Tag Archives: psychedelics

Pixel Scroll 1/11/25 There’s Even Pixels Walking Through It As We Watch

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(1) ALMOST HALFWAY TO 101. The Science Fiction 101 podcast devoted its 50th episode to a look at a vintage prozine: “Analog Solutions”.

This time we have another one of our (made-up) time-honored traditions: reviewing a current science fiction magazine. We usually do this once a year, to keep on top of current SF trends – and also to compare & contrast current magazines with the SF magazines of the past.

In our last episode, we went back 50 years to review ANALOG from 1974.

This time, we’re bang up-to-date (almost) with a very recent issue of the very same magazine. Analog is the longest-continuously-running SF magazine, having been around under various titles since the 1930s!

What will we make of Analog‘s longstanding reputation for “hard SF”? How does the magazine stack up against its wholly online competitors such as Clarkesworld and Uncanny? How does it stack up against its former self?

(2) FREE IMAGE LIBRARY. The Public Domain Review is “Announcing the Public Domain Image Archive”.

After the hundreds (thousands?) of hours trawling through online image collections since the PDR’s inception, we’ve decided it was time to create one of our own! We are really excited to share with you the launch of our new sister-project, the Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA), a curated collection of more than 10,000 out-of-copyright historical images, free for all to explore and reuse.

While The Public Domain Review primarily takes the form of an “arts journal”, it has also quietly served as a digital art gallery, albeit one fractured across essays and collections posts. The PDIA sets out to emphasise this visual nature of the PDR, freeing these images from their textual homes and placing them front and center for easier discovery, comparison, and appreciation. Our aim is to offer a platform that will serve both as a practical resource and a place to simply wander — an ever-growing portal to discover more than 2000 years of visual culture.

A valuable image archive in its own right, offering hand-picked highlights from hundreds of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, the PDIA also functions as a database of images featured in the PDR, offering an image-first approach to exploring the project’s content. The featured images each link to the relevant article on the PDR where one can read about the stories which surround the works….

Here’s an example of NASA art — government publications are not copyrighted, so in the public domain.

(3) IS THIS WORLDBUILDING CONVINCING? Mark Roth-Whitworth read C.J. Cherryh’s Alliance Rising, and says “I have written a meta-criticism of it — not of the story, which is as good as Cherryh is, but the political and interpersonal structure of the universe”: “Cherryh’s Alliance-Union universe”.

…I can already see problems with it – the sixty-three families, and none of them have anyone who is going to game the system, for their family’s benefit? None are going to cut back door deals with stations, to undercut other ship-families? Every one is going to be honest and trustworthy?…

(4) LISA TUTTLE’S HORROR PICKS. In “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup”, Lisa Tuttle reviews Aerth by Deborah Tomkins; Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix; Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao; and The Garden by Nick Newman.

(5) FIND OUT WHEN SFF EVENTS ARE HAPPENING. Stephen Beale, editor of The Steampunk Explorer site, has announced their “Expanded Calendar Listings”.

The recent re-launch of The Steampunk Explorer forced us to move some tasks to the back burner, and one of those was the calendar of events. When the site re-launched on Dec. 30, the calendar listed just 191 events taking place in 2025. But we got busy over the weekend and it now lists more than 600 happenings.

Here’s some background. We maintain a database of approximately 1,200 events that take place each year. In addition to steampunk gatherings, they include science fiction conventions, anime conventions, comic cons, Renaissance fairs, book fairs, and more.

Periodically, we go through the database and check the event websites to see if they’ve announced upcoming dates. If they have, we update the record and upload the event to the website. It’s a highly efficient process — if the event is in the same location and happens roughly the same time of the year, we can update the listing with five or six mouse clicks. (We also add new events as we learn about them.)…

If you want to see what’s happening over the next 12 months, check it out:

Steampunk events: All events | North America only

U.S. regions: New England | Mid-Atlantic | Southeast

Midwest | South Central | Mountain | Pacific

International: Canada | U.K./Europe | Australia/New Zealand

Plus the complete list covering all regions

(6) ROSENKRANTZ AND THEATER ARE DEAD. “There’s a New Version of Hamlet Staged in Grand Theft Auto” – CrimeReads warns fans of the Bard.

Friends, you read that right. A new film is coming to theaters in January that is… Hamlet staged in the Grand Theft Auto video game. Yes, Hamlet acted out by video game avatars, shot in-frame, and edited into its own film.

Before you wonder if something is rotten in the stage of filmmaking, or that the rest is violence, consider this…

Directed and written by Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls, and co-starring Crane and his friend Mark Oosterveen, the film, which is called Grand Theft Hamlet, is part digital narrative, part documentary. The film’s frame narrative features Crane and Oosterveen, two out-of-work actors sheltering-in-place during the COVID pandemic in January 2021, who discover that their video game pastime seems capable of not only bringing them together (and giving them a project) during isolation, but also allowing them to engage with a foundational text and their beloved craft.

The actors speak Shakespeare’s lines over the staging, in the modern, hyper-brutal world of GTA‘s Los Santos; underscoring the ways that Shakespeare’s words contain a kind of timelessness or malleability. According to critics, what ends up happening is not an attempt to make this as straight a Shakespeare production as possible, but to play with the text and the meaning of Hamlet in ways that only this new setting can unlock….

Grand Theft Hamlet – only in theaters starting January 17.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 11, 1961 — Jasper Fforde, 64.

I, like most folk I suspect, first discovered the somewhat eccentric charms of his writing in the Eyre Affair, the first of his novels with Tuesday Next from the Special Operation Network, Literary Detective (SO-27), who could literally enter the great and not so great works of English literature. 

Bidder and Stoughton published it twenty-five years ago. I’d like to say the Eyre Affair was a much-desired literary property but he says there were seventy-six publishers that he sent his manuscript to. I’m surprised there were that many publishers in the U.K. that he thought could have been interested. 

There would be six in the series in all — this novel followed by Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels, One of our Thursdays Is Missing and The Woman Who Died a Lot. I won’t say that they were consistently great as they weren’t and the humor sometimes wore a lot more than a bit thin, but overall I like the series considerably. 

I re-listened to the Eyre Affair recently and even the Suck Fairy admitted that it had held well over a quarter of a century, particularly the idea of dodos as pets as she wants one. Or two. Shudder. 

Next up, and I wasn’t eggspecting to like it, yes, I know it’s a bad pun there, is The Big Over Easy which is set in the same universe as the Thursday Next novels though I don’t remember any overlapping characters twenty years after reading them. It reworks his first written novel, which absolutely failed to find any publisher whatsoever. 

Its original title was Who Killed Humpty Dumpty? Errr, wasn’t there a novel involving a rabbit by almost that name?  Kinda of drops a large anvil. It had a sequel of sorts in The Fourth Bear. Both are quite more than bearably good. Yes more bad puns.

I have not read his dystopian Shades of Grey series which is about a future Britain where everyone there is judged by how they perceive colors. Suspect someone with color blindness like myself wouldn’t be welcome there. A friend who did read it liked it a lot. 

His Dragonslayer series, also known as The Chronicles of Kazam, are a YA affair and a great deal of fun indeed. 

And we finish off with a news story from Toad News, “Extinct animals hostile to concept of being reengineered, study shows”.

Jasper Fforde

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) ANIMAL NEW YEAR’S PARTY. [Item by Steven French.] Here’s a more upbeat piece from the Guardian’s gaming newsletter, “Pushing Buttons”: “Replaying games from my past with my young children has been surreal – and transformative”.

Thanks to some distinctly Scottish weather over the holidays, my family and I ended up celebrating Hogmanay at home rather than at the party we’d planned to attend. My smallest son’s wee pal and his parents came over for dinner, and when the smaller members of our group started to spiral out of control around 9pm, we threw them a little midnight countdown party in Animal Crossing.

The last time I played Animal Crossing was in the depths of lockdown. Tending my island paradise helped me cope while largely imprisoned in a 2.5 bedroom basement flat with a baby, a toddler and a teenager. (I was far from the only one – the National Videogame Museum compiled an archive of people’s Animal Crossing experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic, and it’s evident that it was a lifeline for many.) Our guests had brought their family Switch, and we set up the kids with their little avatars so they could join the animals’ New Year party.

They spent about 10 minutes gleefully whacking each other with bug nets before gathering with the other inhabitants in the square with a giant countdown clock in the background, the island’s racoon magnate Tom Nook offering party poppers and shiny top-hats. I was visited by a sudden, arresting memory of New Year’s Eve 2021, which I spent on my sofa, alone but also not alone, because I was with my friends in Animal Crossing, watching the same countdown clock tick down. My youngest had just started walking, and was unsteady on his short, chunky legs. Turning away from the screen, I saw him joking with his big brother, thrilled at being up so late. It felt surreal.

(10) EYE-POPPING. DJ Food recalls the “Psychedelic Crunchie Bomb poster offer” of 1969. The original ad is reproduced below. See good images of the four posters at the link.

A rare set of four “Crunchie Bomb” posters commissioned in 1969 by Frys Chocolate, measuring 20×15 inches. Two designed by graphic artist and Professor of Illustration at the RCA, Dan Fern, two by renowned designer Chris McEwan. They were available in exchange for 3 Crunchie wrappers – see the last photo of the original advert.

(11) I SOLEMNLY SWEAR. “Horror’s Hottest Ticket: These Directors Are Never Releasing Their Movie for Home Viewing and Have Created a Cult Hit” – Yahoo! has the story.

It started as something of a joke.

While cutting a trailer for their co-directorial effort “It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This,” Nick Toti and Rachel Kempf had a little fun at the end of the clip.

“We were like, ‘Oh, it kind of needs something,’” he says. “So we put the scroll at the end. It just says, ‘The producers of this film regret to inform you that it will not be released online. See it in theaters.’”

In fact, the three-person creative team behind the found footage horror movie “It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This” made an unusual pact before they even shot a frame: They would never make the work available for streaming, digital or physical purchase, only allowing it to play theatrically. Yet what might have seemed like a limitation ended up creating word-of-mouth interest in the microbudget production, which led to sold-out shows across the country without any promotional dollars….

(12) THE LAST CHATGPT ARGUMENT OF KINGS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Is it a killer robot? No. But it was a step toward that and a step too far for OpenAI to be comfortable letting this engineer use ChatGPT as a front-end to command their sentry gun/mount. Besides, they seem to be having way too much fun riding the mounted weapon like it was a potentially deadly mechanical bull at a country-western bar. 

(Pro Hint: Next time just grab a ruler. It’s cheaper and you can finish your measuring project much faster.)

“Viral ChatGPT-powered sentry gun gets shut down by OpenAI” reports Ars Technica. Videos at the link.

OpenAI says it has cut off API access to an engineer whose video of a motorized sentry gun controlled by ChatGPT-powered commands has set off a viral firestorm of concerns about AI-powered weapons.

An engineer going by the handle sts_3d started posting videos of a motorized, auto-rotating swivel chair project in August. By November, that same assembly appeared to seamlessly morph into the basis for a sentry gun that could quickly rotate to arbitrary angles and activate a servo to fire precisely aimed projectiles (though only blanks and simulated lasers are shown being fired in his videos).

Earlier this week, though, sts_3d started getting wider attention for a new video showing the sentry gun’s integration with OpenAI’s real-time API. In the video, the gun uses that ChatGPT integration to aim and fire based on spoken commands from sts_3d and even responds in a chirpy voice afterward.

“If you need any other assistance, please let me know,” the ChatGPT-powered gun says after firing a volley at one point. “Good job, you saved us,” sts_3d responds, deadpan.

“I’m glad I could help!” ChatGPT intones happily.

In response to a comment request from Futurism, OpenAI said it had “proactively identified this violation of our policies and notified the developer to cease this activity ahead of receiving your inquiry. …”

(13) BLUE ORIGIN WILL LAUNCH NEW GLENN ON MONDAY. “The Very Long Wait for Jeff Bezos’ Big Rocket Is Coming to an End” – in the New York Times (behind a paywall). (Note: The date has changed since the article was published. The rocket now is set to make its inaugural launch attempt as soon as Monday at 1 am. Eastern. Weather conditions at sea, where the company hopes to recover part of the rocket after launch, prompted the 24-hour delay.)

The foundational building block for Jeff Bezos’ space dreams is finally ready to launch.

A New Glenn rocket — built by Blue Origin, the rocket company that Mr. Bezos started nearly a quarter century ago — is sitting on a launchpad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. It is as tall as a 32-story building, and its voluminous nose cone can carry larger satellites and other payloads than other rockets in operation today.

In the predawn darkness on Sunday, it may head to space for the first time.

“This has been very long awaited,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington.

New Glenn could inject competition into a rocket business where one company — Elon Musk’s SpaceX — is winning big. While companies and governments have welcomed SpaceX’s innovations that have greatly cut the cost of sending stuff to space, they are wary of relying on one company that is subject to the whims of the world’s richest person.

“SpaceX is clearly dominating” the market for launching larger and heavier payloads, Mr. Harrison said. “There needs to be a viable competitor to keep that market healthy. And it looks like Blue Origin is probably the best positioned to be that competitor to SpaceX.”

New Glenn is larger than SpaceX’s current workhorse rocket, the Falcon 9, but not as big as Starship, the fully reusable rocket system that SpaceX is currently developing….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. From four years ago, a WIRED making-of short: “Every C-3PO Costume Explained By Anthony Daniels”.

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 11/23/23 As I Was Meredithin’ Over The File, I Saw Murderbot In A Pixél De Vile

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(1) This will be the Turkey Day Lite Scroll. Any links you think deserve to be included should be mentioned in the comments. I’ll be thankful for your help!

(2) WHO ENOUGH TO FILL ALL TIME AND SPACE. Charlie Jane Anders unfurls a long wishlist of “Doctor Who Spinoffs I’d Love To See” at Happy Dancing.

Doctor Who is back! This coming Saturday sees the first new episode in absolute yoinks, and there’s tons more to come. Returning showrunner Russell T. Davies has said one of his goals is to make more Who spinoffs, the same way RTD’s previous stint was accompanied by Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. (Full disclosure: RTD gave a very generous cover blurb to my novel Victories Greater Than Death.)

As someone who thinks about Doctor Who all the time (it’s true!) I’ve been musing about spin-offs I’d like to see. Here’s a bunch. (Warning: Spoilers for old Doctor Who stories ahead…)

One of them is:

The Paternoster Gang

Apparently this one has been a possibility at various times. For those who missed it, past showrunner Steven Moffat introduced a lady Silurian (Madame Vastra) and her human assistant/lover Jenny, living in Victorian England. They were eventually joined by Strax, an oddly peace-loving Sontaran warrior, and made several appearances during the Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi eras, as well as some Big Finish audios. A lesbian dinosaur lady solving mysteries with her friends in Victorian England honestly just feels like a no-brainer. Why doesn’t this exist already?

(3) TARDIS ARRIVAL IMMINENT. “David Tennant and Russell T Davies talk ‘joyous’ ‘Doctor Who’ return” at Entertainment Weekly.

…Davies wrote all of the 60th anniversary episodes and describes them as “a mini-season, really. It’s three different stories. There’s a little link between them, each one kind of cliffhangs into the next, but actually they are three separate stories.”

The first of those stories is titled “The Star Beast” and premieres on Disney+ Nov. 25. The tale starts with Tennant’s Doctor arriving back on planet earth just as an extraterrestrial craft crashes in the vicinity of Tate’s Noble. Davies describes the episode as “a great big family film. An alien spaceship falls in London, which is the Doctor’s meet and drink really. But is it by coincidence that that lands practically on the doorstep of an old friend of his who’s lost all memories of him?” The showrunner says the episode “becomes a huge, great big adventure with fights, and chases, and monsters, and terror, but also some great laughs as well.”

“The Star Beast” is based on a comic strip by legendary comics writer Pat Mills and Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons originally published in Doctor Who Weekly more than 30 years ago. The story introduced the alien character of the Meep, voiced in the new episode by Miriam Margolyes.

“It’s from 1979, an absolute classic,” Davies says of the original strip. “Pat Mills and David Gibbons, they were kids back then, but they created this marvelous thing. It’s always been one of my favorite Doctor Who stories, and coming back I thought it would be such enormous fun to celebrate the 60th, and also to grab hold of a great idea, to adapt it, And for those who might know the comic strip of old, don’t worry, there’s a lot of new stuff woven into it.”

(4) AUREALIS AWARDS DEADLINE APPROACHING. The Aurealis Awards, Australia’s premier speculative fiction awards, are taking entries through December 14.

It’s important to remember that ALL eligible Australian work published for the first time between January 1 and December 31, 2023 must be entered by December 14, even work intended for publication after the December 14 cut off date.

If you have any work scheduled for publication after December 14, enter it NOW! If publication is delayed, we can easily remove the entry, but we are unable to make exceptions afterwards if work is not entered by the December 14 deadline.

Please take care to check the updated entries received list and get your entries in!

(5) FREE COMIC BOOK DAY. May 4, 2024 is Free Comic Book Day. Titan Comics is getting a head start by announcing two titles that will be part of it.

Heroic Signatures and Titan Comics are pleased to announce that CONAN THE BARBARIAN will feature as part of FREE COMIC BOOK DAY, May 4, 2024. Written by Jim Zub with art by Jonas Scharf, this issue will launch a BATTLE OF THE BLACK STONE event, which will roll out through late Summer and into the Fall, building on plotlines introduced in the critically acclaimed CONAN THE BARBARIAN ongoing series.

Titan Comics is pleased to announce that it is returning to the TARDIS once more on Free Comic Book Day, with the release of DOCTOR WHO: THE FIFTEENTH DOCTOR: FREE COMIC BOOK DAY EDITION. Available in participating comic shops May 4, 2024. 

Written by master of sci-fi and fantasy, Dan Watters (Loki, Home Sick Pilots, The Sandman Universe), this special issue kicks-off an all-new DOCTOR WHO comic series starring the FIFTEENTH DOCTOR (Ncuti Gatwa) and his companion in time and space, RUBY SUNDAY (Millie Gibson). 

Free Comic Book Day takes place every year on the first Saturday of May. With over two thousand stores and several comic book publishers participating, the event gives readers a chance to grab a free comic and meet fellow comic readers. Readers can find their local participating store HERE. 

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born November 23, 1955 — Steven Brust, 68.  

Steven Brust

Of Hungarian descendant, something that figures into his fiction which he says is neither fantasy nor SF. He is perhaps best known for his novels about the assassin Vlad Taltos, one of a scorned group of humans living on a world called Dragaera. All are great reads. The Dragaeran series is twenty three novels deep with the latest, Tsalmoth, out this year, and Lyorn, out next year. 

Now the related Paarfi’s historical romances are, errr, not my cup of Chai but may well be yours. 

His recent novels also include The Incrementalists and its sequel The Skill of Our Hands, with co-author Skyler White. Both are superb. 

His finest novel? Brokedown Palace. Oh, just go read it. It’s amazing. There’s nothing about it that’s not perfect from its setting to the character there to the fact that it’s based upon a folktale. 

Brust’s short story “When The Bow Breaks” was nominated for the 1998 Nebula Award.

And no, I don’t love everything he’s done. I wrote a scathing review of Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille despite wanting to love it because of the premise. A Bar with flying through the galaxy with a resident band and eating great food. What’s not to love? So which of you did love it? 

Freedom & Necessity with Emma Bull is decidedly different but excellent none the less. 

His rather good Firefly novel, My Own Kind of Freedom, stays true to that series. It was pitched as an actual episode but that never happened obviously.

He’s quite the musician too with two albums with Cats Laughing, a band that includes Emma Bull, Jane Yolen (lyrics) and others. The band in turn shows up in Marvel comics. A Rose For Iconoclastes is his solo album and “The title, for those who don’t know, is a play off the brilliant story by Roger Zelazny, ‘A Rose For Ecclesiastes,’ which you should read if you haven’t yet.” 

Quoting him again, “’Songs From The Gypsy’ is the recording of a cycle of songs I wrote with ex-Boiled-in-Lead guitarist Adam Stemple, which cycle turned into a novel I wrote with Megan Lindholm, one of my favorite writers.” The album and book are quite amazing! Yolen’s son Adam is the vocalist on this album. 

Did I mention he’s on the chocolate gifting list? Well, he is.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) BEYOND ROBOTECH. “As A.I.-Controlled Killer Drones Become Reality, Nations Debate Limits” in the New York Times.

It seems like something out of science fiction: swarms of killer robots that hunt down targets on their own and are capable of flying in for the kill without any human signing off.

But it is approaching reality as the United States, China and a handful of other nations make rapid progress in developing and deploying new technology that has the potential to reshape the nature of warfare by turning life and death decisions over to autonomous drones equipped with artificial intelligence programs.

That prospect is so worrying to many other governments that they are trying to focus attention on it with proposals at the United Nations to impose legally binding rules on the use of what militaries call lethal autonomous weapons.

“This is really one of the most significant inflection points for humanity,” Alexander Kmentt, Austria’s chief negotiator on the issue, said in an interview. “What’s the role of human beings in the use of force — it’s an absolutely fundamental security issue, a legal issue and an ethical issue.”

But while the U.N. is providing a platform for governments to express their concerns, the process seems unlikely to yield substantive new legally binding restrictions. The United States, Russia, Australia, Israel and others have all argued that no new international law is needed for now, while China wants to define any legal limit so narrowly that it would have little practical effect, arms control advocates say.

The result has been to tie the debate up in a procedural knot with little chance of progress on a legally binding mandate anytime soon….

(9) A NEW MEANING FOR CPR. The Clarke Center at UCSD has announced a Center for Psychedelic Research.

Initially organized at the Psychedelics and Health Research Initiative at the Clarke Center, this dynamic collaboration—which cuts across several divisions and departments at UC San Diego to bring together novel approaches and insights into the potential of psychedelics to help millions and produce new fundamental insights into the brain and consciousness—is now formally recognized as the Center for Psychedelic Research). The new center, and the history it builds upon—dating back to research on psychedelics in the early 1970s by CPR Director Mark Geyer—was recently featured in the UC San Diego Magazine, which can be read online here.

The article is “Psychedelic Revolution” and it begins:

The story of psychedelics research at UC San Diego does not begin with research scientist Albert Yu-Min Lin,  but it is certainly a good place to start.

In 2016, the world-renowned scientist, National Geographic explorer and three-time UC San Diego graduate (’04, MS ’05, PhD ’08) suffered a devastating accident that resulted in the amputation of his lower right leg. After the physical wounds healed, Lin was left with excruciating and debilitating “phantom limb pain.” 

He describes the sensation as the feeling of “my leg folding in half and breaking into bones and lighting on fire and knives stabbing into it … but there was no leg there.”

Lin had recently read about successful studies using psychedelics in the treatment of depression and anxiety. Desperate and willing to try anything, he drove to the desert to try psilocybin, the active compound in “magic mushrooms.”

He says, “If our mind is how we perceive the world, and our mind can also perceive our bodies in that context, then maybe I should be looking into the tools that are used to treat other aspects of the mind.”

A single session with psilocybin alleviated his pain in less than 30 minutes. After weeks of all-consuming and debilitating pain that had him on the brink of extreme depression, Lin felt like himself again. 

His psychedelic experience changed everything. 

But until then, the use of psilocybin to treat phantom limb pain had not been researched in a controlled, rigorous way. According to the National Institutes of Health, phantom limb pain affects an estimated 60% to 80% of amputees….

(10) SOUND EFFECTS. The New York Times covers the work of a composer: “Martians, Dolls and a Cellist’s Dog: The Many Worlds of Jennifer Walshe”,

… a new piece, composed by Walshe, … called “Some Notes on Martian Sonic Aesthetics, 2034-51,” it invites a chamber ensemble to impersonate a musically trained crew who have set up a colony on Mars and are beaming performances back to Earth.

While researching the piece, Walshe, 49, said that she had asked NASA how sound waves travel in carbon-dioxide rich atmospheres (“you don’t hear high-end frequencies”). She had also requested that packets of freeze-dried food be placed on the percussionists’ tables, so that the audience could hear the sound of astronauts chowing down, along with cans of compressed air to imitate the hiss of airlocks opening and closing.

And the helium-filled balloons? Here to make the double bassist’s bow feel 60 percent lighter, as though he were playing in Martian gravity. “I’m a hardcore science fiction fan,” Walshe said as she strode onto the street. “I want things to be as accurate as possible.”

(11) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George is more than just a fly on the wall at “The Marvels Pitch Meeting”.

The Marvels definitely raises some questions. Like how are they still making villains like this? Isn’t that the same plan as in Spaceballs? Why did Monica not try to fix the space-time hole from our side? Captain Marvel is so powerful she can reignite suns? What was up with that singing planet? To answer all these questions, check out the pitch meeting that led to The Marvels!

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]