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 almost all aspects except the location: rent, space, parking spots, noise. The biggest downside is of course proximity to our dear friends…

• I was on paid time off since Wednesday, so we had some time to watch three movies:

  • One Battle After Another (2025): After all the fuss this movie made last year, I was very curious about it. I found the portrayal of revolutionaries too caricatured, but it was nevertheless an enjoyable watch. See Žižek’s review.
  • Sentimental Value (2025): This was a very slow-burning movie but I liked it. I posted about this on Mastodon: “One can endlessly psychoanalyze the characters of the movie but it was ultimately about making peace with Home.” Also, I think this was my biggest exposure to Norwegian and I was fascinated by how beautiful it sounds.
  • Project Hail Mary (2026): I kept hearing about this movie the last few weeks and, being always thirsty for science fiction, we decided to watch it. I really really enjoyed the friendship between Grace and Rocky so much that everything else about the movie was shadowed by it. Because of the camaraderie between them, Project Hail Mary is now located closer to RRR (2022) in my vector space. See Marta’s review focusing on the politics of the movie.

• I started playing World of Warcraft Classic with a friend primarily to have a gathering location in cyberspace. I remember how boring it was to kill monsters to complete quests when I was into MMORPGs years ago. To my surprise, I now find it relaxing to mindlessly farm and loot.

• Susan Sontag’s essay collection On Photography had been sitting in my book pile for a long time. This week, on a whim, I opened it and started reading the first essay, “In Plato’s Cave.” This was my first experience reading Sontag; I can definitely say that I’m impressed by her foresight:

It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form. That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph. — Susan Sontag, In Plato’s Cave