Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 149
June 16, 2015
A Little Less Of Me Dept.
Between work and work, I won't be around much in the next couple of weeks. I might try to squeeze in an essay or two, but there's a lot that has my attention right now. I've got a day-job related thing coming up, and am also trying to finish the outline forRed Desert (next novel) and getFoldprepped for submission to various people and places.
I also somehow managed to injure the tip of my finger in such a way that typing re-opens it (this happens to me every so often). I see myself burning th...
June 12, 2015
Killing In The Name Of Me Dept.
Anders Breiviks Inexplicable Crime - The New Yorker
I do not believe that Breivik himself has anything to teach us. I believe that his life is a coincidence of unfortunate circumstances, andwhat he did was such an anomaly that it makes no sense even to guard ourselves against it.
Emphasis mine.
June 11, 2015
Many Legs And Too Many Brains Dept.
JSON-LD and Why I Hate the Semantic Web | The Beautiful, Tormented Machine
The problem with getting a room full of smart people together is that the groups world view gets skewed. There are many reasons that a working group filled with experts dont consistently produce great results. For example, many of the participants can be humble about their knowledge so they tend to think that a good chunk of the people that will be using their technology will be just as enlightened. Bad feature ideas...
June 10, 2015
Irrlicht (Klaus Schulze)
If we can creditMiles Davisfor the birth of the cool, maybe we can credit Klaus Schulze for the birth of the drone. Strictly speaking, I know others got there first — La Monte Young, for instance, was producing "musical environments" a good decade before Irrlicht was waxed. ButIrrlichtserves the dual function of being Schulze's first album proper — the start of one of the longest and most durable careers in electronic music — and one of the first works to point people at when they ask, in all...
June 9, 2015
R100
Hitoshi Matsumoto* is fast becoming the master of something I guess we could call the cinematic shaggy-dog story. His movies never go where they're supposed to, are never about what they claim to be, and are always this way defiantly so. By the time I got to the homestretch of Matsumoto's Big Man Japan, I'd given up on even trying to figure out where the movie was going, but I also didn't feel like I was being punished for sticking it out. Its weirdness was rewarding.
Now comes R100, a movie...
It's Hard To Be Humble When You're Perfect Dept.
The Attack on Truth - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
The strategy of willful ignorance is not to fight theory with theory and statistic with statistic. It is instead to say, "I refuse to believe this," and then filibuster in the court of public opinion. It is not crackpot theories that are doing us in. It is the spread of the tactics of those who disrespect truth.
...The real enemy is not ignorance, doubt, or even disbelief. It is false knowledge. When we profess to...
June 7, 2015
Tiddling About Dept.
Last week I downloaded TiddlyWiki 5 — the latest version of the personal wiki software I've used to organize my last two writing projects — and set to work outlining my next book,The Palace of the Red Desert.
June 2, 2015
Rebel Without A Pause Dept.
Not something I agree with in toto, but some good points:
Ani DiFranco is bumming me out. | making edible playdough is hegemonic.
As a feminist gets older, if shes paying attention, she starts to see that the world is a little more complicated than she thought, and that a lot of different types of prejudice and oppression are acting on people all at the same time, and sexism and racism and classism and ableism and heterosexism and other forms of oppression are all wrapped up together. As a f...
June 1, 2015
Angry And Lazy Dept.
Hypocritical Sloth - NYTimes.com
... when is the charge of hypocrisy relevant? Basically, only when a public figure is preaching about individual behavior, and perhaps holding himself or herself up as a role model. So yes, its fair to go after someone who preaches morality but turns out to be a crook or a sexual predator. But articles alleging that someones personal choices are somehow hypocritical given their policy positions are almost always off point.
Charges of hypocrisy get thrown aro...
May 31, 2015
No New York Dept.
After myprevious postabout the way the New York that existed for generations is now being erased by easy money, Paul Krugman has some thoughts about the dynamics of how wealth changes neighborhoods in unpredictable, not just undesirable, ways:
Preliminary Notes on Inequality and Urbanism - NYTimes.com
... when it comes to things that make urban life better or worse, there is absolutely no reason to have faith in the invisible hand of the market. ...When, say, a bank branch takes over the spa...
