Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 164

For A Limited Time Dept.

Flight of the Vajra is $1.99 on Kindle through next week.

And theentire first part of the book is available as a Kindle sample freebie.

If you've been on the fence about whether or not to grab it, this is just your excuse.

And if you're still wondering what the book is about, take it from my good friend Steven:"A more responsible version of Tony Stark finds he's got to save the galaxy - and his team consists of a circus acrobat, a futuristic Dali Lama, Jim Gordon, Seven of Nine, and David Bowie....

Last Year's Model Dept.

A comment I made on Twitter earlier (yeah, I do that from time to time) deserves revisiting here in depth.

Hollywood's mania for sequels makes sense in light of how forgettable the films are. With no follow-up, who would remember they even exist?The inherently disposable nature of the films is a design feature, not a flaw. That's how they get you to buy next year's model.

What's puzzled me about this approach is how it runs contrary to some of the professed aims of the industry. When Hollywood...

Me Me Me Dept.

It's been an unproductive day on multiple fronts, which ended with me shelving my current work and writing a few notes to people for the sake of further research on stuff I couldn't see from 30,000 feet up. In the long run it'll get worked out, but the short-term frustration that comes from hitting such a wall is always a bummer. When in such a state, I get philosophical.

Brad Warner has a nice post up about the way our happiness-seeking activities constitute a trick played on us by our brains...

Krug's Rules, Pt. The Last Dept.

The last and simplest — you'll see soon how the pun is intended — of Krugman's rules of researchis "Simplify, simplify".

... always try to express your ideas in the simplest possible model. The act of stripping down to this minimalist model will force you to get to the essence of what you are trying to say (and will also make obvious to you those situations in which you actually have nothing to say). And this minimalist model will then be easy to explain to other economists as well.

In the same...

Wise Up Dept.

Some notes on Richard Dawkins and his turning his nose up at the idea of taboos as being antiquarian concepts:

Stumbling and Mumbling: Limits of rationalism

... taboos exist because humans are emotional creatures. We feel upset and disgust, and taboos exist to protect us from such feelings. Introducing rape gratuitously into a public discussion upsets some people unnecessarily. Etiquette dictates that we don't do this ... Anddisgust, like it or not, is the basis for some moral judgments - such...

Krug's Rules, Pt. 3 Dept.

"Dare to be silly" — that's a rule, courtesy of Paul Krugman, that I should barely have to elaborate on. The evocation of italone should be enough, whether or not you're a Krugman fan (or a Weird Al fan, for that matter), but the context for the word "silly" is worth detailing. Krugman found that the really valuable work to be done was not in making safe but unadventurous extensions to existing theories, but rather to take bold, potentially foolish-seeming steps — what he deemed the use of si...

Chicken Little Hits Again Dept.

The more I think about end-of-the-world fiction, the more I'm seeing it as a red herring. Not just because we're surrounded by so damnmuch of it lately (it started most recently with, I think,The Walking Dead and it's just gone on unabated from there), but because it's predicated on a few assumptions that I'm finding harder to swallow as I go along.

First, the core premise: things fall apart, the center cannot hold, etc. It's hard for me to look at such things and not see them as a gross under...

Krug's Rules, Pt. 2 Dept.

The first of Paul Krugman's rules for how he works was "Listen to the Gentiles", meaning (as I applied it to creative work) get out of your bubble. The second is "Question the question". As he puts it:

... if people in a field have bogged down on questions that seem very hard, it is a good idea to ask whether they are really working on the right questions. Often some other question is not only easier to answer but actually more interesting!

The way I approach this for creative work is a little...

So It Was Written Dept.

A fascinating article, based on the premise that validity of canon isn't the only criterion for assessing a story:

Canon Fodder @ Comics Bulletin

... the Arthurian legends work so well and have survived the centuries because they eschew a strict canonical structure. The writers of each period adapted the character to the as necessary to fit the stories they wanted to tell. Often these myths were a means of sharing oral history or a way to celebrate a tribe, clan, or country.

This actually got me...

Krug's Rules, Pt. 1 Dept.

I come back often to how useful it is to get out of your bubble, to read things that kick you into a different circle than the one you're accustomed to playing in. For me, one of those outer circles was economics, a subject I normally associated with nodding off in class.

Then along came Paul Krugman, whose books, columns, and blogging changed all that. He wasn't coming down from the mount to give a sermon; he was a bright, engaging, curious fellow who just happened to know his field thoroughl...