Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 157

Don't Dream It, Be It

Some great thoughts in this essay (it's mainly about Interstellar, so warning, spoilers), esp. about how the possibility that this planet may be all we get:

Zachary Bonelli - "Perelandrian Dream"

Gene Roddenberry’s ideology, which was that humanity would go to the stars having overcome the colonial impulse, has clearly failed to take root in the popular culture.

I don't think the problem was that space mania didn't take root in popular culture; space mania was pretty big in the 60s and 70s. But...

A Healthy Level Of Disconnect Dept.

Abundance Without Attachment - NYTimes.com

The frustration and emptiness so many people feel at this time of year is not an objection to the abundance per se, nor should it be. It is a healthy hunger for nonattachment. This season, don’t rail against the crowds of shoppers on Fifth Avenue or become some sort of anti-gift misanthrope. Celebrate the bounty that has pulled millions out of poverty worldwide. But then, ponder the three practices above. Move beyond attachment by collecting experienc...

Fifty Million Elvis Fans Strike Back Dept.

Some great insights into the success of one of the most amazingly awful books to make Amazon's bestseller lists:

Zachary Bonelli - "Tunnel Vision"

... the lens of hyper-consumerism changes attitudes toward literature to such an extant that sane, intelligent individuals end up drawing nonsensical and bizarre conclusions.

... there is no paradox when it comes toBillionaire Dinosaur’s popularity. My natural conclusion: a significant number of individuals in the Western world are so philosophically...

Many Legs And No Brain Dept.

James Horner Says 'The Amazing Spider-Man 2' Was "Terrible" - /Film

I look for those people [such as Phil Alden Robinson, director of Sneakers and Field of Dreams], almost 90% of those type of filmmakers are gone. Now, the filmmakers are making the DC/Marvel Comics, all of that stuff.The world of the director being the laser focus is very different now. I’m used to working with the director and producer and that’s my relationship, it’s very simple. When you deal on films now you have a directo...

My Way Dept.

Various kinds of work have kept me busier than I would have liked these past couple of weeks — the start of the third draft forWelcome to the Fold, the flood of material I've been assembling for Ganriki.org (anime/manga/J-culture fans, take note, that's the project I booted up after being booted from About.com), and just a farrago of other goodies. All of it has made for a major indictment of my time-management skills.

Read more at Genji Press

A Better Man Than This Dept.

The Temptation to Dehumanize by Ed Kilgore | Political Animal | The Washington Monthly

... the thing that bothers me most about the dehumanizing of the poor and the dispossessed is its violent conflict with the supposed religious ethic of this country, particularly when it is promoted by people who think of themselves as good Christians. For the life of me I cannot understand Christians who do not grasp that an essential tenet of their faith is theradical equality of human beings as subjects o...

Give It Up Dept.

Article « By Cozzens Possessed « Commentary Magazine(Dwight MacDonald)

In the Novel of Resignation, the highest reach of enlightenment is to realize how awful the System is and yet to accept iton its own terms. Because otherwise there wouldn’t be any System. Marquand invented the genre, Sloan Wilson carried it on inThe Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, and Herman Wouk formulated it most unmistakably inThe Caine Mutiny. Wouk’s moral is that it is better to obey a lunatic, cowardly Captain Queeg, ev...

A Momentary Pause For Breath That Refreshes Dept.

Next week or so is likely to be slow for me — not much bloggo de blog due to Thanksgiving and such — although Christmas is likely to actually havemore of me than before, thanks to me not flying anywhere this time around. The tradition has been to visit my in-laws for Christmas, but this year they're literally just up the road, so there ought to be far less of a hole in my schedule because of that.

That said, I more or less finished draft 2 edits onWelcome to the Foldlast night.

Rephrase:they we...

No Analysis Please, We're Audiences Dept.

GamerGate, criticism, ideology and 'They Live' | Polygon

This fight to maintain a surface enjoyment of video games makes sense. If you see that games support a certain political idea you have to somehow react to it. If you begin to explore what the content you consume means you then have to do something. That takes effort, and saying something is "just a game" is not only easier, but more comfortable.

People get hung up with the idea that violent games make people violent, which is a tired argu...

Good Guy, Bad Guy, I'm The One With The Brain Dept.

Stumbling and Mumbling: Hammett's world

Why do we cleave to the presumption of Manichaeism rather than the Hammettian conception?* I suspect the answer lies more in psychology than in facts. We want to preserve what Richard Sennettcalleda purified identity and hunger for what Christopher Laschcalled"psychic security". In an age of narcissism people want to believe - often without troubling to read a word of moral philosophy - that they are right and others wrong and the wish is the father to t...