if you find yourself wondering “what does ege listen to on repeat these days” i got you fam:

Random thoughts on the passing week.

• After 2 weeks of hiatus I was finally in the atelier again to work on my sculpture. I think the bust is coming to an end. I feel the resistance to continue working on it. One part of me says “I’m bored of this, I want to work on something new,” while another part says “this is 80% finished and I know the last 20% is the hardest part.” I honestly don’t know what to do. Anyway this is how it looks right now:

• We are watching the new Traitors Türkiye show with my wife. It’s definitely cringey, but thankfully I’ve exercised my cringe muscles enough to get hooked on the show. It’s so funny to watch a group of people slowly implode because of their failure to coordinate. They keep voting away the innocents because the group keeps selecting tall poppies as the Schelling point. I’ve never watched the US show so I don’t really know the format, but I wish we didn’t know the traitors so we could try to spot them alongside the participants. Nevertheless it’s a good show to watch while we eat instead of the always depressing Turkish news.

• I don’t know why but I haven’t been able to read the last few weeks and I’m starting to worry. I’ve been reading Rosalind Krauss’ Passages in Modern Sculpture since last month. It’s a good book and it’s a gift from my friends, so I don’t want to abandon it. I think I’m not able to read because life has been so busy the last few months. Work is busy, I needed to travel a lot, and my political duties plus my hobbies already take up too much space. The problem is authors keep writing books, so there’s this never-ending feeling of being behind. (GUYS CAN YOU PLEASE STOP PUBLISHING NEW BOOKS FOR LIKE THE NEXT 10 YEARS OR SO!?)

Continue reading → 79 words

group chat is silent. no one responds to your invitation. it’s okay. it’s been months since you walked aimlessly in the streets. didn’t you miss being a flaneur?

aren’t you entertained?

you bump into Spinoza. HELLO MR. SPINOZA! such a great philosopher. you take a selfie with him. suddenly, the anxiety of an imaginary scene where someone asks you “what’s the gist of spinoza?” clenches your stomach. you hope no one asks anything about him. fingers crossed.

let’s take a few puffs here.

two men are standing on the corner. you can’t hear what they are talking about. but somehow a cackle reaches your ears. isn’t it funny to recognize your kin, by the sound of a singular cackle? you smile at this thought. one needs to walk without a purpose to notice these thoughts. AIMLESS WALKING ROCKS!

until you realize you have to pee.

you need to find a toilet. is this a purpose? IS THIS AN AIM? are you still a flaneur?

calm down. strolling around in a city presents many struggles to the flaneur. non-existence of the goal must not imply the non-existence of intentionality. what do you have in your hands but this intention? who can say that it was not the spirit who filled your bladder by paving the way brick by brick which you happened to set foot on. wasn’t “freedom, the appreciation of necessity”? you raise your hands to the sky and shout a plea to the spirit: “please show me a public toilet!”

you see a small road construction near the canal. you suddenly realize that all construction sites have a portable toilet. you approach the fences. there really is a portable toilet. alas, fences are locked with a padlock. you see a bench nearby. you feel tired. you want to sit there and have a smoke. you want to sit on every bench in the city and have a smoke! amsterdam’s benches are amazing. how cool it is to be able to be outside without being a customer? everyone talks about walkable cities, not enough people talk about sitable cities though.

you still need to pee tho.

you decide to check google maps for public toilets. HAHA LOOK AT THIS google-map-checking-flaneur, my ass! SHUT UP! “junior knows rules, senior knows exceptions.” you are a senior. you know when to switch modes. you know how to balance the apollonian and the dionysian!

señor, you are just a guy who needs to pee.

maps show a toilet 100 meters away. thank goodness! who can say that it was not the spirit that manifested as your agency for deciding to check the map? NO ONE. no fucking one.

you reach the toilet. it smells a little more pleasant than a decaying corpse. the toilet looks like the one in trainspotting. it doesn’t matter. pee…

the warmth of emptying your bladder fills your body. isn’t it strange how removing warm liquid from your body makes you feel warmer?

you feel the buzz in your pocket. chat invites you to the beer temple. you need to get on a tram. no more flaneuring today.

are you entertained?

chat passes you a joint. you take a puff. the smoke itches your throat. ugh americans… yuck. you don’t understand how not mixing the grass with tobacco makes it easier to smoke.

you pass a coffee shop. “let me roll another one.” you watch him squeezing enough weed for three joints into a single fatboy. this is excessive. you are excessive.

you walk between the red lights. an asian in fishnets catches your eye. “we can share if you want buddy!” “you can just do stuff.” yeah, that implies you can just not do stuff.

“only by freeing ourselves from sad passions can we truly act,” said Spinoza.

is that a cock ring? no babe this is prince albert.

Two years ago I asked this blood-chilling question:

what if the text I see is not the same text you see in the same url?

This is now happening. Google patented a technology that rewrites webpages tailored to each individual user.

i’m writing this in amsterdam. i’ll be in the city for kubecon till friday. let me know if you want to meet!

• it’s been almost a month since i wrote that i’m yearning for a digital community that runs preferably on irc. guess what, there’s now the dealgorithmed irc server. if you want to believe in the magic, voice your intentions more.

• halloy.chat might be the prettiest software i’ve seen in a long time!

• i forgot to mention the whereabouts of the photos i talked about in january. i decided to buy yet another domain and create a new site. this way i have the liberty of posting photos without worrying about their “professional” associations. my photoroll is now live on hyperimages.net.

• i smoked weed tonight (ofc i did–i am in amsterdam) after 6 months of cold turkey. i both missed the feeling of my intuition firing on all cylinders and forgot how much work it was to flow with it. thankfully, my years of reading posts on r/petioles about tolerance breaks finally resulted in something and i started with a low dosage. btw the appeal of amsterdam is not weed being “legal”, it’s a city that offers you hundreds of AMAZING spots to sit and smoke. (i wish i had taken the photo of the benches at my metro station’s exit).

• nothing much happened last week due to my hours in front of the keyboard. it was a busy week at work–i needed to create a PoC for point-in-time recovery for mysql on kubernetes. i’m writing a post about it for ege.dev, hopefully will publish it sometime this week.

Pluribus

We were watching Pluribus for the last 10 days and finished the first season today. I have mixed feelings about the show. I especially found the first few episodes hard to watch because I couldn’t stand Carol. It got easier towards the end of the season but I can’t say that I loved the show. Nevertheless, it was an interesting watch. I especially liked the depiction of the collective power that humans possess. It’s eerie to think about the connection between our individuality and the problem of coordinating with others. I read a take (Turkish) that said the show is trying to teach communism to American masses but I disagree. Although the world becomes communist in a few hours after everyone gets “infected,” Pluribus’ virus is not of communism but McLuhan’s. It turns the world into the global village:

Global village is not created by the motor car or even by the airplane. It’s created by instant electronic information movement. The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged and poking his nose into everybody else’s business. The global village is a world in which you don’t necessarily have harmony. You have extreme concern with everybody else’s business. And much involvement in everybody else’s life. — Marshall McLuhan

The global village, once formed, renders game theory useless. And thus, it removes the hardest problem of communism: the coordination. In this sense, I found Pluribus deeply anti-communist. Communism is shown as only possible in the case of an alien hive mind with a biological imperative to cooperate. The obverse, of course, is that we, as humans, have a biological imperative that is not suitable for communism.

Kagi Small Web

It’s been a few weeks since I started using kagi as my search engine. I love this kind of initiative that tries to form a more humane internet (I believe we need to reclaim the internet). Apart from my RSS reader, Kagi Small Web has become my go-to to read stuff on the internet. To my pleasure, they also released it as a mobile app last week!

Crucial Tracks

What are crucial tracks? A crucial track is a song that changes the direction of your life or helps you see the world in a different way. The songs that represent relationships or trigger memories. The songs that make you, you.

Crucial Tracks is a music journal with a simple idea: share the important songs in your life. Every member gets one post per calendar day. Use a daily prompt or pick any subject you’d like!

I. LOVE. THIS! I heard about Crucial Tracks thanks to Steve Makofsky.

This was my first post there:

You can subscribe to my feed with your favorite RSS reader.

I wish I could share all the love that’s in my heart
Remove all the bars that keep us apart
I wish you could know what it means to be me
Then you’d see and agree
That every man should be free (I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free)

2026 is definitely the year of blogging for me. I already published twice as many posts as I did last year. Last Friday I published a post in my technical blog in the same vein as this post: a reflection on the week. Today I posted another one there about the women who shaped me in my career. Happy Women’s Day to all women around the world!

I’m writing this while my neighborhood is under siege by law enforcement. There’s a bunch of police officers in every corner just because the women of Istanbul want to have a rally to celebrate March 8, express their anger and mourn the losses of their fellow sisters who were killed by men.

As politics affects citizens of privileged countries more and more, I see more people writing about it on their personal corner of cyberspace. But for some reason it always comes with an apology for bringing up political issues. That’s the primary reason why we feel powerless in the face of the political crisis we are currently in: political space is treated as something separate and political issues as something you should almost feel ashamed for caring about. The collective person is forgotten in the pages of history. What we have now is a radically atomized individual who can only relate to others by their choice of commodities and lifestyle.

In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent.

Marwan Makhoul

Another Sunday, another weekly reflection.

This was a really busy week. I worked more than 8 full-focus hours every single weekday. This means I probably spent more than 10 hours in front of the computer. It’s a lot! Thankfully this week was a 4-day week so I had time to rest.

On Friday I spent the whole day working on my sculpture. The bust is coming along. I decided to do something strange (as I usually do) and make it half female and half male. I don’t know how I will do the transition smoothly in the middle of the face but we’ll see.

The biggest thing this week was seeing Louis C.K., my favorite comedian, live in Istanbul. It was amazing. He’s the king of uncomfortable topics and no one does body horror like him. Seeing him live was an incredible experience, I feel very lucky to have had the chance.

I tried to see Louis before, in 2022. He was going to do a show in Kyiv on February 25. I bought tickets and went to Ukraine. On February 24, the war started. Yes, I was in Ukraine at the time (maybe I will write that story here some day). A day before the Istanbul show, I jokingly said that USA is going to attack Iran on the day of the show. My friend laughed at me for believing such superstitious shit. On Saturday morning he sent me the news about Israel’s bombing of Tehran. I told you so!

It didn’t affect the show though and I managed to see Louis this time. Writing this makes me a bit ashamed of myself. People’s homes are bombed and I am grateful because it didn’t affect my Saturday evening plans. My father used to say that we are like antelopes. Our fellows are mauled to death right in the corner and we keep chewing the grass until it’s our turn.

I wrote about the upcoming war at the beginning of this year. I don’t know at which point history books will start the third great war in the future—or whether there will be history books or humans to read them—but it’s happening right now. It’s crazy how contingent everything is. The world is in the middle of a political crisis on top of the economic one. But in the end, we are heading to this war because of a handful of people’s personal agendas—Netanyahu’s imperialist ambitions and Trump’s need to get away from Epstein. Busy, busy, busy.¹

A few hours before writing these lines, we watched Sinners (2025). I really enjoyed it but I don’t see why it has record-breaking number of Oscar nominations. It definitely didn’t feel that groundbreaking to me. Nevertheless, the racial tensions were perfectly portrayed. And the music… I am writing this while listening to the soundtrack. The scene where Sammie sings “I Lied to You” deserves an Oscar.

Ah, also I wrote The Designated Rebel this week. It had been sitting on my backlog for a long time. I don’t think I did a good job writing it but I am happy that I did it anyway. Someday I’ll revisit it and do it the justice it deserves.

A while ago, during a sprint retrospective, I suggested significant changes to our “Definition of Done.” When I finished, the room went quiet. What did that silence mean?

The silence lasted nearly a minute. Why was no one saying anything? Finally, the PM broke the tension by prompting the team:

His comment further irritated me. I wondered: Are we really going to operate like this, where I suggest a top-down change and everyone silently accepts the new rules? So, I protested.

After the meeting, I couldn’t stop reflecting on it. A quote from Žižek began racing through my mind: “Those in power often prefer even a critical participation to silence.” I told myself I spoke up to allow people to be active participants in decisions affecting their day-to-day lives. But then I had to ask: Did I say what I said because I was in a position of power?

At the moment, I thought the PM was interpreting the silence as agreement and that his comment was calcifying the team’s passivity. Later, I realized the opposite was true. He was the one trying to break their stagnation; his joke was the perfect bait. It was an invitation for the team to engage.

This led me to a sad realization: my objection achieved the exact opposite of what I intended. It only made everyone more comfortable in their passivity. By jumping in to “defend” their right to speak, I became the Designated Rebel. I allowed them to stay passive while feeling good about having a champion. Now they know someone will always speak up “for” them. I had become part of the very power structure I was trying to resist.

So, did I speak up because I was in a position of power? Was I trying to keep the team busy with “pseudo-activities” so that nothing changes while a lot is happening?

Modern politics often functions this way. There is an ever-present urge to be active and to participate. We tweet, we condemn, and we protest—all within the coordinates of the system. We do a lot so that, ultimately, nothing really changes. Our critical participation is exactly what allows the system to function.The best example of this is Žižek’s neurotic, who endlessly talks on the divan because a moment of silence might result in the analyst asking a crucial question.

While the passivity of subjects might give them breathing space to see the underlying mechanism behind politics, in a space where decisions are made from the bottom up, it simply locks everything down. If people refuse to participate in a democratic space, there is no moving forward.

Contemporary democracy is often an illusion to obscure the fact that a minority rules over an enormous majority. In that context, whatever keeps us busy enough—discourse, work, pleasures—to avoid revolting is “good” for the system. However, in a team that runs on democratic principles, decisions require participation. Without the critical engagement of my teammates, whatever I suggest is impossible to truly implement. My “power” over them is only the influence I’ve earned—or perhaps I am in power and completely blinded by the fact that my “rebellion” is just the grease on the wheels of their silence.