In a month with so many compelling stories – from the release of the Hugo Voter Packet to criminal charges against a fake Trump elector familiar in sff art circles – the Terry Pratchett stamp issue news was by far August’s most-viewed post.
Next after that came our coverage of F&SF’s official decision to rescind acceptance of a David A. Riley story, which had become the focus of a social media controversy.
Here are the ten most widely-read posts of August 2023 according to Google Analytics.
- Royal Mail To Issue “Terry Pratchett’s Discworld” Stamps
- F&SF Will Not Publish Riley Story
- Pixel Scroll 8/22/23 The File Exploded With A Mighty Crash As We Fell Into The Scroll
- Pixel Scroll 8/13/23 Make Your Scroll Kind Of Pixel Even If Nobody Else Scrolls Along
- Pixel Scroll 8/14/23 Nine Hundred Granfalloons
- Pixel Scroll 8/28/23 It Was Scrolling Hard In Pixel, I Needed One More File To Make My Night
- Chengdu Worldcon Releases First Block of Hugo Voter Packet
- Pixel Scroll 8/10/23 Pick A Peck Of Pixels
- Pixel Scroll 8/11/23 The Secret Diary Of Pixel Scroll, Aged Four And Five Fifths
- Pixel Scroll 8/26/23 It Was An Early Evening Pixel And The Scroll Had Just Opened Up
SCROLL-FREE TOP 10
- Royal Mail To Issue “Terry Pratchett’s Discworld” Stamps
- F&SF Will Not Publish Riley Story
- Chengdu Worldcon Releases First Block of Hugo Voter Packet
- Michele Lundgren Charged as a Michigan Fake Trump Elector
- Scoring the 2023 Dragon Award Nominees
- 2023 Dragon Awards Ballot
- The Greatest Motion Picture Scores Of All Time
- John R. Douglas Dies
- Are These Awards Dead or Just Pining for the Fjords?
- Essential Judge Dredd: The Apocalypse War Review
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
For all that I appreciate how tres amusant the Pixel Scroll titles are, the “Scroll-free” titles are what I would prefer to see as subjects in my inbox, as an email subscriber. I wonder, also, if you can change the settings to send the whole post in email instead of just the first paragraph or so. I will still click through to the site to see or make comments on an interesting topic, but sometimes with so little preview I’m still not sure even what the topic is.
The “scroll-free titles” are single-topic posts, and their topics are pretty clearly stated in their titles.
The scrolls are grab-bags of topics with some standard items, like the birthdays. Of course you can’t tell “the topic” from one paragraph. They’re also part of a social tradition that has developed here over the course of almost a decade, with the scroll titles themselves being part of the fun.
Lis has explained the rationale behind the Scrolls. The reason for not sending the full text of posts to subscribers is that in the past people have used the tool to post my content on their robo blogs and monetize it through advertising. Once I made that less attractive by sending short excerpts only a couple of have been willing to do the work of actually scraping my stories for their use.
To date, I’ve sent 14 post cards with Discworld stamps…
Mmm re the Terry Pratchett UK Post Office stamps, another stamp issue has been recently published on this side of the pond – but this time mainly re an author only well known in the UK. He did major 1950-70s TV dramas (on both BBC and on Thames TV) under the name “Quatermass”. He also did, all also for BBC, the original “1984” on UK TV in 1954, “The Stone Tape” (1972) and “The Year Of The Sex Olympics” (1968). The now late author Nigel Kneale (a Manxman) has been honoured by a set of Isle of Man Post Office stamps. These are available to buy/collect by anyone but of course (like those re the late Terry for postage from the UK) Kneale’s stamps may only be used for postage from the Isle of Man. (And ahem the Isle of Man (like Guernsey or Jersey) is NOT part of the UK tho the citizens of / passport-holders from those three “Crown Dependencies” are British. And Manx, Jersey and Guernsey passports are a little bit different to those issued by the UK itself.)