I read a story a couple of years ago about an alien transporting the MC back in time to mid 1800's America, and moving his possessions into a cave aswell, good action involved, also he meets a different species that are a mix between a dog and a bear and are sentiment and become his friends. They communicate telepathically with each other.
I also remember a special food that's like a chocolate bar, but different flavours like back n and eggs, meat loaf etc..
I think you are looking for "Oh Hell No" by TerribleThom. But I haven't seen a copy of that in sometime myself.
What's a SyFy?
It's the name of a US cable and sat television channel that distorts the name of the abbreviation SciFi for science fiction - personally, I think the people who set it up didn't know how to spell.
It's the name of a US cable and sat television channel that distorts the name of the abbreviation SciFi for science fiction - personally, I think the people who set it up didn't know how to spell.
They know how to spell and it the network name used to be SciFi, but they can't trademark SciFi, so they changed it to SyFy.
they can't trademark SciFi, so they changed it to SyFy.
and an even dumber reason to change it like that.
They wouldn't be the first company to change their name because the original name could not be trademarked, and they won't be the last.
They wouldn't be the first company to change their name because the original name could not be trademarked, and they won't be the last.
True, but, in this case, it simply proves to me what idiots the corporate leaders are. Such a warping of an existing genre name pushes me away from even considering any of their products.
Apologies for the wrong spelling of SciFi earlier. I had a brain fart!!
I thought you'd been brainwashed by cable TV.
Apologies for the wrong spelling of SciFi
Don't. If history shows us anything, SyFy will eventually become the preferred spelling. It's shorter to text too!
If history shows us anything, SyFy will eventually become the preferred spelling. It's shorter to text too!
I can see it taking off with the almost brain-dead single thumb texting crowd who are too lazy to learn how to spell properly. But the growth of voice activated applications are already pushing them into the background.
typo edit
Don't. If history shows us anything, SyFy will eventually become the preferred spelling. It's shorter to text too!
So, SF has fallen completely by the wayside? SciFi was bad enough, and now SyFy is a complete abomination.
SF has fallen completely by the wayside?
I hope not, but it has become much less used. I could never really understand the popularity of SciFi, because SF was never pronounced Science Fikesion (unless you are in NZ), but popular it is regardless. Branding has a lot to answer for ...
SF has fallen completely by the wayside?
Yes and no. Go back far enough in time and you'll find SF and SciFi aren't quite the same thing.
The bookshops display books in categories - Mystery, adventure, children, cooking, self-help, etc. However there were two very small genre's they put together in the one section because they weren't big enough for a section of their own. That section was the Science & Fantasy Fiction Section which was abbreviated to the SF Section. Decades later the interest in them both grew to the point they warranted their own, so the Fantasy Fiction section was split off in the bigger bookshops and the Science Fiction Section also by itself, and it got shortened to SciFi. Thus in big bookshops you have a Fant. Section and a SciFi section while the smaller bookshops have a SF section.
Huh.
My understanding was SF was science fiction, and Forrest J. Ackerman came up with SciFi to rhyme with HiFi. Also, at one time SciFi was sometimes pronounced 'skiffee', and was a somewhat derogatory term used for bad video SF, which wasn't Forry's concept at all.
But I wan't active in fandom when this occurred, so I may be in error.
My understanding was SF was science fiction
Being an avid reader and buyer of science fiction since the early 1960 I know the bookstores all had a section marked SF in the small stores while the Science & Fantasy in the bigger stores, both with mixed stories of science fiction and fantasy stories A decade later the small stores still had the SF section with the mixed stories and the bigger stores had Science Fiction in one section and Fantasy in another. Another decade and the sign in the Science Fiction section now read SciFi. However, by then a lot of the SciFi authors were using the term and so were some of the conventions. Some conventions were SciFi conventions where it was all science fiction like Asimov, Heinlein etc, and others were SF conventions where fantasy was also included.
Every time I've seen or heard the term SF used it's included the fantasy stuff that's excluded when the term SciFi is used.
My understanding is that is roughly correct, and it all occurred back in the 1930s. And in the 1890s Hugo Gernsback (after whom the Hugo Award is named) coined Scientifiction (for Scientific Fiction), abbreviated "StF," which didn't really catch on.
they can't trademark SciFi
Sorry to pester, but why would they want to stop using a widely used name just because they can't trademark it? Was there something stopping them from using SciFi?
Sorry to pester, but why would they want to stop using a widely used name just because they can't trademark it? Was there something stopping them from using SciFi?
Exactly because they can't Trademarke it. No, nothing was stopping them from using SciFi, the problem is that they couldn't stop someone else from also using SciFi as the name or part of the name of a cable network.
Corporations don't like names they can't trademark because a competitor could start up in the same field with the same or a similar name and they couldn't do anything about it.
Corporations are very sensitive about protecting their name/reputation. Trademarks are an important part of that.
This is also a partial driver of companies re-incorporating with their new official name as the known initialism of the company name. The initialism can be trademarked, but the original full name either can't be trademarked at all or the trademark comes with extra limitations because the individual words are too generic/descriptive.
Someone else could have started a SciFi 2 cable network unconnected to the original SciFi and they wouldn't be able to do anything about it. SyFy they can protect.
Was there something stopping them from using SciFi?
already a public domain name and couldn't be trademarked - but no reason they couldn't use it, they just couldn't stop others from using it. Although, in most places they could register it as part of a business name and stop others from using the whole name
They could've registered SciFi Channel and stopped others from using that, but couldn't stop them from using SciFi Television etc. BUt that wasn't good enough for them.
but no reason they couldn't use it
I don't think I will ever understand the corporate mindset. They use a well recognised name (SciFi) to attract viewers of the genre, but then because they can't use the well recognised public domain name exclusively from now on, they invent a new name that happens to sound like the well known one (if you pronounce it just so) because they can then stop others from using it. Others, by the way, that were never using it before, and are never likely to want to use it in the future, because it isn't well recognised. Is it just me?
I don't think I will ever understand the corporate mindset. They use a well recognised name (SciFi) to attract viewers of the genre, but then because they can't use the well recognised public domain name exclusively from now on, they invent a new name that happens to sound like the well known one (if you pronounce it just so) because they can then stop others from using it.
If you built a brand, and spent loads of money and time promoting it, you may not want to have it confused with a generic product, or worse yet, used by your competitors. That's the rationale behind trade (and service) marks.
Is it just me?
No, it's just the way some greedy scavengers thinks.
Mind you, I, and all I know tend to pronounce SciFi as 'sigh-fie' but when I see SyFy I think it should be pronounced 'see-fee' because the dropping of the 'c' moves the 's' from a hard sound to a soft sound and the 'y' on the end has a softer drag sound than the 'i' does because that's how a word ending in 'y' comes out. I know many people here in Australia who couldn't understand why the channel wanted to be called See-Fee.
And once you have See-Fee it is not that difficult to add "liss".
which identifies the illness they have.
Mind you, I, and all I know tend to pronounce SciFi as 'sigh-fie' but when I see SyFy I think it should be pronounced 'see-fee' because the dropping of the 'c' moves the 's' from a hard sound to a soft sound and the 'y' on the end has a softer drag sound than the 'i' does because that's how a word ending in 'y' comes out.
Do you pronounce "by" like "bee" or like "bie"?
Do you pronounce "by" like "bee" or like "bie"?
since it's the 'y' on the end of a four letter word it should be the ee version like you get with Buffy, Mandy, and Candy etc.
since it's the 'y' on the end of a four letter word it should be the ee version like you get with Buffy, Mandy, and Candy etc.
It's not a four letter word. It's two two letter words without a space between them. If it was one four letter it would be Syfy, not SyFy.
It's not a four letter word.
They present it as a four letter word that's not even an acronym. So you read it like a a four letter word. Because it's a made up word you don't even have the pronunciation help you get from most words due to their derivation - many letter combinations vary depending on if the root word is Latin, Greek, Gaelic, Saxon, Anglic etc. So there's no way they can accuse anyone of mispronouncing it, regardless of how it's said.
I don't think I will ever understand the corporate mindset.
...
Is it just me?
No, it's not just you. However, you and others are confusing actually confusing two different mindsets.
There's the entrepreneurial mind set and the corporate mind set.
Entrepreneurs are the people who start new businesses. They have a very different mind set from everyone else. They tend to be optimistic and idealistic. They will make sure that they have patents on any new technology that they invented, but they tend not to be so concerned about trade marks.
If the business is successful, it grows. Eventually, it either stabilizes or the founders reach a point where they need outside investors to keep growing. Then they go public.
Once they go public, eventually the founder's die, retire, or lose control of the company and are pushed out. At this point the company is taken over by people with a true corporate mind set.
The corporate mind set is less optimistic, non-idealistic, legalistic and bureaucratic. The corporate administrators want to protect everything no matter how small.
The CXOs and the BoD at SyFy wanted to change the name for quite a while before it actually happened. They are not the people who founded the network and they have a very different mindset from those who did.
The CXOs and the BoD at SyFy wanted to change the name for quite a while before it actually happened. They are not the people who founded the network and they have a very different mindset from those who did.
And in doing it, especially the way they've done it, they alienated a lot of the people who they should've been trying to encourage.
I don't think I will ever understand the corporate mindset. They use a well recognised name (SciFi) to attract viewers of the genre, but then because they can't use the well recognised public domain name exclusively from now on, they invent a new name that happens to sound like the well known one (if you pronounce it just so) because they can then stop others from using it. Others, by the way, that were never using it before, and are never likely to want to use it in the future, because it isn't well recognised. Is it just me?
Maybe someone will start the new 'SciFi Television' channel and show classic SciFi TV programs and movies like "Forbidden Planet", "The Day the Earth Stood Still", and "The Blob".
Actually, I would almost be happy if they went back to only having a few major channels. Programming was so much better when they had to put on something good to get viewers to watch their channel rather than their competition. Now half of the day is filled with 'infomercials' and the other half is more like someone dug something out of a trash can and made a show from it.
I've read stories on here that would make better shows than most of the crap they broadcast.
My understanding was that the "SyFy" change was a "re-branding" of sorts, to allow the network to run programming that didn't fall strictly into the "Science Fiction" genre. So far it has worked for them in my opinion.
I am really looking forward to a new series they are supposed to be starting in a couple of months.
It has something to do with the great grandaughter of Wyatt Earp (a personal hero) fighting bad guys (and demons) in the present day. The commercials for it look pretty good.
My understanding was that the "SyFy" change was a "re-branding" of sorts, to allow the network to run programming that didn't fall strictly into the "Science Fiction" genre.
So you say it as now including fantasy stories - interesting. I don't watch it, so I don't know what they have.
typo edit
To get back to the original topic, yes he finished the story. My copy is dated January of 2011. If I recall correctly, he posted somewhere that he had finished it and told where it could be downloaded from, but I can't recall now.
Don't ask. If he gives permission, ok, else no way.
Thom's blog on Fine Stories says:
Oh Hell NO
For those of you inquiring about OHN i am slowly working on it. I had it pulled because I would rather do that than leave a story hanging on until I come up with new ideas. I am working on it but it is going very slowly at present. I started The Escape to get my mind back into writing again. Hang in there it will show back up soon I hope. Oh and The Protector is on SOL and completed.
I would imagine they wouldn't want to put money into a brand/company name that anyone who wanted to could later copy. I could start the scifi shopping channel if I wanted and they can't stop me without trademark protection.
MH
Most Americans see the Sy in SyFy as being pronounced in the same way (sigh) as the diminutive Sy for Seymour and Cyrus. In the States, "Sy" is also a given name.
I seem to recall some authors preferred to parse SF as speculative fiction. On the basis that not all SF was hard science fiction based on science.
In all this, it's very sad that new generations have some moronic "marketing guru" trying to destroy something so brilliant as SF.
And even worse is that new SF is just a faint shadow of great SF works of our past. To be an engineer was prime dream of lot of young people, and to became one - whaww :)
Now young ones are wishing to be "stars" in reality TV shows like Big Brother or just plain porn actors, and are thinking that only zombies and moronic superheroes are SF.
This is another pointer that our civilization is going full speed ahead to shit hole ...
