ege's weblog

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. After these two I’ll allow myself to graduate from human anatomy and work on more abstract things.

• We watched Die My Love (2025). I’m adding it to the list of movies that provide a glimpse of the feminine psyche. I found a lot of parallels between Grace’s turmoil due to her creative block and my own relationship with creativity. I might want to explore this further in a future blog post.
• I don’t know why but on a whim I decided to create a personal Instagram account and connect with my friends there. I think something in me is trying to communicate an elevated need for connection.
• Speaking of connection, after a discussion on the future of our zine, I started to feel a strong urge to create a digital publication to collectively publish something periodically. I think this too stems from the same impulse.
• We saw a play called Fairfly which I really enjoyed. I wrote about it at length in another post.

• 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 much opportunity to wear headphones and listen to a book, and when I have the opportunity it’s usually for a brief period (10-15 mins), during which I usually prefer listening to something on YouTube. Because of this, the book I was listening to, The Time Regulation Institute, was waiting unattended even though I was enjoying it very much. I decided to continue reading it as an ebook.
• In parallel, I continue reading The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe. At first, I found it hard to read, mostly because of the author’s choice of words: a lot of medieval terms and words Wolfe invented himself (at least I assume so, because they have no definition in the dictionary). After grinding through 1/3 of the book, reading became easier. I think I started to get used to Severian.
• On Thursday, I published my most popular post ever on this blog. It’s a wonderful feeling to see something I wrote resonate with others. Also, I noticed how different the attention of strangers makes me feel here compared to social media, especially Twitter. On Twitter, I had a few viral tweets (thousands of retweets and likes) in the past, and they always made me feel dirty, even ashamed of myself. Here, on the other hand, it made me feel connected.
• We watched 28 Days Later (2002) this week. I’m not well versed in the history of zombie-apocalypse movies, but I thought this movie established a few tropes in the genre, the biggest being “in any apocalyptic setting the most horrid thing you will encounter is other humans”.

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 to the corporate platforms where the connection is heavily mediated to be commodified, in smallweb the connection needs to be intentional. Connection here requires quilting points even if temporary.

I feel a recent change in the smallweb. It’s started to feel more connected than ever. Take Robert’s Junited for example: this year’s participants outnumber those of all previous years combined. I believe the reason for this liveliness is the emergence of blog directories and discovery platforms that act like quilting points for shared meaning. How would I have participated in junited if I hadn’t heard about it in the first place?

Bubbles is one example of a gathering location for the smallweb. It’s a blog aggregator where you can discover the newest posts published on a handful (~5000) blogs. Kagi smallweb is another one with a different approach. Bear Blog’s discover page is another one; although it’s platform-specific, it’s part of the smallweb in spirit. A recent addition is the standard.site protocol where stitching blogs together happens automatically thanks to AT Protocol. They are gravity points that halt the centrifugal drift of isolated blogs in the smallweb. Together, they create a landscape for shared discourse.

These developments are signs of the upcoming smallweb renaissance. Smallweb no longer feels like a refugee camp where people find themselves thrown together while escaping the high walls of the corporate web. We are now building something together. Our isolated islands have started to feel like an archipelago.

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 disgusting. Where are those really scary movies?
• I started reading The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe. It’s been a while since I started reading a new fantasy series.
• Last Wednesday we held a memorial for the death anniversary of the great Turkish poet, Nazım Hikmet Ran. It was a day of poems and songs. Many people read his poems I know, but there was one poem I’ve never heard of where Nazım (Turkish) walked over Berkeley and his idealism.

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",
  "name": "ege's weblog",
  "$type": "site.standard.publication",
  "description": "We must reclaim the cyberspace.",
  "preferences": {
    "showInDiscover": true
  }
}

Protip: Leave Collection and Record key empty when creating the record to use default values. Record keys are subject to strict validation rules.

Then you need to create .well-known/site.standard.publication at the root of your site.

$ cat static/.well-known/site.standard.publication at://did:plc:32534e3a5wza2m3omyuflhm3/site.standard.publication/3mnmnwcnftk2i

did:plc:32534e3a5wza2m3omyuflhm3 is my account, 3mnmnwcnftk2i is the record key of the publication.

I also put the following into <head>:

<link 
  rel="site.standard.publication"
  href="at://did:plc:32534e3a5wza2m3omyuflhm3/site.standard.publication/3mnmnwcnftk2i" />

This is all I needed to do to register my blog on AT Proto. The rest is creating site.standard.document for each blog post like this one:

{
  "path": "/entries/2026/01/we-must-reclaim-the-cyberspace",
  "site": "at://did:plc:32534e3a5wza2m3omyuflhm3/site.standard.publication/3mnmnwcnftk2i",
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "title": "we must reclaim the cyberspace",
  "publishedAt": "2026-01-01T09:33:17.000Z",
  "textContent": "The internet I grew up in no longer exists.\n\nThe internet, with its hyper-fast communication flows, was meant to enable the\nnew golden age for humanity. We were promised to have a global village where\ntribes transcend the limitations of geography. We could find our people\nwherever they were. Our ideas, our niche interests were supposed to connect us\nwith others in the vast network of nodes. If, only if, we can discover them.\n\nInstead, what we got is the commodification of communication. The connection\nthat was promised to us has been reformatted in terms of the market: \"How can a\npractice, experience, or feeling be monetized?\" Yes, discoverability is solved\nthanks to search engines and social media platforms. But now we connect, not to\neach other, but to the algorithm. We no longer contribute ideas to each other,\nbut to the circulation of the \"content\".\n\nWe must reclaim the cyberspace.",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://hypersubject.net/entries/2026/01/we-must-reclaim-the-cyberspace"
}

I didn’t want to create records manually, so I started looking for solutions. To my surprise, I couldn’t find an SDK for AT Proto in go. But there’s goat (go at [protocol]). Unfortunately it didn’t allow me to create site.standard.document records:

$ goat record create doc.json 
error: API request failed (HTTP 400): InvalidRequest: Unknown lexicon type: site.standard.document

Protip: Even though I couldn’t use goat to create records, it can delete them. Since I figured out the integration through trial and error, it came in handy:

$ goat record ls did:plc:32534e3a5wza2m3omyuflhm3 \
	| grep document \
	| awk '{print $2}' \
	| xargs -I{} goat record delete -c site.standard.document -r {}

Then I found Sequoia. It’s a “simple CLI for creating standard.site documents from your existing static blog.” It’s not that flexible (yet) but very simple to use.

$ sequoia auth # authenticate with an app password
$ sequoia init # configure publisher
$ sequoia publish # create site.standard.document records
$ sequoia inject # inject <link> elements to each blog post for validation

It’s also able to post on Bluesky when you publish a new blog post. Very handy.

Finally, I confirmed that everything works with Standard.site Validator.

I’m not sure if standard.site will turn out to be something important but today it feels like a good step forward for the indieweb. And since it’s not intrusive and easy to integrate, I encourage you to publish your content on AT Protocol.