Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 170

But Here's What It's Really About Dept.

Last night a friend mentioned he'd discussedFlight of the Vajra with someone at a geek meetup, although the lead-in was a bit oblique.

Other Person: "I don't read long stories as much as I used to."

Friend: "This book has a guy punching another guy in the brain with a city."

Other Person: " . . . what?"

Yes, this sorta-kinda does happen, but it's that the climax of the story, and it's far from being the most important thing that happens in it. But it's become something of a running-gag-explanatio...

Hold Your Collective Breath Dept.

FromTolstoy or Dostoevsky:

What makes us “believe” in the reality of a Shakespearean play? What is it that makes Oedipus or Hamlet as exciting to us after we have seen ten performances as when we saw the play for the first time? How can there be suspense without surprise?

Emph. mine. The whole question of suspense and surprise comes up often when we look at, say, movie adaptations of comics or other media. The suspense in some franchise product likeMan of Steel doesn't come from knowing, outsid...

The Shelf Is Full Dept.

Much discussion as of late in the "are there too many comic book movies now?" rubric:

Are Too Many Heroes Coming to the Big Screen at Once? | MovieBob - Intermission | The Escapist

Comics (and thus superheroes), then, aren't a genre but are up until recently a "niche," and it's my read of the situation that the rise to prominence of this particular niche is likely seen as vaguely threatening to established critics of certain vintage. Cultural awareness is THE intellectual currency among art and...

Act Your Age Dept.

I'm currently clavicle-deep in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky — full disclosure, I'm a Dostoevsky man, but I won't turn down the Big T at his best — and the sheer amount of social upheaval in the 19th century that served as the background for both authors' works makes the times we live through now seem almost piddling. Well, almost. We only know the times and the manners we have been born into.

And the times and the manners I was born into don't seem any less seismic in their own way. Right now it's a...

To Push All The Right Buttons Dept.

I sometimes think the hardest thing about writing is how easily that falls into a routine of telling people what they want to hear about things. As soon as you find you have a captive audience that likes being flattered about something, and you're rewarded for such flattery with success — it doesn't have to be monetary, just social — congratulations! You're now stuck in your own echo chamber. Hope you brought your own lunch and dinner.

This kind of flattery doesn't have to be very sophisticate...

Pounded Out And Pounded Flat Dept.

Why I Don't Like the User Story Template | The Agile Management Blog

... where they excel is making sure every story is expressed in the format As a ____ I can____So That____. No matter what the story is, they find a way to shoe horn it into that template. And this is where things start to fall apart. The need to fit the story into the template becomes more important than the content of the actual story.

The term "story" here is being used in the context of Agile management, where a user's need...

A Critical Hit Dept.

Part two.

Music Criticism Has Degenerated Into Lifestyle Reporting - The Daily Beast

Discerning consumers who care about music and have good ears should be the bedrock of the music business, but many of them have given up on new artists because they can’t find reliable critics to guide them. Record labels, for their part, need frank, knowledgeable feedback from critics — both to keep them honest and hold them accountable — but such input is in short supply and veering towards extinction.

The sam...

But All My Friends Loved It Dept.

Music Criticism Has Degenerated Into Lifestyle Reporting - The Daily Beast

Even statements that appear, at first glance, to address musical issues are often lifestyle statements in disguise. I’ve learned this the hard way, by getting into detailed discussions over musical tastes, and discovering that if you force pop culture insiders to be as precise as possible in articulating the reasons why they favor a band or a singer, it almost always boils down to: “I like [fill in the name] because the...

Dream On, Dream Off Dept.

One of the fun pastimes I entertain with friends (read: arguments I like having) is arguing about the definitions of words with subtle shades of meaning between them. At some point along the way, one such discussion turned to the meaning of the word fantasy — in the most generic sense of the word, one broad enough to mean things like a Playboy centerfold, not one limited merely to books by Tolkien / C.S. Lewis / Eddings / GRRM / et al — and about what classified as a "harmless" vs. a "harmful...

Power Up Dept.

One of the most naïve political ideas out there is that a person can have no politics by choice — that you can somehow opt out of the political rat race by not voting or not holding political opinions, etc. It's reminiscent of another, parallel idea I came across when younger — the notion that everyone has a philosophy, whether or not they are aware of it or profess it explicitly.

But given that a lot more people care about politics than they do philosophy, the fact that people have politics w...