(1) LADY GAGA PROMISES NOT TO DO JOKER 3 ON SNL. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] During the opening monologue on last night’s Saturday Night Live, Lady Gaga showed a sense of humor about winning a Razzie Award. “‘SNL’: Lady Gaga Mocks ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ for Winning Worst Sequel Razzie Award” in The Hollywood Reporter.
Lady Gaga kicked off her Saturday Night Live episode with some jokes about her movie Joker: Folie à Deux.
“Anyway, I’m an actor now,” the Oscar and Grammy winner says during her opening monologue before quipping, “I select films that would showcase my craft as a serious actor, films such as Joker 2. Apparently, people thought it was awesome. Joaquin [Phoenix] and I even got nominated for a Razzie, which is an award for the worst films of the year. So we won worst onscreen duo.”
She continues, “But jokes on them. I love winning things. My Razzie brings me one step closer to an EGORT. It’s like an EGOT, but it’s hurtful.”
Joker: Folie à Deux, the sequel to 2019’s Oscar-winning Joker, was nominated for seven Razzies after bombing at the box office last year. The movie ultimately won the Razzies for worst screen combo of Phoenix and Gaga and worst sequel.
Lady Gaga later adds, “Tonight, I promise to act, to sing and to not do Joker 3.”…
(2) REPURPOSED MINE HOSTS CON. Cora Buhlert attended a retro comic/toy/gaming con in the town of Dorsten in the Ruhrgebiet. The venue was a former coal mine and really cool. She took lots of photos, and wrote a three-part blog post about it.
- Journey to the Edge of the Ruhrgebiet: Cora’s Adventures at the Marché Noir Retro Fair in Dorsten, Part 1: It’s Roadtrip Time Again
- Journey to the Edge of the Ruhrgebiet: Cora’s Adventures at the Marché Noir Retro Fair in Dorsten, Part 2: The Con and the Mine
- Journey to the Edge of the Ruhrgebiet: Cora’s Adventures at the Marché Noir Retro Fair in Dorsten, Part 3: The Road Home and Greven
(3) NEUKOM AWARDS TAKING ENTRIES. Play submissions are open for the 2025 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards through May 1.
The Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College is accepting play submissions for the 2025 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards.
The seventh annual Neukom Award for Playwriting will consider full-length plays and other full-length works for the theater that address the question “What does it mean to be a human in a computerized world?”
Playwrights with either traditional or experimental theater pieces, including multimedia productions, are encouraged to submit works to the award program.
The award comes with a $5,000 honorarium as well as a week-long workshop and public reading produced by Northern Stage (https://northernstage.org/) in early 2026.
Works that have already received a full production are not eligible for the competition.
The deadline for all submissions is May 1, 2025 at 5pm. The award will be announced in the fall of 2025.
(4) WITHOUT EXCEPTION. Steve J. Wright is quite taken with the Starship Troopers motto “Everybody works, everybody fights.” The new US Secretary of Defense sounds like he is, too. But how does it work out in practice? “Marching on Its Stomach”.
…(There is no response from behind the door, but, nearby, a small hatch opens in the deck, and a STOKER‘s head pops out. The STOKER is a small man, dressed in coveralls like the PILOT, but much grimier.)
STOKER: Oi! What’s all the noise about? You stop that or you’ll wake the ship’s cat – besides, the head stoker’s got a hangover, he doesn’t want all this racket.
PILOT: Sorry, I – wait a minute, since when do starships have stokers?
STOKER: Since Rebel Moon: The Scargiver, that’s since when.
PILOT: … Whatever. Look, I’ve got a delivery here for the MI, and I can’t get a peep out of them. Called them on the radio, tried the intercom, nothing.
STOKER: The Mobile Infantry? Well, you’re out of luck there, mate, you’ll have to wait. They’re out.
PILOT: What do you mean, they’re out?
STOKER: Call to action, innit? Soon as they get that, they get into their little capsules and off they pop, down to the planet, kicking some E.T. arse….
(5) TARGET RICH ENVIRONMENT. Victoria Strauss asks, “Are Writers Uniquely Vulnerable to Scams?” at Writer Beware.
This is a question that sometimes comes up when I do interviews. Writer Beware has been in operation for more than 25 years, yet it’s still so busy. There seem to be so many scams that target authors. Are writers somehow more vulnerable to fraud than other creatives?
In my opinion, no.
Writing scams aren’t unique. There are similar frauds in every creative industry. Headshot scams for models. Talent agency scams for actors. Representation scams for illustrators. Pay-to-play venues for musicians and artists. They may not be as numerous as writing scams, but they are widespread, and they use the same tricks and techniques to lure and ensnare victims.
Why are there so many writing scams, then?
Because (again in my opinion) there are so many writers.
Other creative pursuits have boundaries and requirements that create bars to entry. Musicians need training, not to mention instruments. Actors and singers may have limited venues in which to practice their craft: there isn’t a casting call around every corner. Painters and sculptors need often-costly materials. Models must conform to various standards of physical appearance–much broader these days than in the past, but still restrictive.
But writing: writing is just words. Everyone has those. If you can speak, you can write, and all you need to follow your impulse is an idea and a computer, or pen and paper if you prefer….
(6) NO PRESSURE. [Item by Steven French.] A nice idea! “Silence please: how book clubs without the chat help focus the mind” in the Guardian.
It’s commuter hour on a late-summer morning and the sun is still stretching through the leafy canopy of Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Gardens. In the cool, concrete sanctuary of MPavilion – the city’s annual architecture installation/event space/public shelter – a small group of people sit reading. Some recline on beanbags, some perch on stools; others lean against the fluted concrete wall, breeze running through their hair. For close to an hour, nobody speaks; they just read.
This is Silent Book Club, where there is no required book list, no entry fee, no organised discussion. Just reading, quietly, in company.
Billed as “book clubs for introverts”, Silent Book Club was started in 2012 when a couple of friends in San Francisco felt traditional book clubs involved too much pressure – to read a particular book in a certain amount of time, to “have something smart to say” – so they started their own kind of club, where neither was required. Silent book clubs have become global since then, with chapters opening on every continent….
(7) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
The Return of Captain Nemo series (1978)
Forty-seven years ago this weekend, The Return of Captain Nemo aired on CBS. It was, need I say, based quite loosely off Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The three-part series was one hundred eighty minutes long; a very much truncated theatrical version was released overseas, The Amazing Captain Nemo, running only one hundred two minutes.
Now the series was originally planned as run four sixty-minute episodes but CBS changed its mind and at the last moment told Allen that it’d be three instead.
It was written by a lot of screenwriters which included Robert Bloch. Robert Bloch and his fellow writers fleshed out producer Irwin Allen’s premise that after a century of being in suspended animation, Nemo is revived in modern times for new adventures.
It was intended as the pilot for a new series which didn’t happen obviously, another project by Irwin Allen widely considered as an attempt to follow-up on the success of his Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea series. A series didn’t happen. It was his last attempt to produce a series.
It had a very large cast but, in my opinion, the only performer that you need to know about is José Ferrer as Captain Nemo. He made a rather magnificent if very, very hammy one. Of course, a few years later he’d get to chew on scenery again in Dune where plays Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV. And oh, did he chew it up there as well. I still like that film not matter how bad it really is, or is it?
Nemo was aired over three nights with Bloch writing the final script of the finale. That episode which initially co-written with Larry Alexander is titled “Atlantis Dead Ahead”.
Later the miniseries would get condensed as I noted previously, rather choppily as reviewers criticized, into a film called The Return of Captain Nemo which generated one of the best review comments: “Best line in the film was when Hallick says Captain Nemo was a figure of fiction, and Ferrer says that Jules Verne was a biographer as well as a science fiction writer. From there get set for some ham a la mode.”
So, let’s let IGN have the final word: “If one comes to an Irwin Allen-produced adventure seeking a thoughtful, challenging film, they’ve come to wrong place.”
Need I say that is still under copyright by Paramount, so any copies at YouTube and elsewhere are illegally there and therefore links to them will be immediately assigned to the deepest ocean?
It is not, as near as I can tell, streaming anywhere.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
- Alley Oop discovers an alien can’t keep his story straight.
- Brevity finds a monster’s snack.
- Brewster Rockit corrects the clock.
- Frank and Ernest are misled by book titles.
- Luann has a nightmare.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal describes the end of the world.
(9) A RECENT MONGOLIAN TRANSLATION. [Item by Mikael Thompson.] You should be pleased by this: a recent Mongolian translation of Ray Bradbury’s Machineries of Joy. Here’s the cover and the table of contents.
(10) FREE AUDIO STORIES. Listen to George Clayton Johnson read his stories “The Hornet” and “Your Three Minutes Are Up” at the Lott W. Brantley III and Associates Motion Picture Literary Management website.
(11) POP PARODY. From eight years ago, but it might be news to you: “Jedi Jedi (Louie Louie parody)”.
(12) VIDEOS OF THE DAY. “Brian Keene’s Secret Histories: Running With the Devil”.
In this series, I’ve been going through my books in chronological order, and talking about their origins — where I got the idea, how it was written, what was going on in my life at the time, how the public responded to the book, what positive or negative impact it had on my career (if any), and other factors. This week, I focus on IN DELIRIUM and RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL.
[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, JJ, Mikael Thompson, Daniel Dern, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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7) I remember seeing the Nemo miniseries when it first premiered. Bloody awful. Horrible Nautilus design (to be fair, nothing has approached the perfection of Harper Goff’s design), and some really bad acting, especially from Trog, the android? henchmen to Burgess Meredith.
(2) Looked through the one at the site… and I guess they don’t give tours of the mine itself. In ’14, when my ex and I (and the kid) went to the UK for Worldcon, and traveled around, we took a tour down into a closed slate mine in Wales. Yep, work down there, your only light is a candle, literally, for 10 or 15 years, then you move up to cut slate for 10 years or so. Then you die from black lung disease.
(4) Right. Um, er, in WWII, I’ve read it was 9 people for every one in combat.
(5) Missed the other detail: there are always a ton of new people writing, so virgin targets.
Memory Lane: sigh How can I get Nemo’s sub? There are a ton of billionaires yachts out there (like the two 60′ and the one 90′ that were torched in Miami-Dade last night), and I wanna sink ’em on the high seas…
(11) I prefer The Saga Begins (Weird Al).
Mark, I’ll qoute this for you: “Slate black lung” is a colloquial term for black lung disease, or coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (CWP), a lung disease caused by inhaling coal dust over a long period, leading to scarring and impaired breathing. Slate mining does not cause black lung disease, coal does.
@Cat
He might be confusing the color name “slate black” with the name of the disease.
(The slate I’ve seen was dark grey. Or sometimes red, possibly with markings.)
PJ, he is most likely that which is why I quoted that.
Coal dust is nasty stuff, it causes acute respiratory failure, airflow obstruction, arrhythmias, chronic bronchitis, hypoxemia, pneumothorax and respiratory tract infections. The only cure is a double lung transplant. Such a procedure will cost over $1.3M dollars.
(6) Quietly reading in the company of others doing the same is a wonderful thing.
(7) I believe Irwin Allen was quite honest about not offering thoughtful, challenging films. Could be fun, though.
@Cat
My father worked for a company which at one point was trying to get into coal mining equipment. There aren’t any working mines in that area, so… they built one. He had to go into it once, for something that required serious darkness (“reagent-grade” is one term I’ve heard). Came home covered in coal dust. Eventually they sold it to the School of Mines in Colorado. (He thought that the college could have built their own for the cost of moving it halfway across country pl;us taking it apart and putting it together again.)
@Mark
The Ruhrgebiet area is littered with abandoned mines. This particular mine had parts of its above ground buildings preserved and turned into an arts and events center, though the below ground mine tunnels were filled in for stability. Other former mines have been turned into museums and offer tours such as Mine Zollverein in Essen, which is a Unesco World Heritage site, and the German mining museum in Bochum, which does offers tours of preserved mine tunnels.There’s also a mining museum in Clausthal-Zellerfeld (which is not in the Ruhrgebiet, but the Harz mountains), which again offers tours of preserved mine tunnels. We visited the Clausthal-Zellerfeld mining museum in school.
Black lung disease used to be an issue for miners, but the German mines were pretty strictly controlled and largely safe. The last coalmining accident in Germany happened in 1992, while the last coalmine closed in 2018. The last mining accident in Germany happened in 2014 in a potash mine with injuries but no fatalities. Regarding dust inhalation related lung disease, the biggest problem is actually asbestos, because it was so uniquitous for decades and still can be found in many buildings, etc…
@Cora, I enjoyed reading your account of the Marché Noir road trip & con experience. When my husband was growing up, there were plentiful numbers of working coal mines up and down the NSW south coast. It was common for groups of schoolchildren to go on excursions to their local colliery. From what I’ve heard, the kids would be given a tour of the pit top and surface buildings (including the coal washery and the showers for the miners), but they wouldn’t go underground. I’ll have to ask my old man what he remembers from those days.
When you mentioned the Harz mountains, that brought to mind the Harzer roller canary. I thought this might be the same bird that miners once used as a gas detector, but apparently not – roller canaries were considered too valuable, so wild-caught birds were used instead. Learned something new!
Congratulations on your purchases; excellent finds!
@Shrinking Violet
I wouldn’t be surprised if school children in mining regions had gotten tours of working mines in Germany as well. After all, it was considered very important even for kids like me who didn’t live in a mining region to learn about mining.
The Harzer Roller canary actually is linked to mining in the Harz mountains, because miners engaged in breeding and selling canaries as a passtime and side business.
Slate dust isn’t nice stuff either, the illness it causes being silicosis.
(5) “Please observe me if you will
I’m Professor Harold Hill
And I’m here to organize a River City writers’ group”
Writing using the “Think method” is easy. Just think your plot, over and over again, and a writer will put it down into words for you.
4) Thanks for the plug! Starship Troopers annoys me for exactly the same reasons as B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two – both feature social systems which work perfectly, but only because the author says so.
5) Victoria Strauss is quite right about writing – anyone can do it. A point to bear in mind, when the “generative AI” supporters come around whining about how AI “democratizes” art. (Anybody can draw, too. Even I can draw – I drew an aardvark, didn’t I?)
Unrelated to any scroll item, but I recently got this storybundle offer:
https://storybundle.com/fantasy?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fantasybob
I have to admit I’ve not read anything by any of these writers. Anyone familiar with any of them? Would you recommend their work? For those who don’t want to click through the link, author and book series are:
Ann Gimpel, “Dragon Heir”,
Brigid Collins, “Winter’s Consort”
Kristine Kathryn Rusch, “Faerie Justice”
Lisa Silverthorne, “A Game of Lost Souls”
Robert Jeschonek, (four apparently unrelated books)
DeAnna Knippling, “Underland” and some other books
T. Thorn Coyle, “The Witches of Portland”
Thomas K. Carpenter, “Stone Singers”
Anthea Sharp. “The Darkwood Trilogy”
(Ok, I’ve read a little Rusch. But not this series, and nothing from the other authors.)
Any recs (or counter-reccs; “meh, their work didn’t resonate with me” is also valid) would be welcome.
JohnE, thanks for the correction.
CatE, so sorry, they died of silicosis, not black lung disease. That’s such a huge difference… they’re still dead young.