Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 152
March 27, 2015
Of Silos And Vin Diesel Dept.
Why Is The Idea Of FURIOUS 7 Winning Best Picture So Funny? | Badass Digest
... if you’re making a big pop movie you’re not going to be engaged with in any real way; there’s an early sense of dismissiveness to how critics approach the work. What’s interesting is that it’s going in an exactly opposite way in the world of music; if you wrote an essay decrying Beyonce you had best be ready to defend yourself not just from fans but from music critics, but writing the 10,000th “Hollywood is makin...
March 24, 2015
Metric System Dept.
One of the biggest dangers in tech is if you focus just on metrics, that might be all you get.
It isn't just tech where that risk rears its ever-so-sleek head, of course, although that's where I hear about the most ostensibly practical majority of it. "Data-driven" this and "test-driven" that; after a while, it ceases to sound like good practice or common sense, and becomes just another item on the Mindless Buzzword Roster. Not because of what it is, but how it's appro...
March 19, 2015
Next One Is Real Dept.
IN PRAISE OF DELAYS — Gabriel Squailia
Most living writers will tell you to complete a full first draft before reworking anything, but I'm incapable. I always worry over the first stretch, scrapping an entire book's worth of first scenesbefore I find an acceptable point of entry. By now, I'm in no hurry. This sucker will gel when it gels. I've learned to enjoy the delays.
...I used to bemoan the months-long wait between polishing a piece and learning whether it was rejected or accepted. Thes...
March 18, 2015
The Nut Job Dept.
Earlier my friend Steven Savage and I were reminiscing about the way literary SF in the 60s and 70s had enjoyed a burst of maverick creativity. I felt the reasonwhywritten science fiction was such a bowl of gorp* at the time revolved around a few things. Most of them were market conditions.
After stuff like 2001came and went,it started to become clear to publishers that there were tons of young people with tons of disposable income who wanted to read science fiction, so they started putting o...
Lucy
Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way: Lucy isn’t science fiction. It’s science foolishness. It relies on one of the most egregious misstatements of scientific fact — that human beings only use ten percent of their brainpower — as the linchpin for a movie so enjoyably bonkers that in the end it doesn’t really matter how dumb its core premise is. This movie is the cinematic incarnation of the old cliché, “Dance like nobody’s watching.” This one breakdances.
The premise is simple; what bec...
March 17, 2015
If You're Not Part Of The Solution, You're Part Of The Precipitate Dept.
Not a whole lot of blogging going on lately — various kinds of work have occupied my time and attention. Mainly, I'm neck deep in the slow and difficult process of building a complete replacement for Movable Type (in a fit of tongue-in-cheek, I called it "MeTal"). I am not the best programmer in the world, but I am a bloody stubborn one, and I absolutely refuse to let go of a problem once I latch my teeth around its ankle.
March 15, 2015
Glorified Typewriters And Faster Horses Dept.
There is a book on programming calledOh! Pascal!,one of the first college-level texts on programming I ever encountered, and its first edition begins with an exhortation that seems to have been lost somewhere along the way:"It's time we stopped treating the computer like a glorified typewriter."(The second edition seems to have excised this part, which I do miss.)
Twenty-odd years later, the computer has become split along roughly two paths. In one, it is — as someone else once put it wonderf...
March 9, 2015
Propagandart Dept.
And now, the part where I either offend the majority of you or have you all nodding. Either one has its risks, as you can imagine. At least the people you tick off can awaken you as to how you've strayed off the road and plowed into the impact attenuators; your yes-men will never be your teachers.
So:
All art is propaganda, as George Orwell once claimed.I believe him, but not in the way most people mightthink.
March 3, 2015
The Irreplaceables Dept.
The other night I was talking to a close friend about a whole passel of issues involving creativity, and one of the things that popped out was how easy it is to start second-guessing yourself — how easy it is to start contorting yourself into the position where you give people what you thinktheywant (easy [allegedly]),instead of trying to figure out how to make them interested in whatyoudo (much harder).
I put it like this: "When you give yourself creative freedom that doesn't think much about...
March 2, 2015
Perpetual License Dept.
Business Musings: What Traditional Publishing Learned in 2014 | Kristine Kathryn Rusch
... corporations like CBS (and News Corp, which owns HarperCollins and Zondervan) want to exploit from the bottom up. So imagine that a writer writes a lovely book that has pieces which might make a good TV show or a nice addition to the YouTube Channel. If the contract between the writer and publisher are written correctly from the point of view of the parent corporation, then the exploitable content become...
