Fish(er) Tales

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! These posts will give you a better idea about what this site is about. Start here, then go here, and here, and then here.Eight requisites for contented living: “Health enough to make work a pleasure. Wealth enough to support your needs. Strength to battle with difficulties and overcome them. Grace enough to...

No other problems scare people more than failure and success. What? Fear of success? Yes, indeed. Though fear of rejection and failure seem to be the predominant reasons people avoid taking action, success also frightens many. What if I fail? Or worse, what if I succeed? People will discover all my faults and that I can’t live up to their expectations. Come on now, do you really believe that? Whether...

I’m not one to overly simplify life. But sometimes there are certain elements that are both true and quite simple. Here’s one … Horses’ Asses > Actual Horses   (Translation: There are more horses’ asses in the world than actual horses) … Originally posted 2010-08-20 16:51:47.

Recording dialogue in the field is difficult at best. So many just don’t try and instead say “we’ll just ADR it.” (ADR = Automated Dialogue Replacement or Looping). Don’t be that dude. Actors hate it. It usually sounds unnatural and ruins performances. Try BDR instead – Better Dialogue Replacement! Capture sound on location under more controlled circumstances. Shoot the scene...

Over on Flowtown, Dan Martell came up with this interesting graphic on the Evolution of the Geek. Check it out on their site by following this link.   Not sure where I fit in to this chart. Hmmmm. Originally posted 2010-10-22 22:32:11.

I was musing on my teaching philosophy (I teach some college courses and train a lot of amateurs and professionals alike). And I ran across a saying attributed to Goethe that goes like this: “If you treat a man as he is, he will remain as he is; if you treat him as he ought to be and could be, he will become as he ought to be and could be.” – Goethe Unfortunately, you can fall prey...

The opening lines of a novel should really set the tone for the story to come. There are some great leads out there that always capture my attention. Some authors really know how to pull you in with just a few opening words.   There are tons of examples (as I’ve read hundreds of novels!). But my all-time favorite has always been the opening to Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest: “I first...

Today in my e-mail I find a message from the WordPress engine (the free software that runs this blog). It says I have a comment to approve. I’m shocked. Not because I have a comment, but because, well I have a comment already. You see I’ve been building this blog site in secret and had kept it hidden for the past few weeks. Or so I thought. I mean it’s always been out there in cyberspace,...