Oh don't be so hard on yourself. You've finally solved that big riddle about where that whole business about the moon hitting someone's eye like a big pizza pie came from.

"That's Amore"

When an eel bites your legs, and the pain makes you beg, that's a moray.

Holy crap! I had the same idea years ago, word for word except mine was "thigh" and "cry." Great minds think alike, I guess. :)

I love it!

Nice. 11 pizzas and 12 beers at a party on on the moon.

And to think that once SF aimed at new worlds....i think you nailed it. They'll print it and won't get it.

I quite like the retro-style rocket.

It's modeled on the Hugo Award itself -- the bases are different every year, but the chrome rocket is mandatory.

A few year's ago, there was actually a place called Apollo Pizza, not too far from where I live.

The Hugos are the official awards presented by the World Science Fiction Convention every year. They are the oldest and most presitigious awards in the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres, bar none. For that matter, they are relatively old as any literary prize goes, dating to 1953. (The Worldcon itself dates to 1939, when the first was held in New York City -- every year it moves to a new location. Next year it is in Seattle.) Oddly, perhaps, the Hugos have little mainstream prestige, despite their age. That's because SF had no prestige -- it was widely regarded as a juvenile literary form, like comics books, until well into the 1960s, when it began to be fashionable in progressive universities among the younger professors to acknowledge popular art forms of all sorts. The genre is taken seriously today mainly because it makes Hollywood and the publishers of best-sellers a truck-load of money.

Not "Bheer"?

Eh, fans today wouldn't get it.

That's what I figured. Nine out of ten fans at a Worldcon have had no connection with fanzine fandom or its traditions.

Awesome. :)

when the magic duplicator was required reading. i've never been to a world con. kindof a bit spendy for me.

in the 80s i was in PorSFiS and went to all the oricons from 82-86, along with a couple of westercons.

You can download "The Magic Duplicator" -- in several different illustrated editions -- from eFanzines.com. There was also a sequel, written by the same two fans, but I thought it a terrific disappointment. In effect, the first volume is all about the magic of discovering that you can write and publish your own fanzines, creating something unique and personal. The sequel is about discovering conventions, and how you might as well forget about fanzines since they dlon't matter anymore once you can socialize in person, like any normal, uninteresting slob.

I've been to a few Worldcons, most of them when you could do it cheaply -- five people in a car, sleeping on floors of a shared hotel room, eating burgers or the party snacks in the con suite. It has gradually become more and more difficult to do that, however -- at least for me -- so worldcons now are for generally for middle-aged, double-income, childless fan couples, or for young people off the street who only need a one-day pass and take the bus home.

the smaller fan run cons you could gopher. i did that several times. yes i did generally live in the same town and ride the bus, although i generally preregistered. and then stay up all night filking. we have some very good furry musicians now, but some how the filk sing bardic circle thing never seems to have taken off in furry and i don't entirely understand why. of course filk, like furry, seems to have become entrely its own genre now too.

eFanzines.com sounds interesting. thanks for the link. i'll check it out.

i've sort of been toying with the idea of moving back to science fiction fandom, now that furry seems to have become kind of bloated and diluted, but it seems like most people today don't read, have never heard of l.o.c.u.s., and seem to think science fiction means fantasy set in urban futures, with a lot of wishful thinking about things not changing which i don't see how reality can help but forcing to change, and to completely miss the point of it having been called science fiction, because it was fiction about science, well the good stuff anyway, instead of the kind of dumb soap opera baggage that mundane humans drag with them everywhere.

and i don't mean that as in being hard core about accuracy to current knowledge, i mean more about story focus. where the challenges are more about solving engineering problems in unfamiliar environments, then who's sleeping with whom in the cargo bay.

Science Fiction fandom has gotten pretty bloated and amorphous also. The traditionalists have become increasingly marginalized and are in the last throes of being edged out entirely, I think.

So the big question is...did they deliver in 30 minutes or less? :)

Thirty orbits or the pizza is free ... cold, but free.

*grin* Just hold it under the retrorockets for a tenth of a second. It'll be fine. :)