(1) TODAY’S DAY.

“Ray Bradbury’s Fatal Prophecy: What Will Happen in Early August 2026” – Inbox.lv knows.

Did you recognize it? This is the plot of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains.” We are used to viewing science fiction writers as prophets. The date mentioned by the author is just around the corner. Is it time to be afraid? The answer may surprise you… Everyone has seen this cartoon, and for many, it was frightening at a tender age. Blurry outlines move across the screen. What is happening here? Where are the people? Nothing is clear, but something terrible has obviously happened.

The 1984 cartoon (“Uzbekfilm”, USSR) based on Ray Bradbury’s story is experiencing a revival today. Foreigners are posting full versions and fragments on social media. They are astonished by the “atmosphere” and the artistry of the animator. Watching something like this as a child was certainly endlessly creepy. Although most of us did not read the story and did not count the details. For example, here is a window, with endless green fields outside, a gentle breeze rustling the curtains. However, in reality, this is a screen. It goes dark, moves aside, and we see that it is winter outside. A nuclear winter. Today, it is doubly eerie. August 4, 2026, the day when, according to the plot, the town of Allendale, California, was destroyed – it is approaching.

And it is hard not to recall that Bradbury actually predicted a lot. Flat screens. Wireless headphones. The widespread obsession with short, brain-rotting videos. ATMs. Finally, smart homes – those that will remain after us. **What about the date?** Let’s first clarify the dates. We take the English original of the story. – “Today is August 4, 2026,” a voice from the kitchen ceiling said, “in the town of Allendale, California.” It repeated the date three times. “Today is Mr. Featherstone’s birthday. Today is the anniversary of the Tilitas’ wedding. It is time to pay for insurance. And there are also bills for water, gas, and electricity that have piled up.” So, on the morning of August 4, 2026, the owners are already dead. Literary scholars disagree on when the catastrophe occurred. It is most often believed that the nuclear mushroom rose, and the heavens opened the night before, perhaps at midnight, or in the evening of August 3….

Wally Wood adapted the Bradbury story for comics in 1952. See the whole comic here: “There Will Come Soft Rains” at Dochermes.

(2) WORLD FANTASY AWARDS FINALISTS. The 2026 World Fantasy Awards Ballot was released today. See the full list of nominees in the File 770 post.

(3) GRRM UPDATE. “Game of Thrones Author George R.R. Martin Shares Personal Update, Discusses Health and ‘Falling Further and Further Behind’”. IGN shares details.

77-year-old Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin has shared a candid update on his health, and discussed “falling further and further behind.”

Penning his first entry in six months on his personal blog, Martin acknowledged the lack of recent updates and described the year so far as having been “stressful, to say the least.”

“So much has been happening, it’s been overwhelming,” Martin wrote in a post titled ‘Better Late Than Never.’ “Some great things, exciting things. Dreams coming true. But there have been nightmares too. I have lost friends. Battled sadness and depression. The worst may be yet to come.

“I turned 77 last September, and I tell you, getting old is no fun,” Martin continued. “But there have been amazing times as well.”

Ending the blog on a more positive note, Martin celebrated the nine Emmy nominations recently secured by Game of Thrones spinoff A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and said he “will try and catch up some” on posting in future.

(4) TECH FROM IMAGINATION TO REALITY. BGR presents “Star Trek’s 5 Most Iconic Sci-Fi Gadgets, Ranked”.

“Star Trek” is one of the most iconic science fiction brands ever. Its impact on modern culture and its role in redefining science fiction tropes can’t be overstated. Many scientists, engineers, and others have stated that they entered their respective fields because of the series. And many of those people influenced by the show have been working to create the gadgets presented across its many iterations…

The list includes —

1. PADD

The Personal Access Display Device (PADD) is a small handheld computer, iconic across the “Star Trek” universe. Designed for basic data entry and retrieval, the PADD served much like a small, portable informational kiosk. Rick Sternbach conceived the PADD in 1987, seeing it as a possible near-future device and expecting similar devices to become available at some point.

Sternbach was correct, as the rise of the personal digital assistant (PDA) came only a few years later with the release of the Apple Newton. Considered by many to be the very first PDA, the Apple Newton would eventually lead to the Sony Reader, the first portable e-reader, in 2004. But it wouldn’t be until 2010 with the release of the Apple iPad that the PADD would become a technology of the present.

Many Trek fans saw the iPad’s name as a direct reference to the PADD from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”. Apps for the device would quickly follow, allowing iPad users to turn their devices into a pseudo PADD, sound buttons and all. It’s crazy to think that even powerful budget tablets today come pretty close to replicating everything the PADD could do. 

(5) UKRAINIAN BOARD GAMES WAREHOUSE DESTROYED. “Russian missile strike destroys Ukrainian Catan, Exploding Kittens publisher’s entire 200,000-strong inventory” reports BoardGameWire. (A fundraiser for the company is here: Підтримати ROZUM.)

The Ukrainian publisher of board games including Catan and Exploding Kittens is fighting for its existence after a Russian missile strike destroyed its warehouse, wiping out its entire stock of about 200,000 games.

Rozum, which started as an educational board game maker in 2018 before expanding to localisations, said there were no casualties at its warehouse amid the attack on a logistics centre in Vyshneve, just outside the capital Kyiv, on August 1.

But the company has been devastated by the strike, with its parent business Factor Group estimating the losses at up to $670,000 – a situation which has prompted Rozum to launch a fundraising appeal to help it reprint its lost inventory.

Factor said the destroyed games included Ukrainian editions of Catan and Exploding Kittens, alongside locally developed games including Who’s on Top? and The Amateurs’ Club, as well as the publisher’s entire stock of releases planned for the autumn.

The company’s localisations have included titles such as Power Grid, Voidfall, Wonderland’s War and Rising Sun.

A statement from Factor Group said, “This blow is not only to cardboard boxes, but also to a cultural product that promotes the Ukrainian language, fosters a culture of shared leisure, brings people together in such difficult times, and educates children through play….”

(6) STAR WARS: GOBAITH NEWYDD (NEW HOPE). [Item by Steven French.] Finally!!! “Star Wars dubbed into Welsh for first time for S4C broadcast” in the Guardian.

There are a few links between the Star Wars franchise and Wales, including the secretive building of the Millennium Falcon in an old hangar in the far south-west of the Celtic nation.

But until now speakers of Welsh – Cymraeg – have not been able to hear the words of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia spoken in their own language.

On Tuesday, however, it was revealed that a Welsh-language version of the 1977 blockbuster Star Wars will be shown on the Welsh television channel S4C and its platforms from Christmas Day.

Rhys Ifans, who has appeared in Harry Potter and Spider-Man films as well as Notting Hill, voices the Jedi master Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Matthew Rhys, a winner of a Primetime Emmy, voices Han Solo, and Aimee-Ffion Edwards, best known for her roles in Peaky Blinders and Slow Horses, is Princess Leia.

Mark Lewis Jones, who had a role in the 2017 Star Wars film The Last Jedi, is the Welsh Darth Vader.

The rising talent Osian Morgan voices Luke Skywalker, and Rhys Ifans’s brother, Llŷr Ifans, C-3PO. The Ifans siblings won plaudits for their 1997 cult film Twin Town….

(7) SARA PAUL (1948-2026). Philadelphia fan Sara Paul died peacefully in her sleep on July 31. Her husband Gene Olmstead made the announcement on Facebook.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

August 4, 1964 — Jaroslav Olša Jr, 62.

That we are doing the Birthday of Czech fan Jaroslav Olša Jr. is entirely the credit of Our Gracious Host as he will explain later on with a charming tale of their encounter.

Today’s the sixty-second birthday of Jaroslav who currently is the Czech Consul General in Los Angeles. (OK I’m foreshadowing why Mike will be telling a tale.) He’s also done diplomatic service in Zimbabwe, South Korea and the Philippines — very impressive. 

In our corner of things. Jaroslav’s a SF editor, translator and bibliographer. That in itself is also quite impressive, isn’t it? 

Let’s start off with his amateur work. Jaroslav started the major Ikarie XB fanzine back in the Eighties which turned into their sf monthly magazine Ikarie which had a twenty-year run before becoming the still published XB-1. He was assistant editor there for a time.

In the period after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. with Alexandre Hlinka he also started the AFSF press which was active until the late 1990s, publishing some seventy titles including such as selections of the best stories by SF writers and also novels by Robert A. Heinlein, Robert Silverberg and Kim Stanley Robinson to name a few. 

If you were at Conspiracy ’87 in Brighton, you might have him as he was there. And he attended many other international conventions. 

He was responsible for twenty years for the Czech Encyklopedie literatury science fiction (“Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Literature”, 1995) co-editing it with Ondřej Neff. He also has edited about a dozen sf anthologies; has compiled bibliographies of Czech and Slovak fanzines; and often contributed to Locus.

Finally, he recently won an N3F Laureate Award for his book Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles: Miloslav (Miles) J. Breuer: Czech- American Writer and the Birth of Science Fiction.

Mike: In 2019 Jaroslav Olša, jr. invited me to a nice lunch in Westwood – making sure we had the restaurant’s front window seat. That was nice. We discussed science fiction and what he could do in that line when he became Consul General of the Czech Republic in LA. And first thing, he gifted me with copies of several sff publications he’d helped produce, including a copy of XB-1, the longest-running monthly publication in the Czech Republic, which began life as Olša’s fanzine Ikarie XB (1986-1989). He also gave me a copy of a Czech SF anthology (English translation). Since then, he’s hosted a lot of cultural events in LA, including one in conjunction with an in-person LASFS meeting.  A very fannish fellow!

(9) COMICS SECTION.

• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal might have lost the point.
• BC overlooks a hiding spot.
• Brewster Rockit’s cluelessness reaches mythical proportions.

(10) BONING UP. [Item by Daniel Dern.] File under “What could possibly go wrong” … “People are 3D printing life-sized dinosaur skeletons with free Smithsonian models” at How To Geek.

…How do you make an authentic 3D print of a real fossil? Well, you need the help of the professionals, because you’re probably not going to find a T. rex skull in your backyard. Many universities and other educational organizations have been using 3D scanning technology to preserve a digital copy of fossils and other artifacts for years.

In fact, in 2015, my office at the university where I worked as an educational technology specialist was above the anthropology and archeology department. This is how I got involved in printing replicas of bones from the Homo Naledi discovery….

… Getting the scan data from the researchers who did the work wasn’t exactly hard, but back then it wasn’t exactly advertised either. Now, the Smithsonian has a big, beautiful dedicated website called Smithsonian 3D. Here you’ll find 3D models more refined than what I had to work with over a decade ago, and with the proliferation of cheap advanced 3D printers, people are taking advantage of this free data. I really do mean free. As you can see from the catalog listing above, these scans are “CC0”, which means they’re Public Domain….

(11) DESTROY THEM…KILL…KILL! [Item by N.] With The Odyssey in theaters, Animation Obsessive does a deep dive on another auteur filmmaker with an epic Greek myth fantasy on their resume—stop-motion animator and visual effects innovator Ray Harryhausen:  “How Ray Harryhausen Conjured the Skeletons”.

…At $3 million ($32.9 million today), Jason and the Argonauts was one of Harryhausen’s most expensive films. He used the money for great moments like the Hydra and the harpies and Talos’s coming to life. But it was the skeleton battle that “was always intended to form the centerpiece,” he wrote.⁹

It comes toward the end of the story, and it took four-and-a-half months to animate. Harryhausen recalled the work as “painful to the extreme.” On slow days, maybe 13 frames got finished. Like he wrote:

“When one pauses to contemplate that there were seven skeletons fighting three men, with each skeleton having five appendages to move in each frame of film, this meant that an unprecedented 35 animated movements had to be synchronized with three live actors’ movements”.

To understand what Harryhausen was doing, you first need to grasp his most basic film trick: “rear projection.” It’s something you might recognize from car-ride scenes in old movies — the prerecorded footage that plays behind the actors. He used a version of the idea in most of his projects.¹¹

Harryhausen’s skeletons sat on a table in front of a projection of live-action footage from Jason. The camera captured the illusion that his tiny 8-to-10-inch models were together with the actors. Harryhausen advanced the footage frame by frame, moved his skeletons to fit the action, then photographed….

(12) BEYOND THE PALE. [Item by Steven French.] Here’s an interesting lunar link: “Moonlight-like fur and feathers may explain Egyptian god Thoth’s two animal forms” at Phys.org.

The ancient Egyptian god of the moon had two very different faces: a crescent-beaked white bird and a silver-coated baboon. Now, researchers think they may have found the common thread connecting them all.

Using an instrument that measures light, the researchers pointed at the silvery fur of the sacred baboon (Papio hamadryas) and the white feathers of the sacred ibis (Threskiornis aethiopicus), and both shone back with the brilliance of the moon, possibly ending a decades old debate.

“Why would two strikingly disparate animals be used to represent a deity known for wisdom?” asked Nathaniel Dominy, an anthropologist at Dartmouth College, and Catherine Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St Andrews, authors of the study published in Time and Mind. “Sacred ibises and hamadryas baboons are different in many ways, but one thing that unites them is their moon-like color.”

(13) TODAY’S TITLE EXPLAINED. [Item by Daniel Dern.] DPD notes, other 5th Dimensional imps in the DCU include Mister Mxyzptlk, Qwsp (friend/foe of Aquaman), and Yz (Johnny Thunder’s Thunderbolt) (See “Invasion of the Imps: Five Magical Pranksters From the Fifth Dimension” at DC.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “The Lost Footage That Changed Logan’s Run (1976) Forever” at Golden Flicker.

Logan’s Run (1976) is missing between 10 and 20 minutes of footage – and those deleted scenes quietly broke the story. In this Golden Flicker video essay, we dig into the lost version of this 70s sci-fi classic and show how studio cuts warped the film we know today. If you’ve ever felt that Logan’s Run is rushed, confusing, or full of strange continuity errors, you’re not imagining it. To secure a PG rating and a wider audience, MGM removed entire scenes: violent moments, character beats, and connective tissue that originally made the plot and relationships much clearer. The result is a compromised theatrical cut that jumps, stalls, and sometimes barely makes sense. In this in‑depth movie analysis, we walk through what was filmed versus what survived into release. From the darker original opening hunt to the missing details of the Ice Cave and Box, we reconstruct the lost version of the story and explain how those edits changed the tone, themes, and emotional impact of Logan’s journey. Along the way, we also explore the troubled development of Logan’s Run, the age and romance changes from the novel, and the very real technical dangers behind the Carousel set and that “impossible wetness” at the Fort Worth Water Gardens. If you love production history, deleted scenes, and movie facts about 1970s science fiction, this is the hidden story behind one of the era’s most fascinating near‑classics.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Dann, Rick Kovalcik, Susan de Guardiola, N., Daniel Dern, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]