The Steve2^4 Memorial Random Tweet Thread

Arr, it be like shootin' fish in a barrel... with a rocket! It be glorious, aye.

I am putting that on my bucket list.

True story: In 1994 (long before 9/11 and the TSA) I was on a half-empty flight from L.A. to Newark (the only sane airport to fly into if you're going to NYC - word!). I had the entire row to myself.

Cue @Uncle Albert pitching a hissy because I've told this story before...

Just before they closed the gate, a tough-looking guy with a salt-and-pepper ponytail made his way into the row in front of me. OMFG, I thought - it's Edward James Olmos!!!

I'm not the kind of person to bother celebrities, especially if they're trapped for 6 hours in a metal tube 30,000 feet above the ground, and this was long before Battlestar Galactica. But I'd loved him in Blade Runner and I thought: How can tell him that in as unobtrusive a way as possible?

The character in Blade Runner left origami paper cranes as his signature. I used to dabble in origami and I thought: When we're getting our stuff out of the overhead, I'll hand him a paper crane... if I can remember how to make one.

Of course, I couldn't. So I sat behind him for all those hours, noticing that he was studying a script, which meant he was auditioning for something in NY. I know actors; I left him in peace.

Got off the plane without ever letting him know I knew who he was. Um, BTW, the novel I'd been reading on the flight? Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep... the novel Blade Runner was based on.

You can't make this stuff up.

When Olmos was cast in BSG (and after Ron Moore once bought drinks for a bunch of us mere Trek novelists at a con in Springfield, MA and we sat up talking all night, I thought: Shit, there's another ship that sailed without even letting you know it was at the pier; I could have put the two together and... nah, who am I kidding?), I've been kicking myself ever since.

"If only, if only."

Supposedly, the titles for most Dick's work were picked by his editors. (Not that the titles he picked were that great. I mean, WTF outside of opera fans would get the reference for "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said"?)

Apparently she's never had to deal with a clogged drain.

I'm terrible with titles (and they're often either the last thing I come up with after a 100K-word ms. or they're suggested by an editor), but I've heard two versions of this story;

One, that the minute Dick died, the vultures descended and scooped up all of his pulp fiction (Do Androids Dream..., The Minority Report, et al.) and turned them into blockbuster movie scripts to which the studio owned the rights or, two, that he left enough legal documentation (he was only 54 when he died) to make sure his heirs were protected.

I have no proof one way or the other, but I've seen enough writers, artists, actors, musicians (translation: anyone with talent and not money) to notice that the former is more likely than the latter.

Blade Runner was far enough along in production that Dick saw footage of the film before he died. His daughters have managed to obtain control over the rights to many of his works and say that they're trying to only license them to people who will do a good adaptation. Based on what we got with A Scanner Darkly I'm not sure they know what they're doing (though The Man in the High Castle wasn't bad from what I saw).

I know @steve2^4 would have hated me posting a tweet without an article, but the dude does have a Blue Checkmark... Seems legit to me.

That’s just nuts.

No way the Chi-Coms would only send one platoon.

We lobbed potatoes at them. The Chinese were helpless before our starchy barrage.

And then came the lobsters.