Why Do Druids Always Have Red Hair?

that seems racist to me

Firstly, I have a new article out with Utopia Science Fiction Magazine. As mentioned last week, they are nearing the end of their Kickstarter, with some substantial ways to go before meeting their goal. Please consider supporting, and if you do, let me know and I’ll comp you a paid subscription to this newsletter.

As a little boost to their efforts, I include a link to The Sample, a newsletter forwarding service.

Ret-Con Report

I’m not really an academic any more, but I still come from an academic background. Academic meetings have multiple aspects and multiple audiences. The youngsters, grad students and postdocs, are there to learn and to network, to meet people they don’t already know. The older people often treat them more like family reunions. They are there to see friends and renew relationships.

When I go to a convention, I am likewise mostly interested in the programming. At this small con, I went to a panel on Saturday morning cartoons from the Boomer / Gen X era — Johnny Quest, the Herculoids, Space Ghost (basically anything that Alex Toth designed for Hanna-Barbera), Dungeons & Dragons, the Pirates of Darkwater, Jem and the Holograms. That was my one big nostalgia moment.

The other programming thing I found really interesting was a whole new-to-me community called the Organization for Transformational Works. They archive, curate, and legally defend fan fiction and other aspects of fan culture. I have almost no experience with fan fiction, reading or writing, beyond this one story that I wrote partly as a tribute to my older brother

The Rake

and a surprisingly deep slash fiction about a sexual encounter between Optimus Prime and Megatron, which you can look up for yourself if you want. I went to An Archive Of Our Own (AO3) and found 53 Kolchak results, including one that started as an entry to the same 50th anniversary anthology that mine was originally submitted to. Another was a multi-part crossover with Scooby-Doo; I didn’t get past the first chapter of that. I definitely plan to make an account and post my story there. They also allow non-fiction, but because I sold this one before I posted it here, it’s probably not eligible¹.

The Haunting of Carl's Hat

As a university lecturer, I’m very familiar with the Educational side of Fair Use exemptions to copyright law. I have much less experience with Transformational works, beyond Weird Al-type song parodies, and the legal justification for them. The librarian who was representing OTW did a very standard academic PowerPoint pitch for volunteers, which I was totally down with as someone who wrangles internships for students. It’s just a question of becoming familiar enough with the organization to know how match individual passions and skill sets to projects.

A bonus was that one of their users took pity on my ignorance and reminded me of the SCP Foundation, which is a collaborative world-building project. It’s more horror than sci-fi, but an excellent organizational model for what I’m trying to build with my Alien Ecosystems students. If you’re unfamiliar, Emily Zarka offers a good primer on her web show Monstrum.

Nicole is On a Roll

The biggest exception to my basically antisocial convention tendencies is Nicole Givens Kurtz. At any family reunion, there’s always that one really cool cousin who you seek out, and it’s like no time has passed since you saw them last. I actually have several of those, but that’s because my dad was the youngest of nine children and I have about 50 first cousins and 100 second cousins.

The problem is that everybody wants to hang out with Nicole, because she is both personally charming and killing it professionally. She just sold a Captain America story.

She even made the cover!

And by sold, I mean “sold,” as in it’s not her story any more. She can’t reprint it, or sequel it, or probably not even fan-fiction a sequel unless she did it under another name and Marvel didn’t find out about it. At the OTW infodump there were fanfic authors with somewhat gleeful horror stories about cease-and-desist letters they got from Disney or whoever when they were twelve.

As an indie author at the bottom of the food web, my temporary contracts are a page, or maybe two. I’m sure Nicole’s contract with Marvel was much longer. Presumably also paid a lot better.

Bitching is Bonding

Complaining about rates and royalties is an old author-panel tradition. With the above I’m just giving you the flavor. At this con and some others of the laid-back variety, there’s also competitive self-deprecation, where you pump up your friends and downplay your own efforts. Bonus points if you can get the audience to laugh. As an old country boy with an oral storytelling background, folklorist and ghost hunter Tally Johnson is a master of this particular dynamic. If you weren’t paying attention, you might never know he was the Guest of Honor.

Curry Point Express

My try-new-things bias and my local-first bias combine to keep me out of chain restaurants when I’m flying solo as I was on this trip. But this “simple counter dispensing familiar Indian fare” was new to me, and close to the hotel, so I tried their lamb curry for lunch and enjoyed it.

War of the Rohirrim

This was a very pretty movie in the anime style. I saw it on the big screen over Christmas break and liked it. But it was not the first Tolkien movie to use Japanese animators.

Movie poster from Wikipedia.

Topcraft was a studio whose members eventually became Studio Ghibli. I saw The Hobbit when it was broadcast as a child, and multiple times on VHS during college, but it was much harder to find their second effort, The Return of the King (they didn’t do the first two volumes because Ralph Bakshi beat them to it²).

I found it on HBO/MAX the Sunday night after Ret-Con. I had completely misremembered parts of it. I had forgotten that Roddy MacDowall played Samwise, and that Casey Kasem was Merry. In my mind, the song about “Frodo of the nine fingers, and the Ring of Doom” was not in folk singer Glenn Yarborough’s wavery tenor. I remembered it as a dirge, using the same much deeper male chorus that did the Mordor suite of songs. So it remains, in my fan-filk imaginings and shower performances, though even my improved version can’t stand up to the electrofunkalicious awesomitude of “Where There’s a Whip, There’s a Way.”

Longtime readers will know that I am often wrong and not usually too defensive about it.

D&D: Honor Among Thieves

“Not nerdy enough?” Are you ^&%$( kidding me!??! That girl has a wrist rocket! And a prehensile CGI tail!

This popped up on Netflix this past week, and I watched it the night before Mythic Con. Clearly the finest of all the officially licensed attempts. Good cast, good jokes. There was even a cameo from the PCs of the 1983-5 cartoon, during the High Sun Games. Nobody could ask for more in a 2-hour commercial for Hasbro³.

And yet . . . the sequel will be EVEN BETTER!!!! Called Dungeons & Dragons: Feet of Clay, it will be about a sex-addicted flesh golem, who alienates his loved ones through his constant philandering. Sophia Lillis (my favorite) reprises her role as Doric the tiefling druid, and the obvious “chasing tail” joke will be right there on the edge, the entire time, and never drop — because they’re just that classy.

Coincidentally, from one year ago, this. Read it quick, before it drops behind the paywall like gold out of Hugh Grant’s portal-mouth.

Dadgone ol' Orcs, man

Mythic Con West 2025

This will have to wait for next week.

Thanks for reading!

1. Well, not sold. Licensed for one year to ParABnormal Magazine, after which the rights reverted to me. It’s one of the reasons those magazines can get away with paying almost nothing; they’re only renting the story for one-time use. Most of them also reserve the right to archive it on their website (which drastically reduces reprint opportunities), and some of them want audio rights as well. The better ones pay extra for those.

2. That’s not the story they tell on Wikipedia.

3. Including action figures, which is what you have to call dolls for boys.