And Scene

“We really need to deal with climate change issues before there are no workable ways to solve some of the enormous problems from it that are already under way.”

“What are we going to do about rogue killer robots?”

“We don’t have any actual rogue killer robots. But we do have melting icecaps, rising seas, massive amounts of drought and environmental refugees.”

“Should we treat rogue killer robots as a kind of human legally and prosecute them for their crimes?”

“Right now we’re trying to figure out how to sustain and adjust our food sources in higher temperatures, acidified oceans and loss of key pollinators to pesticides.”

“Some of the rogue killer robots will look just like humans! How will we tell them apart?”

“We’ll be the ones who are dead from global warming.” 

“Rogue killer robots are shiny!” 

Various Geek Article Links

Some interesting bits and news from the Internet:

 

Mindy at Skepchick ponders the science of Star Wars: The Force Awakens‘ Starkiller base. 

And speaking of Star Wars: The Force Awakens‘ Starkiller base, blogger Matty Granger fisks and debunks a really obnoxious article in the Huffington Post about plot holes in the movie. Not that there weren’t any plot holes in the movie, but I agree with Granger that there’s a big difference between inattention and actual plot holes.  Plus, it’s just a fun piece if you’re a Star Wars fan.

An announcement that Vanessa Hudgens will headline a new DC Comics sitcom. Which sounds like an interesting experiment.

The New York Times digs out a business piece from 1985 expressing that laptops and mobile computers is going to be a limited market, just to show that tech prediction is frequently not very predictive about how we’ll use tech.

Author Kevin Hearne gets author Ursula Vernon to do her rant about the potato apocalypse on Twitter.

An interesting experiment based on the Harry Potter world, though she seems to have cheated a good bit.

A rundown on everything you need to know about upcoming Disney movies. (The Mouse will not be stopped!)

 

Amazon Gives In

Every few years, giant we’re-selling-parts-of-the-moon-next conglomerate Amazon decides whether it’s going to keep selling books (a mere 7% of its revenues,) and when it decides, so far, that it’s going to do so, it negotiates sales terms contracts with the Big 5 global conglomerates that dominate U.S. publishing, among other presses. (It doesn’t have to negotiate anything with the self-published authors since they agreed to a contract that states that Amazon can change their terms, including the monetary ones, whenever it wants.)

The sales terms do not include just what prices publishers will sell print books to Amazon for or price e-books with Amazon at, but also how much Amazon gets of each sale as its retailer cut, and how much additional monies Amazon gets of each sale in “developmental marketing” fees. Those are the fees that Amazon charges for search rhythm algorithims, search inside this book features, special screen displays, recommendations, etc., that all help books sell on Amazon and make it easy for people to find them. Amazon has been increasing the number of fees it demands the publishers pay to sell with Amazon in the contracts, squeezing the publishers for more revenue to feed its enormous business acquisitions engine. (Amazon gives most of these services away for free to self-pub authors, but it has been adjusting its cut and charging some fees to them.)

This has been particularly hard on small presses, for whom the balance between the costs of doing business with Amazon and making it up in cheap bulk sales they depend on from Amazon is very precarious. But it’s of concern for the big publishers as well, especially because some of the conglomerates also sell other merchandise to/through Amazon and because other retailers and wholesalers are likely to follow Amazon’s lead in charges. So when French-based global conglomerate Hachette entered into negotiations with Amazon this year, it balked at Amazon wanting a higher cut of revenues for marketing fees for e-books and print, as well as tighter control of the e-book market and better terms on print returns refunds (meaning more expenses and shipping costs for Hachette.)

Amazon promptly tried one of its favorite negotiating tactics with any size of publisher — suspending sales on Hachette’s titles, which it claimed were suddenly out of stock at Amazon or didn’t have a buy button anymore altogether, or messing up prices, so that Hachette would cave quickly. But Hachette isn’t as dependent on Amazon sales as some of the other Big 5, and more to the point, they are facing the same need as Amazon to cut costs and squeeze more revenue, so they dug in. Amazon promptly started a media campaign, claiming the dispute was only about e-book prices, that it was trying to decrease the costs to the consumer by making more e-books at the legendary price point of $9.99. This of course ignores that most e-books, including from the Big 5, are priced well below $9.99 already.

Hachette offered a few terse statements that the negotiations were about way more than e-book price points, but otherwise ignored media knattering in favor of confidentiality over the negotiations. That media coverage, as it was back when Amazon tried this tactic on Macmillan a few years ago, was not exactly positive towards Amazon. It got worse when a bunch of authors, some Hachette authors affected by the ban, some just big bestsellers, took to the presses to complain about Amazon’s author punishment negotiation tactic in a business deal that the authors had no say in. Amazon made pie in the sky promises that they knew contractually they and Hachette couldn’t actually do, even if authors and Hachette had been willing, over e-book prices only. But that didn’t change the general view that Amazon was riding roughshod over the book publishing business, especially in the States, which was still reeling from various retail shrinkage in recent years. That e-book sales have flatlined, having reached perhaps their natural share of the market for now, and that online selling of print books has expanded to more vendors, didn’t help Amazon have more leverage.

Gamesplayers Are A Mighty Wave

Once upon a time, a very angry man teamed up with some anti-feminist frothy guys to get revenge on his game-designer ex-girlfriend. They claimed that she had sex with a game reviewer in return for favorable review coverage of her game, and harassed, doxed and death threatened her. The fact that the favorable review coverage never occurred was irrelevant; the charge was meant only to raise questions on the Net. Meanwhile, the frothy guys proceeded to attack with doxing, harassment and death threats other women who had nothing to do with game reviewing or game company PR, and then went after anyone and any website that criticized them for it.

Despite all this, their efforts didn’t draw much media attention outside of the geekosphere until two events occurred. First, the frothy guys confused some Intel marketing folk into withdrawing one of thousands of ad buys from a games website that had been critical of them.* And second, they shut down a talk by an academic in women’s studies at a university by threatening a mass shooting at the event. The bulk of the media coverage from that was negative, depicting the frothy guys as terrorizing women and bigoted. Right wing activists, who used to decry games as violent degeneracy, about-faced and helped push the message that those calling for better diversity and talking about the presentation of women in games were somehow corrupting the gaming industry and engaging in vague, often contradictory conspiracies. (*Update: Intel has now re-bought the ads they pulled a month ago, after getting a clue.)

The saddening thing about this campaign – and it has been an organized campaign — is that its threats and identity theft towards these women are ultimately futile towards its main stated goals. Yes, women have only a toehold in the engineering, tech, animation and gaming industries. But women used to have only a toehold in the fields of medicine, law, education, publishing and laboratory sciences too. The men in those areas used to throw up their hands and suggest that maybe the women were few because they weren’t really suited for those fields, while frantically rolling boulders to try to keep women out and making the atmosphere as toxic as possible for the ones who were there.

Women have always worked in games, despite such barriers, from board and tabletop to educational games, sports, and electronic games from the arcade to the console to the computer networks. And women have always played electronic games, in great numbers, from their earliest days. Currently, they make up half the gaming market and the largest demographic group in the 18-39 age range. Electronic games have always been commercially mainstream, put out by large companies for a global market, and sporting a wealth-load of popular spin-off merchandise and toys, from Pac Man lunch boxes to Pong earrings. 

A Thought for Our Age

Spam Poetry, Philosophical Version

My current batch of spam comments, when not in Asian print characters, has gone from admonishing me to philosophical cultural commentary.

“Perhaps I’ve been looking at too many fashion magazines. There are a lot of them, proliferating in somewhat the way fashion itself has, as a decentralized system constantly mutating, replicating and deconstructing itself as the globe grows ever smaller. Increasingly, fashion has come to seem influenced not so much by monolithic and oracular editorial posses as by renegades, outsiders with few historical ties to the trade.”

Interesting thesis, give me a twelve page proposal on it by Monday. What? It could be true. I don’t know, I don’t read fashion magazines. What I do know is that A) 90 percent of fashion for stores is designed for fifteen-year-old underweight straight-figured girls, and B) fashion currently is frantically recycling styles from the 1970’s, 80’s, and early 1990’s, which I suspect is not very outlawy.

“’Whether an abduction occurred or not remains to be seen, and out of respect for those close to the ski, I’m not going to speculate on that at this time,’” Sheriff DiSalvo told reporters, adding that every second the ski remained missing its owner was losing valuable time on the slopes. “’Obviously, the pain of knowing one’s ski is out there somewhere, very possibly in harm’s way, is a lot to bear. I just can’t imagine if it were my own ski.’”

This is quite funny satire and fairly coherent, so I’m guessing they cribbed it from something. How this is supposed to sell me anything other than skis, I’m not sure. Perhaps it was penned by a renegade outsider with few historical ties to the trade.

“Fit a period restricted in songs. Similar to a patent is basically a fixed monopoly whereby typically the obvious support is actually awarded the particular unique to certainly make, work with, market the actual branded innovation for any confined time period. Once the name associated with defense has finished, typically the branded development goes in anyone area. Songs is no distinct after that an individual inventing anything.”

Sounds pretty, but doesn’t scan. I think they are making an argument for plagiarism of music and limitation of copyright. Why are they doing such a thing? They’re renegade outlaws! Don’t question it!

 

Interesting Writings on Writing and Publishing

Lot going on here and in about three, four weeks, I’m going to be making some changes to the blog, but until then, have some more links! These are about writing fiction, book publishing and SFFH media:

Author Ferrett Steinmetz talks about selling his novel.

Lauren Davis talks about the perils of genre shaming readers and writers.

Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff talks about issues in critiquing people’s writing.

Mary Robinette Kowal talks about turning off your inner editor when writing.

An article on award-winning SF author Ann Leckie, her novel Ancillary Justice and its impact in the field. (I quite liked Ancillary Justice — more on that later.)

Ask a Game Developer explains what it is important to focus on in higher education if you want to get into games development.

Gwenda Bond explains quite simply about fiction being a symbiotic market for authors and how you should concentrate on your own career in fiction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yay Science!

I Believe Most of Us Would Say that We Want One

Courtesy of Jim C. Hines‘ blog:

If I Concentrate Really Hard, I Can Now Apparently Run the Planet

Your mind blower for the day. I mean, literally, a mind blower. Also an excellent holiday present:

Puzzlebox Orbit’s Mind Controlled Helicopter Toy (also being developed for things like wheelchairs and the software is open sourced so if you’ve that sort of mind, you can jump in as part of the inventing community here):

And the University of Minnesota in the U.S.’s brain-computer interface controlled robot helicopter that they are developing for wheelchairs, prosthetics, etc.:

In other words, science is fun!