. Romero Archival Collection documents a creative history of Romero’s work spanning his entire career. It includes drafts and manuscripts for both his produced and unrealized projects, as well as production, publicity, and promotional materials related to his work. It is part of the horror studies collecting area within Archives & Special Collections.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Memory: Ngaio Marsh’s A Man Lay Dead (1934)

I truly love country house mysteries.  I really do. And they are perfectly suited, the classic ones, for me to listen to, especially this time of year.

There’s A. E. Milne’s The Red House Murder and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. And now let’s talk about Ngaio Marsh and her country house mystery, A Man Lay Dead. 

Ngaio Marsh was born in 1895 Christchurch, New Zealand where she lived until 1928, when she went to London with friends on whom he would base the Lamprey family in the Surfeit of Lampreys novel, her tenth novel to feature Roderick Alleyn. But long before that, she would write A Man Lay Dead which as I said is a country house murder. It is the first novel of thirty-two to feature Roderick Alleyn, and was first published ninety years ago by Geoffrey Bles in London. 

The plot concerns a murder committed during a game of murder mystery at a weekend party in a country house.  

WE ARE GOING TO TELL A STORY HERE, SO GO AWAY UNLESS YOU WANT KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IN THIS NOVEL!

A small group of guests at Sir Hubert Handesley’s estate including a man about town, several of his nieces, an art expert, a gossip reporter, and pay attention as Marsh makes sure you notice him, a butler of Russian ancestry.

The murder mystery game in which one of the guests is of course chosen to be the murderer and someone to be murdered by him or her. At the time of the murderer’s choice, he tells the victim they’re dead.

At that point, the lights go out, a loud bell rings, and then everyone comes back to together for yet more drinks and to piece together who did it. It is all intended to be a good hearted diversion, except that the corpse is very, very real.

When the lights go up this time, there is a real corpse with a real dagger in the back. All seven suspects have solid alibis, so Chief Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn has to figure out the whodunit. (Alleyn is conveniently investigating a murder connected to a stolen chalice in the area, but he’s called when this murder occurs at uncle’s estate.) 

Will more murders happen? I’m not saying, but this a classic manor house mystery, so what do you think? Need I say? 

NO MORE STORY SHALL BE TOLD, SO COME BACK NOW.

Marsh had being reading a short story by Christie or Sayers, she forgot which, and wondered if she could write a mystery novel set in the Murder Game which was popular at English weekend parties. So she bought some composition books and set down to write.

Marsh regretted this novel immensely once she’d refined her writing skills in years to come. Joanne Drayton noted in Ngaio Marsh: Her life in crime that she would “cringe at the thought of her first novel with its barely plausible story line, shallow characterization and confined setting”.  

Despite her criticisms, the story does work decently, or at least I think it does. Who else has read it, and what are your opinions of it?  I’d say a lot of the manor house mysteries of that period weren’t exactly literary masterpieces by any reasonable measure, but were they meant to be? I think not. 

It would later be adapted for the Inspector Alleyn Mysteries series with the Angela North character here being replaced by Agatha Troy who appears in later novels as Alleyn’s romantic interest and eventual wife. 

It, like almost everything Marsh did, is available from the usual suspects. The Inspector Alleyn Mysteries series is streaming on Amazon Prime.  

The cover is that hardcover first by Geoffrey Bles. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Breaking Cat News details how Tortimer the Roomba will save the world.
  • Strange Brew has a strange crossover.
  • Tom Gauld wasn’t blinded by science – but by lunch.

(9) COMICS HISTORY UP FOR AUCTION. Christie’s will auction this month “Les Cousins Dalton” by Morris (1923-2001).

The Belgian cartoonist Morris (pen name of Maurice De Bevere) introduced his comic-book cowboy Lucky Luke in 1946. Les Cousins Dalton, an original strip in which our hero defeats four gunslingers at a single stroke after slurping a Coca-Cola, dates from 1958, when Morris was working with René Goscinny, co-creator of Asterix

(10) THE ODDS OF LIFE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Dave Kipping over at the Cool Worlds channel has always been a bit of a sceptic regarding the possibility of life elsewhere, especially technological life.  The reason why some biologists, like Jack Cohen and I, do think that life is fairly common and while intelligent life with technology may be rare, it is not that rare. However, Dave Kipping does have some mathematical arguments on his side (if you go down the Bayesian route — it’s a maths probability thing). However, work the past few years had pushed back evidence for first life to even earlier in the Earth’s life than before, and a recent paper extends the likely lifespan of our biosphere.  So, Dave Kipping has had a re-think and is coming around to our way of thinking…

There’s been some new studies in the fields of palaeontology that have changed my mind about one of the most profound questions – does life start easily on Earth-like planets? Join me today to find out why…

(11) OVER THE GARDEN WALL 10TH ANNIVERSARY SHORT. [Item by N.] Over the Garden Wall, an animated fantasy miniseries that has become an autumnal staple for many, premiered 10 years ago today. In celebration, Cartoon Network has released a stop-motion short with help from Aardman Animations.

Concurrently, Inverse has published an interview with series creator Patrick McHale, who both looks back and looks forward: “10 Years Later, the Creepiest Cult Classic Just Got a Huge Upgrade”.

Here’s an official mirror on X.com which can be seen outside the US.

(12) AI BLIGHT OF THE DAY. [Item by Danny Sichel.] Generative AI is a blight, but sometimes it can make things like this – a music video for Game of Thrones in a Trailer Park. “A Song of Rednecks (Official Music Video)”.

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

Pixel Scroll 10/28/24 John Pixel Is Dead, He Scrolled On His Head

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(1) DETECTING AI-GENERATED TEXT. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The rise of large language model AI provides not only boons in tidying up text (of particular benefit to some users such as those with English as a second language or those suffering from, say, dyslexia) but comes with issues when used nefariously by those wishing to pass off AI generated text as their own creativity. Manual checks on text come with the risk of relatively high false positives as well as false negatives. Mandatory archiving all AI generated text comes with both compliance and privacy issues, so this leaves digital watermarking.

AI-generated text (and images) is already causing problems in science with fake paper submissions and also in science fiction where magazine editors have been receiving AI-generated works causing some bodies to come up with rules to govern their use, or banning, AI, one recent body doing so is the Horror Writers Association.

The latest issue of Nature has as its cover story (and an accompanying editorial such is this subject’s importance) on a new digital watermarking system developed by researchers at Google DeepMind in London. Their system is called SynthID-Text. File770 readers interested in this should check the original, open access, paper (I am not a computer scientist and this is definitely outside my comfort zone) but the way it works is to generate ‘tokens’ which are synonym words generated from the text’s context. A number of tokens are needed for the system to work.

Both the researchers and Nature say that this research is an important step in establishing an effective watermarking system, but both the researchers and Nature also clearly note that there are still many hurdles to overcome. For example, it is possible to wash out such digital watermarks by simply running through the AI-generated text through another large-language-model AI.

Currently, both the US and EU are considering legislation and respective bodies to oversee AI. China has already made digital watermarking mandatory and in the US the state of California is thinking of doing the same.

Meanwhile, DeepMind has made SynthID-Text free and open access. Yet, as said, the hurdles are great and there is still a long way to go. As the Nature editorial makes plain, ‘we need to grow up fast’.

The paper is Dathathri, S. et al ((2024) Scalable watermarking for identifying large language model outputs. Nature, vol. 634, p818-823.

The editorial is Anon. (2024) AI watermarking must be watertight to be effective. vol. 634, p753.

(2) OPEN LETTER. Literary Hub reports “Hundreds of Authors Pledge to Boycott Israeli Cultural Institutions” – among them are Jonathan Lethem, China Miéville, Junot Díaz, Marilyn Hacker, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, and Carmen Maria Machado. They have signed an open letter titled “Refusing Complicity in Israel’s Literary Institutions”, text available at Google Docs. It says in part:

…We have a role to play. We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement. This was the position taken by countless authors against South Africa; it was their contribution to the struggle against apartheid there.

Therefore: we will not work with Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians. We will not cooperate with Israeli institutions including publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications that:

  1. Are complicit in violating Palestinian rights, including through discriminatory policies and practices or by whitewashing and justifying Israel’s occupation, apartheid or genocide, or
  2. Have never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law. 

(3) CHANGING OF THE TAFF GUARD. Michael J. “Orange Mike” Lowrey imparts the latest Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund news:

Sarah Gulde has returned home “after many days” and has as of today taken over North American TAFF admin duties, allowing Mike Lowrey to retire.

Sarah Gulde, of course, was the 2024 TAFF winner and went to the Worldcon in Glasgow.

(4) THE WITCHING HOUR GOES HIGHBROW. Midnight book release events began to market Harry Potter, and initially most (but not all) subsequent ones were for genre works. Not anymore. Publishers Weekly points out that Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo and Haruki Murakami’s The City and its Uncertain Walls, translated by Philip Gabriel have or will get the midnight treatment this year: “Literary Publishers Embraces the Midnight Release Party”.

The midnight book release party, which sees patrons descending on bookstores at 12 midnight to get their copy of a buzzy new book, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Still, it has evolved considerably in its short lifespan. The rise of the midnight release in the book business can be traced back to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, which debuted in the U.S. in 1998. But it was the strict embargo put on the fourth book in the series, before its publication in 2000, that helped popularize the late-night bookstore gatherings.

While this trend began with books for younger readers—Stephanie Meyers’s Twilight series and the final installment of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games series also got the midnight release treatment—it hasn’t stayed that way. In the years since, bookstores have held midnight release events for the likes of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, and Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments….

(5) ARCHIPELACON 2. The week after Midsummer will be the highlight of the European sci-fi summer of 2025! This will be when the 2025 Eurocon, or Archipelacon 2, comes to Mariehamn in the Åland Islands of Finland.

Date and venue: June 26–29, Culture and Congress Center Alandica (Strandgatan 33, Mariehamn).

“We wanted to organise a second Archipelacon because the first one was so great that people still get dewy-eyed remembering it. Mariehamn is exactly the right place for this type of event. It is a place where land and sea, Finland and Sweden, small town idyll and world history all come together,” says Karo Leikomaa, chairperson of Archipelacon 2.

Guests of Honour:

Ann VanderMeer (USA): editor, anthologist, acquiring editor for Tor.com and Weird Fiction Review, and Editor-in-Residence for Shared Worlds.

Jeff VanderMeer (USA): writer, environmental activist, and friend of many baby raccoons. Has recently published Absolution, the fourth part of the award-winning Southern Reach Trilogy. The New York Times calls it “his strangest novel yet”.

Mats Strandberg (Sweden): purveyor of fine Swedish horror, set in the most mundane of environments: conference centres, care homes and the very weird world that exists on board the massive passenger ferries between Finland and Sweden. His book Blood Cruise (Färjan) will be made into a TV series by the Swedish public service broadcaster SVT, set to be broadcast in late 2025.

Emmi Itäranta (Finland) writes her books in both Finnish and English. Her debut, The Memory of Water (Teemestarin kirja), was produced as a feature film in 2022 and set the tone for her work, which often explores environmental themes. She has since published two more novels, The Weaver (Kudottujen kujien kaupunki), and The Moonday Letters (Kuunpäivän kirjeet). Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. 

“Being selected as the 2025 Eurocon is a great honour, and also recognition of the work that the Finnish and Nordic fandom has done. The first Archipelacon proved that large international conventions can be organised in Finland, and Worldcon 75 in Helsinki in 2017 demonstrated what Finnish, Nordic and international fandom can achieve together,” says Leikomaa.

Archipelacon 2 memberships are on sale on the con’s website.

Memberships are capped at 1,000. By the beginning of October, well over half of the memberships had already been sold.

Adult membership costs 40 euros, for 13–26-year-olds the membership fee is 20 euros, and for children 5 euros. The price will remain the same all the way.

(6) HOLD THE PHONE. “Publication of The Martian Trilogy Will Be Delayed” — here’s Amazing Stories’ official announcement.

The Martian Trilogy’s release will be delayed and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki’s introduction to that book has been removed from the contents.

This follows the release of serious allegations made against Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki of “unethical behavior and bad faith dealings” by Erin Lindi Cairns, a South African author, which has since been supported by statements from others, including a detailed statement by Jason Sandford.

This is a huge blow to the team that worked on this book, to John P. Moore’s legacy, and to the science fiction community at large, as this will delay the release of what is considered to be an important chapter in the history of Black science fiction and its contributions to the genre…

They are now looking at a mid-2025 release date.

(7) GABINO IGLESIAS REVIEWS. Yesterday we had the link to the September column, which is why we are able to come back so soon with the link for Gabino Iglesias’ next New York Times column “New Horror for Readers Who Want to Be Completely Terrified” (behind a paywall). In October he reviewed Yvonne Battle-Felton’s new novel, Curdle Creek (Holt, 292 pp., $27.99), Kevin J. Anderson’s Nether Station (Blackstone, 308 pp., $27.99), Nick Cutter’s The Queen (Gallery, 374 pp., $28.99), and Del Sandeen’s debut, This Cursed House (Berkley, 374 pp., $29).

(8) KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES. California’s governor has a proposal to encourage film and TV productions to stay in-state. “Newsom To The Rescue: Governor Supersizes California’s Film & TV Tax Credits To Get Hollywood Back To Work” – Deadline has the story.

… In an announcement this afternoon at Raleigh Studios, the Governor will reveal that he aims to boost the state’s tax credits from their present level of $330 million a year to around $750 million annually, I’ve learned

The whooping increase will not take place immediately, and is subject to approval by the Democratic majority legislature in the Golden State’s 2025-2026 budget. However, in this election year of close down ticket races, Sunday’s announcement is intended to swell confidence locally for an industry and a workforce that has seen production in L.A. and across the state dramatically shrink and jobs dry up over the last year or so, sources say….

… Also, besides the more than doubling of California’s credits, which were established in their current form in 2014, the increase will make the Golden State the top capped source for production tax incentives in the nation — at least on paper. Presently, with a $280 million expansion last year, New York state offers about $700 million in capped incentives. However, that number is augmented by a patchwork quilt of other offsets and exemptions available to productions in various specific jurisdictions in the Empire State.

While states like New Jersey, Nevada, and Utah have been putting more tax credit money on the table, Louisiana and Georgia still remain among the top rivals to California. Coming out of the shutdown of production during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes and industry wide layoffs and cost-cutting measures, the Peach State, like California, hasn’t anywhere near fully rebounded. Having said that, while California has more production than anywhere else overall, Georgia, especially Atlanta, still attracts more big budget productions on average that anywhere else in the U.S.A.

It doesn’t hurt that costs in Georgia are generally much lower than on the West Coast, and that the state has an uncapped incentive program that ranges from around $900 million to $1.2 billion per annum. Movies or TV shows that shoot in the Southern state receive a 20% base transferable tax credit. As accounting execs at Disney, Netflix and everyone else in town will tell you with no small sense of disbelief, productions also easily receive a 10% Georgia Entertainment Promotion “uplift” if they include the state logo in their credits for five seconds or, according to the Georgia Department of Economic Development, an “alternative marketing promotion.”

This new increase recommended Sunday by Gov. Newsom will certainly shake up the tax credit status quo….

(9) THE OTHER CHOSEN ONE. Variety tells what happens when “Timothée Chalamet Makes Surprise Appearance at Lookalike Contest”.

A sea of 20-something boys, with a mix of defined jawlines, hazel eyes and mops of curly hair congregated at New York City’s Washington Square Park on Sunday afternoon to take part in a Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest. But in a surprise twist, around 30 minutes after the contest kicked off, the real-life Chalamet made a surprise appearance in the middle of the crowd.

Chalamet snuck his way through the packed mob, hiding behind a black mask and baseball hat, before sneaking up on two doppelgangers posing for photos. Once he got to the middle, he took off his mask for the big reveal as shrieks quickly erupted across the park….

… The lookalike contest was promoted the past few weeks through flyers posted across the city, in addition to a public Partiful invitation promising a $50 cash prize for the winner. By Sunday morning, the event had more than 2,500 RSVPs.

Chalamet pulled up behind one of the more popular lookalikes, 22 year-old Spencer DeLorenzo who spent much the afternoon posting for photos. At one point, he was even hoisted on a chair as the crowd cheered him on…

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Media Anniversary: It Came From Outer Space film (1953)

Seventy-one years ago It Came From Outer Space premiered, the first in the 3D films that would released from Universal-International. It was from a story written by Ray Bradbury. The script was by Harry Essex.

Billed by the studio as science fiction horror — and I’ll get to why in the SPOILERS section — it was directed by Henry Arnold who would soon be responsible for two genre classics, Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Incredible Shrinking Man, the latter of which as you might remember won a Hugo at Solacon in 1958.

HORROR, ERRR, SPOILERS, ARE ABOUT TO HAPPEN. BEWARE!

Amateur sky watcher (as played by Richard Carlson) and schoolteacher Ellen Fields (as played Barbara Rush) see a large meteorite crash near the small town in Arizona. Being curious and not at cautious (who is in these films?), they investigate.

Putnam sees the object and knows it is a spacecraft but everyone else laughs at him. People start disappearing. (Cue chilling music.) The sheriff opts for a violent answer, but Putnam wants a peaceful resolution.

In the end, a Bradburyan solution happens, atypical of these Fifties pulp SF films and the aliens get what they need to leave without anyone, human or alien, dying. 

YOU CAN COME BACK NOW FROM UNDER THE TABLE. 

The screenplay by Harry Essex, with extensive input by the director Jack Arnold, was based on an original and quite lengthy screen treatment by Bradbury off the fore mentioned story by him. It is said that Bradbury wrote the screenplay and Harry Essex merely changed the dialogue and took the credit. There is no actual written documentation of this though, so it may or may not be true. You know how such stories get their beginning. 

It made back twice its eight hundred thousand budget in the first year. 

Many, many critics took to be an anti-communist film about an invasion of America. However, Bradbury pointed out that “I wanted to treat the invaders as beings who were not dangerous, and that was very unusual.” 

Twenty years ago, Gauntlet Press published a collection of essays about It Came from Outer Space. Bradbury contributed an introductory essay plus a number of other pieces. There’s also the four screen treatments Bradbury wrote before the final screenplay along with photos, original ads, marketing posters, reviews and quite a bit more. 

Final note: It Came from Outer Space is one of the classic films mentioned in the opening theme (“Science Fiction/Double Feature”) of The Rocky Horror Show theatre performance and the film.

It Came From Outer Space is streaming on Peacock and Prime.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) WITNESS THE SCOPE OF MARVEL’S NEW ULTIMATE UNIVERSE. An epic connecting cover by Josemaria Casanovas will run across every Ultimate series over the next few months, starting with this week’s Ultimate X-Men #8.

The second year of Marvel Comics’ new Ultimate Universe is on the horizon. To celebrate, a special connecting cover by acclaimed artist Josemaria Casanovas will run on upcoming issues of each current Ultimate title—Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto’s Ultimate Spider-Man, Bryan Hill and Stefano Caselli’s Ultimate Black Panther, Peach Momoko’s Ultimate X-Men, Deniz Camp and Juan Frigeri’s Ultimates, and the just announced fifth ongoing Ultimate series, Chris Condon and Alessandro Cappuccio’s Ultimate Wolverine. An homage to Jim Lee’s iconic X-Men #1 cover, the breathtaking 6-part piece teases upcoming storylines and characters from future issues—including the long-awaited return of the creator of this exciting universe, the Maker.

Check out the full piece below. For more information, visit Marvel.com. [Click for larger image.]

(13) MOOMIN IN THE MUSEUM. [Item by Steven French.] Ahead of next year’s 80th anniversary of the Moomin stories, the Helsinki Art Museum is putting on an exhibition of Tove Jansson’s paintings, including a number of large murals (and if you look closely at Party in the City, from 1947, you can see a certain big nosed, pot bellied figure, hidden away beside a vase on the edge of the festivities!). “Tove Jansson murals, with hidden Moomins, seen for first time in Helsinki show” in the Guardian.

The exhibition, entitled Paradise, at the Helsinki Art Museum focuses for the first time on the murals and frescoes Jansson was commissioned to paint on the walls of factory canteens, hospitals, nurseries and even churches – long before Moominmania conquered the world and the adventures of Snufkin, Snork Maiden and Little My became a Finnish secular religion.

“By the end of her life, Tove was most famous as a writer,” said the artist and author’s niece, Sophia Jansson, now president of the board of the company that manages her copyright. “But she always saw herself first and foremost [as] a painter. It was only later that her reputation as the ‘Moomin woman’ overtook her.”

See more information about the exhibition at the Helsinki Art Museum website.

Tove Jansson: Bird Blue, 1953 (detail). © Tove Jansson Estate. Photo: HAM / Maija Toivanen.

(14) A LOT OF THIS GOING AROUND. Another publication won’t be telling you their pick for President: “The Starfleet Gazette Will Not Be Endorsing a Candidate for President of the United Federation of Planets” — McSweeney’s Internet Tendency has the scoop.

… The Starfleet Gazette will not be endorsing a candidate in the upcoming election for president of the United Federation of Planets. This decision was not made lightly, but neither of the two candidates—decorated Starship Voyager Captain Kathryn Janeway or The Borg—has shown us a real path to endorsement, and we must stay true to our priorities: journalistic integrity and not pissing off The Borg….

(15) WHEN EYES RETURN FROM ORBIT. Futurism reports “Space Tourist Alarmed When Vision Starts to Deteriorate”. But it was a short-lived phenomenon.

Scientists are still trying to understand the toll that spaceflight takes on the human body.

With SpaceX’s civilian Polar Dawn mission, which lasted five days and wrapped up last month, we’re getting an opportunity to observe the effects on more or less average humans — rather than the elite, highly trained government astronauts who are normally the ones that spend so much time in orbit.

Some of what they’re reporting sounds a little worrying. At the top of the list: inexplicably malfunctioning eyeballs.

“My vision acuity started to deteriorate those first few days,” Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a former US Air Force pilot who served as pilot of the mission, told CNN of the journey.

… As it turns out, Poteet’s faltering vision wasn’t the end of the crew’s optic oddities. Jared Isaacman, the mission’s commander and a billionaire entrepreneur, told CNN he saw “sparkles or lights” when he closed his eyes, a mysterious symptom related to space radiation that other astronauts have reported…

… What caused Poteet’s vision to deteriorate is likely a condition known as spaceflight associated neuro-ocular syndrome, or SANS. This is believed to be the result of a microgravity environment, which causes the optic nerve to swell, and fluids in the eye and brain to shift.

SANS is still poorly understood. All four crew members wore high-tech, cyberpunk-looking contact lenses to measure intraocular pressure throughout the mission, in the hopes of teasing out its causes.

Poteet said his vision quickly returned to normal once he was back on Earth. But as SpaceX engineer and the mission’s medical officer Anna Menon told CNN, the effects — if unaddressed — could be disastrous in the long term….

(16) TOP SF BOOKS – MAYBE? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.]  BookPilled has just re-ranked his top 15 SF books. Like or dislike his ratings, the titles are interesting. I’m guessing that most of you will have nearly all the books in his top chart, and even if you haven’t you will probably know of them. Personally, it was good to see a Bob Shaw in the mix. Alas, poor old Alan Dean Foster…  There are one or two authors in Pilled’s list I have not read, but that might be a Brit-N.America divide thing (?). Anyway, see if you agree with him… “Ranking All the Books from Every Top 15 Sci-Fi List”.

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

Pixel Scroll 10/27/24 I Do Want To Pixel It, Just To Ride With Mr. Mxyxptlk

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(1) EKPEKI ALLEGATIONS. Yesterday File 770 published Erin Cairns’ allegations in the news post “Author Erin Cairns Charges Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki with ‘Unethical Practices’”.

Erin Cairns, a South African-born white woman who moved to the U.S. with her parents when she was young, has published a 78-page memo charging Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki with unethical practices, among them submitting her work under his name to a “Black voices magazine”.

“I am reporting Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki for unethical practices. He submitted a story entirely written by me into a Black voices magazine without my name on the byline. He lied about who he knew and how well he knew them. He obfuscated information about publications and editors and manipulated me to such an extent that I still struggle to trust myself and others.”…

The 770 post also quotes and links to more information about Ekpeki and the status of his projects which has been broadcast in social media in response.

Jason Sanford has also written a summary of “Allegations raised against Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki” which is available as an unlocked post on his Patreon. It includes his personal reaction:

… As someone who helped Ekpeki fundraise to both attend the Chicago Worldcon and to deal with his visa issues, and who also donated my own money to support him, these revelations have left me pissed and gutted. I spent a lot of time helping Ekpeki. I’m glad Cairns went public with her report, but I also wish I’d pressed her for the name of that author when she’d originally approached me. At the time I felt, based on her email, that she was fearful to reveal the name and that it wasn’t appropriate for me to even ask. Now I wish I had done so…

Finally, Steve Davidson of Amazing Stories says they are delaying the release of The Martian Trilogy – a project reported in yesterday’s Scroll which includes a contribution by Ekpeki — owing to the current controversy.

(2) BEWARE OF GARDEN GNOME. Deadline’s Pete Hammond offers praise in “’Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’ Review: Return Of ‘Toon Duo”.

It has been 19 long years between the first Wallace & Gromit feature in 2005 and now the second in 2024, but it is an understatement to say it was well worth the wait. Nick Park‘s and Aardman‘s delightful buddy movie, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is an animated film noir merged with the dangers of technology running rampant….

(3) LIS CAREY MEDICAL UPDATE. Yesterday Filer Lis Carey was admitted to the hospital. Today she reports feeling a bit better, and reports more tests are being done to diagnose the problem.

(4) GABINO IGLESIAS REVIEWS. In the New York Times,  Gabino Iglesias assesses Laird Barron’s latest collection, Not A Speck Of Light: Stories, Hildur Knutsdottir’s new novella, The Night Guest (translated from the Icelandic by Mary Robinette Kowal), Richard Thomas’ novel Incarnate, and Sinophagia: A Celebration of Chinese Horror, translated and edited by Xueting C. Ni: “4 New Horror Books Filled With Eldritch Terrors and Other Frights” (behind a paywall.)

(5) MEAT LOAF RECIPE? Well, yes, there is one in The Rocky Horror Cookbook by Kim Laidlaw.

From the depths of Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s laboratory comes 50 culinary concoctions to titillate the taste buds of Rocky Horror fans, in this lip-smacking officially licensed cookbook based on the cult classic stage musical.

Never worry about the likes of Brad and Janet crashing your party; there will be plenty of food for everyone with this delightful and delectable cookbook beamed directly from the galaxy Transylvania to your kitchen. Give your guests a little tease with appetizers like Magenta Mash(ed) Potato Cakes and Thrill Me Chill Me Spicy Gazpacho. The main courses—which can be served in either the dining room or bedroom—offer scintillating options like Rocky’s Mussels, Riff Raff Ramen, and Slow-Cooked Thigh Ragu that will have you shivering in antici…

…pation. Wash it all down with a Make You a Man-hattan before biting into Midnight Double Chocolate Feature Brownies for dessert. With a foreword by Rocky Horror creator Richard O’Brien, The Rocky Horror Cookbook will have long-time fans and newly discovered creatures of the night singing in unison, “Don’t dream it. Eat it.”

(6) WAIT – THERE’S MOORE! Sam Thielman reviews two Alan Moore books in the New York Times (link bypasses paywall): “Book Review: ‘The Great When,’ by Alan Moore, and ‘The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic’”.

“Have you got a name or should I just keep thinking of you as ‘the liability?’” a beautiful young woman named Grace asks the protagonist of Alan Moore’s THE GREAT WHEN (Bloomsbury, 315 pp., $29.99).

He does indeed: Our hero rejoices in the name of Dennis Knuckleyard, and that’s the least of his problems. Dennis, a miserable teenager who works in a bookshop for a phlegmy old crone named Coffin Ada, has been sold a dangerous book — “A London Walk,” which ought not to exist outside the fiction of horror writer Arthur Machen, but has somehow left the world of ideas and entered his possession. He must properly dispose of it or be drawn into a magical world called Long London that exists parallel to the Shoreditch of 1949 where Dennis usually resides. Also, at least some of Long London’s inhabitants possess the ability and possibly the inclination to turn Dennis inside out…

(7) MARC WELLS HAS DIED.  Portland fan Marc Wells passed away October 25 after several months of illness. OryCon’s Bluesky account posted a statement provided by Linda Pilcher:

I am sending this on the behalf of Marc’s family:

With sadness, we share that Marc Wells, a long-time Portland fan, passed away on October 25 after several months of illness. Throughout his life, Marc was an active techie at conventions, served as president of the Portland Science Fiction Society, and President of the Board of Directors of OSFCI fo many years.

Above all, he was a cherished husband, father, grandfather, and friend.

Marc didn’t believe in funerals. Instead, his ashes will be scattered in the Columbia River Gorge. We will hold a wake at a future date, likely at the Rose City Book Pub, with a general invitation to follow.

As many of you know, Marc was a talented musician himself who loved supporting young musicians and all sorts of music, especially Friends of Noise, a non-profit dedicated to helping to support diversity among young musicians. If you wish to make a donation in Marc’s name, you can find the donation link as well as more details about Friends of Noise and their upcoming shows on their website: Friends Of Noise | All Ages. Always. 

The family extends deep gratitude to everyone who supported Marc during his illness.

(8) JERI TAYLOR (1938-2024). Jeri Taylor, the showrunner behind Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager (which she co-created), died October 24 at the age of 86. The Deadline tribute

…In 1990, she began writing for Next Generation Season 4, eventually working her way up to co-executive producer in Season 6. She was the showrunner of the Patrick Stewart vehicle in its seventh and final installment, for which she garnered an Emmy nom for Outstanding Drama Series.

Afterward, Taylor co-created Voyager alongside Next Generation co-EPs Rick Berman and Michael Pillar, serving as showrunner from 1995 through 1998 and later creative consultant for its final three seasons. She pioneered the idea of a female lead captain in the franchise with actress Kate Mulgrew. In a tribute post on X, Mulgrew wrote that Taylor was “responsible, in large part, for changing my life. She was elegant, erudite, and fiercely opinionated. She wanted Kathryn Janeway to be a significant part of her legacy and I think there is no doubt that in that endeavor she succeeded.”…

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born October 27, 1939 — John Cleese, 85.

By Paul Weimer: My first introduction to John Cleese was not, as it turns out, Monty Python.  My older brother was to blame. He was in fact a Python fan, although in those times before we had a VCR I had never gotten to see any of it, and it had not circulated back around to being syndicated again, But he loved it, and loved Cleese’s work in it. And so, in 1986, he and I went to the movies to see…Clockwise.

Clockwise is an absurdist film that defies description and easy plotting. Let us say that a punctual school headmaster played by Cleese, someone bound to schedules and timing and order winds up making a single mistake, and his entire schedule and life go off the deep end. The absurdity and unbelievable vignettes and adventures Cleese gets up to as he tries to get back to normalcy are not just Pythonesque in their comedy, they are sui generis.  It’s a movie you have to be in the mood for, but I was in the mood then, and have often been in the mood since to see a man’s life just go so off kilter, hilariously.

After seeing Clockwise, I finally was able to see Monty Python films…and later, the series itself (I realize just how weird it was to go in that order, but that was the hazards of life before having a VCR or streaming).  I then enjoyed Cleese in other films and works like A Fish Called Wanda (a favorite) and the sometimes frustratingly fun, frustratingly terrible Rat Race (I am also an It’s a Mad Mad Mad World fan, you see). I found some of his later work disappointing (looking at you Fierce Creatures) and some of it surprisingly delightful.  When I played Jade Empire, I was surprised to hear what I thought might be his voice playing an outlander wandering in the Empire. When I found out later that Sir Roderick Ponce von Fontlebottom the Magnificent Bastard was indeed voiced by Cleese, I was *delighted*

Cleese’s rants against “Cancel Culture” are disheartening, and make me sad that an actor and comedian whose work I’ve enjoyed for years could go so very wrong headed.  Alas.

John Cleese

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Argyle Sweater has ideas about restroom signs for monsters.
  • Carpe Diem knows they better look impressed.
  • Wumo overhears complaints about a different infestation.

(11) TIM BURTON EXHIBIT. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Halloween may not be as big a deal in the UK as in North America, but fans in the London area will now have a chance to celebrate it with one of the modern Patron Saints of the day: Tim Burton.

Continuing a world tour that started in 2014 (albeit with a hiatus in 2019–21), The World of Tim Burton exhibition will opened October 25 and will be open until April 21, 2025 at the Design Museum in London. 

In fact, Burton fans around the world may want to take note since this is said to be the very last time the exhibition will be displayed. “Tim Burton Says He’s ‘Technophobic’ And Jack Skellington Came From Subconsciousness” at Bored Panda.

(12) SUPERCHEAP PC. [Item by Steven French.] Here is “an edited extract from the book Curious Video Game Machines by Lewis Packwood, which explores the stories behind rare and unusual consoles, computers and coin-ops” and which describes how engineer Voja Antonic got around import restrictions in Yugoslavia to build his own computer, which had a major impact on the gaming and computer enthusiast community (I loved the description of an early form of ‘wireless’ tech when software was recorded in tape and transmitted over the radio!). “How one engineer beat restrictions on home computers in socialist Yugoslavia” in the Guardian.

…Antonić was pondering this while on holiday with his wife in Risan in Montenegro in 1983. “I was thinking how would it be possible to make the simplest and cheapest possible computer,” says Antonić. “As a way to amuse myself in my free time. That’s it. Everyone thinks it is an interesting story, but really I was just bored!” He wondered whether it would be possible to make a computer without a graphics chip – or a “video controller” as they were commonly known at the time.Typically, computers and consoles have a CPU – which forms the “brain” of the machine and performs all of the calculations – in addition to a video controller/graphics chip that generates the images you see on the screen. In the Atari 2600 console, for example, the CPU is the MOS Technology 6507 chip, while the video controller is the TIA (Television Interface Adaptor) chip.

Instead of having a separate graphics chip, Antonić thought he could use part of the CPU to generate a video signal, and then replicate some of the other video functions using software. It would mean sacrificing processing power, but in principle it was possible, and it would make the computer much cheaper….

(13) ALL’S WELL. “NASA astronaut is released from the hospital after returning from space” reports WAFF.

A NASA astronaut who was taken to the hospital for an undisclosed medical issue after returning from a nearly eight-month space station stay extended by Boeing’s capsule trouble and Hurricane Milton has been released from the hospital.

A SpaceX capsule carrying three Americans and one Russian parachuted before dawn into the Gulf of Mexico just off the Florida coast after undocking from the International Space Station mid-week. The capsule was hoisted onto the recovery ship where the four astronauts had routine medical checks.

Soon after splashdown, a NASA astronaut had a “medical issue” and the crew was flown to a hospital in Pensacola, Florida, for additional evaluation “out of an abundance of caution” the space agency said in a statement….

(14) THE ORVILLE GUIDEBOOK PUBLISHED. “’The Orville’ executive producer delivers deluxe guidebook to the cult sci-fi series” – Space.com has the details.

… “Dark Horse presents ‘The Guide to The Orville,’ a jam-packed lore book collecting everything a new crew member needs to know about the Planetary Union’s most remarkable ship!”…

…Written by seasoned “The Orville” writer and co-executive producer Andre Bormanis, it’s a beautifully bound 192-page volume immersing followers into every aspect of the show’s world. It features dozens of illustrations, diary entries, and detailed cutaways that serve as an exacting manual for newbie spacefarers familiarizing themselves with the huge vessel and the vast universe it explores….

(15) SATURDAY AND OTHER MORNINGS. CBR.com surprises with these forgotten series: “15 Sci-Fi & Fantasy Movies You Didn’t Know Had Cartoons”.

Sci-fi and fantasy movies often challenge viewers to imagine infinite possibilities, but many forget just how many cartoon spinoffs exist in their wake….

Cinema has long captivated children with its fantastic worlds, and over the years, it became increasingly common for movies to spin off into animated TV series… Today, that tradition continues with titles like Jurassic World: Chaos Theory, Gremlins: The Wild Batch, and an upcoming Ghostbusters project. For pop culture archivists, these animated adaptations often offer a glimpse into how beloved franchises evolve and reimagine themselves for new generations….

Here’s an example:

A Forgotten Cartoon Featured an American Werewolf in High School

Teen Wolf (1986-1987)

The teenage years come with plenty of changes, but for most high school students, those experiences don’t include fangs, claws, or the awkward discovery that they’re a werewolf. Starring Michael J. Fox of Back to the Future fame, this hair-raising comedy takes the term “fantasy sports” to a new level as protagonist Scott Howard becomes a basketball-playing lycanthrope.

The Cartoon Adventures of Teen Wolf, as it was known in the UK, followed the chaotic life of the “all-American werewolf” and his family. Navigating the ups and downs of high school, Scott’s life is less The Wonder Years and more “The Werewolf Years” as he tries to protect his family’s secret while dealing with a world that still sees them as monsters. While overshadowed by the 2011 live-action TV series, hopes were high in 2017 when Shout! Factory announced the release of the Teen Wolf cartoon in its entirety. However, due to legal issues, audiences are still left wondering where this werewolf series will resurface next.

(16) HORROR CLASSIC IN PUBLIC DOMAIN. [Item by Cat Eldridge.] The film is legitimately in the public domain due to some really stupid legal mistakes by the producers. “House on Haunted Hill, 1959 with Vincent Price and Carol Ohmart” – see it at Public Domain Movies.

House on Haunted Hill is a 1959 American horror film directed by William Castle. The film was written by Robb White and stars Vincent Price and Carol Ohmart as eccentric millionaires Frederick Loren and Annabelle Loren, who have invited five people to the house for a “haunted house” party.

Whoever stays in the house for one night will earn $10,000. As the night progresses, all the guests are trapped inside the house with ghosts, murderers, and other terrors….

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

Pixel Scroll 10/25/24 I Don’t Want A Pixel, Just Want To Ride On My Motorcyxle

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(1) HWA AI POLICY UPDATE. The StokerCon Facebook page reports that the Horror Writers Association sent members the following email about their draft AI policy.

The Horror Writers Association Statement on Artificial Intelligence and Working AI Policy Summary

The Horror Writers Association stands firmly against AI-generated creative work and will act diligently with organizational stakeholders to ensure the rights of our members and nonmembers within the writing, editing, arts, and publishing industries are protected.

The Horror Writers Association is aware of the ongoing legal and regulatory hurdles and will work to ensure our policies reflect a changing technological environment, however the Horror Writers Association only supports work from human creators and work authored by humans.

While the Horror Writers Association acknowledges the unknown challenges ahead in an ever moving and shifting landscape, the HWA will always support human authored work, first and foremost.

Lastly, the full comprehensive document will be available for all

members to read no later than January 4th, 2025.

Here is the 12-page working AI Policy in a short, easy-to-read summary

1. Use of AI Within the HWA: No generative AI software will be used by HWA workers, including generative AI tools added to pre-existing software platforms we already use.

2. Oversight: All software tools used by HWA workers will go through an approval process first. The HWA Board or a committee appointed by the Board will do that, in addition to coordinating with any logistics and enforcement.

3. Software Review: Beyond just being against the use of generative AI, we want to make sure none of our materials, or the materials entrusted to us by members, will be used to train generative AI. This means regularly reviewing all new features added to software we use, and any changes to their terms of use or privacy policies.

4. Enforcement: The Board, or any AI Oversight Committee appointed, will investigate suspected policy violations. Any action taken as a result will be done by the appropriate committees in charge of the areas where infractions happened, or by the Board itself within the HWA, including the Bram Stoker Awards and any anthologies the organization publishes (within contractual purview) and not extending to third-party providers, vendors, or partners.

5. Awards: All works submitted for Bram Stoker Award® consideration must be non-AI[1]generated works. If a work under award consideration is found to be AI-generated the work will be banned from consideration.

6. Scholarships: No works involved in the scholarship process can be AI-generated. If the resulting work is found to have been AI-generated the scholarship recipient must return all scholarship funds.

7. Publications: Submissions for official HWA publications, and HWA-branded anthologies published by our industry partners, cannot be AI-generated.

8. Membership: Prospective members who use AI-generated work to meet eligibility requirements will be denied membership. If it turns out an HWA member has failed to comply with any part of this policy their membership can be put under review.

9. Grievances: While the Committee will continue helping HWA members resolve breaches of contract, or situations that clearly go against established industry ethics, we strongly recommend you consult legal counsel before signing new contracts or renegotiating old contracts. We can point you to examples of generative AI clauses to include in your contracts moving forward.

10. Subject to Revaluation and Updates: As mentioned earlier this is an area where software and legislation are expected to undergo rapid changes. We’ll stay on top of news to keep members informed, and to update our policy as needed.

HWA volunteers will be asked to sign an agreement that they will comply with the HWA’s generative AI policy. The final policy will include a glossary of terms, documents from external organizations, tutorial videos, and other supplemental material.

Sincerely, The Board of Trustees, Horror Writers Association

(2) THE FUTURE OF BACK TO THE FUTURE. It’s on the road, where else? “‘Back to the Future’ to Close on Broadway, Rerouting DeLorean to Germany” says the New York Times (behind a paywall).  

“Back to the Future,” a nostalgia-rich and spectacle-laden musical adaptation of the much-loved 1985 film, will end its Broadway run on Jan. 5, succumbing to the difficult economics of the commercial theater business.

The show had a decent run — the first performance was on June 30, 2023, and for more than a year it grossed over $1 million most weeks — but it was costly to mount and expensive to sustain; its grosses took a dive in late summer and early fall, and although it had rebounded somewhat more recently, sales were still insufficient to justify continuing. Thus far it has been seen by 720,000 people at the Winter Garden Theater.

The long-gestating show began its production life in England, and won the 2022 Olivier Award for best new musical in London’s West End, where it has been running for more than three years. It has not been so fortunate on Broadway, where it won no Tony Awards. It cost $23.5 million to capitalize, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Ultimately it did not run long enough, or make enough money each week, to defray its New York costs.

But this is not the end of the line for the show. The Broadway set will move to Germany, where “Back to the Future” plans an open-ended run starting next season. The London run is ongoing, there is a North American tour now underway and productions are planned in Japan and on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship.

(3) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to share a bowl of Cullen skink with the award-winning Wole Talabi in Episode 239 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Wole Talabi

Wole Talabi is the author of the critically acclaimed Nommo Award-winning novel Shigidi And The Brass Head Of Obalufon — which was also a finalist for the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the Ignyte Award — plus was named one of the best books of 2023 by The Washington Post.

He’s actually a three-time winner of the Nommo Award – because he also won in 2018 (for “The Regression Test”) and 2020 (for “Incompleteness Theories”). He’s been a finalist for the Hugo Award for his novelette “A Dream of Electric Mothers,” a story which also won him the Sidewise award for alternate history. His fiction has appeared in such magazines as Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, and Clarkesworld, and anthologies such as The Big Book of Cyberpunk, Africa Risen, and Nowhereville: Weird Is Other People. Many of those stories may be found in his collections Incomplete Solutions (2019, Luna Press) and Convergence Problems (2024, DAW Books).

We discussed his love of combining contradictory ideas, why failing is an important step toward success, how optimism can be a choice (and why making that choice could also make the world a better place), how to convince others who might fear hurting your feelings you truly want their honest criticism, whether AI could ever actually be intelligent or create art, what he means when he says he often writes “two or three people in a room science fiction,” how a friend’s gift of a story seed led to the longest piece in his new collection, the things he learned from writing his first novel which are helping him write his second, the secret to writing successful flash fiction, the accidental catalyst which launched his editing career, the stubbornness that keeps him going both on the page and in the ring, and much more.

(4) WOLE TALABI Q&A. And you can get a second serving of Talabi in thisImaginize World interview: “Our Future and Challenging Perspectives with Wole Talabi”.

Nigerian science fiction author Wole Talabi describes into his unique writing process, shaped by his engineering background and the concept of convergence problems….

One of the questions was about the meaning of “Africanfuturism”.

WOLE: Africanfuturism is a bit of an interesting term because if someone asks you, “What are the defining literary features of Africanfuturism?” It would be very difficult to point to specific markers and say, “It’s stories that contain this, that contain that. That use this particular style.” There’s no unifying literary feature of it. It’s more of a geographically influenced genre, where it’s focused on the continent of Africa, on the history, on the culture. It basically centers Africa and moves outwards.

And I think, sometimes that’s a misconception some people have is that they think every Africanfuturist story is only about Africa. But I think in my work, especially, in my Africanfuturist stories and in other Africanfuturist stories as well, some of Nnedi Okorafor’s works and Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s as well, the central focus of the story is African, but the theme that we are working with, the larger theme is something that applies generally, globally….

(5) WHAT ABOUT THOSE SAYING NO TO NANOWRIMO? [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Just to let you know what’s been happening with NaNoWriMo since they refused to ban AI: someone I know very well, Morgan Hazlewood, replied when I asked her about her “November writing project”, replied, “there is a reason I am calling it my November project. Pretty much every group I know has disassociated from the parent group, but the people who found each other through the project are sticking together. And most of us are still doing our own challenges.”

(6) CAREER DERAILED. Sophia McDougall was asked whether there could ever be a third book in the Mars Evacuees universe. The answer is sad.

…It’s been long enough now that I don’t think there’s any reason not to give the frank answer to this question.

I did consider it. I had a plot worked out. Unfortunately these things aren’t always (or often) up to us.

The initial contract was for two books.

Around the time the first book was coming out, I wrote this incredibly mild feminist piece in the New Statesman about the gender discrepancy in bookshop displays and how it made me feel.

And then a certain prominent bookshop chain threatened me. It let my publicist know it didn’t want me in its shops to promote my book, because it didn’t know what I might do. And then, it decided not to carry the second book, which basically guaranteed it would not sell well.

Maybe those things are unrelated, but it certainly didn’t feel like it. My agent and publisher largely abandoned me, (it didn’t help at all that my initial editor, who loved the book, had sadly been away with cancer for much of this period) and as sales were obviously disappointing, there was no question of a new contract for a third book. And that’s why I haven’t published a book since….

(7) ROCKY HORROR GAME. CNET gave it a whirl: “We Played the New Retro Rocky Horror Show Game. Here’s What It’s Like”.

The antici…. pation can finally be over if you’ve been waiting for the Rocky Horror Show game adaptation. Announced early this month, The Rocky Horror Show Video Game is a retro-styled 2D side-scrolling platform game with chiptune versions of well-known songs from the show including The Time Warp and Dammit Janet. It’s been released for Nintendo Switch and for PC on Steam, with Xbox and PlayStation versions due later this month ahead of Halloween….

…A boss fight with Frank-N-Furter amounts to throwing objects at the character until they lose parts of their costume. Whenever Brad takes damage, he’s stripped down to his tighty-whitey underwear.

While the game is very limited in its design and gameplay, it may still be worth checking out for hardcore Rocky Horror fans for its retro aesthetic and enjoyable 8-bit soundtrack. For everyone else, even at about $10, it might be a time warp best left to Rocky Horror completists. 

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary: Star Trek’s “Spectre of the Gun” (1968)

Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. Where the laws do not operate, there is no reality. – Spock to McCoy, at the OK Corral.

Fifty-six years this evening on NBC, Star Trek’s “Spectre of the Gun” first aired. It was written by former producer Gene L. Coon (under the name of Lee Cronin) and directed by Vincent McEveety.  

It had one of the larger guest casts — Ron Soble as Wyatt Earp, Bonnie Beecher, Charles Maxwell as Virgil Earp, Rex Holman as Morgan Earp, Sam Gilman as Doc Holliday, Charles Seel as Ed the bartender, Bill Zuckert  as Johnny Behan, Abraham Sofaer as the Melkotian Voice and Ed McCready as Barber. 

SPOILER ALERT. GO DRINK WHISKEY WITH JONAH HEX. In the episode, having been found trespassing into Melkotian space, Captain Kirk and members of his crew are sent to die in a surreal re-enactment of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Not surprisingly aliens are behind this entire affair, testing humans before they make contact with them by inquiring about Kirk’s refusal to kill. They finally grant the Enterprise permission to approach their planet. END OF SPOILER. WAS HEX GOOD COMPANY? NO? 

and END OF SPOILER.  WAS HEX HIS TACITURN SELF?  

The first I know the use a setting similar to this was the First Doctor two years previously, “The Gunfighters”. A later splendid use is Emma Bull’s Territory.

I will note that the budget wasn’t available to shoot on location on a full set, so instead a Western street of false building fronts and no sides was used. 

It’s considered one of the finest episodes of the original though Keith R.A. DeCandido of Tor.com inexplicably decided to criticize the episode for its historical inaccuracies.  Eh? 

Christian Science Monitor and Hollywood Reporter both put it in their  top 20 original Star Trek episodes, and the A.V. Club ranked this episode as one of top ten “must see” episodes of the original series.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) MARVEL’S HAWKEYE COMING OUT ON DISCS. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Having just (re)watched Marvel’s Hawkeye series (Season 1, which is all that’s out so far), includes a bunch of deleted scenes and bonus material – great fun, well worth the time! — I was commending it to a friend who doesn’t subscribe to The Mouse That Streams (Disney+)…and a quick easy web search turns up that it (along with Loki Season 2) will be out (for sale) in “4K Ultra HD Dolby Vision along with Atmos audio,” (Blu-Ray) on December 3, 2024, as “Marvel Studios’ Hawkeye – The Complete First Season,”, according to Marvel and also Collider.com (“Available to pre-order from October 31, 2024.”)

Extras (“bonus content”) will include deleted scenes, gag reel, a “making of” and other  documentary/behind-the-scenes stuff,” and possibly some physical collectibles. (I’m going to request this from my library, so I’m not concerned with physical ephemera.)

(I’m also seeing some plain old DVD and Blu-Ray Hawkeye Season 1 disks, on eBay, dunno whether they’re legit, but either way, unlikely to have any/all of the bonus materials.)

‘Nuff scrolled!

(11) BE STILL MY BEATING HEART. “Science Names 2024 Irish Horror Movie Oddity One of the Scariest Films Ever Made” – Movieweb tells why.

Every year, the Science of Scare project gathers together 250 people to help determine the most frightening horror movies ever made. While Scott Derrickson’s 2012 film Sinister and the 2020 UK film Host have been trading the top spots since the project began in 2020, a new independent horror movie has emerged out of Ireland this year to crack the Top 20, beating out a number of other 2024 films that were nowhere to be seen.

According to science, Damian McCarthy’s Oddity is now one of the scariest horror movies in history based on the data that was collected from a fresh group of 250 people that screened a plethora of spooky films throughout the year. Premiering at the South by Southwest festival back in March, Oddity made its way to the streaming service Shudder on September 27, and has been giving people the creeps ever since. Certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes with a critical ranking of 96%, its audience score sits at a healthy 78% from over 1,000 fan reviews, with many people echoing the results of the scientific study by calling it one of the most “terrifying” movies they’ve ever seen….

…Are you wondering how science was able to determine which horror movies are the most terrifying of all? We’re glad you asked, because it’s simple, really. Each person involved in the study is hooked up to a monitor that measures their heart rate, and, as the Science of Scare project tells it:

“With heart rate (BPM), the higher the number, the faster the movie got our audiences’ blood pumping, an indicator of excitement and fear as part of your fight or flight instinct. On the other hand, heart rate variance (HRV) measures the time in between each beat of your heart. The lower the heart rate variance the more stressed our audience members became, a good indicator of slow burn fear and dread.”…

(12) I VOTE FOR ‘YUCK’. “Ketchup in space: ‘You gotta squirt it out’” – a BBC video.

NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick has recorded a video demonstration of what happens to ketchup in a zero gravity environment.

Dominick said “some interesting science stuff” was happening during the display, which he filmed aboard the International Space Station on Wednesday before departing for Earth.

In a post on X, he said: “Everyone I’ve shared it with either thinks it is awesome or gross. Nothing in between.”

(13) FOUR RETURN FROM ISS; ONE HOSPITALIZED. “SpaceX Crew-8 astronaut hospitalized in Pensacola after Dragon splashdown, in ‘stable condition’” reports Space.com.

The astronauts of Crew-8 were taken to a Florida hospital as a precaution, shortly after their successful splashdown on Friday (Oct. 25), NASA said.

The SpaceX Crew-8 group of four astronauts was evaluated at Ascension Sacred Heart Pensacola, a hospital nearby their splashdown site in the Atlantic Ocean, a NASA representative told Space.com via email. A newer update from NASA issued at 1:30 p.m. EDT (1730 GMT) said one astronaut, described as “in stable condition,” will remain behind in the hospital “as a precautionary measure.”…

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

Pixel Scroll 10/17/24 Nothing To Read And Nowhere To Go, I Wanna Be Pixelated

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(1) YOUR MIDDLE-EARTH CANDIDATES. At McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Sam Woods admits “I’m an Undecided Hobbit, Torn Between a Dark Lord Who Promises an Age of Chaos and an Elf Queen Whom I Just Wish I Knew More About”.

I’m a well-informed Hobbit—a Boffin from Overhill, thank you very much—who is in a kerfuffle about whom to throw my Hobbit-sized support behind. For some, the choice is clear, but for a little guy like me, I’m feeling awfully torn up, like a tear-and-share cheese bread during Winter Solstice! I simply can’t seem to decide between the Dark Lord determined to return to power and stay there until shadows drown all of Arda, or the Elf Galadriel, who seems to be great and exceedingly normal, but I just wish I knew more about her….

(2) NEW WALLACE & GROMIT MOVIE NEXT YEAR. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl will be coming to Netflix on January 3, 2025.

The world’s best boss – Feathers McGraw is back with a vengeance. A brand new epic Wallace & Gromit family adventure, the first full length feature film in 19 years since BAFTA and Academy Award-winning The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

From the brilliant Aardman and four-time Academy Award®-winning director Nick Park and Emmy Award-nominated Merlin Crossingham comes Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. In this next installment, Gromit’s concern that Wallace is becoming too dependent on his inventions proves justified, when Wallace invents a “smart” gnome that seems to develop a mind of its own. When it emerges that a vengeful figure from the past might be masterminding things, it falls to Gromit to battle sinister forces and save his master… or Wallace may never be able to invent again!

(3) DUNE: PROPHECY TRAILER. The new HBO Original Series Dune: Prophecy premieres November 17 on Max. According to Deadline:

…The series takes place 10,000 years before the ascension of Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides in the Denis Villeneuve-directed movies. It follows two Harkonnen sisters as they combat forces that threaten the future of humankind, and establish the fabled sect that will become known as the Bene Gesserit. They’re Jedi-like sisters types in the Frank Herbert novels to you Star Wars folks out there….

(4) FUN WHILE IT LASTED. “Peter Capaldi: ‘Being Doctor Who was more fun than being me’”, so he tells Radio Times.

…While he’s been open about the fact that he wouldn’t return to the role, he clearly looks back fondly on it, exclusively telling RadioTimes.com: “It was just an incredible experience. Suddenly, you’re in the middle of this fantastical world, surrounded by people who love Doctor Who.

“I was watching Tom Baker talking about something, and he said that when he was Doctor Who he would do tons and tons of publicity and stuff, because being Doctor Who was much more fun than being Tom Baker, and I would say the same, probably, being Doctor Who is much more fun than being me.”…

(5) GODZILLA WILL TIP THE SCALES. More to love! “Godzilla Minus One Returning to Theaters With New Bonus Content” announces CBR.com.

…Per AMC, Takashi Yamazaki’s Academy Award-winning film is making its way back to AMC theaters starting on Nov. 1, 2024, with 13 extra minutes of content. The film’s return to the big screen is part of the Godzilla franchise’s 70th anniversary celebrations. In the fall of 1954, Ishirō Honda’s original film premiered, creating a cultural phenomenon that has lasted throughout generations. The franchise has been reinvented multiple times, and it has transcended cultural boundaries. Still, Godzilla Minus One feels like a particularly good homage to the original, having risen to become the best-selling Japanese Godzilla film of all time….

(6) FREE READ. Grist has shared an original Imagine 2200 short story, from Nebula and Aurora award-winning author and scientist Premee Mohamed: “Who Walks With You”.

Mohamed imagines a world in which many have adapted to extreme weather by moving into mobile pods, designed to relocate towns away from disasters:

“After the weather started going wild, after the cities emptied out, much of humanity discovered somewhat to their surprise that what they had done initially out of panicked necessity — uprooting, becoming mobile — suited most folks rather well. Now a relaxed nomadicism has become ingrained, life as normal. No more did you have to stay in one place and wait for the big one, whatever that might be, to hit you; now you could walk away with all your friends and family, and eat heirloom popcorn while watching the news about the big one hitting the place you had just left.”

But when independent, logic-minded Ysolt finds herself in a broken pod at the bottom of a ravine after a freak storm, will technology and willpower be enough to save her?

(7) YOU LOOK WILLING TO PAY. “Kroger’s Plan to Use Facial Recognition Raises Concerns About Surge Pricing”. Gizmodo asks, “How soon will the Minority Report-style supermarket arrive?”

Democratic congresswoman Rashida Tlaib recently sent a letter to Kroger over the grocery giant’s purported plan to introduce digital price tags that could be changed in an instant to raise or lower prices for shoppers based on the time of day, the weather, or any other number of factors. But one particular detail in Kroger’s plan is raising the most eyebrows: The company intends to put cameras in stores that would be used for facial recognition.

…“Studies have shown that facial recognition technology is flawed and can lead to discrimination in predominantly Black and brown communities,” Tlaib said in her letter. “The racial biases of facial recognition technology are well-documented and should not be extended into our grocery stores.”

Kroger is the largest grocery store chain in the U.S. by revenue and owns a number of different brands, including Ralphs, Fred Meyer, Pick’n Save, Food 4 Less, and Dillions, among a host of others. Tlaib is worried that ESLs will allow Kroger’s stores to “use customer data to build personalized profiles of each customer” in such a way that it will be able to “determine the maximum price of goods customers are willing to pay.”…

(8) LOONEY TUNES MOVIE. “’The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie’ Release Date Set” – Deadline tells us when.

… The movie will make its North American premiere Friday at the Animation Is Film festival, where it will qualify for the Best Animated Feature Oscar race.

The pic was directed by Pete Browngardt and follows Porky Pig and Daffy Duck teaming up again, this time faced with the threat of an alien invasion….   

…Unlike Coyote vs. Acme, which was pulled from theatrical release by Warner Bros amid a swath of cost cutting, the great news is that The Day the Earth Blew Up is seeing the light of day. Sales were launched at the American Film Market by GFM Animation. 

(9) JODIE OFFUTT (1934-2022). It has just become generally known that longtime Southern fan (and File 770 contributor) Jodie Offutt passed away in November 2022. The family’s memorial page is here: “Mary Joe Offutt Obituary – Coleman Funeral Home”.

Born in Lexington, Kentucky, Jodie Offutt, 87, passed away of natural causes in Oxford, Mississippi. She was the daughter of John Jerome (Jack) McCabe and Mary Joe (Josie) McCarney. She was preceded in death by her husband of 56 years, Andrew J. Offutt.

Jodie is survived by her four children, Chris Offutt, Jeff Offutt, Scotty Hyde, and Melissa Offutt. She is also survived by her sister, Phoebe McCabe Tanedo, five grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

Jodie grew up in Lexington, Kentucky and lived in Morehead and Haldeman, Kentucky. She graduated from Morehead State University with a B.A in Philosophy and a M.A in English. She worked as a teacher and an administrative assistant to lawyers. After the death of her husband, Jodie retired to Oxford, where she embraced the local community.

Her Fancyclopedia 3 entry recalls that she was a convention guest of honor at Rivercon II and BYOB-Con 6 (1976), Artkane 2 (1977),  MidSouthCon 5 (1986), Transcendental ConFusion (1993), and LibertyCon 9 (1995). And in the early years of File 770 she was wonderfully supportive, frequently sending news and letters of comment.  

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born October 17, 1934 – Alan Garner, 90.

So these are my favorite works by Alan Garner on his ninetieth birthday.

Let’s start off with what Boneland, a novel I dearly like as it’s very much unlike most of his other works. Despite sharing a primary character with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, beloved children’s novels known as The Alderley Tales that were published in the late Fifties and Sixties, nearly 60 years before this work, as this is very much an adult novel not intended for the pleasure of children whatsoever. 

Indeed, its tone is more akin to what the late Robert Holdstock did in his Ryhope Wood series than anything else Alan Garner has done excepting Thursbitch and Strandloper, again adult works. This story can be disturbing and very odd in places.  I can’t tell what is happening here but it doesn’t read like fantasy as all.

Alan Garner

The Owl Service I’ve read and then later listened to a number of times. Garner bases his story on Blodeuwedd, a woman created from flowers by a Welsh sorcerer. She betrays her husband, Lleu, in favor of another, Gronw, and is turned into an owl as punishment for inducing Gronw to kill Lleu.  

In Garner’s telling of this story, three teenagers find themselves tragically reenacting the story as they first awaken the legend by finding a dinner service with an owl pattern on the plates.

The Naxos audiobook is told by Wayne Forester, who handles both the narration and voicing of each character amazingly well, I’m impressed by his ability to handle both Welsh accents and the Welsh language, given the difficulty of that tongue, which make Gaelic look easy to pronounce by comparison.

My final pick is The Stone Book Quartet which is series of four interconnected stories, telling Alan Garner’s personal and family history as fiction. It’s set in Manchester, England, where Garner’s family is from. It is important to note that, unlike John Berger’s Into Their Labours, in which Berger, an Englishman, moved to a remote French village where that series is based, Garner’s tale reflects his deep roots in the culture, a theme that has become stronger in his fiction over the decade before this was written. 

Simply put, each tale is, like the peasants in Into Their Labours, a marvelous play of language, of the labouring class in their daily lives, the cycle of the seasons, and the continuity that comes of living for generations in a community.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) TUNING UP. “Minnesota Opera producing first-ever operatic adaptation of a comic book and Stephen King” – Bring Me The News has the story.

In what BOOM Studios and the Minnesota Opera are calling “the first ever deal to create an operatic adaptation of a comic book or graphic novel,” the companies are developing an adaptation of the comic book series The Many Deaths of Laila Starr.

The series, written by Ram V and drawn by Filipe Andrade, was repeatedly heralded as one of the best series of the year when it was released by BOOM Comics in 2021, eventually earning four Eisner nominations, including Best Limited Series….

(13) THEY’LL BE BACK. “’Rick and Morty’ Renewed Through Season 12 at Adult Swim” reports Variety.

“Rick and Morty” has been renewed for two more seasons at Adult Swim, propelling television’s favorite mad scientist and grandson duo through Season 12.

As Season 8 is slated for 2025, and the Season 10 renewal was announced in 2023, the Season 12 greenlight pushes the Emmy-winning animated series through at least 2029…

(14) NEW SHEPARD PICKS RETIREMENT HOME. “Blue Origin donates New Shepard space hardware to Smithsonian” – GeekWire says it wasn’t a foregone conclusion.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has donated a New Shepard rocket booster, plus a New Shepard capsule, to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

The history-making hardware will go on display at the museum’s main building on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in renovated galleries due to open in 2026.

“There is no better final landing pad for New Shepard than the Smithsonian,” Bezos said in a statement. “We are honored and grateful.”

The reusable booster, known as Propulsion Module 4-2, was employed for five uncrewed flights — ranging from the New Shepard program’s first successful booster landing in 2015 to an escape system test that could have destroyed the propulsion module in 2016.

Before that final outing for the booster, Bezos said it would be put on display if it survived. “We’d really like to retire it after this test and put it in a museum,” he said at the time. “Sadly, that’s not likely. This test will probably destroy the booster.”

Fortunately for the Smithsonian, Bezos’ prediction was wrong. The scorched but intact booster was exhibited at a variety of events, including the 2017 Space Symposium in Colorado, and most recently was on display at Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket factory in Florida….

(15) MICROREACTORS. TechRadar says “Micro nuclear reactors are being built that can deliver 5MW of power for up to 100 months, producing a staggering 1.2 petawatt-hours of energy”.

…Now, details have surfaced about Westinghouse’s eVinci microreactor, after the company revealed it had submitted its Preliminary Safety Design Report (PSDR) to the Department of Energy’s National Reactor Innovation Center (NRIC) and in doing so is the first reactor developer to reach this milestone.

“The completion of the PSDR for the eVinci test reactor is an important step toward enabling a micro reactor developer to perform a test in our DOME facility,” said Brad Tomer, acting director of NRIC.

“As a national DOE program and part of INL, the nation’s nuclear energy research laboratory, NRIC is committed to working with private companies such as Westinghouse to perform testing and accelerate the development of advanced nuclear technologies that will provide clean energy solutions for the US.”

NRIC, a key initiative under the DOE, is dedicated to fast-tracking the development and deployment of advanced nuclear technologies like the eVinci microreactor. Its mission includes establishing four new experimental facilities and two large-scale reactor test beds by 2028, with plans to complete two advanced technology experiments by 2030….

(16) STAR TREK FROGS CHIRPING BOLDLY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Researchers have discovered seven new species of tree frog in Madagascar. They make chirps and noises a bit like the sound-effects from Star Trek and so the researchers have named the species after Kirk, Picard, Sissko, Janeway, Pike et al…

We here name and describe the seven new species in honor of fictional captains of starships, namely B.kirki sp. nov.,B.picardi sp. nov., B.siskoi sp. nov., B.janewayae sp. nov., B.archeri sp. nov., B.pikei sp. nov., and B.burnhamae sp. nov. 

Primary research: Vences, M. et al (2024) Communicator whistles: A Trek through the taxonomyof the Boophis marojezensis complex reveals seven new, morphologically cryptic tree frogs from Madagascar (Amphibia: Anura: Mantellidae). Vertebrate Zoology, vol. 74, p643–681.

(17) SPACE TRASH SOLUTION. Popular Science says, “ISS astronauts to test trash compactor that’s basically WALL-E”. How can I resist a clickbait headline like that?

NASA will test a state-of-the-art trash compactor aboard the International Space Station—and yes, it resembles a certain Pixar character tasked with the same job responsibilities. If all goes well, Sierra Space’s Trash Compaction and Processing System (TCPS) will be operational for ISS astronauts to use by the end of 2026.

(18) NEMO: IN THE MINOR LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA. SCIFI Radio introduces us to “Nautilus”, a Prime Video series that launches the first of its ten episodes on October 25.

…This mini-series focuses on the early days of Nemo’s career, before the events portrayed in the beloved 1954 Disney movie. Nemo is still the genius who designed the Nautilus, but he did not build her for himself….

…Nemo leads a prisoner escape, stealing his own ship to do so. Naturally the East India Company is not happy about this, and pursue him with all the means at their command. If you remember the British Raj in the days when Rudyard Kipling was a young writer, you’ll remember they had considerable means. If you’re not a Kipling fan, think of The Far Pavilions….

(19) SPACE IS COOL. Tom Cardy, an Australian comedian, musician, songwriter, and actor, has dropped an animated music video of his 2023 single “H.S” – because whether or not it’s a planet, Pluto still knows it is “hot shit”!

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, N., Joel Zakem, Mlex, 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 Camestros Felapton.]

Pixel Scroll 10/13/24 Pixels, Hardworking And Honest, Need The Support Of Their Scrolls

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(1) UNCANNY DELUGED WITH AI SUBMISSIONS. Michael Damian Thomas of Uncanny Magazine announced on October 10 that the volume of AI submissions has caused a delay in their responses to writers.

Then he later followed up with these additional thoughts:

(2) EARLY SERIALIZATIONS OF DRACULA. At Deeper Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein, Bobbie Derie makes “A Survey of Dracula Newspaper Serials in English (1899-1928)”.

The research for Deeper Cut: Lovecraft, Miniter, Stoker: the Dracula Revision required an examination of the history of the Dracula manuscript and an evaluation of the textual variations in order to evaluate whether there was any place in the timeline for Edith Miniter, as Lovecraft alleged, and to judge Bram Stoker’s involvement with changes to the text before and after publication.

One of the most notable developments in Dracula studies in recent years has been the discovery of and translation into English of the 1899 Swedish translation Mörkrets Makter (translated into English as Powers of Darkness), which was serialized in in the newspaper Dagen, and 1901 Icelandic edition Makt Myrkanna (also translated into English as Powers of Darkness) serialized in the newspaper Fjallkonan. What has become apparent, however, is that there were also numerous Dracula serializations in English-language newspapers in the period 1899-1928. Thanks to the digitization of old newspaper archives and online subscription services, these newspaper serials, which have received rather scanty attention, are more accessible today than they were previously. Enough that a survey of the extant texts is warranted….

… There may well be additional newspaper serializations of Dracula besides these; these are just the serials available via newspapers.com as of the time of this writing. Links will be to the full pages, as clips tend to come out illegible….

(3) JOY DAVIDMAN AT THE LONDON CIRCLE. Rob Hansen has assembled excerpts of fannish memoirs about “C.S. Lewis & The London Circle” at Fiawol.org. A great deal of it is about Joy Davidman’s attendance at pub meetings of the London fan group.

[SAM YOUD, who wrote as “John Christopher”] …Joy herself I got to know quite well. We drank bitter together and argued endlessly through those Thursday evenings. Joy never stopped arguing, and we derived much mutual pleasure from the exercise.

She had endured a cruelly-hard childhood, involving a range of diseases that included curvature of the spine, exaggerated insulin secretion resulting in excessive appetite and a weight problem, and Grave’s disease – hyperthyroidism. For the last she was treated by a doctor who required her to wear a radium collar around her neck, weekly for a year. It appeared to cure the condition, but one can speculate on the cost in later life. I did not know any of this before reading AND GOD CAME IN, her biography by Lyle Dorsett, published in 1983. Nor did she talk about her achievements as an award-winning poet, her authorship of two well-regarded novels, or her stint in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Perhaps she did not want to belittle our petty triumphs in sales to Astounding Stories or Galaxy or New Worlds….

(4) NOBEL PEACE PRIZE. “2024 Nobel Peace Prize goes to Japanese atomic bomb survivors’ group” – NPR has details.

A Japanese anti-nuclear weapons group made up of survivors of the atomic bombings in Japan during World War II has won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it has awarded the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again,” sending a message to countries that are considering acquiring or threatening to use them.

Committee Chair Jørgen Watne Frydnes said Nihon Hidankyo, made up of survivors of the August 1945 nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nakasaki by the United States, has been instrumental in the global movement that has kept nuclear weapons from being used in conflict for 80 years….

… At a press conference in Hiroshima, Nihon Hidankyo’s co-chair, Toshiyuki Mimaki, 81, held back tears and pinched his cheeks when the award was announced. “I can’t believe it’s real” he told reporters.

Mimaki is a Hiroshima survivor and said the award helped recognize the group’s work. “It would be a great force to appeal to the world that the abolition of nuclear weapons can be achieved,” he said.

He said the idea that nuclear weapons bring peace to the world is wrong.

“It has been said that because of nuclear weapons, the world maintains peace. But nuclear weapons can be used by terrorists,” he said. “For example, if Russia uses them against Ukraine, Israel against Gaza, it won’t end there. Politicians should know these things.”…

(5) SOME OF THE ORIGINAL MONSTERS. Atlas Obscura introduces us to “The Wendigo and 6 Other Ancient Monsters From Indigenous Folklore”.

…Around the world, Indigenous communities have passed rich storytelling traditions from one generation to the next from time immemorial. Many of the stories have been lost in the upheaval and destruction of the colonial era. Selfless heroes and bold tricksters alike have been forgotten, or faded to a mere wisp of collective memory. But the monsters, ah, the monsters. Ferocious, fanged, skulking, slithering, they seem to have endured better than most. These beings still haunt—and hunt—from Australia to Brazil, Lake Victoria to Lake Winnebago. Here are some of the most memorable ancient terrors from Indigenous lore that still send chills down our spines.

First on the list:

Beware the Wendigo, the Frostbitten Flesheater of North America’s Chilly Heartland by J.W. Ocker

Few monsters from Indigenous folklore can boast of making it in Hollywood. There’s Krampus, a modern amalgamation of deeply ancient Central European traditions, and the wendigo, which first terrorized the Algonquin, Ojibwe, and other Anishinaabe peoples around the North American Great Lakes. We’ll leave it to you to decide whether the 2021 movie Antlers does justice to the wendigo’s ferocity, but we’re betting the wendigo doesn’t care. It’s too busy looking for its next victim. A potent symbol of human greed, the emaciated creature is insatiably hungry and appears in the lean and desperate season of winter. In the 19th century, some documented regional cases of cannibalism and other unspeakable acts were chalked up to individuals “going wendigo.”

(6) FANTASY STUDY. Adam Roberts, winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Jack Glass, a three-time BSFA Award winner, and Professor in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, will have a nonfiction book Fantasy: A Short History out in April 2025 from Skylight Books.

One of the most popular genres of modern times, fantasy literature has as rich a cultural and literary heritage as the magical worlds that so enrapture its readers. In this book, a concise history of the genre, Adam Roberts traces the central forms and influences on fantasy through the centuries to arrive at our understanding of the fantastic today.

Pinning the evolution of fantasy on three key moments – the 19th-century resurgence of interest in Arthurian legend, the rise of Christian allegory, and a post-Ossian, post-Grimm emergence of a Norse, Germanic and Old English mythic identity – Roberts explores how the logic of ‘the fantastical’ feeds through into the sets and trappings of modern fantasy. Tracking the creation of heroic and high fantasy subgenres through antiquarian tradition, through C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and into the post-Tolkien boom in genre fantasy writing, the book brings the manifestation of the fantastic beyond literature into art, music, film and TV, video games and other cultural productions such as fandoms. From Tennyson and Wagner, through Robert Graves, David Jones, Samuel Delany, Dungeons and Dragons, Terry Pratchett and Robin Hobb, to the Game of Thrones, Skyrim, The Witcher and The Lord of the Rings media franchises, the book digs into the global dissemination and diversity of 21st-century fantasy. Accessible and dynamic, wide-ranging but comprehensive, this is a crash-course in context for the most imaginative form of storytelling….

(7) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary: Star Trek’s “Mudd’s Women” (1966 on this date)

By Paul Weimer: Harry Mudd is, for all being a reprobate, cheat, con man, and sneak, is one of the iconic characters of all of Star Trek. In a supposedly glorious Federation, it is heartwarming in a way to see a character as mercilessly mercenary as Harry Mudd come on screen. 

“Mudd’s Women” is his first appearance. (he would be in one more TOS episode, an animated episode and surprisingly, also on Discovery (before they go to the future).   

“Mudd’s Women” itself is a con man scheme involving a drug to make women appear more beautiful, and Mudd trying to marry them off to settlers while on the drug, and reap the profits. It shows the early “Wagon Train in Space” roots of Star Trek to the fullest, because with just some changes, this could easily be an episode of Bonanza or another Western. And if you look at Mudd’s getup (and that hat), you can totally see it. And Kirk’s clever use of a placebo in the denouement is a positive message that beauty drugs, in the end, pale to self-confidence and real inner beauty. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) LEFT-HANDED COMPLIMENT. From 2018: David Williams tells us about the time: “They Tried to Ban Fahrenheit 451 and Replace It With. . . My Book” at Literary Hub.

So it was no surprise when from Santa Rosa County in the panhandle of Florida this past month there came familiar news. A parent, discovering their child was reading something they found problematic, approached a school board and asked that Fahrenheit 451 be removed from the curriculum.

“Filth,” that parent called Bradbury’s work, as she pressed for it to be removed from an eighth grade reading list. The concerned mom leading the banning effort didn’t see its prophetic relevance. All she saw was a vulgarity, the word “bastard,” which she felt was inappropriate for her 13-year-old daughter. “I’m just trying to keep my little girl a little girl,” she said.

This kind of book-banning effort isn’t unusual, but this one was a gut punch. Why? Because the parent organizing the banning effort suggested that Bradbury’s work should be replaced with something more acceptable to her.

Among her suggestions for more “suitable” material: my own dystopian novel, When the English Fall.

I cannot imagine receiving a more troubling and heartbreaking endorsement.

Sure, my Amish protagonist and narrator doesn’t use vulgarity in the face of the world’s collapse. Because he’s Amish. Old Order Mennonites don’t tend to swear like sailors. But my story contains its fair share of death and murder and human horror, at least as graphic as anything you’ll find in Bradbury.

The mother bringing the complaint was concerned at the violence in the book, and worried that the book wasn’t “safe,” and suggested that kids might read about murder and violence and become murderous and violent themselves. As a pastor, I preach the Bible every Sunday, and teach it in classes. My gracious, I can’t imagine a less “safe” book than the Bible. Try reading Genesis sometime. That’s a rough, rough book. My Adult Ed class has been discovering this last month as we’ve been reading it together. Murder? Rape? Betrayal? Incest? Ray Bradbury’s got nothing on the Word of God….

(11) THEY MAKE A DESOLATION. “SpaceX wants to go to Mars. To get there, environmentalists say it’s trashing Texas” reports NPR.

…Musk might see Starship as an ark for all God’s creatures, but environmentalists tell a different story. As Starship prototypes have begun flying from SpaceX’s launch pad in Boca Chica, Texas, they say the company has shown little regard for the wildlife Musk has said he wants to protect.

Now, a review of state and federal records by NPR, including some obtained through a freedom of information request, shows how SpaceX has sometimes ignored environmental regulations as it rushed to fulfill its founder’s vision. With each of its launches, records show, the company discharged tens of thousands of gallons of what regulators classify as industrial wastewater into the surrounding environment.

In response to the discharges of water from the pad, both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) have determined that SpaceX has violated the Clean Water Act. Both agencies levied fines totaling more than $150,000 against the company in September….

(12) EMBRACEABLE YOU. Meanwhile, “SpaceX pulls off unprecedented feat, grabs descending rocket with mechanical arms” – CBS News has the story.

In one of the most dramatic, high-risk space flights to date, SpaceX launched a gargantuan Super Heavy-Starship rocket on an unpiloted test flight Sunday and then used giant “mechazilla” mechanical arms on the pad gantry to pluck the descending first stage out of the sky in an unprecedented feat of engineering.

The Starship upper stage, meanwhile, looped around the planet and re-entered the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean as planned, enduring temperatures nearing 3,000 degrees as it descended to a controlled, on-target splashdown.

The spacecraft came through the hellish heat of re-entry in relatively good condition, protected by improved heat-shield tiles and beefed-up steering fins that worked as needed while engulfed in a fireball of atmospheric friction.

But the jaw-dropping first stage capture back at the launch pad, using pincer-like arms more familiarly known as chopsticks, was the clear highlight of the giant rocket’s fifth test flight.

Snagging the descending 23-story-tall Super Heavy booster with the mechazilla arms represented an unprecedented milestone in SpaceX’s drive to develop fully reusable, quickly re-launchable rockets, a technological tour de force unmatched in the history of earlier space programs relying on expendable, throw-away rockets….

(13) PIRATE SITE CHANGES NAME. “Aniwatch, World’s Biggest Anime Piracy Site, Rebranded to HiAnime” reports CBR.com.

The world’s biggest anime piracy site, Aniwatch, has recently rebranded itself following a huge rise in infamy.

The popular site “Aniwatch” has changed its domain name to “HiAnime” this week. Users attempting to access Aniwatch received the message: “Aniwatch is being rebranded to HiAnime. You will be redirected to the new HiAnime website in 10 seconds. Or you can also click here to go to HiAnime now.” According to Similarweb, “Aniwatch” is the #1 most accessed anime piracy site worldwide with 136.2 million visitors in January 2024. It’s also 16th overall in the “Streaming and Online TV” category. Aniwatch does not provide an official explanation for the rebranding.

A new report by Torrent Freak adds that a recent ‘dynamic+’ site blocking order in India may have motivated this. This refers to a court-ordered instruction to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block access to a website, with the theory proving especially likely given that India is Aniwatch’s biggest user base…

(14) VIDEOS OF YESTERDAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Last night’s Saturday Night Live had several items that could be considered anything from genre adjacent to vaguely kind of sort of adjacent to genre adjacent. It depends on how you look at it. And how hard you squint.

This one is definitely horror. But not supernatural horror or anything else that’s really SF-adjacent. More like serial murderer horror. Although, the fantasy talking furniture, bookcases, etc. DO lend more credibility as genre related. I think it’s extremely well-made, considering they (presumably) had less than a week to put it together. “My Best Friend’s House”.

Oh, this one is absolutely solidly genre IMO. You just have to watch it all the way to the end to see why. “The Hotel Detective”.

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