WWWednesday: February 24, 2021

Thylacine image courtesy of Discovery Magazine

Writers, Writing, Reading, Books:

Marvel’s elite artist team created the Fine Arts covers for the final issues of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s run of Black Panther. Click through to see the mouth-watering covers themselves.

Wired provides a collection of interesting quotes from David Gerrold about worldbuilding and life on other planets.

Tonight, SymphonySpace is offering a live online event discussing the works of Octavia Butler. You can register at the site. Panelists include writers, musicians and actors: N.K. Jemisin and Yetide Batake among others, and the panel starts at 7:00 Eastern Standard Time.

Mars Rover landing

Mars:

ElderFox provides images from Mars, garnered from Opportunity, Spirit and Curiosity. (I found the “Educational” timbre of the narrator a little distracting but the imagery is great.)

Perseverance made a successful landing last week. Here’s the update, with pictures and sound.

The Moon:

Later this year, Astrorobotics will launch the first mission of its Peregrine Lunar Lander. The lander will deposit some testing equipment on the moon, along with some digitized content… including an anthology with a story of mine in it. Seriously.

Earth:

This three-minute-twenty-second video is a guy walking, telling us he has photographic evidence of living Thlyacines, carnivorous marsupials indigenous to Tasmania that are believed to be extinct. There are no photographs posted in the video. I’m waiting for images, but you may draw your own conclusions.

Black Panther cover by Iban

Streaming, Movies, TV:

The Umbrella Academy will return for Season Three.

Apple+ TV has adapted The Essex Serpent, and Claire Danes will star.

The State of Things:

Baen Bar scandal is the latest test of free speech, hate speech, incitement and safe havens. The original exploration of comments made in the Politics forum of Baen Bar, a decades-old forum run by Baen Books, by Jason Sanford, has spilled over into WorldCon 2021.  Many people have posted about this; I’m going to include links to two posts by Cat Rambo on her Patreon. (They may be behind a paywall.) To me, of all the people weighing in, Rambo is the best voice addressing the key point, moderation (versus the comments themselves), and also presents reasoned arguments. There are links in the articles if you want to search out the details.

This Forbes article contains a little more information about social media and the attack on the Capitol on January 6. (Not the Baen Bar, just social media generally.)

Ty Schalter has questions about WorldCon in general. I’ve been to two, total, and I enjoyed both of them. Schalter admits he’s never been to one, and he is asking his questions as an outsider. They’re good questions.

Here’s video from 1968 of Nina Simone playing Sounds of Silence.