Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 128

The Sweet And Sour Crew Dept.

For some strange and wondrous reason, the Nile Rodgers interview in��Behind the Glass��has proven to be an endless source of wisdom for me. At one point he talks about complementary dynamics in a song, and how analogies can be drawn between those things and, say, food: "I think of weight and substance, and I understand flavors and ingredients and textures and how to work with sweet and sour, hot and cold, funky and smooth."

Notions like this tend to wash around in my head and attach themselve...

Outside Lookin' Inside Dept.

One of the things that bugged me about Buddhism (Zen and otherwise) when I first ran into it was something that is typically encapsulated with the following formulation: The past, the present, and the future are all unknowable. You only know about the past through traces left behind, and those aren't really the past; they're traces left by the past. Likewise, you only know about the present by way of your tiny perceptions of your tiny slice of it. And the future — who knows about the future?

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Gather Those Rosebuds Dept.

Tim Hall, a/k/a Kalyr, sometime commentor on this blog, fan of prog rock, RPGs, and trains (not necessarily in that order), is in palliative care for an inoperable cancer.

Wish him and his well while it's still possible. Twitter seems the easiest way.

Read more at Genji Press

Favored Creation Status Dept.

Tramps Movie Review & Film Summary (2017) | Roger Ebert

���Tramps��� director Adam Leon once said something in an interview that I will never forget. While talking about his gritty debut film ���Gimme the Loot,��� about two young graffiti writers wanting to tag a New York City landmark, Leon said that his goal was making someone���s favorite movie of the year. That���s quite a novel idea that only interesting filmmakers could accomplish — to make something that speaks to a viewer so directly...

Do You Mind? Dept.

Can This Company Create A ���Neural Prosthetic��� To Reprogram Our Brains To Be Smarter?

For the last eight months, serial entrepreneur Bryan Johnson has conducted an experiment: He invites a small group of the smartest people he knows to dinner and asks them what they think needs to happen to reach their vision of an ideal world by 2050. The answers���from solving the climate crisis to curing cancer���never focus on improving human intelligence. But Johnson, who has committed $100 million o...

Unblock Me Please Dept.

Is writer���s block a real thing, or just a figment of the imagination? | Life and style | The Guardian

The most important step in overcoming writer���s block, then, may be cutting it down to size: grasping that it���s just a situation, not an underlying condition, and that it���s solved, by definition, the moment you write anything. You could keep a dream journal, as Graham Greene did, or do ���morning pages���: three pages of whatever comes to mind first thing. Give up writing in binges, a...

Some Of The Above Dept.

Not long ago someone said to me, "I noticed you have a great many notes about Buddhism and Zen on your blog. Does that mean you are a Buddhist?"

My short answer was, "I'm not sure."

My long answer is much��more involved.

Read more at Genji Press

Wikispertise Dept.

For some time now I've been using a personal wiki product, called TiddlyWiki — stupid name, great program — to do all the organization for my writing projects. My original approach for tracking all the stuff associated with a writing project was just to dump everything in a Word file, but over time that grew unwieldy, and having everything in a wiki makes it easier to search, cross-reference, organize, and reason about. I didn't like the closed-ended approach provided by apps like Scrivener,...

Cheap Shots Dept.

Some time back I wrote that there seemed to be two conditions for how political opinions and creative work could be intermixed successfully:

The politics had to be used to enrich the work in question, not the other way around. The politics in question ought not to be revanchist, triumphalist, or mean-spirited.

Of the two, I think the second point is the slightly more important one, in big part because a good piece of creative work shouldn't have those attributes in general. If the only way...

Get Back To Work! Dept.

One of the downsides to putting yourself on a fairly industrious writing schedule is that your��reading schedule suffers. I could be writing, I could be��productive, you tell yourself; what am I doing here��goofing off? And so you end up not reading.

Read more at Genji Press