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Nov 14th: On Independency, David Graeber, and Friends

Hi, this is gonna be a (happy?) stream of thought, next one prolly is about religion or wasting the days away, based on how edgy or sad I feel and when. Question for you after you finish the writeup: is this more Lain or Evangelion? DM me your thoughts.

Personal update before: I've randomly caught a mean as fuck cold, I didn't know colds were even contagious before? Language barrier ig, cold refers to a different condition in Turkey I'm pretty sure. Either way it's passed me in like 4 or less days. I've also gotten a bike to travel to and from work with for 8km total a day(imagine the savings in time and money over the bus pass!). It kinda has massive tires and doesn't feel well set-up, so it'll be a bit of a misery to ride, but that just means more muscle development to me until I give up and buy a damn e-scooter. I've also fucked up two more exams. I just have 2 more of those and 1 assignment before I graduate, weee! Finally, the library of alexandria episode(now THAT was a lain ass writeup) continues as I clear out old discord messages, ironically contradicting with this writeup's messaging. Anyways: 

I love my friends and family. Holy shit, like I cannot word to you what miracles have happened to me in Canada and before. I've developed around four mostly distinct groups of incredibly good friends who I am as close with as I've been with any friends ever, starting within 2 months of me being in Canada. My friends from back home also remain as close as ever, regularly checking up and making the effort to keep it fresh over like the last 4 years.

Many people, especially intl students, especially through COVID, worry about making connections, because some genuinely can't seem to. While I believe my luck to be a wild zigzag, I've seemingly never struggled to find genuine people, who regardless of my having been able to be of help to them, have repeatedly done me incredible favors, be it material support or emotional or just rooting for me in my endeavors, and honestly sometimes I wonder why and how I came to deserve such unconditional love and support. It is mutual-and I do try my utmost to show it-but often I am still shocked by how genuinely kindly I'm treated by people who have no obligation or need to, or respected while I believe I have not yet proven my capabilities to myself let alone the world. 

I've remained infinitely grateful and puzzled about why people continually show me such love. In highschool my boys/bros/gang/fellow explosives experts theorized that it was that I was an open book and very approachable(alongside not pulling punches) that people found me so immediately trustworthy or insufferable and not much inbetween. I think that hypothesis is correct, but I also think there's another way of analyzing friendships: David Graeber.

The relevant part of Graeber's texts is Debt, specifically that early societies weren't barter societies, but instead functioned on debts of trust. You'd do something for your neighbour because you knew they'd do you a favor if and when the time came. Exchanges of favors not necessarily equivalent in material value, but ongoing and not too off from each other. Barter and currency both came when societies grew significantly and had to trade with groups and people they could not trust or know. Think of a group of Turkish dads fighting over who gets the bill this time(fun fact: a lot of them will actually sneak toward the cashier and pre-emptively pay for the whole group) versus 5 europeans paying the exact amount on the check associated with what they bought. 

One thing I keep noticing is that a lot of people in our hyper-atomized, individualist society have cherished the concept of independence so much that they dodge being indebted to anyone or have anyone indebted to them, when it comes to trust. Around me, I see people(sadly including my own mom) that just refuse help, though there's the worse version which involves self-caring your way out of caring for anyone or anything else. Complete independence is a myth, and complete independence from your fellow man is a crisis. If you avoid trust and trusting, your dependencies become ever more fragile, ever closer to that crisis.

As the theory of international trade goes(Whiplash paragraph start, right?), if two economies of different capabilities lean into what they do best and trade those between each other, both sides will end up with better results than producing all their needs by themselves even if they *can* do that. This doesn't work with countries in reality due to politics, but it absolutely works with people. One can't and shouldn't be a spineless leech, but some things you just can't fully manage alone, be it getting the best job or dealing with something in your head, or just being 5$ short for your order at a restaurant, and your quality of life goes up if you're willing to be open about things like this to your friends, and be willing to provide these things back to them if and when the time comes.

I wouldn't be half of what and who I am without the countless people who were there when I needed a chat, an artist for my videogames, a roommate, a shoulder to cry on, a recommendation letter, an extra cigarette. There are numerous life-changing favors I remember people doing for me, without me asking, without any conceivable way to pay them back on my side. So many have put down ladders for ledges I couldn't climb with my own(or my family's) facilities, be it social or economic. 

In return, I hope to put down as many ladders as possible for those who may need them and be the best version of me to show the people who were there for me that their faith was well placed. I wish I was born into a situation where I didn't have to rely on a fluke-level chance of getting here, but it sure got me to appreciate how valuable it is to trust and be trusted. I think we all should strive to channel that Turkish dad when we can.

Oct 29th: 100 Years of the Turkish Republic!!!!!

Hi, I've been rabid about this: Turkey was declared a democratic republic on the 29thd of October 1923. Here's why I am absolutely over the moon about it(Beside being Turkish!!)

The Turkish War Of Independence was the event that caused the Turks' international reputation to be that of a phoenix, going from the Treaty of Sevres which would have constituted the formal end to the independence of the Turkish nation(beside a tiny enclave in mid-anatolia) to the Treaty of Lausanne 3 years later-forming around 90% of the current Turkish borders. This was done through a people's revolution.

The significance is that those 5 or so years of the Turkish resistance constitute a leftist rebellion against imperialist and colonial powers as well as the Ottoman monarchy. After the successful revolution, the ashes of the Ottoman Empire were turned into modern Turkey: a secular democracy that explicitly rejects ethnonationalist tendencies, one of the first to give women the right to vote, and so on and so forth. 

For 1923? Turkey was one of the most progressive countries on earth and bounced into a state of once again being peers with the Europeans who were attempting to colonise it 3 years prior. Few revolutions succeed, even fewer result in a society and country that is better off afterward. I'm sure there's a few more, but short of the founding of the Soviet Union, which is since dead and widely hated, this is the most successful one I know of.

What is also crazy is that these changes were top-down, the leadership of the revolution realising change had to happen and pushing the country away from the religiously governed, imperialist empire segregated across gender, race, and religion that it was. The citizenry would have been okay with, and in fact probably preferred keeping a few of those things. Tet those leading the charge to win back independence, and chiefly, Ataturk, refused the title of emperor, and effectively quantum leaped Turkish society and it's values, to the point his 6 principles, united under the title 'Kemalism' remain globally relevant and poignant as ever today. He certainly was a man of his time and had numerous flaws, but those are honestly not relevant to the conversation here.

My favorite principle is "Ne mutlu Türk'üm diyene", in an era of ethnonationalism, this basically translates to saying that identifying as Turkish is what makes someone a Turk, rather than race, ethnicity or religion. Considering the modern Twitter(X) feed, this refusal of ethnonationalism is a pretty good take that remains at least lukewarm.

To acknowledge: these principles are under threat within Turkey, and the country's not gone particularly well economically or societally arguably since WW2(though especially since Erdogan's election), due to a chain of electing charismatic right-center politicians who sell the country out, a coup happening to depose them, and the populace picking the next right-center guy to sell the country out then be deposed in a coup. There are other factors such as very heavy CIA involvement, but still.

I blame part of this on Ataturk's revolution being top-down. We never had to behead our monarchy, we were just given things like democracy and equality without really asking for those things. I am pretty sure I could take the presidency on charisma alone if I do not lose my good looks in the coming 30 years and given some money to run the campaign with. People to this day, especially for religious reasons, will literally ask to be oppressed or be okay with such if it means [insert minority ethnic, gender or sexuality group of Turks] have it worse than them. Populism is busted, a QAnon type cult of personality is very easy to form the way Erdogan has with at least 30% of the country.

YET: Regardless of the backsliding on the global stage in both economy and reputation, as ills that we thought gone in 1923 come out the woodwork, the Turkish nation remains dedicated to Kemalist principles, remembering, repeating, and furthering them. Ataturk, being one of the 20th century's greatest statesmen and generals, remains rightfully revered, and I can't help but be proud of my countrymen for their staunch faith in what is right and loyalty to the principles that continue to provide the Turks their independence. The current regime's struggle against Kemalist principles has had not that much effect despite 20 years of effort and will fade as soon as Erdogan, who has no appropriate successor, dies of old age.

Oct 26th: Torque, Restraint, Un-Shitting The Font

Hi! Elephant firmly in the room: I changed the font. It was offensively bad and honestly I do want my writing to be less upsetting to attempt to read[it'll remain as such, but because of content rather than presentation!]

So I watched 2004's Torque yesterday after seeing a scene involving two leather-clad women engaged in motorcycle-fu in front of massive Mtn Dew and Coke ads, set to Static-X's "Push It". The tidbits on it on imdb involve the director going "I wanted to make a dumb movie for smart people, but the studios intervened and that's why it's dogshit". Ice Cube is in the cast!!!

You just know. If anything is going to be a fun watch it's Torque(2004). And shockingly, it's not a 'so bad it's good', it's a very competently directed, fun as hell distillation of the platonic ideal of 2004. Intentionally or not, it holds up a mirror to the era and I'd honestly argue that's why it was panned so hard despite being well made and supremely 2004.

The thing that Torque makes me think about though has been in my head for a long while. It's not lacking in self-awareness, in fact it's quite literally a parody, yet it is unironically good even if you hadn't watched the thing(s) it parodies. It's unrestrained, shameless and unapologetic. I feel like after 2008, culture shifted into a very painfully self-aware, critically-focused vibe. I have a voice in my head that fucking soyjaks anything I think or do before and after I do it, and I'm sure it's not just me. It just seems hard for us to un-cinemasins ourselves, not second guess everything, and just make stuff.

This applies to more than just hedonistic shit: unless you completely fall flat on your face, it's better to say things sub-optimally and let others(or yourself!) iterate on it, than to not say things at all as you take too long searching for the right way to do so.

Not much else to say or a big grand conclusion on how to reach it, but we all just gotta all somewhat muzzle our internal critic(both for ourselves and others and media). Restraint generally goes out and in the window per decade, but I just feel like it's stayed a little too long and is getting pointless.

Oct 24th: My Personal Library of Alexandria and The Digital Millenium

I was born in 2000. The start of the digital age. We moved slowly but surely from polaroids to photos stored on an 80gb hard drive, and then our Facebook accounts, which was the *only* social media in Turkey far as non-MySpace people cared(we had a few turn-of-the-millenium proto-social-media that still maintain activity to this day, a la eksi sozluk, which is like urban dictionary mixed with 4chan). 

I'm old enough to remember playing club penguin over MSN with my first-grade friends, with my folder on the family windows XP PC called "[My Name]'s File Folder", passing the mannerism of saying WWW out loud as I typed URL's(far as I remember you used to have to type it in!) to my cousins, going to my dad's and grandma's offices and playing Flash and later even early Unity games, picking up English not through schooling, but because if you wanted to do or learn anything on the internet pre-2012, you only had resources in English. Getting hyped about shoddily made mods for NFS MW '05, taking part in forums etc. Fraps as a software being everywhere, and the little banner it had on the free version getitng me to pirate it, even throwing up my first twitter account(which is the one I use today, after losing one in the middle and recovering this) for a bonus car in NFS World in 2011.

It was bliss. The true promise of the internet, all the world's information at the tips of your fingers. Google still worked and led to genuine resources and information that wasn't click-farming, pre-2014 youtube basically being a couple dudes having fun, all of my childhood photos being crammed onto me, my mom and my dad's Facebook accounts. Everything was ad-hoc and anonymous to a notable extent(even post-facebook).

I am not going to give anyone a lecture on enshittifcation and the acceleration of capitalism ruining good things. IMO part of the goodness was always unsustainable and not meant to last as hosting costs mounted, people figured out algorithmic exploits, tech got outdated and unmaintained etc. I, in fact, also somewhat welcome and like the centralization we had of there being like 2 websites to get games from, 3 social media sites that I use to engage with the world at large, reddit and discord servers replacing forums and forming centralized hubs for that. I think the centralization has in fact helped a lot of preservation as well. We're burning VC money to keep a lot of the internet free-of-charge and convenient, and I'm okay to trade a bit of data and get ads that I block anyways for it. Most of the improvements to our day to day lives that were brought about in the 2010's on weren't driven by individuals and open source communities(who I am infinitely grateful for, they remain the soul of the internet or even society and have used these for-profit developments to up their own personal creativity and output.), but the platonic ideal of capitalism providing more and more convenient services for cheaper and cheaper monetary cost.

Yet it is inevitable that I get struck with the feeling of loss. We went from anonymity being the standard to more and more association of our IRL person to our accounts, and started to forgo redundancy, especially the older generations. Those photos of me from my childhood are probably half lost now because me and I think my mom's original facebook accounts were both removed for some reason or other. My Reddit account that went live in 2014 was a time capsule of who I was, what I cared about, and what I thought since then, but I foolishly did not separate it from my video games or youtube videos on my like 3-4 different youtube channels over the years. My personal twitter account is tenuously but still somewhat attached to my person in real life as well. Even this fucking website, due to it being cost expedient, is hosted on a domain that literally also hosts my portfolio.

Preservation for preservation's sake makes a hoarder out of all of us, one must accept letting go. Older generations' polaroids disappeared at far higher rates than my stuff will being passed from site to site and hard disk to hard disk, I am sure. But given the combination of the increasing ties your IRL person has to your accounts, and the desire and encouragement to blare yourself out into the world, increasing amounts of caution become necessary as your accounts age and carry more and more of your past. I didn't do or say anything particularly reprehensible ever I don't think, but man was I a shithead occasionally on a few places(that I cannot specify for reasons being discussed in this article!), in manners that were publicly visible and are still searchable if someone is enough of an asshole(or thinks I myself am reprehensible enough to deserve it in the present day) to break the new unspoken rule of "do not dox someone and use their online activity to cause them real life problems, regardless of how possible it is, unless they are a terrible person".

So I am burning my personal library of Alexandria. I still have a load of old photos and backups of my phones, and things I've made on old disparate accounts on websites, stored primarily in memory but sometimes in text. Yet I privated my twitter account and scrambled then nuked my reddit posts, all of them. Fact of the matter is, there is and was too much for me to manually prune references to my irl person, or bad taste posts, or ties to other accounts that tie more directly to me IRL, so fuck it, let it burn.

Information is detached from each other on different parts of the web, but not fully, and simultaneously never goes off the internet, but can disappear in a flash. Part of this is me growing up, part of it is culture around the internet shifting from your online persona being completely separate to no such persona being considered to exist, part of it is enshittification. It just sucks that it feels like nothing lasts, yet anything you do *could* last and be a liability to your real life person, so you must simultaneously run redundant preservation efforts for the things you care for but also pre-emptively cover your tracks on both past and current posts. I feel we get the bad parts of posting anonymously and also the bad parts of posting with your name attached, and refuse to fully accept being explicitly tied to my real person online.

Thank you for reading my tweak session about people willing to put in a bunch of effort being able to know more about me than I'd like them to be able to, or the changing of times with my nostalgia and data hoarding tendencies, maybe it's a nothinburger, I don't imagine I made any profound observation, but I really needed to get it out there.

Oct 20th: G*d's Eepiest Soldier Finally Gets an OK Job
TW: Delusions of Grandeur or Unrealistic Expectations, maybe both?

I spent Thursday sleeping. I literally did nothing but sleep. I had stayed awake to like 1pm, missed a work meeting and then didn't get out of bed 'till 10pm(then went back to bed at 2!). I truly have been doing nothing with my time since the last entry beside write one 700 word essay(not nothing, but as per trend, barely scraping by my responsibilities). 

My gf is suggesting I get a blood test or something with how bad my sleep is, sleeping either too much or too little and entirely randomly, which is probably fair but oh my god I hate the wellness hub it'll be damn near impossible to get an appointment and I have like a 75% chance of sleeping through it anyways. I may actually just be a cat.

Great Fucking New Though: I got the job!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am becoming a professional, career game developer come January!! It took 3 years of non-stop grinding(not that I was grinding specifically to get a job but I was making videogames and taking part in the gamedev club, both because I love doing so) in uni, 6 total years of making games, so many near misses where they told me "you were our second best choice" or "you were a strong candidate but...", I was almost there but never quite enough. It was a matter of time and it happened. I've literally had zoomies(for lack of a better term) since monday. This is the one time things seemingly worked out and without coming down to like a final stand do or die thing or random chance encounter, at least since 2017. 

It was like an Anime Arc, a Running Gag, Kaya (allegedly) had all the skills but could only get hired by weirdly managed military companies, literally everyone at the gamedev club expected this moment would have come a year ago, and upon getting the news, the reaction was "Finally!". I had even begun fearing even they were losing faith in me(they weren't! god I love having friends with goodwill and appreciation for me).

My general luck in life since around involved putting in 100% of myself and then losing out because of factors beyond my comprehension(maybe I wasn't good enough, maybe it was discrimination, maybe it was brute bad luck, maybe all!), to the point this video had become one of my two slogans, next to this[second from the bottom]  so I was very well entertaining graduating with no job let alone one as a game developer, let alone one in the best company in MTL(far as I'm concerned at least). But maybe this is the start of being able to reasonably estimate a good trajectory for my life and not have to expect it to blow in my face.

I am just an intern, but absent an economy crash or massive fuck up on my part, this will lead to a permanent job. I am gonna be doing programming, which isn't quite design, my real end target. So I'm very happy and grateful, but also not quite satiated by barely getting around to scoring an internship by the time I graduate. I absolutely am better than this. I have *had to* be exceptional all my life and I just can't make do with comparatively middling results. 

Still, being able to for once mentally be on the "things will sort themselves out" page, and with my foot in the door, I should be able to take this slow start into some good pace forward in life. Good luck begets further good luck, and also more motivation, so I can actually maybe finally reverse the cycle of things going wrong, me being less motivated and less able to positively affect my life. Not quite saying bye to burnout yet but we'll see how it goes. This bit of news, a month after the whole German Debacle, have significantly energized me. I'm still a bit of a mess and a wreck, but clearly I can still make good things happen in wrecked state, so god knows what happens when I ramp back to full power(sustainably this time, without torturing myself like I did in HS).

Oct 16th: Why Create?

Welcome back to my soapbox! I was thinking of All The Things I wanted to do this year in terms of creativity while having a smoke and honestly it's no big revelation but I wanted to put my biggest block on paper.

Why put pen to paper or fingers on keyboard when all your readers are 5 friends who honestly don't need more takes/opinions/research/analysis from you? Why make a videogame when it's about a year of work to release something you'll be proud of, when the only playerbase you can count on is like maybe 500 people from your past projects? Why even tweet anything you consider important or worthwile when its just soapboxing at no one? Why play the guitar for only your neighbors to hear and get annoyed by?

The nature of creating anything in this day and age is honestly that you need a significant social media following or just extreme amounts of luck to get anyone to care, and I'm personally both externally motivated and of the opinion that things are only as valuable as the amount of impact they can have, which is mostly directly proportional to the number of people who care, which is mostly directly proportional to your pre-existing audience. It is better than ever, I recognize that people couldnt have been self-made philosophers or gamedevs or political analysts like they are now if not for the internet, but it requires tons upon tons of throwing your shit to the wind and hoping a few people see and evangelize it. It's inane and deeply demotivating still, the quality of your work is a prerequisite, but a mere baseline, and past that baseline, your audience's size and your luck with marketing matters far more. 

Coffin Mall crossed the baseline quality and had a few lucky hit tweets and lets plays, and it didn't do great the same way it would have from an established name, or gain me any significant audience, but it became my most successful effort(even if it isn't so by sheer download numbers) and sorta brand until I top it, and I hate it for that, a somewhat forced, by-the-book effort, successful enough for me to not be able to forget about it, but not enough to enable me to do the next, more satisfying project. 

Further, while it's easy to grasp that just making more stuff and relying on the part that isn't directly related to your size is the way through this funk, the solution also poses a challenge: WHAT do you make when you're almost sure it's going to be seen by no one? Can't do anything incisive or much criticism, because you'll either get shouted down or be small enough to ignore regardless of how good the material is, and certainly can't do anything too high-effort, as that effort is most certainly not going to be paid back to you in any way shape or form. Therein lies the paradox: you must make new, fresh, good stuff that connects to an audience, but it must be low effort to make and low effort to engage in. You cannot make your magnum opus before you know people will care, lest it go to waste, so you must purposefully tone down how much of yourself you pour in your work.

My work has tangibly impacted many a life, even if shortly, and I've been time and again energized by people's positive comments or personal conversations with me. I make stuff to make people either feel or think things, and any success makes my day, but I just find it hard to justify making stuff when the stuff I want to do and make is stuff that's decidedly too small for my existing platform, but building up to the point where those are less suicidal efforts requires passing the crapshoot with meh stuff, hoping one of those blows up enough to give me an actual audience rather than internet drifters stumbling on my work(I love my 20ish OKSoft loyalists!).

Anyways, soapboxing over. Hope someone got something out of that, feel free to dm me "felt" or any thoughts you may have that go deeper. The barbeque went -mostly- well, and I love my friends, woke up at 5am, slept 3 hours between 4-7 and now am up at 1:38 writing this instead of doing development for the next game project or work for my workplace. I'll need to do an assignment and also some research and android port for my workplace, and hear back from my job application tomorrow. We'll see how it goes and if I make it, see you in like 3 days.

Oct 13th: Cloud Atlas and General Fun

We watched Cloud Atlas with my girlfriend and holy hell I never could normally figure any "favorite movies", and if you asked me probably would unironically reply Drive(2011)[sorry! that one's still somewhere on that list!]. That changed today. It's not without flaws and I do not know why I liked it so much but damn is Cloud Atlas something else. The Wachowskis can sure as hell make a movie.

I also took a job interview yesterday on 0 hours of sleep and a whole liter of redbull, slept, woke up the same day and attended an Osama Dorias talk, which was like, also ungodly good.

Further, I'm doing a cute lil BBQ with friendos soon, and honestly am beyond excited. If that goes well, and especially if the job thing works out, I'll be over the moon. Overall things are and have been good, the executive dysfunction/burnout is still here, but that's sometihng you get out of by having good things happen to you.

I should also fix my godforsaken sleep schedule like holy hell, I sleep god knows when, wake up noon-1pm(after ignoring my earlier wakeup at like 9am), hang with the euros till 5-6, then barely get the space to do anything, which likely leads directly into the evening-night socialization, so I'm only really free between midnight and the aforementioned god-knows-when, which is really not the time to be productive for my aging body anymroe it seems.(the woes of a 23 year old retiree!)