Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 89

cliffhangin'

(Alan Robson, in sffnet, remarked about the ending of STARBOUND . . . )

Alan, I'm glad you liked the ending to STARBOUND. I scratched my head over it. How do you end the second book of a trilogy without making it something of a cliffhanger? I mean, you do want people to buy the third book. But you also want to make the second book a complete novel.

The beginning of EARTHBOUND is more of a gamble, perhaps. I don't want to say much about a work in progress, but suffice it to note that the th...

Stars 'n' bars

My favorite pre-computer office machine was the Friden calculator. It was a big noisy mechanical thing that did arithmetic to twelve or thirteen significant figures, gears and wheels chugging along.

I used one when I was "working" as a statistician's assistant in the summers after 11th and 12th grade, in the Public Health Service in downtown Washington. I fancied myself a jazz musician at the time, and one of the guys working with me actually was a pretty good jazz drummer, so when we had th...

Daybreakers

Continuing a family tradition, Lori and Tim and I went out to see the vampire movie _Daybreakers_. Better than the usual blood 'n' gore fest, with an attempt at plot, logic, and characterization. It could have used some better organization, so as to make the process by which vampirism might be cured more clear and believable. As shot, it has a make-it-up-as-we-go-along quality that I think (for a change) is misleading. The writers knew more than they revealed.

The basic situation is _I Am ...

Jack Williams

Up early for a little writing and then off to studio. Because I wasn't bicycling, I could take all the gear I wanted, and so fiddled with some gouache on larger paper than usual. Not completely successful, but interesting. I used gouache over a ground painting of transparent watercolor, and so could paint light over dark. But I was too timid with it.

Afterwards, we had a good time with Jack Williams and Judy. Jack had an evening concert in Gainesville and we met for a leisurely late lunch...

Avatar etc.

(Talking about the battle cries in AVATAR, in sff.net . . . )

I suppose battle cries crop up in most cultures, but an army advancing silently would have its own variety of scariness.

In Basic Training when we were thrusting at dummies with our bayonetted rifles, we were allowed to scream either "Kill!" or "Lollipop!" I was not the only one who chose the latter.

We didn't have battle cries in Vietnam. Kind of silly in dense jungle. "Hey! I'm over here!"



Plot wasn't very important in AVATAR. J...

unobtainium

(In sffnet, people are talking about unobtanium in AVATAR .... 0

I, for one, enjoyed the fact that nobody said anything connecting unobtanium, the floating islands, and the floating crystal. That's what they're on the planet for; they don't remark on it any more than a prospector would say "This here yellow stuff . . . "

The floating island motif is a direct rip from a well-known fantasy painting. Can't find it googling or scanning my library, though.

I liked the cartoonish villains, guys you ...

AVATAR

This afternoon we went out and invested three hours in AVATAR. What an awesome success. James Cameron is still king of the world.

The combination of free-wheeling imagination and meticulous attention to detail makes it one of the best sf movies ever. It does use a few things from THE FOREVER WAR and FOREVER PEACE that I wish had been saved for my own movies. Plus a couple of amusing rips from ROBOT JOX. But that's Hollywood.

I hope its huge financial success will encourage Ridley Scott to ...

Home, James, and don't spare the horses!

Home and comfy now. Carrying around a quart bottle of antibiotic set up for continuous infusion (it's under pressure, and releases the drug all day through the PICC line in my upper arm).

We put off Christmas till this morning; Lore and Tim came over at 8:30 for opening presents. Not quite as much of a consumer orgy as usual, since I was indisposed and couldn't even go shopping on the web. I got some nice fountain pens. Gay got me a chrome yellow extra-fine Lamy Safari, to replace the on...

whither kudos?

(There was a lot of silliness about kudos on sffnet . . . )

So I had to look up the etymology of "kudos," which looked Japanese to me . . .

"fame, renown," 1799, from Gk. kyddos "glory, fame, renown," from kydos "glory, fame," lit. "that which is heard of". A singular noun in Gk., but the final -s is usually mistaken as a plural suffix in Eng., leading to the barbarous back-formation kudo (first attested 1941).

Kudzu, though, is just the Japanese word "kuzu," an admirably economical rendition o...

The Xmas Bunny

There's an interesting opinion piece in the Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-debord/tiger-woods-is-so-so-so-m_b_396116.html, claiming that golf will not survive the shensnigans of Tiger Woods. Yeah, like remember football? People used to watch it all the time, before O.J. Simpson murdered it.

Big-name sports guys are no more able to keep their dicks tucked in than big-name academics or bankers or even writers. Sports pundits get all fluttery when their heroes stray and...