Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 147

Put Away Childish Things And All That Dept.

[Addendum 06:17PM: I wrote this post with my fists, and it shows. Looking back on it, I realize the tone is terribly over-the-top, and I'm not proud of that — although I stand by the points of view expressed within.]

Stop Making Superhero Movies Just for Grown-Ups | The New Republic

The very idea of constructing a story where Batman fights Superman only works on the level of childs logic: Batman is supposed to be no more than a physically fit human, while Superman is an alien with God-like p...

iScribble Dept.

Time for a writing progress report — or rather, an editing progress report.

Final (4th draft) edits onWelcome to the Fold are around 30-40% complete. I had been hoping to get the whole thing done by the end of the month, but some real life complications slowed me down, so I'm looking at mid-September. Then comes both starting thenext book,The Palace of the Red Desert, and getting Fold out the door to be looked at by prospective publishers.

Read more at Genji Press

Another Piece Of MeTal Dept.

Time for an update on MeTal, my blogging system — a replacement for Movable Type and an alternative to WordPress. The project started early this year to give me someplace to go with this site and the others I run, now that MT is no longer open source (and because I'm really not much of a Perl, WordPress, or PHP fan).

What we have so far: The core create/edit/publish cycle works. You can see a small test site I created — nothing too impressive yet, but that has less to do with the program itse...

Open And Shut Case Dept.

As of late I've been reading Sir Karl Popper'sThe Open Society and Its Enemies,and with only slightly less enthusiasm than a man fresh from three weeks in the desert reserves for the first water spigot he finds. Like Barrows Dunham'sMan Against Myth — another book I cherish, and which I feel perpetually ashamed of never taking the time to talk about properly — it was written as a defense of democratic and rational society, on the grounds that it's just about impossible to will anything else i...

Busyness Dept.

Not much time for blogging — bunch of real-life things got in the way, and I ended up not doing book edits for a couple of days in a row. For me this constitutes a major failing of mettle, so I'm trying to get back in the saddle. But I did want to note something.

An easy downside to not having as much time as you'd like is that you don't get to do all the things you most want to do. Books go unread, closets uncleaned, roofs unswept of fallen pine needles (well, maybe not where I'm living, but...

Nothing Special Dept.

A Warning For Our Next Great Screenwriters — ART & SCIENCE — Medium

When any image is possible, no image is all that impressive anymore.

Once upon a time, I wrote down a possible blurb for a story: "What if everything were possible and nothing mattered?" I didn't realize at the time I was talking about a phenomenon unfolding around me right then, one which continues to be true today.

Read more at Genji Press

The Un-Educator Dept.

Deeper Levels of Realization Are For Suckers | Hardcore Zen

Zen teachers, if theyre decent ones, dont really teach anything. They work on themselves and kindly allow others to hang around and watch. Its not like theyve got a technique theyve mastered and can now show you how to master it too. Instead, they fail at it over and over and invite you to watch them fail. The only real lesson you learn is how they manage not to throw their hands up in frustration, go aw fuck it! and give up. Actual...

Big Market, Soft Corners Dept.

Michael Moorcock: I think Tolkien was a crypto-fascist

Fantasy became as bland as everything else in entertainment. To be a bestseller, youve got to rub the corners off. The more you can predict the emotional arc of a book, the more successful it will become.

I do understand that Game of Thrones is different. It has its political dimensions; Im very fond of the dwarf and Im very pleased that George [R R Martin], whos a good friend, has had such a huge success. But ultimately its a soap opera...

Predestination

Stop reading this. Go to Netflix, your local video kiosk, wherever you can get your hands on a copy of Predestination.Watch it first, because I can guarantee it will be one of the best things you've seen all year, and odds are you might never have run into it if someone else hadn't told you about it. I want to put all this up front, because this movie deserves discussion and thought, and yet it is absolutely impossible to talk about this film without treading into complete spoiler territory....

After The Party Dept.

Otakon kept me busy for the past week or so — see herefor more on that score; it was the fun kind of busy — so not much blogging taking place. Some catch-up, then:

MeTal, my "WordPress killer" / "Movable Type slayer" blogging system, is now running provisionally on the same server you are reading this. It isn't being used for live production, just testing, but that by itself is a milestone. I was able to load it onto a completely different system, boot it up, and use it to publish a blog. Th...