Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 168
June 11, 2014
The Good Old Dark Ages Dept
This canard, again.
George R. R. Martin Wants More ‘Game of Thrones,’ Too - NYTimes.com
... some critics have complained about the show’s depictions of sexual violence. But Mr. Martin said it was an inescapable aspect of this world. “Rape and sexual violence have been a part of every war ever fought, from the ancient Sumerians to our present day,” he told The New York Times in an email last month. “To omit them from a narrative centered on war and power would have been fundamentally false and d...
No Time Like The Present Dept.
Worth quoting at length:
Are We Living in the Worst Decade for Music? | NoisePorn
The problem isn’t that the music is crap, necessarily. The problem is that, because of the speed with which things develop in today’s technological age, people have gotten so inundated with what other people think they should think is cool, that they don’t really have time to think for themselves. A certain beat or technique gets attention, and fledgling artists feel as though they should jump on and cash in befor...
June 9, 2014
Binge & Purge Dept.
No, this isn't World's Worst Hoardersterritory, but it did make me reflect on such things.
Before I relocated (NY → FL, cost of living issues), I had a book collection that obstinately refused to be pruned down.Sixfull-sized shelves in my office alone. Navigating the place was like a potential re-enactment of the collapsing-library scene at the beginning ofThe Mummy. (And I don't have the excuse of being as cute as Rachel Weisz to make up for it, either.)
The hardest part of having such a pile...
June 4, 2014
The Books Or The Lifestyle Dept.
While doing the homework forWelcome to the Fold I've noticed that there is not much in the way of literature about the concept of the role-playing game as a social and psychological phenomenon. Oh, sure, there'sMazes and Monsters*, about which the less said the better, but everything outside of that is more about role-playing in the abstract than the gamification of same. And while stuff like Knights of the Dinner Tableis a great comic sociology about gamer culture (and a great zinging of the...
June 3, 2014
You've Seen The Headlines, Now Read The Book Dept.
One of the marketing suggestions I've seen for authors, self-published or not, is for them to tie their work into some current event in some form. Viz., Brad Thor observing that the recent swap of five Gitmo detainees for a hostage is reminiscent of his bookThe First Commandment.
This sort of thing has always made me uneasy, because it seems like yet another way to encourage authorsto become marketers, or rather to denature the distinction between their work and the promotion of it. Or, in pla...
June 2, 2014
My Water Cooler Runneth Over Dept.
The Water Cooler Runs Dry - NYTimes.com
With so very much to choose from, a person can stick to one or two preferred micro-genres and subsist entirely on them, while other people gorge on a completely different set of ingredients. You like “Housewives”? Savor them in multiple cities and accents. Food porn? Stuff yourself silly. Vampire fiction? The vein never runs dry.
That sounds like the old paradox-of-choice problem writ locally: with so much out there, you tend to focus only on what you alr...
May 31, 2014
Flop Of The Pops Dept.
Today, I get angry. I might even aim to misbehave.
/Film is reporting about the latest Empire Magazine greatest-movies-of-all-time poll, and god help me but I feel like the results are proof of malevolent alien intelligences tinkering with human memory.
How else to explain, in the course of six years, the complete disappearance from the top 15 list ofallblack-and-white films (the one winner last time around, in 2008, wasThe Apartment — a very good choice, actually),allfilms older than 1975,all...
May 28, 2014
There's A Hell Of A Bad Universe Next Door, Let's Go Dept.
Let’s Go to Dystopia by Diane Johnson | The New York Review of Books
Dystopian novels portray a society, usually of the future, that has arrived at the destination we’re all headed for if we don’t change now. The great dystopian novels and the scary developments they portray convince us of things that are all too possible in the society we live in, if we hadn’t spotted them for ourselves. The most shocking dystopian novel is the first one you read, when the whole idea of the arbitrariness of h...
May 27, 2014
Blog Hop (Around, Y'all) (Dept.)
Normally I don't do these kinds of tag-you're-it blog games, but I got tagged by Steven Savage, for whom I would carry a back-box of Gatorade through the Sahara on hands and knees. The way this shtick works is, you get tagged to answer four questions. To wit:
What am I working on?
How does it differ from others of its genre?
Why do I write what I do?
How does my writing process work?
So, let us begin the beguine.
1.What am I working on?
My current longform project isWelcome to the Fold,scheduled fo...
May 26, 2014
Execution Ground (Painkiller)
John Zorn is arguably one of the few people who has done something with jazz that isn't redundant or insulting ever since Miles Davis hung up his machine.ExecutionGround is an exhibit A for why: he's fearless. Who other than Zorn would have the nerve to pair up not only with Bill Laswell — whose career has hopscotched between jazz, downtown New York avant-gardism, and psychedelic dreamtime world-music — but withNapalm Death drummerMick Harris? And not as a stunt, either, but because Zorn sees...
