Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 167
July 1, 2014
Your Brainwashers Come With Smiles Dept.
Peugot Uses WACKY RACES Nostalgia To Sell Cars To Gen Xers | Badass Digest
... this commercial is in the same vein as the Volkswagon Darth Vader commercial, where you don't even realize you're being sold a car. It's all about positive brand identification; they want you to finish the commercial feeling good about their brand so that when youarecar shopping Peugot or Volkswagon are your first choice. This is how advertising truly works, not by making you want a Coke right now but by making it s...
June 30, 2014
Computive Creating Dept.
Today, we go back. Way back ... no, no, take the Jimmy Castor Bunch records off. I'm talking about 1981/1982, and I'm talking aboutSoftline Magazine.
I'm betting you don't know Softline. They were a daughter publication of Softalk, a magazine dedicated to the Apple II, back when Apple products (and the company itself) didn't have quite so insular a reputation. Softalk was dedicated to the Apple II generally, but Softline was dedicated to gaming — mainly on the Apple, but with some nods towards...
June 27, 2014
(Don't) Do It Again Dept.
On the occasion of yet another remake of a lightning-in-a-bottle production, one most likely doomed to the same ignominy as theRoboCop reboot (god, just typing those words leaves such a terrible taste in the mind):
Please Don't Ask Hollywood To Reboot The Same Old Ideas - This Is Infamous
I don’t want to watch a copy of [Predator]projected up on the big screen, leading to those inevitable comparisons where it just can’t quite measure up to the original. I want something bold, something new, som...
June 25, 2014
Ah, The Good Old Days, Weren't They Awful? Dept.
Devin Faraci has a post on the pop culture nostalgia problem that is so good I don't think I can bring myself to just chomp any one piece out of it. Go read the whole thing first and then come back here.
You're back? Good.
The two things Devin nails about nostalgia: a) it is essentially narcissistic, and b) it crowds everything else off the table. Both of these are troubling for different reasons.
First, narcissism. That'sa difficult charge to make stick — you could concoct an argument that any...
June 24, 2014
Karma Chameleon Dept.
Review: Colin Farrell and Jessica Brown flounder in the complete failure of Winters Tale
I feel like films that grapple with theology can either tend to the esoteric or they can end up being overly complicated or they can take the tact this film does: they can end up being gooey, pandering, simple-minded garbage. And in the final five minutes of the film, they wrap it all up with some narration that made me violently angry. It is the sort of feel-good affirmation garbage that can only be deliv...
June 22, 2014
The Positive Snob Dept.
The Early History of Smalltalk(1993) (Alan C. Kay)
A twentieth century problem is that technology has become too “easy”. When it was hard to do anything whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse fandalism: the making of things because you can. Couple this to even less sophisticated buyers and you have generated an exploitation marke...
Freedom ... To Wipe Tables And Shine Shoes Dept.
Came a moment the other day when a friend of mine and I were gabbing about the Culture of Free Problem — with the mantra now beinggive it away, give it away, give it away, give it away now, never mind that Kiedis & Cie. were talking about doing that as an act of free will, not as a matter of culturally demanded compunction. It's hard to sell anyone anything unless you already have a massive capital base already in place and can therefore lose a little money upfront taking the risks and gettin...
June 19, 2014
No New Sunsets For You! Dept.
Devin Faraci takes the words out of my mouth:
Max Landis Did Not Have A Good Idea For GHOSTBUSTERS 3 | Badass Digest
Just because a thing can be franchised indefinitely - guys comedically trap ghosts is vague enough that you could do itforever -doesn't mean you should. We used to understand this on a cultural level, that sometimes a thing is really good and that thing being really good is quite enough. We don't need to go back and keep redoing that thing until we suck the wonder, the joy and th...
June 17, 2014
Dr. Goodreads Dept.
A couple of months back, I did some due diligence regarding my status as a Self-Published Author And All That: I set up my Goodreadsauthor profile and added in some of the books I knew weren't present. I've since acquired a whoppingthreefans. Even dwarves started small, as Werner Herzog once said.
Logically, the next step would be for me to go out and hype people into adding me on Goodreads, assuming they have a Goodreads account in the first place. It's actually not hard for people to get one...
June 15, 2014
You With Your Fandom, Me With My Fandom Dept.
Godzilla & The Flaws of Tribal Film Criticism; or, Joe Brody is Godzilla | Cinefantastique Online
... as counter-intuitive as it seems, the famous radioactive reptile got a fairer shake from mainstream critics than from genre specialists. Many viewers with a Sense of Wonder seem to have checked that sensibility at the door, replacing it with symptoms of Early Onset Grumpy Old Man Syndrome (also known as: All You Kids Get Off Of My Lawn Syndrome). ... I am interested in the sensibilities underl...
