“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 a...
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 bureaucrac...
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 bureaucrac...
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...
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?
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 ...
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 ...
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’...
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 su...
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...
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 bloss...
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.
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 mont...
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...
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 ...
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....
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.
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,...
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. W...
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 ...
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...
A few days ago I wrote that I want to make peace with the mundane. With that in mind, I decided to update the theme of my blog to a classic weblog format. The new theme is heavily inspired by jwz.org and simonwillison.net.
I have too many books, especially in digital form. Whenever a book piques my interest, I immediately seek it out, acquire it by any means possible, and at least read its table of contents. This of course results in piles of books that I will never manage to read. As my knowl...
the biggest news of this week was definitely the exhibition at OtonomArt. after
~50 hours of work, it was so exciting to put Syzygy on display. it was also
thrilling to see my name as the artist on the label.
i’m glad i photographed the sculpture after every session so i could see the
gradual process. now, looking back, i find it eerie to look at the
first photos. i created this thing from mud with my bare hands!
one of the most eye-opening videos on youtube for me was anna p. foxen’s exoticizing the impossible, in which she talks about a common spiritual failure mode where the practitioner, being overfocused on the extraordinary, misses the beauty in mundane reality.
i was thinking ...
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