Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 150
May 30, 2015
Yeah, But Isn't That Somebody Else's Problem? Dept.
Monica at Mozilla: Tracking Protection for Firefox at Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2015
Advertising does not make content free. It merelyexternalizes the costs in a way that incentivizes malicious or incompetent playersto build things like Superfish,infect1 in 20 machines with ad injection malware, andcreate sites that require unsafe pluginsand take twice as many resources to load, quite expensive in terms of bandwidth, power, and stability. It will take a major force to disrupt this ecosyst...
Object Lesson Dept.
The other day I finally put into words the marrow — not just the skin or the meat — of what most of my objections to stuff like the Marvel movies are, or any other pop-culture trend that offers so much and yet gives so little. It's not that these things aren'tentertaining (although my own mileage varies drastically with them in that respect). It's that they are lousy models to follow for other creators.
May 23, 2015
No Hex Please, We're Critics Dept.
Cannes Dispatch: Son of Saul - From the Current - The Criterion Collection
It is one of my most strongly held critical beliefs that you should not write about films you dont like. First, it is bad for the soul to exult in pointing out the deficiencies of the film in question. Second, if you have ever had the luck to produce a film yourself, you are aware that any film that makes it to a public screen is a small miracle of energy and determination, and it is simply unkind to say that the mira...
May 20, 2015
Bigger Is Not Better Dept.
Fantasy must shake off the tyranny of the mega-novel | Books | The Guardian
The mega-novel is a pinnacle of the storytellers craft. When a writer appears who can really create one, it will always be a major event. Gwynnes six-figure deal is a sign publishers are ready to invest in big stories, but theres more to reading than bingeing on epics. If the fantasy genre, and fiction more widely, wants to remain healthy, it needs to nurture all kinds of stories. There are great fantasy short storie...
May 19, 2015
Seriously? Dept.
"...part of me looks at society as it is now and thinks weve been infantilised by our own taste. Were essentially all consuming very childish things comic books, superheroes Adults are watching this stuff, and taking it seriously!"
Goodness, imagine that. Peopleconsuming works of the imagination, and having the nerve totake them seriously.
I leave myself open to the p...
May 17, 2015
Big Blu Upgrade Dept.
Something I forgot to comment on when the news broke was word about the new Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc spec, the 4K disc format that is ostensibly going to be to Blu-ray Disc what BD was to DVD. It's such a strange piece of news, because there are a few things in the spec that I genuinely like — higher color depth, for instance — but for the most part I can't see this as being anything but another shot by the studios across the bow of the streaming services, and a waste of everyone's time and mone...
May 16, 2015
Windowbreaker Dept.
Traveling and work this past week, so not much time to blog. A few things stand out:
Broken Windows and American Oligarchy - NYTimes.com
... the eruption of top incomes that began around 40 years ago need not have solid causes — it could be a case of contagious norms-breaking. This might also explain why movements of top incomes are so different in different countries, with the most obvious determinant being whether you speak English; think of it as an epidemic of broken windows in the Unite...
May 9, 2015
Metalizer Dept.
On and off I've mentioned a project codenamed "MeTal" (real name TBA*), the replacement I'm brewing for Movable Type for use here and elsewhere. The goal was, and is, to create a blogging/CMS system with the following requirements (listed here in no particular order):
Pure Python and HTML5. No PHP, no Flash front-ends, no platform-specific binaries. Support for multiple blogs and sites within the same installation. Workflow tools (e.g., page-locking). A full GUI a la WordPress or Movable Typ...May 6, 2015
Sundries & Assortments Dept.
Forgive the radio silence on this end; there's about to be a good deal more of it. I spent the last few days being sick (I'm still on the mend), and I'll be spending the next week and change dealing with family matters and work. Between then and now, some news:
Welcome to the Fold is off to my erstwhile editor, as a preliminary move to getting an agent or publisher to take it on. How likely that is to happen, I couldn't say — it's not that I lack confidence in my work, but that I suspect a b...May 1, 2015
Under The Skin
The easy, and wrong, way to talk about Under the Skin is through analogy and metaphor: it’s The (Wo)Man Who Fell To Earth by way of David Lynch, or something like that. I resist this approach, because it reduces any discussion of the movie to outside references, and threatens to do a disservice to what the experience of watching the film is actually like. Talk about something only through the lens of something else and you end up not talking about the thing itself at all. The thing itself wor...
