Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 154
February 11, 2015
An Open And Shut Case Dept. (Open-Source Software Wonkish)
There's this site entitled Occupy GPL! that's been making the rounds lately. I don't know who's behind this thing — at least one comment on Hacker News smelled AstroTurf in the air — and I have some misgivings about the snide way it's presented. But the underlying points made have a germ of truth: the GPL isn't the only way to do open source, and we might have reached a point where the GPL does more harm than good for software as a whole.
February 9, 2015
Mudpie Trebuchet Dept.
Call me behind the times, but I'd never actually read anything by Andrew Breitbart until I came across a piece he did — and what a scurrilous, smear-job piece it is; I'm not linking it here — about the political controversies currently roiling the SF world. His position is entirely predictable: those social justice warrior types are driving all the real diversity out of the field and replacing it with thinkalike conformism imposed from the Left on across.
This is one of those areas where I kno...
February 8, 2015
The Year Of Building Dangerously Dept.
In this episode, your humble narrator reveals himself to either be stupid or brilliant.
As some of you guys know by now, unlike every other sane person out there, I don't use WordPress for my Web publishing needs. Rather, I use what was once a very competitive product called Movable Type. There has been a lot to like about it, and that's why I've stuck with it in the face of almost total abandonment of the program by the blogosphere.
So why has just about every blogger drawing breath and with a...
February 6, 2015
Gendergapped Dept.
Can gaming's great women characters be written by men? | Polygon
... writers are required to create convincing characters who are different from themselves. But in video games, writers have tended towards idealized versions of themselves. I take this as a sign of limited ability and of limited ambition, driven by the concerns of marketing. In any case, it is not easy to find a Hilary Mantel or a Joss Whedon or even aRhianna Pratchett or aNeil Druckmann. (Thispiece in The Guardian argues for an...
February 5, 2015
A Silence In The House Dept.
That dead silence emanating from my side of the screen needed to be broken one way or another; might as well break said fast with a little personal news. Not good news, I fear.
Pepper, my khorat of some six years of age, had to be put to sleep the other week due to an aggressive and spreading cancer in his jaw. He was a remarkably reticent and sweet-natured cat: whenever he'd want to come into my office, he would stand at the door and tap politely on it. I work in a drafting chair with a footr...
January 25, 2015
Blinded By The Light Dept.
The Problem with Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See | The New Republic
A novel is not a historical document, but it does become one, regardless of its author’s preference. Our entertainments reflect their times: how we choose to remember historical events, and how we prefer to remember them. Especially when the worst of times, World War II, becomes material for the lightest of entertainments.
Emphasis mine, in big part because of how it echoes something I've been reiterating in various...
January 24, 2015
Alan Smithee's Revenge Dept.
Film bosses accused of mutilating scripts and pushing out writing talent | Film | The Guardian
Three of Britain’s Oscar-nominated screenwriters say that an increasing tendency among film studio bosses and directors to “mutilate” film scripts is forcing top writers to either direct their own work or write for television, where they command greater respect.
... Writers’ Guild rules do not permit writers to take their name off a screenplay if they have been paid more than a certain amount. Studios...
Soul Discharge (Boredoms)
There was at least one kid like this in every class. Turn your back on him for five minutes, and the entire surface of his desk (and maybe the floor around his desk, too) would be lacquered with crayon scribbles. Not one school supply in his possession was used for its intended purpose: erasers up the nose, paper clips attached to the earlobes, and hole punchers used to create confetti that would be sprinkled into his own hair and then shaken off into your lap as fake dandruff. If a kid like...
January 23, 2015
Brokedown Castle Dept.
For some time now I've been investigating migration options for my various blogs and sites — as in, out of Movable Type. WordPress seems like the likely choice, but my biggest objection to WordPress is that it doesn't do static sites by default, and it doesn't make sense for a blog to be a dynamically generated asset.
Now, there's various plugins which can produce something akin to a static blog, and after some experimentation with them I think I have a reasonably stable end result. But I stil...
The Rut And How To Get Out Of It Dept.
This is either the smartest or stupidest thing I've done in a while. I'm tilting smartest.
I went back and re-read many of my posts from the past several months. Stupidest, because it made me nod my head and realize I might be on to a bunch of things (self-reinforcement!) Smartest, because the sheer amount of topical repetition made me realize I was getting stuck in a rut.
What I've decided to do, then, is to take all the stuff I was shelving in favor of regular blogging — the reviews, mainly —...
