Earnout!

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From my tech-writing agent, in an email message yesterday:

Did you want us to send you a check for the payment due, or did you want an electronic funds transfer to your bank acct?

It took 7½ years, but my last tech book finally brought in more for the publisher than the size of the advance.

(And no, I do not take this as a hint to return to tech writing. Heh.)

Woot!

P.S. To answer the obvious question: thirty-six dollars and change, after subtracting the agent’s commission. Of my five tech books (depending how you count), this is the only one to have crossed the magic threshold.

P.P.S. I’ll probably request payment by check; I have a feeling I’ll either want to frame it or (depending on circumstances at the time it arrives) maybe just frame a photocopy.

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Avatar and the Uncanny Valley

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We saw Avatar the other day, and did the whole 3D, IMAX nine yards. It complicated things a little — there are many more showings of the plain-old 2D version, and for that matter of the 3D in non-IMAX theaters. But after all we’d heard about the experience, it seemed the only way to go.

My original intention with this post was just to provide a thumbnail review, along these lines:

James Cameron, damn him, has done exactly what he said he’d do: delivered a kickin’-good movie with mind-blowing special effects and cinematography. He may not be king of the world — any more than Orson Welles was in 1940 — but…

Etc., etc.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I was interested mostly in one thing: one facet in which the film didn’t disappoint, exactly, but also didn’t (probably couldn’t) quite succeed. Before getting into that, though, let me say:

  • The 3D effects in Avatar — at least, as viewed in an IMAX theater — go way beyond the lame, unimaginative poke-the-audience-with-a-sword precursors. When little flies and moths beset the characters in the jungle, you may have to fight the impulse to try swatting the bugs away. Or, like me, you may find yourself looking over your shoulder to draw the projectionist’s attention to the need for an exterminator.
  • Motion-capture technology, likewise, has leapt ahead since even the (justly) celebrated tools which Peter Jackson and Andy Serkis employed to bring Gollum to life in The Lord of the Rings — particularly in capturing facial expressions.
  • Technology aside, you’ll recognize Avatar‘s plot and love story from numerous “civilized man goes native” films that came before (Dances with Wolves, anyone?)…
  • Yet, you may still find yourself welling up from time to time.
  • I thoroughly enjoyed every second of the film. Thoroughly. (At some moments, indeed, I felt that I may have been undercharged despite the almost $14-a-pop admission price.)

So what didn’t succeed?

[Read more…]

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Hoppin’ Kudos

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Okay, I know I’m at risk of exhausting your patience with all the recent round of congratulations, thanks, trophy-giving, and so on. I just want to point you in the direction of one more nice little feather in the cap of an RAMH regular. It’s especially nice to be able to do so via a post at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast (a/k/a “7-Imp”) — whose innkeeper, Jules, also frequents the corridors here.

Sundays at 7-Imp are always special. Besides celebrating (as usual) the work of wonderful authors and illustrators of books for children, the blog also asks commenters to chime in with their own lists of seven impossibly great, hilarious, etc. things which happened to them in the previous week.

The first Sunday of each month focuses on an up-and-coming artist and illustrator (of kids’ books or otherwise) whose work has especially caught Jules’s eye, or outright dazzled her.

Which is why the 7-Imp post today is so cool, because it’s all about the artwork of Marta Pelrine-Bacon — RAMH‘s commenter with the longest tenure, having first shown up out of the blue a couple of months after I started the blog.

Very nice, Marta, to find yourself featured in the first post of the year at a blog which has also featured the work of the likes of Ed Young, Grace Lin, Daniel Pinkwater, et al…. what company!

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Gracias

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Thank you for 2009 and best wishes for 2010 to all in the RAMH universe (both visitors and, uh… visitees?) — especially to the proprietors of the following blogs: you collectively and separately inspired me, awed me, made me laugh out loud and ponder, stopped my breath, wonder what the hell I was doing calling myself a “blogger,” and wait eagerly for your next post, way out of proportion to my ability to return the favor.

In alphabetical order:

(Note: Many of you talented, industrious folks work with more than one site or blog, and your other presences are often just as powerful/meaningful as their main ones. Thanks for them, too, folks — especially Maggie for Violence Unsilenced, Marta for Words Are Art (etc., etc.), Moonrat for The Book Book, and Froog for Barstool Blues.)

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Awards Season, at a Distance (and Highly Concentrated)

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Heartiest congratulations to RAMH regular visitor and blog-friend Froog, who has performed the hat trick and then some in garnering — all at once — five best-of-the-year awards for his online presences:

  1. Most Prolific Blogger,
  2. Most Alcoholic Blog,
  3. Most Uncomfortably Personal Blog,
  4. China-Basher of the Year, and (the one I really envy him for)
  5. Most Diverse Blog

It’s about time someone gave him his due!

I understand Joan Rivers has begun making plans for the presentation ceremony. If she can just find a red carpet in his neighborhood which isn’t fluttering from a flagpole, she should be all set.

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Okay, I Still Hate the Name “SyFy”…

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…and probably always will. But this is a pretty damned impressive advertisement/trailer:

It sort of compresses all the memes from the SyFy cable network’s distinctive bumper spots into a big ol’ nearly coherent 2:40 whole (and avoids the corny-CGI temptations to which the network’s special-effects guys all too often succumb in the actual programs). Nice.

(Anybody know what song is on the soundtrack? Musically, it reminds me a lot of the song whose adorable video I featured in this post back in June, but the lyrics don’t seem the same.)

(Hat tip: Speak Coffee to Me)

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‘Twas the Night Before Cthulhu…

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Ryun Patterson of the Bookgasm site/blog (slogan: “reading material to get excited about”) has reviewed ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas as you’ve never seen it reviewed before. Excerpt:

Descriptions of human sacrifice and the power of blood magic are commonplace throughout history, but one — Clement Clarke Moore’s ‘TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS — takes place on the eve of a holiday that most consider a time of joy, happiness and generosity. This makes a poem that would be unsettling in any circumstances an intense, dark and enduring tale of supernatural horror.

Set on the eve of the eponymous Christian feast day, the book begins innocently enough, with a desperately poor family bedding down for the night in their rodent-infested hovel…

…Despite its age, ‘TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS is a sure favorite for fans of supernatural horror, but because of its intensity and subject matter, it’s a work best read safely away from the Yuletide season — it can inspire dreams that are far more unsettling than sugar plums.

Read it all here.

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Discoveries

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[Photo above taken by the Hubble Wide-Field Camera 3 and released a few days ago by NASA. Several thousand galaxies are visible in the original, “a peek at the universe as it looked about 600 million years after the Big Bang.” More info here and here.]

From whiskey river (which excerpted from this poem, in different words, via translation):

The startling reality of things

The startling reality of things
Is my discovery every single day.
Every thing is what it is,
And it’s hard to explain to anyone how much this delights me
And suffices me.

To be whole, it is enough simply to exist.

I’ve written a good many poems.
I shall write many more, naturally.
Each of my poems speaks of this,
And yet all my poems are different,
Because each thing that exists is one way of saying this.

Sometimes I start looking at a stone.
I don’t start thinking, Does it have feeling?
I don’t fuss about calling it my sister.
But I get pleasure out of its being a stone,
Enjoying it because it feels nothing,
Enjoying it because it’s not at all related to me.

Occasionally I hear the wind blow,
And I find that just hearing the wind blow makes it worth having been born.

I don’t know what others reading this will think;
But I find it must be good since it’s what I think without effort,
With no idea that other people are listening to me think;
Because I think it without thoughts,
Because I say it as my words say it.

I was once called a materialist poet
And was surprised, because I didn’t imagine
I could be called anything at all.
I’m not even a poet: I see.
If what I write has any merit, it’s not in me;
The merit is there, in my verses.
All this is absolutely independent of my will.

(Fernando Pessoa [source])

…and:

Your beloved and your friends were once strangers. Somehow at a particular time, they came from the distance toward your life. Their arrival seemed so accidental and contingent. Now your life is unimaginable without them. Similarly, your identity and vision are composed of a certain constellation of ideas and feelings that surfaced from the depths of the distance within you. To lose these now would be to lose yourself.

(John O’Donohue [source])

[Read more…]

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Superstar in the Making

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Regular whiskey river Friday post coming up shortly. In the meantime, in case you haven’t seen it already, another of those going-/gone-viral instant Web sensation videos to put a Friday grin on your face:

To begin, if you don’t already know of the songwriter/performer Jason Mraz and his song “I’m Yours,” you might want to watch this:

With or without watching that one, though, you need to watch this one:

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