(1) SEND YOUR NAME ON THE ARTEMIS MISSION. The public is offered a chance to “Send Your Name to Space” on NASA’s Artemis II mission. Submitted names will be included on an SD card that will fly inside Orion when the Artemis II mission launches in 2026.

Four astronauts will fly around the Moon and back on Artemis II, the first crewed flight under NASA’s Artemis campaign. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, as well as CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen will be the first humans aboard the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket, Orion spacecraft, and supporting ground systems as the crew ventures into the harsh environment of space. This flight is another step toward crewed missions to the lunar surface and helping the agency prepare for future astronaut missions to Mars.

Artemis II will test NASA’s deep space capabilities, as humans fly on the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft for the first time. The approximately 10-day mission will launch from Launch Complex 39 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida no later than April 2026.

The crew will perform initial checkouts of Orion’s systems and manually test the spacecraft’s handling near Earth over the first two days of the mission, before heading toward the Moon.

(2) SMOFCON 42 Q&A VIDEOS. Kayla Allen has been editing video from the Worldcon Q&A sessions at last week’s SMOFcon, and is posting them to the SMOFcon 42 Q&A Sessions playlist.

Allen also suggests that people may want to subscribe to the Worldcon Events YouTube channel Worldcon Events YouTube channel so they will be notified when new videos are posted.

Here are several that are already online:

• SMOFCon 42 – Worldcon QA – 2025 Seattle
• SMOFCon 42 – Worldcon QA – 2026 Los Angeles
• SMOFCon 42 – Worldcon QA – 2027 Montréal

Allen cautions, “There is not much I can do about the audio quality of these recordings. I think what we’re getting is whatever the room sound was heard on the computer that was at the front of the room. From my own recollection of watching it, this is about what those of us watching on Zoom heard, which was at times well-night unintelligible.” 

(3) AI AD PULLED. “McDonald’s ‘AI Slop’ Holiday Commercial Completely Backfires” reports The Daily Beast. (View “McDonald’s – ‘It’s the Most Terrible Time of The Year’” at Adforum.)

McDonald’s has jumped on the AI-generated holiday-commercial bandwagon to disastrous effect. An ad from McDonald’s Netherlands titled “It’s the most terrible time of the year” was so widely reviled that the company was forced to pull it after just a few days. The 45-second spot shows a series of holiday mishaps—a Christmas tree falling over, pedestrians getting blasted with snow, shoppers brawling over a toy bear—and encouragers viewers to escape the chaos by hiding out in a McDonald’s until the new year. Online commenters quickly blasted the uncanny-looking characters as “creepy” and complained that the rapid-fire scenes were “poorly edited,” while others questioned the ad’s premise. “Even without all the ai slop this ad feels incredibly odd. Ditch your family and hide in mcdonalds because christmas sucks???” wrote one commenter on YouTube….

(4) HEALTHIER GAMES. [Item by Steven French.] Naomi Alderman, author of the award-winning novel The Power has bought a games studio. In the latest “Pushing Buttons” newsletter she talks about the importance of storytelling in this context: “As AI floods our culture, here’s why we must protect human storytelling in games” in the Guardian.

A few days ago, I clicked a button on my phone to send funds to a company in Singapore and so took ownership of the video game I co-created and am lead writer for: Zombies, Run! I am a novelist, I wrote the bestselling, award-winning The Power, which was turned into an Amazon Prime TV series starring Toni Collette. What on earth am I doing buying a games company?

Well. First of all. Zombies, Run! is special. It’s special to me – the game started as a Kickstarter and the community that grew up around it has always been incredibly supportive of what we’re doing. And it’s special in what it does. It’s a game to exercise with. You play it on your smartphone – iPhone or Android – and we tell stories from the zombie apocalypse in your headphones to encourage you to go further, faster, or just make exercise less boring. Games are so often portrayed as the bad entertainment form, but I made a game that fundamentally helps people to be healthier.

The experience of playing Zombies, Run! is also completely focused on storytelling. My co-creator Adrian Hon and I were talking about doing a project together. He said: “Let’s do something to make running more fun.” I said: “How about if we do a story where you’re being chased by zombies?” And here we are….

(5) NEW INTRUSIVE US VISA APPLICATION REQUIREMENT. BBC reports “US could ask tourists for five-year social media history before entry”. (Behind a paywall.)

Tourists from dozens of countries including the UK could be asked to provide a five-year social media history as a condition of entry to the United States, under a new proposal unveiled by American officials.

The new condition would affect people from dozens of countries who are eligible to visit the US for 90 days without a visa, as long as they have filled out an Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) form.

The proposal document was filed by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), of which the agency is part.

US media reported that it appeared in the Federal Register, which is the official journal of the US government. The BBC has asked DHS for comment.

The proposal says “the data element will require ESTA applicants to provide their social media from the last 5 years”, without giving further details of which specific information will be required.

The existing ESTA requires a comparatively limited amount of information from travellers, as well as a one-off payment of $40 (£30). It is accessible to citizens of about 40 countries – including the UK, Ireland, France, Australia and Japan – and allows them to visit the US multiple times during a two-year period.

As well as the collection of social media information, the new document proposes the gathering of an applicant’s telephone numbers and email addresses used over the last five and 10 years respectively, and more information about their family members.

An announcement on the website for the US Embassy and Consulate in Mexico states certain visa applicants must list all social media usernames or handles of every platform they have used in the last five years.

It warns that if any social media information is not listed, it could lead to both current and future visas being denied….

… Earlier this year, the World Travel & Tourism Council said the US was the only one of 184 economies that it analysed that was expected to see a decline in international visitor spending in 2025.

October marked the 10th straight month of decline in the number of Canadian travellers to the US. In the past, Canadians have made up about a quarter of all international visitors to the US, spending more than $20bn (£15.1bn) a year, according to the US Travel Association.…

(6) WATCH YOUR PREHISTORIC STEP. At Mind Matters, Gary Varner does a deep dive into Bradbury’s time travel story: “A Sound of Thunder: Does the Famous Butterfly Effect Make Sense?”

… Unfortunately, the problem with the time travel trope is that any amount of thought tends to lead to chaos, and both this movie and the short story on which it is based are no exception. But I’ll give the writers of the film and the author of the short story, Ray Bradbury (1920‒2012) credit for daring to carry the concept to its logical conclusion.

Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” (1952) is a classic short story that attempts to demonstrate the possible consequences of a concept in chaos theory called the butterfly effect. It’s an interesting concept, but ultimately, in my opinion, the theory isn’t plausible, and that’s the short story’s downfall.

The butterfly effect, if you don’t happen to have heard of it, is the idea that the tiniest change in past time would have grave effects on the future. So if a butterfly is stepped on in the past, the entire course of history would be altered through a giant domino effect. One little change will lead to another, and then another, and so on. The trouble with this idea is that nobody can seem to agree on what the changes would look like. Ray Bradbury dodged the problem by keeping his story short. That way he didn’t have to explore in detail how killing a butterfly eons earlier could create a situation where people chose a completely different world leader.

It’s not that the writing is bad. Ray Bradbury was a world-famous author. The problem is the premise….

… There are only two options. One: They’re speculating, and no one really knows. Two: They’ve already messed up the past in the past and had to correct the timeline. If the second option is the case, how did this company ever manage to open? Surely, somebody would’ve told them to shut down.

The second question is, how did they manage to enter the past in the first place without altering it? The truth is they couldn’t, not if something as small as a butterfly can unravel the current timeline. Thirdly, how did they find their perfect prey? In order for this time safari to work, somebody had to travel into the past and find a creature that died. To the film writers’ credit, they address these questions, but Bradbury’s story kept things ambiguous….

(7) ARTHUR D. HLAVATY (1942-2025). Twelve-time Best Fan Writer Hugo nominee Arthur D. Hlavaty died December 9. He is survived by his spouses Bernadette Bosky and Kevin Maroney.

Bosky announced his passing with full medical details in a public Facebook post. The specific cause of death is not known, other than it must have had “much to do with his long-time, severe COPD.”

The Fancyclopedia has a long list of his apazines and other publications. Some of his best-known personalzines were:

• Derogatory Reference [1990-]
• The Diagonal Relationship [1977-82]
• The Dillinger Relic [1980s]

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Item by Cat Eldridge.]

Statue of Dorothy L. Sayers

Surely mysteries are winter comfort reading and anything about them is appropriate to talk about this time of year, right?  So it is that we have the statue of Dorothy L. Sayers which you will notice includes her SJW credential and stands in Newland Street, Witham, opposite the Witham Library, and also opposite her house.

The statue was cast in bronze, about six-and-a-half feet tall, by the Ardbronze Foundry and designed by John Doubleday, the sculptor who did the Sherlock a Holmes sculpture. It was unveiled in 1994. 

An amusing note: several commenters online say that you can see that quite a few children and even adults like to pet Blitz, Sayer’s feline companion — he is now quite shiny on top! Don’t worry he gets his finish regularly reapplied. 

A very, very not amusing note: it was privately funded through sale of much smaller statues as the British government didn’t think she was worthy of have a statue and wouldn’t fund it saying that she lacked literary worth. Fans of Ngaio Marsh need not apply. 

The plinth bears the inscription: Dorothy L. Sayers 1893 – 1957 and the name John Doubleday, Sculptor with the foundry name.

Witham Library holds a reference collection of all of her works, press-clippings, all of her reviews and letters in the Dorothy L. Sayers Centre, which is jointly managed by Essex Libraries and the Dorothy L. Sayers Society, and which is held in a specially outfitted room on the upper floor.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

• Bizarro has a genre legal speciality.
• Dinosaur Comics justifies its low opinion of dental hygiene.
• Imagine This gets sidetracked.  
• Six Chix might get this job, sooner or later.
• “Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal” says you get this when you backtalk the Blue Fairy.

(10) JACINDA ARDERN ONCE AUDITIONED TO BE A HOBBIT. In this clip from the Graham Norton Show, “The former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern tells Graham Norton she auditioned for Lord of the Rings but fell short on a specific requirement.”

(11) ABOUT (TYPE)FACE. “Rubio orders return to Times New Roman font over ‘wasteful’ Calibri” – BBC has the story. (Behind a paywall.)

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered the state department to return to using Times New Roman font for documents instead of Calibri, erasing a change under the Biden administration meant to make documents more accessible.

Antony Blinken, Rubio’s predecessor, had changed font requirements to Calibri to make text more legible for people with disabilities, but Rubio reversed this decision in part to make text “more formal and professional”.

The new changes go into effect on10 December, and apply to both external and internal documents.

Lucas de Groot, the Dutch designer who created the Calibri typeface, told BBC Newshour the change was both “sad and hilarious”.

“Calibri was designed to facilitate reading on modern computer screens – it was chosen to replace TNR – the typeface that Rubio wants to go back to now,” Mr de Groot said.

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “A Thunderbirds Reunion: Behind the Scenes at the Original Supermarionation Studios”.

Join the team that brought you ‘Stingray’, ‘Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons’, ‘Joe 90’, ‘Thunderbirds’, and more as they embark upon a reunion tour of the original Supermarionation studios where childhood dreams became reality. On the eve of the buildings’ demolition, CENTURY 21 SLOUGH brings them to life one last time for a documentary journey behind the scenes. Join original A.P. Films team members as they say goodbye to the buildings, sharing memories as they tour recreated sets, models, and puppets from the iconic Gerry and Sylvia Anderson series alongside studio originals. Featuring original Century 21 crewmembers Brian Johnson (Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Space: 1999), David Lane (Thunderbirds Are Go, Superman, New Captain Scarlet), Mary Turner (Rupert the Bear, Cloppa Castle), David Elliott (Thunderbirds, They Who Dare), Alan Shubrook (Thunderbird 6, Joe 90) as well as Dee Anderson, daughter of Thunderbirds’ co-creator Sylvia Anderson.

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