Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 161

Men Of War, Men Of Peace Dept.

Monks and Laypeople, War and Peace | Hardcore Zen

... [Buddhist practitioners are] able to live lives that allow us to self-identify as special, peaceful people in contrast to those awful, violent people out there. ... We’re able to create the illusion that we live in a bubble of peace and we start thinking, “If only everyone else could be just like me, the world would be as one!” We fail to see how we can’t be barefoot Zen hippies unless someone else is willing to be a tough-as-nails, jack-bo...

Oh, You Want To Live Forever? Dept.

An article on the way Buddhism and science intersect on certain key issues features this line: "Unlike Christ, who promises eternal life, the last words of the Buddha reportedly began, 'Decay is inherent in all things.'"

It's timely and appropriate that I came across this piece right around the same time I started reading Miguel de Unamuno'sThe Tragic Sense of Life, that man's philosophical treatise on the collision between the romantic impulse to live forever and the grim certainty that etern...

Tell It Again Sam Dept.

Work on the 2nd draft ofWelcome to the Fold started in earnest this weekend, and to mark the occasion I have some more notes about the whole rewrite process. (Tr.: SKIP THIS POST IF YOU HATE WRITERLY MINUTIAE.)

A first draft for me is just that: a draft. It's a sprint — a way to reach a goal I have in mind, and touch on as many of the concerns for the story that come to mind, too. I can't start any story without knowing how it ends, and what the implications and mood of that ending are like....

The Adventures Of Lem(my) Caution Dept.

Paris Review – The Future According to Stanisław Lem, Ezra Glinter

... Lem preferred to depict societies bogged down by excess information and technology. “Freedom of expression sometimes presents a greater threat to an idea,” he writes in his 1968 novel His Master’s Voice, “because forbidden thoughts may circulate in secret, but what can be done when an important fact is lost in a flood of impostors …?” This observation rings eerily true today, but Lem wasn’t only trying to critique modern so...

Die Neue Mensch Dept.

The Death of Adulthood in American Culture - NYTimes.com

It is now possible to conceive of adulthood as the state of being forever young. Childhood, once a condition of limited autonomy and deferred pleasure (“wait until you’re older”), is now a zone of perpetual freedom and delight. Grown people feel no compulsion to put away childish things: We can live with our parents, go to summer camp, play dodge ball, collect dolls and action figures and watch cartoons to our hearts’ content. These symp...

Critique Is Magic Dept.

A point to consider:

A BRONY TALE Movie Review: Cynicism Versus Naivete In The Land Of Equestria | Badass Digest

... there’s a point where a pleasant lack of cynicism (cited in the film as a principal reason for being a My Little Pony fan) becomes insular naivete. My Little Pony fans - as presented in A Brony Tale - are characterised by steadfast and all-consuming devotion to their fandom. Devotion is often an admirable trait, but it’s important to be able to critically analyse the entertainmen...

Smoothly Tooled, Roughly Drafted Dept.

I spent most of yesterday without Internet access — I'm reminded once again why a reliance on network-based Web apps is such an awful idea; why make the network your single point of failure when we can't even reliably guarantee how fast it runs, let alone whether or not it runs at all? — so I had time to muse over a few things about my writing workflow. Skip this post if you find writerly minutiae numbing.

First off,Welcome to the Fold's first draft was closed as of the other night. It's a ro...

The Hieroglyph On The Wall Dept

io9 (which I normally don't read) just posted an extract from one of the stories inHieroglyph — "By the Time We Get To Arizona," by Madeline Ashby — and it looks intriguing — just edgy (I hate that word, but whatever) enough to be skeptical, and just curious enough to be optimistic. If the rest of the anthology is in the same vein, then I'll be making a meal of my previous words with a side order of crow and a helping of Werner Herzog's boiled shoe leather.

Most of my skepticism — read: cynici...

Hieroglyph The Third Dept.

More about the other day's post. I'm still stung at the tone I used to describe that stuff — Cory Doctorow in particular — but I suspect it's an abreaction, a consequence of being bombarded by so many we're-going-to-change-the-world-with-our-website types.

Zach Bonelli had his own take on it which is a more reasonably worded version of mine: "I’m not sure which I dislike more — wholesale acceptance of anything technological, or wholesale refusal to admit that anything technological might be of...

Hieroglyph Redux Dept.

Some follow-up notes on my earlier post aboutHieroglyph.

First off, I'm just as fed up as anyone else is with SF as a "wet blanket", as someone else put it. I do not believe the point of SF is to talk obsessively and commiseratively about how much the future is going to suck.

But I also don't think the point of SF is to talk about how great the future would be if only we invented this or that. The two are, I think, manifestations of the same mindset at different extremes. One is naïve optimism;...