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 care1. Physical community is important but as a millennial I need text-based friendships too.
On Friday, I got a message from kerey on WhatsApp saying that “there is a need for a non-normie consortium”. It triggered a long conversation about the normie/non-normie dichotomy and whether this type of distinction is elitist or not. I collected my thoughts on this in Against the Non-Normie.
At the beginning of this year, I decided to merge all things I wrote in different corners of the internet. After 5 weeks of that experiment, I decided otherwise. My old writings are worthy in their respective contexts. Visitors of this blog are probably not interested in technical posts about Kubernetes nor political posts about Turkey. And I am not interested in writing about them here.
So, my Turkish writing will continue in bengidoom.com and technical posts in ege.dev. Deciding this was a relief—I don’t need to carry the baggage of old writings here. hypersubject.net is the home of a different persona of mine. A persona that I can use to be more personal and honest on the internet. A persona who can regularly hit publish.
Richard Stallman had a Marxian effect on technology in the 1980s. He started
the Free Software movement. His ideas mobilized a vast number of programmers
and the ideology he initiated still has a great gravity in the software
ecosystem. Since the year 2000, thousands of developers travel to Brussels
every February like pilgrims for Free and Open Source Software Developers'
European Meeting (FOSDEM). I am proud to be among the pilgrims for the second
year in a row.
Weekends feel busier than weekdays lately. Time flew, and I just noticed that I didn’t manage to finish this week’s post. This was bound to happen. It’s okay. Shhh… it’s okay. IT’S OKAY! Discipline is not punching yourself into the mold of a wireheaded soldier. Discipline is the ability to flow around, between, and through various slip-ups. Discipline is persistently looking at the horizon. Okay, I needed this pep talk.
I started my first bust this week. The number of details on a human face is crazy. And what’s hard about reflecting all those details on the clay is not the technique but actually noticing them. Making art requires a lot of noticing. Noticing requires giving a fuck. You need to give a fuck to create something. But too much of it can also paralyze you. There’s a fine balance between giving a fuck and letting go and allowing yourself to create something messy.
I finally did it. I finally found a tutor for sculpting. Actually, what I found is much bigger than just a tutor. I found a workshop, a collective, a mirage in the middle of the desert. Actually… in the middle of an industrial zone.
On Friday I went to OtonomArt for an introductory sculpting class. I made this relief with mud:
Starting next week I’ll go there twice a week. Finally I have a space for sculpting and hopefully will have a regular practice throughout the year. I am going to enter 2027 as a sculptor.
2025 was a good year for me. After quitting my startup, which was going nowhere, at the end of 2024, I entered 2025 rejuvenated. As a result I read more, experimented more, travelled more, did more… I feel like 2025 was a stepping stone for 2026.
What I was up to in the first week of 2026?
hypersubject.net
My online presence is highly fragmented.
I have a personal and “professional” web site at https://ege.dev where I mostly post my technical writings. I also have a content type that I call “beats” which are unlisted, they only show up in the RSS feed. I was using beats to post short form updates that are usually personal. I have a photo gallery at that site as well.
