Noy Jitat!

and other piratical pronouncements

Argh! Tubi Be Trippin’

I’m not sure if watching one kids “pirate” cartoon series can trigger the algorithm, but suddenly there’s a category called Nautical Adventures and Struggles, which also includes things like multiple versions of Moby Dick and several takes on the race to the South Pole, which I just happened to be reading about in a weird little Werner Herzog book called The Future of Truth. Which he reads himself for the audio!

No Erol Flynn or Sinbad, though, which do appear in other categories.

Update: As quick as it appeared, it was gone. A momentary squall in the turbulent flow of web traffic.

As an aside, I experienced my first obvious AI hallucination. When I typed “Gil Gerard pirate” into Google, its annoying top-of-the-feed box told me that he was in the 1984 movie Ice Pirates, which I have never seen.

I decided to check that by typing in “gil gerard ice pirates 1984 movie” and the same know-it-all machine spit out this.

So to me, these things are less Claude Shannon and more Cliff Clavin. Just some dipshit on a bar stool, spouting random nonsense for attention.

I also filled out the feedback form posted by the Science Fiction Writers of America after their attempt to draft LLM rules for the Nebula Awards went (according to themselves in a press release) not according to their best-of intentions. More on that in a future newsletter.

Yearly Writing Stats

At first glance, it looks like I haven’t done much this year, creatively, but we have to take into account that the Lunar Awards and some of the other places I’ve sent stuff are not listed on the Submission Grinder. So my actual stats are probably in the high 20s / low 30s for submissions and rejections both.

Screenshot by me, from The Submission Grinder. As always, thanks to Diabolical Plots for maintaining this as a free service.

That’s still lower than recent years, and aside from being busy with WFIRM for much of the summer I don’t have a good excuse. Or maybe I should just chalk it up to efficiency and claim the win. What do you think?

What Were those Six Seven Eight Acceptances?

Title | Market | Date Sent | Date Held | Date Decision Made

I’m not sure what the color-coding on the titles is about. Screenshot by me.

I’ve never included these before, but maybe it’ll be helpful to the collectors (if such people exist). There was also the short story “The Long Nose of the Law,” in Rated R for Ridiculous, published by Spilled Ink Press.

A New Comedy Anthology

None of these things came out until 2025, so you can see what turnaround times are like — faster than academic journals, but not fast. I have no idea when the Atlas of Deep Ones will be out. Liminal Tales was the exception, in part I think because that was a live show rather than a printed book or magazine.

For Posterity

I also just this fall started engaging with the Internet Speculative Fiction Database for the first time, and to my surprise and delight found that I already have an entry there! It is nowhere near complete, and there might be a couple of mistakes in categorization, but I do plan to make some efforts towards extending and correcting, once I figure out how.

I assume that it’s the editors or publishers who made those existing entries, but I don’t actually know that.

90s: The Pirates of Dark Water

By this time you all know how much I love animation as a natural extension of comics. Not as much as these people do.

They’ve done multiple pieces around the work of Iwao Takamoto, the original designer of Scooby-Doo for Hanna-Barbera in the late 60s. He continued working for them into the 90s, producing memorable designs like these.

From left to right: Ren, inconveniently noble prince of Octopon; Niddler, talking / eating / complaining Monkey Bird comedy relief; Bloth (1/2 size, roughly), captain of the bad pirates, memorably voiced by Brock Peters; Tula, multi-class fighter / thief / ecomancer; Ioz: the muscle; and Mantus, Bloth’s more practical second-in-command. Not shown: Konk, peg-legged comedy relief for the bad pirates.

The Pirates of Dark Water was one of the last things the studio did before being swallowed up by the media mergers of the 90s. I had heard of it but had never watched more than an episode or two until it appeared on Tubi a few weeks ago. I’ve been pleasantly surprised. It’s not quite up to the standards of WB Animation, but before Batman: the Animated Series came out in 1992, it would have been easily the most ambitious cartoon on the Saturday morning airwaves in the US.

It is a quest show, where the lovably rogue-ish heroes have to find the 13 magical Treasures of Rule before the gooey, blobby, seemingly sentient Dark Water bubbling up from an imprisoned demon’s realm at the center of their planet corrupts the entire ecosystem. Mer is a tropical world, so the visuals are brightly colored and the designs seem drawn from a combination of Arabian Nights and various island cultures. Four or five episodes in, Tula discovers that she is an ecomancer, sort of like a Druid from D&D, who can charm animals — and plants, which is handy because there are a lot of plants that can move. Druids can also control the weather, which would be very useful on a sailing ship, and the elder ecomancer from her island can do that, but I’ve seen no evidence of Tula doing so yet. Maybe when she levels up?

The show is especially playful with language. They fake-curse in a way that reminds me of both Battlestar Galactica (feldercarb! frak!) and Firefly, though in my opinion Firefly did it much better, using a mix of corrupted English and fanciful Chinese phrases. PoDW is going for a more Mediterranean or Arabic feel, with Bloth shouting longer phrases like, “Blast his soul to the abyss!” The green reptiles the bad pirates fly around on are called dargons (nope, sorry, dagrons, according to the dictionary). Chongo-longo is the one used most often and least consistently. There’s enough other world-building in the show to justify the homebrew game materials I found on Always the Quest, according to itself “the oldest PoDW fan site on the web.” It would be fun to adapt them to Lace & Steel for some solo stuff, maybe.

80s: Kordon, Queen of the River Pirates

Sooooo 80s: clingy purple mini-dress, necktie headband. ‘Nuff said.

“As beautiful as she is evil.” Oh, well said, barbarian. As a kid I never picked up on Ariel’s now-obvious crush on Thundarr.

70s: Anyone Remember Angelfire?

To me, those fan sites are the true heart of the internet. In that spirit, I’d like to share with you some of the work of my very oldest friend, who I met when I was five. He is in our current social media era, but deliberately not of it. He has no interest in being an influencer. None of these sites are even signed, and he didn’t want to do a Q&A. But he did OK my sharing of the links to his Unofficial Filmation Appreciation pages.

For those who are outside our very specific Gen X age band, or who had better things to do as kids (sports or whatever), these shows were sort of the Power Rangers of their late-70s day. Maybe slightly higher budget than the Krofft live-action shows like Bigfoot & Wild Boy or Electro-Woman & Dyna-Girl, but otherwise similar.

This is just a screenshot, by me. The buttons don’t work unless you go there.

My friend was especially proud of having tracked down some of the principals involved in those live-action productions for interviews.

• Lou Scheimer, Joanna Cameron, Brian Cutler, and Joanna Pang from Isis;

• Jason Bostwick, who played Captain Marvel in Shazam!

• Francine York from Jason of Star Command

This was not a trivial task. Remember that search engines as we know them did not exist at that time.

Poopsheet Foundation

A happy side effect of that recent conversation with the MythMaker was finding this database of scanned fanzines and mini-comics.

A virtual archive of mini-comics, comic fanzines, small press comics, newave comix and related items. The physical archive, housed at PF headquarters, is being built with personal acquisitions as well as generous donations from supporters. This project is most definitely a work in progress.

17,639 listings is more time than I have time for this winter break, but hopefully it isn’t going anywhere.

Happy Holidaze, y’all.