Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 131
January 17, 2017
The Firstest Or The Bestest Dept.
A conversation with a friend turned up the following gem of an insight: It doesn't matter who did something first; it matters who does something best.
My original version of this insight revolved around information technology. Xerox PARC may have invented many of the things we associate with modern GUIs, but it was Apple that made them into a consumer product by way of the Macintosh.
But this applies to most everything else as well, creative work included. If you have a Great Idea for a story...
January 16, 2017
The First Peek Dept.
I kept promising I would do this, but now it's time to make good on my promises. The first public glimpse of my new (well, new since I finished it last year) bookWelcome To The Fold is now available on the book-networking site Inkshares.
My plan is to upload chapters — sections, really — from the first third or so of the book, about one per week, and then see how much attention I can drum up on Inkshares that way. If it turns out to be a dud, I'll drop back to Plan B: Kindle and Amazon Create...
Lipstick Traces Dept.
One of the chief influences on Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned has been the movie Strange Days, easily one of my favorite films of all time, and still not available in anything like a decent home video edition. I ended up dropping some Amazon points to order the German import Blu-ray Disc — it looks terrific — but anyone who doesn't have a multiregion BD player is either going to have to buy one or just suck their thumbs, since inexplicably there are no plans to issue it domestically. Hey...
January 14, 2017
Mudballs And Fear Factors Dept.
I spent most of an evening pawing through the mess of notes Id accumulated for the outline to the last third or so of Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, and tried to pull it together into something like an actual outline instead of just pages and pages of freeform rambling. This is the drawback to using a wiki as an organizational system: if you dont rigorously impose your own discipline upon the results, you will end up with that most dreaded of design patterns, the Big Ball of Mud.
January 13, 2017
Guidance Is Internal Dept.
[Written late at night:]
It's late, so I may not be coherent. But here I am all the same.
My thoughts have become less in the vein of, "What is the wisdom to be sought?" and more in the vein of, "How is this wisdom to be germinated in each of us?"
Pass on the wisdom, like so much advice on housekeeping or cooking or the best way to wash one's car, and you run two risks. The risk of hearing: you risk turning the whole thing intomere advice — words which are nice to say and nice to hear and rem...
January 11, 2017
Truthiness-ness Dept.
My friend Steven Savage has a longish, but highly worthwhile, post where he talks about truth as being a matter of connection.
Something is True (or at least truer than other things) because it can be explained in multiple ways, because its validity is confirmed multiple ways, and the true thing relates to other data, concepts, and experiences. ... Truth is a web of connections. Truth does not exist outside of context.
January 9, 2017
Arguments With Myselves Dept.
I spent most of the vacation break and the following week bashing on a revamped outline for the final third of Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned. Hence my protracted silence. Once again, what was meant to be something fun and free-spirited has turned into a Mission with a capital M. Do I regret it? Nah. Besides, wrestling with it helped codify a way of working on these things that didn't previously have a explicit methodology: the "self-dialogue."
January 2, 2017
No Tacos For Saddam (Andrei Codrescu)
The words "NPR commentator" fill some people with dread and loathing, and the reaction is not entirely undeserved. Andrei Codrescu is not among those who deserves such a brush-off, though — he comes equipped with the kind of grim, cutting wit that only seems possible for a direct-line descendant of H.L. Mencken — or, in his case, a Romanian emigre who's disgusted enough for any three lifetimes but somehow retains enough wonder for a dozen of them.No Tacos For Saddam compiles a number of monol...
December 31, 2016
A World Awaited And A World Attained Dept.
To ring out the old (and busted) and ring in the new, I share with you a note penned just after WWII. I think you will find it as fitting as I did.
2016 And All That Dept.
Other, better folks than I have dealt with all that has happened over the past year — the political chaos that only thickens, the deaths of many generational idols, the whole bit. Me, I'm trying to stay focused. Here's some rundown on the what-it-is on my end:
