(1) BLACK NERD PROBLEMS ON NPR. [Item by Olav Rokne.] Hugo winners Black Nerd Problems editor was on NPR today: “How ‘nerd’ went from geeky insult to mainstream”.

…But around the end of the 20th century, nerd culture assumed a more respected spot in American culture. The computing revolution made Bill Gates and Steve Jobs — and later internet startup CEOs — household names. Rock bands like Weezer sported thick-rimmed glasses. And you’ve seen the Star Wars movies, right?

Mathew Klickstein, a pop culture historian, author and filmmaker, said the 90s independent film movement and indie rock trends started making “the weirdos, the misfits, the outsiders, the nerds, the geeks, cool.” He noted that it even spawned “nerdy geek chic” fashion styles and more….

…Merriam-Webster defines a nerd as “an unstylish or socially awkward person.” But the first definition on its website characterizes a nerd as “a person devoted to intellectual, academic, or technical pursuits or interests” or “a person preoccupied with or devoted to a particular activity or field of interest.”

According to Omar Holmon, an author, content creator and co-founder of the website Black Nerd Problems, “it could be a fan for a spectrum of things, and that spectrum being literally anything. It’s whatever you are passionate about.”

Holmon said nerds strive to spread their enthusiasm to others. “How can I get you to care about this thing that you don’t know about, that I know about? And hopefully you’ll be as passionate about it as I am.”

(2) F&SF BACK? “The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Subscription (Preorders)” are being taken on the Asimovs.com website. The prices stated are for one or two year subscriptions, domestic and international.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Subscription (Preorder)

Price range: $46.95 through $101.97

Award Winning stories from the world’s leading Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine! Subscribe today and get your first quarterly issue in 10-12 weeks.

4 issues per year

(3) WHAT’S UP AT GAMESCOM. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian’s Keza MacDonald runs through the top games being showcase at Gamescom 2025 in Cologne: “Call of Duty, Lego Batman, and unsettlingly-realistic tigers: the news from Gamescom 2025”.

If you are in Cologne this week, you will find the place overtaken by cheerful nerds, as Gamescom, the world’s biggest gaming event, descends upon the city once again. (I first went in 2009 – before that it used to be held in Leipzig, a city home to a famous absinthe bar; perhaps this is why my memories of it are somewhat hazy.) Over 300,000 people are expected to visit the Koelnmesse to play upcoming games and enjoy each other’s company, to the extent that it’s possible to enjoy anyone’s company in a giant crowded convention hall with woefully insufficient food options.

(4) ENTER THE BALTICON FILM FESTIVAL. Lance Oszko announces the Balticon Sunday Short Science Fiction Film Festival (BSSSFFF) is open for entries. The screening date at Balticon 60 will be May 24, 2026. 

A submission fee of $1 USD keeps out irrelevant riffraff. Waivers can be available.  Send Questions to [email protected] 

Two Short Films screened at Balticon 2025 won Awards at Seattle Worldcon Film Festival.

• Best Short Film: Invasion ’53
• Best Fantasy Film: An Old Friend

We will thrill 1600 festival attendees with independently produced short science fiction and fantasy films from around the region and across the globe. BSSSFFF features live action and animated films in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror from some of the best independent filmmakers this side of the Crab Nebula.

Awards will be given in both the Live Action and Animation category based upon audience preferences.

(5) PBS CELEBRATES JANE AUSTEN. It’s Jane Austen’s 250th birthday. Are you heading to the Annual Jane Austen Festival in Bath this year? To celebrate this literary milestone, PBS is spotlighting several beloved adaptations, including Sanditon, Northanger Abbey, Death Comes to Pemberley, and the newly released Miss Austen (premiered May 4), available to stream on all station-branded PBS platforms including PBS.org, the PBS App, PBS Passport, and PBS Masterpiece on Prime Video. 

A trailblazer for female empowerment in literature, Austen’s early works such as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion were revolutionary for its time. By publishing Sense and Sensibility as “written by a lady,” she broke the era’s convention of anonymous authorship, quickly gaining success and a loyal following. Austen’s novels continue to inspire films, TV series, and books, maintaining a vibrant fanbase.

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

August 20, 1961 — Greg Egan, 64.

By Paul Weimer: I first came across Greg Egan’s work browsing in a bookstore (remember those halcyon days, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth?). It was the late 90’s and I was in a mood to leaven by my award heavy reading (my project to read Hugo and Nebula winners in full motion). So I came across a trade paperback of Axiomatic and its tagline “Science fiction for people who like science fiction” attracted me. I also noted “Author of Distress, Permutation City and Quarantine.”

So Axiomatic came home with me.  I was hit right between the eyes by his science fiction, which is definitely not entry level science fiction. Egan likes his maths, particularly, and his stories are uncompromising and sometimes require a bit of work to read.  So I found Axiomatic, and so I slowly added him to my diet–it was clear to me that he would not be an author I’d want to mainline. 

Permutation City was intriguing with its virtual world and its inhabitants. Distress and its idea that a theory of everything could, in effect, be the origin of the universe. “Wang’s Carpets” and the ideas that a simple organism mat could be more complex than the most complicated computer and create a virtual world thereby. 

And on and on. His work hasn’t lost a step but if anything, has gotten even more complicated and more scientific theory experiment heavy. The Clockwork Rocket novels have weird laws of physics in the universe. Dichronauts has even weirder physics than The Clockwork Rocket does and I am still not sure I quite understand what he is doing in it. Morphotrophic, one of his most recent novels, decides to play with the rules of biology in a way that is a little reminiscent of Adrian Tchiakovsky. 

But what separates Egan even more is that he loves to try and communicate the science behind this all. He has a website with essays, apps and more to try and explain the very unusual concepts in his books. You can even play Quantum Soccer from his story “Border Guards”. 

To be frank, I don’t read Egan for his characters or plot. I read it for his amazing science fiction worldbuilding. His work is not for every reader of science fiction, but for those who it is for, Greg Egan’s work is extremely for them. I’d try one of the older and less baroquely strange works like Permutation City, if you want to jump into the pool. Egan was an early adopter of ebooks and his back catalog is all readily available.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal invokes the monkey’s paw.
• Dog Eats Doug is reminded how to browse a bookstore.
• Free Range sort of recognizes a threat.
• Jerry King finds a problem.
• Off the Mark reminds me of Weaselpecker.
• Dinosaur Comics tells how Medusa controlled her power and saved farmers from a plague of locusts, but is Lise Andreasen happy? No! “It creates millions of stone locusts, obviously making agriculture harder.”

And beetle moses gives us a talking space squid:

(8) PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE. JoBlo explains, “Star Wars book Splinter of the Mind’s Eye could have been made as a low budget sequel if the first film wasn’t a hit”.

….If the movie hadn’t been a hit, [George Lucas] had a low budget backup plan for a sequel: a film adaptation of the Star Wars tie-in novel Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, written by Alan Dean Foster.

Foster had been hired to ghostwrite a novelization of Star Wars in 1976, and his contract required him to write a second novel. A novel that could have become a filmed sequel. Foster explains in his book The Director Should’ve Shot You: Memoirs of the Film Trade, “While Lucas was perfectly happy with the novelization of the film, he did want a couple of changes to Splinter. Among the few restrictions that had been placed on me in the writing of the sequel novel were that I could not use the character of Han Solo because Harrison Ford had not yet agreed to the relevant contractual details allowing for the use of his likeness in ancillary material. For me, no Han Solo essentially meant no Chewbacca, which is why the pair do not appear in the book. Other than that I could write pretty much whatever I wanted, bearing in mind that nothing in the story was to blatantly contradict what was in the film. Furthermore, the story had to be filmable on a low budget, the notion being that if the film was not a roaring success but also not an abject failure, George would be able to shoot a sequel utilizing as many costumes, props, and backgrounds from the first film as possible….”

(9) LONE STAR FILMMAKING. Michael Husband of Desert Pirate Studios gives a rundown on why “Texas Is The New Hollywood”.

The Lone Star State isn’t just building film studios, we’re building a complete entertainment ecosystem. Here’s the FULL PICTURE of Texas’s studio boom, including TWO major studios competing in Bastrop alone…

(10) CHATTING IN HELL. “Scientists Created an Entire Social Network Where Every User Is a Bot, and Something Wild Happened” claims Futurism.

…As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study, coauthors Petter Törnberg, AI and social media assistant professor, and research assistant Maik Larooij simulated a social media platform that was populated entirely by AI chatbots, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o large language model, to see if there was anything we could do to stop social media from turning into echo chambers.

They tested out six specific intervention strategies — including switching to chronological news feeds, boosting diverse viewpoints, hiding social statistics like follower counts, and removing account bios — to stop the platform from turning into a polarized hellscape.

To their dismay, none of the interventions worked to a satisfactory degree, and only some showed modest effects. Worse yet, as Ars Technica reports, some of them made the situation even worse.

For instance, ordering the news feed chronologically reduced attention inequality but floated extreme content to the top.

It’s a sobering reality that flies in the face of companies’ promises of constructing a “digital town square” — as billionaire and X owner Elon Musk once called it — where everybody coexists peacefully.

With or without intervention, social media platforms may be doomed to devolve into a highly polarized breeding ground for extremist thinking….

(11) NOW IT NEEDS A NAME. “NASA telescope spots a new moon around Uranus” reports AP News.

The Webb Space Telescope has spotted a new tiny moon orbiting Uranus.

The new member of the lunar gang, announced Tuesday by NASA, appears to be just six miles (10 kilometers) wide. It was spotted by the telescope’s near-infrared camera during observations in February.

Scientists think it hid for so long — even eluding the Voyager 2 spacecraft during its flyby about 40 years ago — because of its faintness and small size.

Uranus has 28 known moons that are named after characters from Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. About half are smaller and orbit the planet at closer range. The new moon, still nameless, ups the planet’s total count to 29…

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Paul Weimer, Olav Rokne, Lise Andreasen, Lance Oszko, Francis Hamit, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, 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 Steve Davidson.]