Pixel Scroll 12/6/17 Pixels Came Naturally From Paris, For Scrolls She Couldn’t Care Less

(1) MANIFESTO. Charles Payseur’s thought-provoking tweets about reviewing begin here —

Some of the points he makes include —

(2) THIS IS HORROR AWARDS. Public nominations are now open for the seventh annual This Is Horror Awards.  Click on the link for eligibility and other information: “This Is Horror Awards 2017: Public Nominations Are Open”. Here are the categories:

  • Novel of the Year
  • Novella of the Year
  • Short Story Collection of the Year
  • Anthology of the Year
  • Fiction Magazine of the Year
  • Publisher of the Year
  • Fiction Podcast of the Year
  • Nonfiction Podcast of the Year

Public nominations close at 12:01 a.m. PST on 22 December 2017. 

(3) DUFF. Yesterday’s announcement that they’re looking for Down Under Fan Fund candidates included a statement that the delegate will go to the Worldcon “or another major convention in North America in 2018.” I asked Paul Weimer, is that a change? Paul replied —

The intention for this is two fold–one to provide, in future years for situations in years where Worldcon is not in North America (if the 2020 NZ bid wins, for example, this will be an issue), and also to provide for the possibility that the winning delegate wants to focus on, say, Cancon, or another major SF con in the United States.

We expect that its almost certain that any winning delegate will want to go to Worldcon, but this provides flexibility in that regard.

(4) GREAT FANZINE. Australian faned Bruce Gillespie has released a new 90,000-word issue of SF Commentary. Download from eFanzines:

Cover by Ditmar (Dick Jenssen).

Major articles by John Litchen (the second part of ‘Fascinating Mars’) and Colin Steele (his usual book round up ‘The Field’), as well as articles by Tim Train and Yvonne Rousseau.

Major tribute to 2017 Chandler Award-winning Bill Wright by LynC and Dick Jenssen, and memories of Brian Aldiss, David J. Lake, Jack Wodhams, Randy Byers, Joyce Katz, among others.

Lots of lively conversations featuring such SFC correspondents as Michael Bishop, Leigh Edmonds, Robert Day, Patrick McGuire, Matthew Davis, Doug Barbour, Ray Wood, Larry Bigman, and many others.

(5) REZONING. The Twilight Zone is coming back. At The Verge, Andrew Liptak reports “Jordan Peele will resurrect The Twilight Zone for CBS All Access”.

The granddaddy of surreal, science fiction television anthologies is returning. CBS announced today that it has issued a series order for a revival of The Twilight Zone from Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions and Simon Kinberg’s Genre Films for its All Access streaming service.

Peele and Kinberg, along with Marco Ramirez (Marvel’s The Defenders), will serve as executive producers on the show and will “collaborate on the premiere episode.” CBS has yet to announce a release date, casting, or any other writers attached to the project. Like Star Trek: Discovery, however, the show is destined as exclusive content for the network’s paid streaming service, CBS All Access.

(6) ON BOARD. How appropriate that The Traveler at Galactic Journey has found a way to kill time! “[December 6, 1962] How to Kill Friends and Influence People (The game, Diplomacy)”.

Ah, but here’s the tricky bit.  Turns are divided into two segments.  The latter is the one just described, where players write their marching orders.  The former is a 15-minute diplomacy segment.  This is the period in which players discuss their plans, try to hatch alliances, attempt to deceive about intentions.  It is virtually impossible to win the game without help on the way up; it is completely impossible to win without eventually turning on your allies.  Backstabbery is common, even necessary.  Honesty is a vice.

Diplomacy is, thus, not a nice game.  In fact, I suspect this game will strike rifts between even the best chums.  So why play at all?  Why suffer 4-12 hours of agony, especially when you might well be eliminated within the first few turns, left to watch the rest of your companions pick over your bones?

Well, it’s kind of fun.

(7) TREACHERY IN THE PRESENT. Meanwhile, here in 2017, holiday gift shoppers might want to pick up the “CLUE®: Game of Thrones™ Exclusive Expansion”.

Add more treachery and betrayal and create an all-new game play experience while solving the mysteries in Game of Thrones Clue with this  special exclusive expansion that includes two additional character suspects and power cards as well as beautifully gold-finished weapons.

Really, though, for a genuine Game of Thrones experience it would have to be possible for all the suspects to be murdered in the same game.

(8) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • December 6, 1979 Star Trek: The Motion Picture premiered.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY COUNTRY

  • Born December 6, 1917 — Finland

(10) COMICS SECTION. Brian Kesinger, a veteran visual artist for Disney and Marvel, has created Watterson-style mashups that merge The Force Awakens characters with Calvin and Hobbes. “Disney Illustrator Combines Star Wars And Calvin & Hobbes, And The Result Is Adorable” at Bored Panda.

(11) HAIR TODAY. Interesting how movie marketing works now. A trailer for the new Jurassic World sequel will be out Thursday, heralded by a 16-second teaser, and this behind-the-scenes featurette. SciFiNow.uk claims, “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom featurette has loads of new footage and freaking out”.

Ahead of the trailer release tomorrow, a new featurette has arrived for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom which features lots of new footage and plenty of the cast and crew freaking out about how awesome the film is going to be. And Jeff Goldblum’s got a beard.

 

(12) GARY FISHER IN LAST JEDI, TOO. The cat is out of the bag, and so is the dog: “Carrie Fisher’s Beloved Dog, Gary, Will Appear in ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi'”.

During the press tour for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” Carrie Fisher’s therapy dog, Gary, became an internet sensation as the late actress took him everywhere for interviews and red carpets. Now, an eagle-eyed fan discovered that Gary will be making an Easter egg cameo in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” which director Rian Johnson has confirmed.

Twitter user Clair Henry found a promotion still for the movie in which Finn (John Boyega) and Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) face off at a galactic casino. On the left side of the screen, you can see a strange brown creature looking directly at the camera. That’s Gary, touched up with CGI to look like an alien pet.

(13) HELLO . A special wine collection is back in time for the season: “‘Hello Kitty’ Wine Returns In Time For The Holidays”.  The five-bottle collection goes for around $150, but you can also buy individual bottles.

The Hello Kitty wines by Torti “L’Eleganza del Vino” returns to the U.S. with new supercute designs and two new blends. Now including an award-winning Pinot Noir, a “Sweet Pink” blend, Sparkling Rosé, Pinot Nero Vinified in White, as well as a special edition Sparkling Rosé with limited edition packaging.

 

(14) CAN’T FACE IT. Forget Sad Puppies: “Sad poop emoji gets flushed after row”.

Plans to introduce a “frowning pile of poo” emoji have been flushed from the latest proposals by the group in charge of creating the symbols.

The symbol was floated as one of many to be introduced in 2018, but it angered typographers who said it was “embarrassing” to the group.

The Unicode Consortium pushes out a central list of emoji so that they show up properly on different devices.

It said changes to the “pile of poo” emoji had not been totally dumped.

Chip Hitchcock sent the link with a comment: “IME, the Unicode Consortium can be very random; around the time I started working with character storage, their principles sniffily declared that they were encoding only live characters, and would therefore not do Glagolitic (the alphabet that Cyril’s students developed into Cyrillic) — but they already had Tolkien’s Elvish alphabet(s?). They later relented, don’t ask me why.”

(15) ALL THEY’RE CRACKED UP TO BE. The BBC answers the question, “Why clowns paint their faces on eggs”. Pratchett fans may remember this was a plot point in at least one of his books.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of Faint’s collection, though, are the eggs. Each one is different, and represents the unique face design of its subject. Eggs like these are kept in only a handful of collections around the world, representing a kind of informal copyright – and much more.

(16) TREE SLEEPER. Older human: “Little Foot skeleton unveiled in South Africa”. 500,000 years older than Lucy — same species, different genus.

One of the oldest and most complete skeletons of humankind’s ancestors has been unveiled in South Africa.

A team spent more than 20 years excavating, cleaning and putting together the skeleton of Little Foot.

Its exact age is debated, but South African scientists say the remains are 3.67 million years old.

(17) BLACK MIRROR. Netflix has released a full trailer for Black Mirror Season 4. The release date is December 29.

(18) LE GUIN. At Electric Literature, “Ursula K. Le Guin Explains How to Build a New Kind of Utopia”:

…Good citizens of utopia consider the wilderness dangerous, hostile, unlivable; to an adventurous or rebellious dystopian it represents change and freedom. In this I see examples of the intermutability of the yang and yin: the dark mysterious wilderness surrounding a bright, safe place, the Bad Places?—?which then become the Good Place, the bright, open future surrounding a
dark, closed prison . . . Or vice versa.

In the last half century this pattern has been repeated perhaps to exhaustion, variations on the theme becoming more and more predictable, or merely arbitrary.

(19) SPACE COMMAND. Four days left in the Space Command: Redemption Kickstarter. Congratulations to Marc Zicree — they made their goal, and two stretch goals. To celebrate —

A scene from Space Command: Redemption in which Yusef (Robert Picardo) repairs a broken synthetic named For (Doug Jones). For more information about this new sci-fi series, follow this link:

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster, Rob Thornton, Cat Eldridge, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]

This Is Horror Awards 2016

The winners of the 2016 This Is Horror Awards were announced on March 20. They were chosen by vote of the UK website’s readers.

Novel of the Year

  • Winner: The Fisherman by John Langan
  • Runner-up: Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones

Novella of the Year

  • Winner: The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
  • Runner-up: X’s For Eyes by Laird Barron

Short Story Collection of the Year

  • Winner: Furnace by Livia Llewellyn
  • Runner-up: Greener Pastures by Michael Wehunt

Anthology of the Year

  • Winner: Autumn Cthulhu, edited by Mike Davis
  • Runner-up: Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories, edited by Doug Murano and D. Alexander Ward

Fiction Magazine of the Year

Publisher of the Year

Fiction Podcast of the Year

Nonfiction Podcast of the Year

[Thanks to Mark-kitteh for the story.]

This Is Horror Awards 2016 Voting Opens

TIH-award-stamp-white COMPThis Is Horror, the UK website, is taking votes for its annual awards through 12:01 a.m. GMT on January 23. Anyone can vote — click through for instructions. Here is the shortlist.

Novel of the Year

Disappearance at Devil’s Rock by Paul Tremblay
Experimental Film by Gemma Files
Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones
Paper Tigers by Damien Angelica Walters
Stranded by Bracken MacLeod
The Fisherman by John Langan

Novella of the Year

Detritus in Love by Mercedes M. Yardley and John Boden
Hammers on Bone by Cassandra Khaw
Noctuidae by Scott Nicolay
The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
The Warren by Brian Evenson
X’s For Eyes by Laird Barron

Short Story Collection of the Year

A Collapse of Horses by Brian Evenson
Ecstatic Inferno by Autumn Christian
Furnace by Livia Llewellyn
Greener Pastures by Michael Wehunt
The Lure of Devouring Light by Michael Griffin
The Parts We Play by Stephen Volk

Anthology of the Year

Autumn Cthulhu, edited by Mike Davis
Eternal Frankenstein, edited by Ross E. Lockhart
Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories, edited by Doug Murano and D. Alexander Ward
Lost Signals, edited by Max Booth III and Lori Michelle
Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow
Peel Back The Skin, edited by Anthony Rivera and Sharon Lawson

Fiction Magazine of the Year

Apex Magazine
Black Static
Lovecraft eZine
Nightmare Magazine
Strange Aeons
The Dark Magazine

Publisher of the Year

Crystal Lake Publishing
Dark Regions Press
Grey Matter Press
Journalstone
Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing
Word Horde

Fiction Podcast of the Year

Pseudopod
Small Town Horror
Tanis
The Black Tapes
The Other Stories by Hawk & Cleaver
Welcome To Night Vale

Nonfiction Podcast of the Year

Booked. Podcast
Lovecraft eZine Podcast
The Faculty of Horror
The Grim Tidings Podcast
The Horror Show with Brian Keene
The Know Fear Podcast

2015 This Is Horror Awards

TIH-award-stamp-white COMP

The winners of the 2015 This Is Horror Awards were announced on February 25. They were chosen by vote of the UK website’s readers.

Novel of the Year

  • Winner: A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay
  • Runner-up: Lost Girl by Adam Nevill

Novella of the Year

  • Winner: The Box Jumper by Lisa Mannetti
  • Runner-up: Dead Leaves by Andrew David Barker

Short Story Collection of the Year

  • Winner: Sing Me Your Scars by Damien Angelica Walters
  • Runner-up: The Nameless Dark by T.E. Grau

Anthology of the Year

  • Winner: Cthulhu Fhtagn!, edited by Ross E. Lockhart
  • Runner-up: The Monstrous, edited by Ellen Datlow

Fiction Magazine of the Year

Publisher of the Year

Podcast of the Year

Film of the Year

  • Winner: It Follows
  • Runner-up: What We Do in the Shadows

TV Show of the Year

  • Winner: Hannibal (Season Three)
  • Runner-up: Penny Dreadful (Season Two)

Artist of the Year

This Is Horror Awards 2015 Voting Opens

This Is Horror, the UK website, is taking votes for its annual awards through 12:01 a.m. GMT on Monday, January 25. Here is the shortlist.

Novel of the Year

  • A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay
  • Brother by Ania Ahlborn
  • Lost Girl by Adam Nevill
  • Skullcrack City by Jeremy Robert Johnson
  • The Deep by Nick Cutter
  • The Devil’s Detective by Simon Kurt Unsworth

Novella of the Year

  • Albion Fay by Mark Morris
  • Carus & Mitch by Tim Major
  • Dead Leaves by Andrew David Barker
  • Leytonstone by Stephen Volk
  • Of Sorrow and Such by Angela Slatter
  • The Box Jumper by Lisa Mannetti

Short Story Collection of the Year

  • Get in Trouble: Stories by Kelly Link
  • Probably Monsters by Ray Cluley
  • Sing Me Your Scars by Damien Angelica Walters
  • The Nameless Dark by T.E. Grau
  • Vile Men by Rebecca Jones-Howe
  • Voices of the Damned by Barbie Wilde

Anthology of the Year

  • Aickman’s Heirs, edited by Simon Strantzas
  • Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good, co-edited by H. L. Nelson and Joanne Merriam
  • Cthulhu Fhtagn!, edited by Ross E. Lockhart
  • Exigencies: A Neo-Noir Anthology, edited by Richard Thomas
  • Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan, edited by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington
  • The Monstrous, edited by Ellen Datlow

Fiction Magazine of the Year

  • Apex Magazine
  • Black Static
  • Cemetery Dance
  • Dark Moon Digest
  • Nightmare
  • Strange Aeons

Publisher of the Year

  • ChiZine Publications
  • Crystal Lake Publishing
  • DarkFuse
  • Dark House Press
  • Lazy Fascist Press
  • Word Horde

Podcast of the Year

  • Arm Cast Podcast
  • Booked. Podcast
  • Horror News Radio
  • The Horror Show with Brian Keene
  • The Last Knock
  • The Outer Dark

Film of the Year

  • Coherence
  • It Follows
  • Spring
  • Starry Eyes
  • We Are Still Here
  • What We Do in the Shadows

TV Show of the Year

  • American Horror Story: Freak Show
  • Bates Motel (Season Three)
  • From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series (Season Two)
  • Hannibal (Season Three)
  • Penny Dreadful (Season Two)
  • The Walking Dead (Season Five)

Artist of the Year

  • Ben Baldwin
  • Daniele Serra
  • Joey Hi-Fi
  • Paul Booth
  • Vincent Castigilia
  • Vincent Chong

2014 This Is Horror Awards

TIH-award-stamp-white COMP

The winners of the This Is Horror Awards 2014 have voted by readers of This Is Horror, a UK website.

Novel of the Year

Winner: Bird Box by Josh Malerman
Runner-up: Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes

Film of the Year

Winner: Snowpiercer
Runner-up: The Babadook

TV Series of the Year

Winner: True Detective
Runner-up: Hannibal (Season Two)

Short Story Collection of the Year

Winner: After the People Lights Have Gone Off by Stephen Graham Jones
Runner-up: The End in All Beginnings by John F.D. Taff

Anthology of the Year

Winner: Burnt Tongues: An Anthology of Transgressive Short Stories (Edited by Chuck Palahniuk, Richard Thomas and Dennis Widmyer)
Runner-up: The New Black (Edited by Richard Thomas)

Publisher of the Year

Winner: Severed Press
Runner-up: ChiZine Publications

Magazine of the Year

Winner: Nightmare Magazine
Runner-up: Fangoria

UK Event of the Year

Winner: Dead by Dawn
Runner-up: FrightFest

Book Cover of the Year

Winner: The Last Projector by David James Keaton (Cover Art by Joel Vollmer)
Runner-up: The Cormorant by Chuck Wendig (Cover Art by Joey Hi-Fi)

Tattoo Artist of the Year

Winner: Ollie Tye, Cosmic Monsters
Runner-up: Alexander TheMeat Bowron, Dragstrip Tattoos

Podcast of the Year

Winner: Booked. Podcast
Runner-up: The Last Knock