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I got sick. I don’t know how I managed to catch a flu-like virus in the middle of the summer, but I did. Funny, in English you say “catch a virus” but in Turkish we say “get caught by a virus”. I don’t know who caught whom, but I had been under the weather since Tuesday. Despite not feeling well for the majority of the week, I managed to spend ~8 hours in the studio working on my sculpture. I missed it after a two-week hiatus. To my surprise, the first time I went to the studio I found that my…
July came and went and I didn’t write a reply post to anyone. Why? I simply haven’t read anything that I felt I could build upon. I had a few knee-jerk reactions where I could have written a condescending reply post, but what’s the point of that? To be honest, I’m not sad about missing JulyReply. I don’t like forcing things.
one day late edition. again. I spent the last week in my hometown at my grandma’s summerhouse. I didn’t take time off from work since I had a lot of commitments to meet, and couldn’t swim as much as I’d have liked. Anyway, I’m grateful to be able to swim at all! Last week I mentioned a recent addition to my personal infrastructure. This new host created an avenue for me to run custom-made applications. The latest thing I deployed there is a small app to serve my blogroll on this website. I…
What’s the point of putting things into my read-it-later app? Actually, I know the point: it gives me a false sense of accomplishment. I now have this essay in my possession. It makes me feel good about myself immediately—without doing the thing. Even though I wrote a somewhat negative review of Erich Fromm’s To Have or to Be? it made me remember a crucial insight about knowledge. If my relationship with knowledge is to hoard information, I’ve missed the whole point. I need to bend, squeeze,…
The Frankfurt School has a special place in history. It’s an object of hatred for both ends of the political spectrum. Leftists, especially Marxists, hate them for diluting revolutionary thought and creating a version of the Left that is “compatible” with the capitalist ruling class. Rightists hate them for giving birth to identity politics and political correctness. However, it’s a mistake to think of the Frankfurt School as a single harmonious entity. While it’s true that the school consisted…
I continued the pending repair work in the new apartment. Last week’s focus was mostly electrical infrastructure which by the way is something I understand but find horrifying, compared to water infrastructure which I don’t understand and find boring. I’ve finished 2/3 of Erich Fromm’s To Have or to Be? but recently I started to worry that I won’t finish this book in time to write a review for Indieweb Book Club. I hope I’ll finish it this week and at least wrap up the first draft of my review.…
Last week was mostly spent working through the minor troubles with the new apartment. I bought two repeaters to fix the wifi coverage and a new TV. Some problematic infrastructure has been repaired but there’s still some work to do. For at least the last 6 years I’ve wanted to buy a new TV. I finally did it and I was very surprised by how hard it is to pick the brand and the model to buy. My old TV was a model from 2012, so I thought anything would be an upgrade and frugally decided to buy a…
“If you can’t write it, write about it.” I read this advice to overcome writer’s block in a blog post some time ago but I didn’t attach much importance to it. I usually don’t register much of the advice I read online. I maintain a somewhat cynical view of it—I believe such advice is usually written by people who are clueless about the issue. However, I recently experienced firsthand how effective this advice is while struggling to write a review of The Time Regulation Institute. I wanted to…
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s The Time Regulation Institute is a novel about a (fictional) Institute founded to synchronize every clock in Istanbul, and then in all of Turkey. The book is generally read as a satirical allegory of modernization in Turkey. The Institute is bureaucracy par excellence with its preference for the appearance of work over the work itself and its founder’s motto that “The Institute as a modern organization is going to create its own work instead of working on something…
Finally the moving is behind us and I’m writing this at our new apartment. I feel a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders. Last week was full of packing and sorting stuff out at our old place. We moved to the new place on Saturday morning and the weekend was entirely spent unpacking and settling in. My wife decided to Marie Kondo the shit out of our stuff and threw out a lot of unnecessary things (although I’m 100% sure she doesn’t know about Marie Kondo. she’s blissfully oblivious to…
Robert has a lot of stuff up his sleeve for connecting bloggers around the smallweb. After an amazing Junited 2026, now it’s time for JulyReply 2026! I really enjoyed participating in Junited. Thanks to that, I connected with a few bloggers, one of whom was Imperfect. Imperfect inspired me to write reply posts, but I was reluctant until now. What’s a better excuse than JulyReply to start doing it? I’ll tag my posts with #JulyReply. Thanks, Robert, for organizing this!
Read & enjoyed: Book Review: The Dialectical Imagination: Scott Alexander on Frankfurt School Who Took A Sh*t In The Austrian Pavilion?: An inquiry into the curious incident at the Venice Biennale. Programmer Science Fiction The Collision of Lacan and Deleuze: Desire in Ballard’s Crash notes on gooning Book Review: Red Plenty Also see the blog posts I saved in my Junited page. Bookmarked: The Bash Hackers Wiki The cave of forgotten films Cool visualizations
Writing this on a Beyoğlu day under siege again, sigh. The whole neighborhood is locked down just because some people want to celebrate who they are… We started packing today and I’ll be writing next week’s update in our new apartment. Even though I don’t feel excited about leaving our neighborhood, I’m excited to leave this apartment and finally be done with this whole moving thing. I finished reading The Shadow of the Torturer. Although I wasn’t hooked by it immediately, it turned out to be a…
We drink a LOT of tea in Turkey. Happy? Let’s drink tea. Sad? Drink tea. Tired? Tea. Relaxed? TEA. I also enjoy brewing tea in the evenings, especially when we have guests. But I was very frustrated with the inconsistency of my tea brewing. One day I decided to apply what I’d learned from brewing coffee to brewing tea. This is for brewing Turkish-style black tea. I’ve never applied it to other types of tea like rooibos or oolong. What you need to brew Turkish black tea with my method: Your…
Yesterday we saw the new play by our comrades in Antrakt7: Fairfly. It’s a play written by the Catalan author Joan Yago which tells the story of four white-collar workers who, upon getting the news of their potential layoff, decide to “change the world.” Let me briefly summarize the story here. If you don’t want to get spoilers, skip this paragraph. Santi, Irene, Martha and Pere are white-collar workers employed by a small baby food manufacturer. The company decides to lay off an uncertain…
Happy Summer Solstice and Father’s Day! The grayness of everything is slowly fading away but it’s still there. Reading, writing, coding… they all feel drab these last few weeks. I attribute this to our upcoming apartment move. I hope I’ll be able to rekindle the fire within once we’ve moved. I spent ~10 hours in the studio working on the female torso. It’s not far from the finish. I also decided on the next two sculptures I want to make: a male arm holding a hammer and a full-size female leg.…
For example, you could email people, which works better in spaces like these where pretty much everyone exposes their email address. Engender the conversations you want, the appreciation for their work you value, and the reciprocal relationships that could help you all blossom together.— ImperfectI like people who put their money where their mouth is. Today I got an email from Imperfect. They noticed I linked one of their posts in my Junited page and asked me what I think of it. This was the…
I’ve come to think that caring for people requires a degree of resistance to the culture around us. Not because people are bad, but because so much of the dominant culture is built around values that put profit, status, and competition ahead of human need. In that sense, care becomes a quiet act of rebellion.— Open Media Network
Days feel like they are compressed lately. I don’t feel like I’m attending life that seriously. This is not an unfamiliar feeling, to be honest. When this happens, I always find myself saying: “I know days are passing but I don’t know if the time is progressing.” A few months ago, I mentioned that I’m giving audiobooks a chance. As of yesterday, I concluded the experiment and once more decided that audiobooks are not for me. Although the listening experience was enjoyable, I don’t have that…
I created a group in the Critical Theory space on DFOS for people who want to talk about the philosophy of Slavoj Žižek. I don’t know if this will turn into something. I would love it if this place became somewhere Žižekians, Lacanians, Hegelians and Marxists could connect with each other and exchange ideas. If you’re reading this, consider yourself invited.
The appeal of living in a small town is being surrounded by the right number of people whom you can care about. On the other hand, living in a big city might make you feel lonely in huge crowds. Being a blogger in smallweb (or IndieWeb) is akin to living in a small town with one big exception: there’s no square in the middle of town, no town hall to gather around. In this sense maybe the proper analogy is a small island rather than a town. Smallweb can easily be an isolated experience. Contrary…
I do strength training with a personal trainer 3-4 times a week. Almost every time I’m a few minutes late and I always inform him that I’ll be late. He says I’m so traditionally late that I don’t even need to mention it. I guess the same applies to my weekly updates. I was in the studio twice last week (including today) working on my new sculpture. Today was one of those days where I made negative progress :( We watched Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. I was hoping for a scary movie but it was only…
If you are part of indieweb, you probably noticed people talking about standard.site. It’s a recent addition to AT Protocol to publish long form content. You might think of it as POSSE on steroids. I spent hours today figuring out how to integrate my blog with standard.site. It was not as hard as I thought thanks to David Bushell and Mat Marquis. The first thing you need to do is sign in and create a site.standard.publication record on Atmosphere Explorer: { "url": "https://hypersubject.net",…
I’ve never seen anything that tickled the gambler in me like this game. My best score is 0.14% (yet) Update: I just hit 0.04%.
As a struggle against capital, the struggle against data centers is a struggle on the side of workers who are at risk of job loss, deskilling, and greater intensification of the work they are already doing. It’s against the imperious billionaires and tech lords who claim what they are doing is inevitable and there is nothing any of us can do to stop it. In fact, the struggle against data centers may be the strongest and clearest front in the struggle against the billionaire class today.— Jodi's…
Things I read (and enjoyed) The Combahee River Collective Statement: Founding text of identity politics by a collective run by Black Lesbian women. On Revolution: A cybernetic look at revolution. The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born In a technopoly, the only ideas and thoughts that have social and cultural legitimacy are those that support, are supported by, and are mediated through technology. Scott Alexander on taste: Contra Everyone on Taste, Three Model Organisms for…
A lot was happening this week. So here are fragmented updates instead of a single overarching theme. Thirteen years ago today, the Gezi Park protests started in Istanbul. Those were glorious days of a rebellion that was and still is unmatched in terms of scale and spirit. We lost eight of us in those days. May they ever live on in our fight for justice and freedom. We are moving! After spending the last 3 years in Beyoğlu, we are moving back to our old place in Bakırköy, which was nicer in…
A few months ago I was reflecting on my need for a digital community: I find myself once again yearning for a digital community. I believe the future of social media (for me) is some kind of invite-only group chat where the conversation flows like a river. It might live in Discord, Slack or even IRC, I don’t care. Physical community is important but as a millennial I need text-based friendships too. Maybe I should have said hypertext instead of text-based. Hypertext is more than just text.…
It was a packed weekend, so I couldn’t publish the weekly update on Sunday. Another one-day-late edition. Fascism became a catch-all phrase for leftists to criticize their adversaries. It is a term that has a historical meaning, and I don’t want to repeat the same mistake of muddying the definition. By fascism I mean: consolidation of power in a single powerful leader, dismantling of all institutions to remove any safety brakes in the system, controlling a large part of the economy and…
What does “superhuman intelligence” even mean at that point if humans can’t detect it if it’s superhuman?— the singularity is nearer
