(1) CHINA EXECUTES FORMER CEO OF COMPANY THAT HELD FILM RIGHTS TO THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM. The BBC story reporting his fate, “China executes man for poisoning billionaire gaming tycoon”, begins —
Chinese authorities have executed a man for murdering his associate, billionaire gaming tycoon Lin Qi.
In 2020, a disgruntled Xu Yao poisoned Lin for sidelining him shortly after he helped him land a Netflix deal, local media reported.
Lin’s Yoozoo Games holds the film adaptation rights for the Chinese science fiction trilogy which Netflix made into the series 3 Body Problem.Xu was convicted in 2024 and his execution, which reportedly happened on 21 May, was confirmed on Tuesday by his company in a statement, adding “justice has ultimately been served”.
“We deeply mourn Mr. Lin and extend our heartfelt condolences to his family,” the statement said.
“As colleagues who fought alongside him, all members of the company are grateful for the impartiality of the judicial process.”âĶ
The AP News story about the execution tells how the poisoning was accomplished:
âĶAccording to local media reports, Xu spent hundreds of thousands of yuan (tens of thousands of dollars) to buy highly toxic substances online, including alpha-amanitin, a lethal compound found in some poisonous mushrooms.
He disguised the poisons as probiotic pills, as well as put them inside coffee capsules, water containers and whiskey bottles, which he then shared with Lin and other company employees.
Lin was taken to the hospital in December 2020 and died a few days later. He was 39.
Several others became sick but recoveredâĶ.
Comments on Weibo indicate that Xu Yao was involved in the early deal-making stages of the Netflix adaptation of The Three-Body Problem.
(2) CELEBRATING DYLANâS BIRTHDAY. Brian Cronin displays â85 Bob Dylan Comic Book Referencesâ at CBR.com.
âĶI’ve been doing this since Dylan’s 70th birthday, and I used to just add a reference each year, but for his 80th, I thought I’d be stupid and actually come up with 80 new references that I had not previously used (you’re welcome, websites that will use these references in the future without mentioning that you got them from here). Starting with his 81st birthday, I picked my favorite references from the 179 options, and now I’m back to just adding one new reference every year. So if you’re familiar with all of these references, feel free to scan to the end of the piece for the brand-new 85th reference in honor of Bob turning 85 todayâĶ.
Hereâs an example â
From G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero #2 (by Larry Hama, Don Perlin and Jack Abel), the introduction of Kwinn the Eskimo, a reference to Dylan’s song “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn”)…
(3) HE-MAN AND THE GANG. Cora Buhlert catches up with Masters of the Universe developments in âCoraâs Thoughts on the Latest Masters of the Universe Trailers and Other Footage and the Marketing Campaign in Generalâ. Her post begins:
The marketing machine for the upcoming Masters of the Universe live action movie is really running on full power. There has been yet another trailer and new featurettes, TV spots, behind the scenes footage and interviews with cast and crew have been released almost every single day. Thereâs even been a massive, world record breaking drone show in the skies above Los Angeles. This isnât even the first drone show theyâve done, theyâve also done another over a congested highway in California some time ago. I kind of suspect that such drone shows wouldnât have been allowed here in Germany â definitely not the one above the congested highway because it might distract drivers and cause accidents â but theyâre very coolâĶ.
(4) PEAK BLINDERS. The Science Fiction Encyclopediaâs John Clute decries âBurning Mappemonde To The Groundâ.
I wonât go on at length here about the arguments that drive The Book Blinders: Annals of Vandalism at the British Library: A Necrology (2024). These arguments, which are presented at length (with illustrations), all stem from a conviction that the British Libraryâs destruction of millions of dustjackets they were meant to preserve has constituted a Puritan war of choice against the huge terpsichorean flow of culture and context and wisdom and flummery and mummery conveyed through those covers since the first one was created in 1819: those millionfold theatres of arrival, each cover an instantiation of the mapping of the story of the world: for every duskjacket that comes into the world proclaims the world within: Speak Friend and Enter: each dustjacket burned is a theatre closed.
The Book Blinders stops around 1990, when the British Library began to retain dustjackets of some categories of friction, thought it stored them in boxes in a warehouse hundreds of miles away, where they were declared to be available to Readers; but as they seem to have been sorted according to date of transfer, it may have proved a tad time-consuming to sort through large boxes filled with how many hundred covers stacked in the chronological order of their arrival at the warehouseâĶ
(5) RODDENBERRY ARCHIVE VIDEOS. TrekCore.com draws attention as âNew INSIDE THE RODDENBERRY ARCHIVE Video Series Debuts with Look at Long-Lost USS Enterprise Modelâ.
The team at the Roddenberry Archive â led by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberryâs son, Rod Roddenberry â is opening its vault to the public in a new series of videos for this 60th anniversary year.
Inside the Roddenberry Archive debuted this afternoon with a pair of videos: one introducing this new series, where Rod Roddenberry shares a brief look at the teamâs archive of Trek-related material and hints at things to come.
Every episode of Inside the Roddenberry Archive will feature an expert guest and deep dives into rare Star Trek artifacts and never before seen memorabilia from Gene and Majel Roddenberry. Experience Star Trekâs creation and legacy in a whole new way.
The projectâs second video today focuses on the current state of the 34âģ USS Enterprise model built in 1964 for âThe Cage,â which went missing for decades until its miraculous recovery in 2024.
(6) TODAYâS BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
May 27, 1911 — Vincent Price. (Died 1993.)
By Paul Weimer: Vincent Price. My first voice and face of horror. But especially, his voice.
Iâve mentioned WPIX many times in these birthday reminiscences and in comments at File 770. And so it was on NYâs movie station that I first encountered the work of Vincent Price. It was one of the Dr. Phibes movies, gory, weird and a lot of fun. That voice was unmistakable. Imagine my surprise when the very different looking Dr. Egghead (played by Price) showed up in an episode of the 60âs Batman cartoon. Although Egghead and Phibes couldnât be more different, the voice was what keyed me, even with my amusia, that the same actor was at work here. That oily, horror fueled voice. He was the voice of terror, of nightmares, of the dark descent.
And thatâs kind of how I kept running into him, by accident, again and again. For a while it seemed I could not escape the Master of Horror. Oh, here he is in a movie based on the âPit and the Pendulumâ. How very droll. Oh, and here he has shown up randomly on an episode of Columbo. Oops, here he is again in a Roger Corman horror film. All with That Voice. Although I still think the Jeff Goldblum version is better, the haunting image of his version of The Fly, where a part of him is trapped in a flyâs body, caught in a web, with a spider coming to eat him, is enough to give me the chills.
Even with all of his other work, again and again, what Price comes down to is the voice of horror. And so I ask you, who else could have been the narrator voice for the music video Thriller?
(7) COMICS SECTION.
- Brewster Rockit adds a security restriction.
- Crankshaft owns a growing black hole.
- Dog Eat Doug knows who can fix things.
- Moderately Confused matches the song.
- Pardon My Planet notes a philosophical exception.
(8) HOMEWARD BOUND. Space Daily remembers: âIn April 1970, the crew of Apollo 13 navigated home by holding the spacecraft against the terminator of the Earth, the line where day met night on the planet they were trying to reach, timing a fourteen-second engine burn with a wristwatch because their guidance computer had been shut down to save battery power for reentryâ.
On the afternoon of April 15, 1970, somewhere between the Moon and the Earth, three men were sitting inside a spacecraft they were not supposed to be living in, watching their breath fog in front of them, and looking through a small triangular window at a tiny crescent of blue and white. The cabin temperature had dropped to near freezing. The guidance computer was off. The navigation platform that normally told the spacecraft which way it was pointing in three-dimensional space was cold and dark. And in a matter of hours they would have to fire an engine for fourteen seconds to refine a trajectory that, if wrong by even a fraction of a degree, would either skip them off the Earthâs atmosphere like a stone off a pond or burn them up on reentry.
So they used a wristwatch. They used the reticle etched in the lunar module window. And they aimed at the line on the Earth where shadow met sunlightâĶ.
âĶ The computer in the lunar module, the Apollo Guidance Computer built at MITâs Instrumentation Laboratory, drew power continuously when running. Running it for the entire trip home would have consumed amp-hours they could not afford to spare while protecting the command moduleâs reentry sequence.
So they shut it down. And without the computer, the inertial measurement unit that kept track of the spacecraftâs orientation drifted. By the time of the second course correction burn, the platform had no useful alignment at all. The cloud of debris from the explosion, lit up by the Sun, made it impossible to sight on stars in the usual wayâĶ.
âĶ For that fourteen-second burn, Lovell and Haise needed to know the spacecraft was pointed in the right direction. Without the platform, they had to use the universe itself as a reference. The procedure, developed on the ground and read up to the crew, came from a technique Lovell had quietly experimented with on Apollo 8. Keep the Earth centered in the lunar moduleâs overhead docking window. Hold the cusps of the Earthâs terminator, the sharp line of day and night across the home planet, on the crosshairs of the Crewman Optical Alignment Sight on the forward window. Lovell would handle yaw with the hand controller. Haise would handle pitch. Swigert, back in the dark and freezing cabin, would call out time on his Omega Speedmaster wristwatch.
Fourteen seconds. Then shut down. Then drift againâĶ.
(9) CHINAâS MOON AMBITION. âChina shakes up its space programs to land astronauts on the moon by 2030: ‘We will spare no effort’â reports Space.com.
China is establishing an integrated program called the Lunar Exploration Program, melding both its robotic Chang’e lunar probe activities with the country’s human spaceflight program. Zhang Jingbo, spokesman for the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) agency, made the announcement at a May 23 pre-launch event for the Shenzhou-23 crew launch to the nation’s Tiangong Space Station.
Speaking at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, Zhang said that “to fully leverage the technological expertise and practical experience accumulated over decades” via its human spaceflight and Chang’e lunar rover programs, “the existing manned lunar landing and unmanned lunar exploration efforts will be integrated across three areas of missions, resources, and teams.”
“We will spare no effort to strive for the goal of achieving the first Chinese landing on the moon by 2030,” Zhang added.
(10) THE TREMENDOUS TASTE OF DICK. [Item by SF Concatenationâs Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff (all hail the Media Death Cult leader) is a massive Philip K. Dick fan. Over the years, he and his Cult followers have had a number of Dick SF novel read-alongs and Moid himself last year completed his personal mission of reading all of Dick’s SF novels (about which he made an earlier video). Anyway, last month Moid was struck down by the worst disease known to manâĶ The deadly man-flu!!!! There was nothing for it. Surrounded by soiled tissues (that would make a germ-warfare biologist blush) he set about to watch all the cinematic adaptations of Philip K. Dick’s SF novels and short stories (but skipped TV series, so no The Man in the High Castle or animated Blade Runner stuff). And he has a confession â he hasn’t watched a couple of non-Anglophone film adaptations and non-SF worksâĶ and Radio Free Albemuth is not available over here in Brit Cit except as a very expensive import (plus shipping plus Trump reciprocal tariff etc. etc..) and if he was going to fork out over US$100 on a two-hour video of not-guaranteed-enjoyment he wouldn’t unless, that is, your mother was presentâĶ
Not wishing his deed of derring-do to go to waste, and because he has an excellent taste in Dick, he has ranked all the adaptations. Do you agree with him? Disagree with him? Or are you somewhere in the middle? You can see his 21-minute video below.
To continue my journey to complete and utter P. K. Dickness, I watched every Philip K. Dick story that has ever been made into a film.
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Ersatz Culture, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenationâs Jonathan Cowie, Chris Barkley, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Camestros Felapton.]
