Thus the year begins anew. Let us together witness what hideosities lurk across the warp of time. I plan to periodically update this intolerable babble, as I did the previous years.
January 4, 2024:
Yesterday I left for the Winkelcentrum up the street since I lacked lemons for my chicken broth soup, which is one the favorite nourishments that I’m able to adequately prepare. I looked outside: no rain. Great, I thought, as I threw on some socially acceptable fabric decorum and quickly left the house. Outside I immediately noticed the rain begin again in that classic shit-drizzle form. I naively surmised this would be endurable mere moments before calamity struck. For I was about one single minute’s distance from the house when a torrential downpour of biblical proportions blotted out not just the sky, but also all oxygen and visibility, and everything else from existence. My supposedly water-proof shoes took about two microseconds before yielding to the assault. I threw up my hood in a hopeless attempt to protect my head from the severity of the liquid battering. The sound became unbearably deafening, such was the force with which they struck my pathetically insufficient hood. I could feel my sanity wither away with each strike, like Chinese water torture. God knows what sins I had committed to deserve this – perhaps breaking spaghetti in two before placing it in the pot really was as sinful as Selin had suggested?
Anyway, I was stuck curb-side on the wrong side of the traffic lights about a single minute’s walking distance away from the house, getting drenched beyond recognition. I decided to return home, which was a hard decision to swallow as one always wishes to continue stubbornly in these situations, but a quick run back made more sense than another 15 minutes in this violation of human integrity. I pressed the traffic-light button in desperation to cross the really busy road that I had only just traversed in the opposite direction. Of course, I was there at the absolute worst possible moment of its operational cycle; it took a full minute to illuminate the pedestrian green, all the while I stood contemplating my helpless annihilation by the elements. Cars whizzed past, splashing the water that had immediately coalesced near the gutter all over me, again and again. I just stood there maniacally, in a form of acceptance psychosis, because they could not make me more wet. And also because I kept assuming it would go green any second and I did not wish to take even a few steps back. Additionally, when your legs are soaking wet, and your jeans are wet-pressed on to them as if bonded by a super-sealant, any movement is a rather annoying feeling. I could see people within their vehicles likely thinking I was some form of plant-based lifeform or a dead tree trunk or something from the way they sprayed jet after jet of liquid over me with no concern to swerve even a millimetre closer to the center of the road to avoid hitting the massive pool of water near the curb. My position in that delightful moment was sub-human clearly, undeserving of warmth or consideration, after all, I had made the grave mistake of being born. Eventually the signal came, and I pretty much crawled across the road, and quickly sort of shuffle-walked (what else can you do with wet jeans) back home. Within just a few minutes I had trashed my shoes and my coat, soaked myself down to my underwear, and been waterboarded by large metal rectangles as a punishment for assuming I could walk to the supermarket in the Hague.
You thought that was it? Well, so did I, rather amusingly. But about 2 hours later, when I finally thought it was safe again, and I wore completely different shoes and clothes and somehow found a new desire to keep living, calamity struck anew. This time it was a windstorm of such ridiculous, cartoon-like force that I fell over in the street in front of the obnoxious library building while wondering why a strange man was holding onto the street-lamp. What I was unaware of was that the building’s absurd architecture and positioning created a wind-tunnel which multiplied the storm’s intensity seven-fold in a specific alley-crossing, just where the man was oddly (or so I thought) clinging onto the lamp. I did not completely fall over, but even just the stumble felt like an absolute violation of my thinly reconstructed integrity due to its unexpected nature. Annoyed beyond reason, I entered the supermarket, only to find out that there were no lemons left. I purchased some unnecessary items to placate my suffering, and also because it’s a very slight hassle to exit without buying anything, which my hyper-stimulated psyche could not handle at that moment. What a day.
January 15, 2024:
For some unknown reason I glance at the news every morning, possibly out of boredom and usually via BBC’s world radio service (great background noise in the cold mornings) or The Guardian’s front page, only to be greeted by a bombardment of negativity in addition to articles of dubious objectivity that irritate me. And that is despite these two sources normally being sort of decent in comparison to many other outlets that may ‘align’ more with my views, but which ultimately end up exuding white-noise from an echo chamber. It seems unwise to solely bask in one’s own sociopolitical fishbowl, and I therefore occasionally peruse the journalistic wilderness that lines the dark gaps between the various narratives spun by large states and corporations. Ultimately though, nothing really changes; I remain sat here in some physically disconnected but optically linked corner of our planet being told things that I have no way of ever empirically verifying. I thus have a brain to process secondary or tertiary or even further removed information that has already been interpreted, arranged and plated for an audience, and that is presented with a precisely curated language, set of words and structure, and which omits or includes details and narrative inflections at will.
Upon receiving this highly processed glob, I then have the glorious opportunity to fashion my own ‘opinion’ out of it, which I may then spread around and defend fiercely, and perhaps even argue with, upset or harm people in the name of. I may then protect my delicately placated house of cards from toppling over by sheltering it from other people’s delicately placated houses of cards, lest they somehow fall onto mine and we all go down the drain, and I thus slowly surround myself with pieces of social glue that do nothing but stick together like a mono-colored wad of mud, a gloriously uniform glob of primal fear. After all, the illimitable abyss extending beyond my continental shelf does not concern me, for what could I ever learn by venturing beyond the similar, beyond the familiar? There is clearly absolutely no reason to ever try to comprehend a viewpoint in minor divergence from what I *know* is the absolute and universal correct viewpoint and which will forever remain the absolute and universal truth. I should thus continue to never look at or seek to understand news platforms and viewpoints that diverge even so slightly from mine. After all, I actually believe that I am able to deconstruct with a single thought process their entire discourse since I am so incredibly intelligent. And of course, *my* news outlet is pure and correct and definitely doesn’t have a political discourse propping it up. Down the drain with state media from X country, unworthy viewpoint of Y supporter, or slightly diverging morality Z – that may have led to a slightly modified opinion on a pre-sifted glob of mud that I acquired from the internet. How fun would it be to be an alien and discover this planetary circus and just observe. I mean, what better entertainment is there? The very comedic essence of the world definitely bolsters the simulation hypothesis. We are, after all, an amusement to behold.
Anyway, these last two weeks have decorated my cerebrum with a cocktail of positive chemicals while playing Lethal Company with the crew. In numbers which have at times reached 7 or 8 people, and in sessions which have at times extended to 8 continuous hours, we have been experiencing hilarities and pixelated absurdities of an original nature that I had not enjoyed for a while in the gaming industry. Particularly the in-game proximity voice communication and its exquisite pairing with the Skinwalkers mod has at times been very amusing to experience. Mocking the sunrise with drawn curtains while skulking behind a liquified crystal mesh that contains barely-humanoid representations of ourselves, our joint adventures, and everything that exists in that moment has surely been fun. Furthermore, I’ve started working through Talos Principle 2, and I must say, Croteam did it again – it is an honor to experience. Although switching to Epic’s Unreal Engine 5 has taken a terrible toll on the game’s performance, thus I often find my CPU meandering the high 80’s Celsius, which is concerning for its longevity, particularly since I can ill-afford to replace it. This reminds me of the winter of 2018: I had just arrived in Vancouver to pursue my doctorate and was feeling a bit home-sick due in no small part to my suboptimal living arrangements. I was thus heavily vested in playing PUBG with Baris and Kutal and the other lads. Unfortunately, though, it obliterated my laptop’s CPU, likely by melting its thermal paste. But it was still within its warranty period, so I made the grand decision to get it serviced.
It was a cold winter’s morning, and I was in a terrible hurry to get my gaming rig fixed since I had f*ck all else to do in my university residence. I was akin to a single-celled organism, incapable of branching out into other activities, lest I perish from the novelty. But that morning was also my teaching day, and about 60 Canadian youngsters split into three sections awaited me at SFU. I thought I’d quickly drop my laptop off at Acer’s service point which appeared to be close to the train station at Production Way. Great, I thought since this was on my route and quite close to the university. Little did I know that this was suburbia incarnate; a hellscape of no pavements, no pedestrian crossings and endless stroads which encroach on the limits of civility. What I thought would be a short 10 minute or so walk from the station to the service point turned into a mud-riddled ‘hike’ through swamp-like terrain where I got bogged down so bad that at one point my shoe came off. Yes, I stepped in some gooey mud (there was no pavement) and my shoe got embedded so forcefully within the mud that my whole foot came out of the shoe. My shoe, meanwhile, remained pathetically suctioned to the mud, half-embedded in the viscous swamp that was the ‘walkway’. And, of course, in that precise moment the shock of the event made me lose my balance, so my socked-foot landed in the glorious mud and my sock decided to instantaneously abandon its function as a barrier. I was also trying to be careful since I had both my work and my gaming laptop in my backpack, since the latter was what I was taking to the service point. I was thus at a particularly annoying conundrum: did I put the shoe back on or just ‘madman it’ by running without one shoe. The fact that I had no time to go home and only about 20 minutes before I would be standing in front of students at SFU made matters even more vexing. Given all this, I decided it would be impossible to avoid wearing the shoe, and therefore sinned big time by muddying the inside of my shoe. (dreading how I would ever clean it).
Anyway, eventually and after a lot of hassle, I arrived at the location Google Maps was indicating. But upon approaching the building, and after searching its façade for an unreasonable amount of time, I noticed a tiny, almost invisible sign stuck to the inside of the window informing me that the service entrance was ‘at the back’. The thing with Canadian suburbia is that most buildings are part of long rows of attached structures, meaning it’s impossible to simply ‘go around back’ in any quick way. I therefore had to run around an entire street, which erased another 10 minutes from my already severely lagging schedule. I was doing that sort of semi-fast, scuffle-run that one often resorts to in times of undesirable locomotion, just wishing to get the whole irritating saga over with. Of course, by this point, my ever-growing lateness was beginning to dawn on me. What was the norm? I supposed 5 or maybe even 10 minutes would be sort of understandable, but anything more would likely necessitate cancellation of my first section. But I had not informed my students in advance, and it was already too late to, so it wouldn’t even be a proper cancellation but a ‘no show’. What a nightmare; I would be that guy who just doesn’t show up to his own class, forcing his students to travel for possibly several hours back and forth to the university for nothing. I wondered if they’d find it amusing that I was so frustrated about not gaming for one extra day, that I had decided to get my laptop serviced on that precise day instead of waiting for the following day when my schedule was completely clear. As these thoughts decorated my mind, I was getting distracted by my mud-riddled shoe making a strangely moist-sounding suction noise with each step I took. And I could feelthe sound too, I could feel it inside my shoe.
I finally approached the building’s back entrance, which was clearly not designed for actual human traffic. I went inside and was greeted by a guy standing amongst a rabble of cardboard packages and electronic paraphernalia. He looked at me with a glint of surprise in his eye, as if genuinely taken aback by my presence in this godforsaken suburban service point in the middle of a weekday. I handed my device to him, received a little square of paper, and rushed back to the train station. I remember finally arriving at the class about 15 minutes late, just seconds before the students were unanimously deciding to vacate the room; crisis averted, or so I thought. But running up 5 flights of stairs to the sixth floor of the Academic Quadrangle had left me so terribly out of breath that I recall all the students smiling and trying to supress their laughter at my flustered panting. Did this TA not know that running isn’t within the limits of civility? One must, I now believe, always take care not to rush too much even when time is absolutely critical, for while the sort of fake, run-walk hybrid ‘look I’m hurrying’ motion is deemed socially acceptable, for some reason, actually sprinting full-on is not. Oh well… I’m a Turkish barbarian, after all.
The icing on top was the calamity of me pulling a chair out and failing to align my backside with it and thus falling on the floor in front of the whole classroom that was already watching me as if observing a pantomime. Unfortunately, I had not realized that the chairs had wheels, for some strange reason. Also, since I was quite embarrassed by my lateness, my brain had decided to devote about 80 percent of its capacity to being embarrassed instead of processing my environment or doing anything useful; how great. So, after I had pulled the chair out to sit, within the short time that it took for me to take my coat off, I was unaware that I had inadvertently pushed it just a tiny bit more, and since it was wheeled, it had rolled quietly away from where I thought it was behind me. What made things yet more amusing was the fact that this was either the first or second week of the semester. At least my shenanigans served as a sort of icebreaker, and I even recall cracking a joke towards the end of the semester about the incident, no doubt one of supremely unfunny and perhaps even cringe formulae.
Anyway, we somehow cobbled together a serviceable 35 minutes, and all was well. But of course, that whole week I remained laptop-less (as it got serviced). What a nightmare. I remember going to the dollar store, to that strangely ‘North American’ hellscape where particles of glitter go to die in a plastic wasteland of cheap and functionless produce, to acquire a paint set and a canvas for something absurd like one dollar. God only knows what sort of supply chains and labor abuses had brought its price down so much. Alas, the ‘fun’ activity of painting something felt so exceedingly boring that after a few dozen brush strokes it decorated the inside of my garbage canister. Sweet winter days indeed.
February 6, 2024:
Waking up about 6:30 or so and working through Pentiment while drinking my morning coffee and basking in cold darkness until I need to leave the house around 7:30. It’s still dark outside, it’s strange, but it’s kind of a vibe. Pentiment is such a hidden gem, it colors the day ahead. Taking the train under a black sky, thinking will it ever dissipate. It gradually gets ‘light’, approaching something vaguely resembling daytime, a concept I recall from other times in other places. Of course, it’s raining. It’s 9:00, I’m now at work. Have a job finally, a data support position at a university in Amsterdam. Sitting in the communal ‘flexi’ office area gazing at an undersized laptop screen instead of the larger monitor it’s connected to. I’m just not used to this. Need to bring the screen closer. There’s free coffee, thank god. But it’s shit, unfortunately. Still, free is free, I suppose. Meetings and onboarding activities occasionally break up the monotony of desk work. It’s almost noon: carefully extract and unwrap ‘lunch’. Unsatisfying but necessary; nourishment is the key to survival. It’s approaching 17:00, everyone looks tired. It’s dark again now. I’ve spent ‘daytime’ beneath florescent lights buzzing at a frequency beyond the space-time continuum. The office is a liminal space, a backroom of forlorn energy. I gaze around: It’s slowly emptying. I too decide to charge into the cold darkness. It’s still raining. Does it ever stop? Soaking wet now, even just after the 10-minute walk to the train station. Train is crowded, it’s hard to sit. Everyone’s damp, the air is stuffy. I find a place eventually. Hard to keep my eyes open. Back in the Hague, it’s still raining. 18:30 and I’m finally home. Selin is already home. Everything smells nice; home is nice, home is warm. The projector beams open; we’re ready for the evening.
March 21, 2024:
Well for the last two months I’ve been employed at the Vrije University of Amsterdam as an RDM specialist. The commute takes an hour and a half each way, which felt a bit gnarly whilst it was still dark outside at 7:30 in the morning, but lately it has been getting light earlier. It had been 9 months since my last financial renumeration (in May last year), so this whole setup is a necessary distraction from the megali idea. A few weeks back I sent my monograph to CUP for official review (yikes!), and I’ve begun working on a previously-rejected ‘Byzantium in Video Games’ article. I’ve re-researched and re-written the thing, but let’s see, due to my love of this medium I am personally vested in getting this damn thing published. One yearns for a means to return to academia despite the charade of emptiness that surrounds it. It is an interesting conundrum indeed. But everything else seems even emptier. I suppose the non-emptiness of any occupation is a psychosocial construct anyway, but still, unfolding Medieval aeons seems moderately exhilarating for some god-forsaken reason. And I do quite like teaching – the family business – although grading is as boring as it gets, but that’s what AI will be for. Right? Maybe one day we can divert all chores to AI including the hassle of having to live. It might actually do a better job at it. For instance, maybe it would not sabotage itself with recursive anxiety loops. In any case, miscellaneous geekery abounds with or without AI.
Knowing how much I like Downton Abbey, last week Selin suggested we begin watching Bridgerton together, even though she’s already watched it twice over on her own. I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it. And the beyond-hilarious and equally sweet faces Selin made when she knew some elating or saucy scene was just around the corner made the entire activity even more enjoyable. Other than that, Pentiment has been an amazing game set in the Alpine Middle Ages (near Innsbruck) that I had the pleasure of experiencing in February. What a gem. Then I worked through the latest twist-take on Christie’s Orient Express by a French studio; it was pretty good too, and I always like the snowed-in night-train mood. What an exquisite setting. Much like a dark forest or a barely-perturbed sea-surface, this setting is timeless and will forever remain evocative. After finishing that game, I must confess I searched around for night-trains departing from Europe. But they’re all so expensive it’s quite sad really; when did trains become luxury travel? And then I saw the ultra-luxurious new company reviving the historical Orient Express (same route, but terminating at Sirkeci), but a one-way ticket from Paris to Istanbul costs something exorbitant like 3000 euros. Some people can afford that clearly, or the early bookings would not be completely full. Well at least I can sit at home and maybe watch a rich streamer take the train, and then try to imagine what it feels like through a pixelated crystal mesh. Fun, fun, fun – I must earmark my calendar for its launch in 2025, because I would not want to miss this level of pathetic.
The other day I was thinking of the things that really interest me. I think the apex is populated by Medieval daily life, for some god-forsaken reason – think Ian Mortimer, Robert Fossier, etc. I even ordered a copy of the Geoponika which should arrive soon, although I already have an electronic copy; it’s such an interesting manual on the Byzantine worldview. I usually do not purchase editions that aren’t dual language (i.e., that don’t have the original Greek), but I made an exception for the Geoponika. Teaching posts (particularly those in the US) often require the submission of a syllabus for a sample course “in the candidate’s interest area.” Despite not currently applying to any such position, I have nonetheless decided to craft a hypothetical lesson plan sketch for a course I dream of calling Daily Life in Byzantium. It makes me happy to envision that one day I might actually deliver it. Third degree Copium for sure… On the other hand, this is a rather humble dream, is it not? I don’t dream of becoming rich or important or a CEO or anything. I merely wish for us to suspend reality for but a moment while we travel into a mud-brick house in Paphlagonia and meet the candle-maker that sits atop a wooden chest threading wax into a small container, or for us to watch an Amastrian carpenter collect tree trunks floated down the Parthenios River, before trekking back to his workshop through orchards, woodlands and winding dirt-pathways in order to fashion a plank of timber for the nearby shipyard where the naked hull of a Chelandion stands to attention. But where is the warship destined for? Likely the bottom of ze obsidian sea.
Beyond all that, the realization that the great gibbous void does not merely whisper to humanity but straight up yells through its molecular fabric continues to be readily apparent. The past slowly but surely dismantles and consumes the future through the illusion of the present, which is ephemeral to the point of non-existence. Although I say that, Buddhism tells us to focus exclusively on this illusion. There is nothing else than `the present moment, it says. Well, what do I know, perhaps there isn’t anything else, but it certainly feels like an immutable object is accelerating into an immovable wall. And when we slice this film into fractals of reality, we find the ‘present’, an abhorrable magnet of hopium held together by duct-tape and rubber-bands that spells out “YOU ARE FUCKED” in some cosmic language that only advanced star-bound civilizations can understand. I’m metaphorically stuck within this little temporal orb of fuck. Let’s see what I can conjure within it. After all, the only thing that separates us from apes is that we are magicians with the ability to spin up figments of unreality and weave them into tales and dreams, and also into humour, mankind’s most inexplicable creation. After all, humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.
Returning to my ‘hypothetical course’: I’ve thought of this as an undergraduate course, so it would only contain small (translated) sections from select primary sources, such as excerpts from the Book of the Eparch, Geoponika, Peri Paradromis, from hagiographic accounts, from letter collections, from monastic documents, treatises, and other such paraphernalia. Each week would have a thematic focus: The Byzantine house and its contents (furniture, household items); food and its production (cheese-making, fishing, fishmongers, guilds, the farming calendar, etc.); death and its delivery (burial, afterlife, mourning); medical practices and hospitals; daily occupations (overview from carpentry to candle and glass making, and from sailors to statesmen); social life (in the village, in the town); movement (travel, postal service, inns, lodgings); superstitions and the thought-world (demonology, occultism). One critical angle somewhat novel theme would be senses, in the spirit of Ian Mortimer. The sound, smell, and tactile cues of Medieval life. That’d be sure to wake a few sleepyheads up.
Beyond Medieval life, another interest of mine (although more of a hobby interest at this stage) is esotericism and occultism and everything that lays within that sphere. Probing the esoteric thought-world of the Middle Ages is indeed fascinating, the treatises of demonology, the guidance on banishing evil spirits, the amulets, diviners and other such things; it’s all so interesting. Of course, this has a looser temporal scope, for one may connect such lines of inquiry all the way to Aleister Crowley and Helena Blavatsky and others who woke up during their mortal lives. A third interest of mine, although now we move away from scholarship and into personal interests, is of course horror literature, both cosmic and traditional, and particularly haunted tales relating to seas, forests and to the frozen depths of the world’s polar regions. This interest necessarily ties into the folklore of many different peoples of our wild world. And finally, we have SETI and astrophysics more broadly speaking: What an amazing slice of science.
March 31, 2024:
I’ve been alone in La Haye for the past week as Selin made an emergency family trip back to Istanblue on Saturday. In the meantime, I’ve turned towards my endless backlog of indie games. I decided to finally finish up my Wadjet Eye catalogue, going through Primordia and Hobb’s Barrow. The latter in particular was very enjoyable, the atmosphere and mood conveyed in the English moors is hauntingly beautiful. I also noticed Life is Strange: True Colors was on sale and ravenously pounced upon it because the original LIS is among my all-time favorites. I’m around half-way through it and it has not disappointed so far; its soundtrack, atmosphere and emotional overture are both jarring but also (and yes, I have to quote Lovecraft again) so hauntingly beautiful. Despite having only ever visited Texas in the United States (wasn’t a big fan to be honest), I am now salivating over the forested mountains of Colorado and the little isolated towns nestled among its nooks and crannies, similar to how I was a big fan of the forested slopes of coastal, northern Oregon after finishing the initial LIS (much like many other fans of that game). I think it’s a combination of the art-style (something just works about it), the haunting storyline, and the excellent voice-acting and soundtrack that makes its set locations very attractive. This reminds me of how we went to see Dune II – or whatever the hell its correct name is – in the IMAX cinema here last week. A triple AAA film with a multi-million-dollar budget, big-shot director and cast, and adapted from a well-respected book; the odds don’t really get any better than that, right? But then, after watching it I just felt sort of… hollow. It’s basically a non-entity, a forgettable nothing. How they have managed to take Frank Herbert’s book and turn it into this cash-grab is beyond me, especially with all that talent and money there. I mean, how the hell is Square Enix able to develop a media which is seven-fold more memorable, visceral and respectable than Dune? I guess either I do not get modern, Western cinema or it is indeed a hollow, non-entity, consumed and forgotten quicker than the spin of a pulsar despite the millions thrown at it. I mean, I guess it works on a basic economic level – for here we are.
I met Kate in Amsterdam today (29.03.24) and we sat for many hours in a nice Veganees restaurant and also a pub that Ozy had recommended. Thankfully the weather was half-decent, so we actually managed to sit outside, even after nightfall. It was, of course, a pleasure to converse with Kate who always carries herself and the conversation with such elan. Never a dull moment, especially as we unfolded our joint family history. Anyway, last week I went to a physiotherapist here in the Hague after finding a sliver of energy to actually do something about this issue that has been bothering me for the last three months. This muscular spasming around my upper torso, particularly concentrated around my right serratus anterior ever since I re-injured it in December, is preventing me from doing any proper exercise. The physio was actually decent, and the Austrian woman who examined me and helped me out seemed very knowledgeable and also understanding of my situation, and it was also not too expensive. We shall see if this charade actually leads anywhere; if it gets this ailment to regress even a bit, then it’s worth the time and money. Well, I’ve enjoyed carving out another day from between myself and death, let’s see how many more of these we have left.
Today (31.03.24) I got home at around 11PM local time to find Selin sprawled out on the couch in-front of the projector listening to a room of zombie-android hybrid lifeforms “discuss” the local election results in Turkey. It is so sweet to see these crustacean lifeforms sit on live television and spin, spin, spin their little cerebral muscles to the maximum only to produce these pathetic snippets of single-IQ drivel. Like seeing a child try really really hard to achieve something really mundane and largely suboptimal or even borderline retarded, but because they’re a child its very impressive. All the different national TV channels show these rooms upon rooms full of “men” that would most likely not survive a single day without their wives tending for them, spoon-feeding them, dressing them etc. When the studio lights hit at the right angle you can see the outlines of their little white undershirts (fanila), which if they did not wear, they might catch a little chill. And of course, we would not want these little baby snowflakes to catch a chill, they might die or something. Seeing these de-boned jellyfish sitting in rows looking all important in their shirts and ties, with their glistening shiny shoes, giving their uninteresting opinions is… it’s like seeing a 5-year-old get up and “explain” something really stupid in-front of the whole class. You can see they are wracking their brain-cells left and right, really cranking the single-gear machinery in their little heads to produce these exquisitely redundant comments on the election. They also get into these cute little “heated moments” with each other, where their unimportant parroting differs very slightly, and where they begin interrupting each other by raising their squeaky little voices an octave or so higher still. Entropy fills the studio… Meanwhile, most of these programs have a single woman acting as a presenter, just for the visuals. To think that she has to sit and watch these little coddled fish open and close their mouths vocalizing some form of “noise” which contains absolutely nothing is quite funny. These fat little spherical objects have of course grown plump from sticking their heads in troughs of thinly-sifted bullshit every day. From this trough to that they pass, every so often vocalizing the shit they have collected as little molecules of audio-waste on live television. Thank god we have these programs, seriously, for what else would we have watched tonight otherwise? Anyway, of course the election results were not bad, but I doubt it leads anywhere.
April 15, 2024:
Sometimes I get this feeling that outside, on the other side of the window, there’s a magical realm that I’m pitifully unaware of, where countless trees all across the world are dancing to a tune emitted by the stars; stars which sing in a frequency that I can neither hear nor ever comprehend. This tune is likely so beautiful that if I could ever (by some godforsaken glitch in the matrix) hear it, I’d probably just vibrate in eternal euphoria much like trees do all day. But alas, this astral ballad passes right through me and the rest of my fellow ape-lite brethren, the accursed homo sapiens… a species unable to detect this celestial resonance despite its overwhelming presence, showering us like rays of neutrinos. We remain miserably unaware of its existence, stoically completing rotation after rotation around the sun, our calendars filled with things that can never compensate for this shortcoming. We sit here all obediently, eternally unsatiated, like good little children of darkness, watching things rise and fall to the tune of undulating radio static. Our sensory limitations filter to us a dull world ripe for wallowing in apathy. Unlike trees, because trees know. They grin at us from the glittering fields of Elysium, dancing away with little glints of starlight trapped in their arboreal eyes. I can see them from my window, right now, mocking my very existence in cahoots with the twinkling bards that don their nicest, brightest costumes after nightfall. For tonight there is a cosmic banquet, just like every other night. But I’m not invited, just like the rest of my species trapped here on the lithosphere, eternally clawing at the exit door. Crawling and clawing is our fate, after all. Or perhaps none of this is true: What if none of the Pickwick triplets did it? Maybe these tree branches in front of me are shaking arbitrarily in the wind; now that’s a stretch in reasoning. But it would be such a dull explanation. If that’s really the “explanation” we should probably stop explaining things. [Disclaimer: My thoughts on this matter were partly spurred on by my current obsession with Mystery’s haunting ballad: The Inner Journey – what a hidden gem! I must’ve listened to this goddamn 2-part song over a hundred times these last few months].
Last week we wrapped up the first series of the 3 Body Problem on Netflix. The main premise is that in 400 years aliens hell-bent on destroying mankind are arriving on the planet, and when news of this is made public, for some reason everyone has a fit, throwing tantrums and getting “stressed”?! 400 years is about 16 or so generations down the line, why the hell would anyone care whether or not mankind exists or perishes that far in the future? Even IF you have children and they have children and so forth that’s still an almost completely insignificant degree of disconnect down the line, it’s crazy to fuss over it. This was my main gripe with this show, I should probably read the book and see if it’s the same. Anyway, our mutual friend Lauren from Innsbruck has been staying with us for a fiesta of board games these past few days, which has been an enjoyable respite. We’re particularly hooked on the complex, quasi-historical board game Oath, where backstabbing, ambushing and all sorts of discord fomenting stratagems blossom. And the day before that we attended a canal cruise with captain Oz in Amsterdam – nice days indeed. Work seems to be intensifying though; suddenly I’m having a hard time balancing my duties as DS for the FRT faculty with my job as TDS for the SSH domain at VU. I think I’ll just leave all these as acronyms for sake of confusion, it’s ultimately unimportant anyway. All that matters is that I’m fiddling around with data management at the university level for some basic financial renumeration. Commuting to Amsterdam Zuid twice a week is not the best thing, but it is indeed quite hassle-free since the train runs smoothly (I can usually sit), and the fields flanking either side of the Leiden-Schiphol route are somewhat pleasant to gaze at in idle-thought. Nice flat fields occasionally broken up by vein-like canalettes. They are only somewhat nice, because like almost everything else in the Netherlands they’re ultimately a bit dull, bland and lacking that punch that less curated views deliver.
Two days ago, Iran delivered a salvo of hundreds of missiles and drones to Israel’s iron dome after the latter had targeted its diplomatic embassy with a precision strike: a little bit of excitement on the news. I doubt anything comes of this sabre-rattling, though a sweet little nuclear winter would not be too bad. Perhaps after the total annihilation that follows, and long after you and I and everyone else has perished… Perhaps then something truly exquisite may blossom in the ashes, rear its head and illuminate the blackened stratosphere. All this fatalism aside, there indeed seems to be a fundamental shift in modern attitudes towards life. These last few generations in the Western hemisphere are the first to live (and likely die) in relative safety from exogenous threats. Violence and warfare are not really a thing, except isolated incidents that are statistically insignificant. A Dutch person, for instance, may safely assume that – barring extraordinary circumstances – they will live to see old age. This is a great luxury that is not usually thought of as a luxury in today’s Western world owing to its relative normality. I believe this has seeped into the thought-world, art, literature and general mindset of people in a subtle manner. For instance, there’s a great deal of concern with pensions, investing, retirement, and planning for the far future in general. There’s also a great deal of gratification delaying, because of the assumed expectation that there will almost definitely be a future point to reap the accrued benefits. This has not been this way throughout most of human history (and still is not in many places in the world) when our health and wellbeing on the morrow was often tenuous at best. It made no sense to plan or consider anything beyond a few years at most, since the tides of fortune could shift at any moment, and the predictability of one’s waxing and waning fate was almost nonexistent. But now it’s normal, in fact it’s almost an expectation, for a person to age into their godforsaken years and then die of cancer or dementia or some other inglorious and memory-tarnishing ailment, all the while machinery and chemicals try to delay this ending through torturous procedures routed via “good intentions” and the collective lack of a spine we have to let someone else rest in peace. I’m ultimately not sure whether this first-in-history sociological situation we find ourselves in is in fact the best outcome for the human psyche. There seems to be an awful lot of regret being insidiously built up by people that will likely be unleashed towards the end, particularly if this glitch in human fragility ever defaults back to its usual state.
Last night there was a thunderstorm here. This is the first time I’ve noticed one in the Netherlands, quite upsetting really considering they are the most enjoyable atmospheric phenomena. Selin used to be frightened of thunder and particularly lightning (cute). Although she now vehemently denies this, I recall the faces she made circa 2015 on one summer’s night in Hisarustu when the heavens assaulted us with extraordinary force. “What if a bolt of lightning arcs into the room through that window, close it!” and similar cries echoed in the room of our first-floor apartment in an eight-storey block. Eventually a compromise was sought where we hid under the bedcovers with the window open, listening to each crack of thunder ripple through the blackened sky. Listening to a thunderstorm approach and then waiting for it to recede feels like dodging a celestial beast that stalks and haunts through the night. Looking back at those days through the veil of nostalgia, they just seem so… amazing. Living near the university campus in an apartment with my close friends, while the buzz of daily, social life was just but a step outside the door, the future looked brighter, and everything was just fresher and more energizing. Also, we were in the Queen City, the center of the world, nothing can ever match the City. It will forever remain the center of the world, the zero coordinate, wherever I may be exiled. If only a downfall of astral proportions had not plagued the country, then maybe we could’ve returned to the crown jewel of urban life on this planetary sanatorium.
April 17, 2024:
As I finally have a little oozling of financial surplus, I have begun accruing some Byzantine texts and grimoires – I prefer editions with facing translations. Some of these were things I worked through in libraries during my MA and doctorate, but which I can now annotate freely. I have been stuffing notes, ideas, and comment-riddled Post-its inside of these for later referral and research idea-generation. How can one not be fascinated by the Peri Paradromis and other military manuals, the Geoponika, the Sea Laws, the Hygromanteia, alongside countless dialogues, epistles, vitae and miracle accounts that are luminous with bygone hopes and dreams. It is truly elating to peruse such long-lost wisdom. After reading the eleventh-century De Operatione Daemonum, I have been trying to trace some of its later evolution. This has, of course, led me to the beautiful Hygromanteia, but beyond that, much of this proto-esoterism leads to Heinrich Agrippa and his three books of Occult Philosophy. The problem is that the only complete edition of this text (that I can find) has been edited and translated by a non-professional and lacks the academic quality that I seek. This is unfortunate and rather disappointing, considering how Agrippa was somewhat of a fulcrum for the transmission of many long-lost Byzantine concepts to Western occultism.
Funnily, I cannot utter Agrippa’s name without instantaneously being transported to the twisted, eldritch corridors of the video game Amnesia: The Dark Descent. What a master-piece that was, despite the absurd way in which me and my friends played it. But since it is indeed one of the scariest games out there, I simply did not have the courage to complete it on my own. It was instead a group venture, sometime circa 2016-17. Gökhan downloaded it and set it up on his computer, meanwhile myself, Mert, Selin, Sevde, Sinan and perhaps even others (I forget) clustered about the screen with all other light sources carefully extinguished. One person played it while the others watched, upon death or failure or loss of IRL sanity, another took over etc. I remember once Sevde just casually slipped underneath the desk out of fear while she was the one playing. She just oozed or gently slid from the chair and ended up on the floor under the desk, and it was all one really quick fluid motion, an amazing scare-reflex. One second, we were watching her play, the next, she was huddled under the desk, while of course, our in-game character was left hapless against the horrific apparition that was chasing it along the asylum corridors. This whole saga was a precursor for our later playing of Outlast and SOMA, similar horror games. While I’m perfectly fine playing point-and-click horror titles on my own, when it’s in the FPS genre, it just exudes a vulnerability that I cannot digest on my own. I think it’s because you can only see in front of you in FPS games, much like real life, so there’s a constant sense of terror. While P&C games are 2D and have third-person, all-encompassing perspectives, somewhat defusing the sense of helplessness and terror. Of course, I supremely despise cheap tricks in horror, such as “jump-scares” – both in films and games – and therefore my favorite horror games are those where the atmosphere and general premise is haunting and scary, rather than loud noises or sudden visuals which startle rather than actually scare a person. Being startled is not a substitute for horror, it’s a different emotion.
I purchased a guitar a few days ago. It’s nothing fancy, a pretty default Yamaha all-metal-stringed “acoustic” guitar. It’s been about 8 years since I last touched a guitar, yet all the chords and certain basic tunes seem to have been engrained in my muscle memory. Perhaps that explains how much I struggled with Greek syntax… maybe all this guitar stuff was taking up brain space. Anyway, my current project, which I’m working on daily, is to be able to play Nothing Else Matters like ye old days. This is a fun little distraction from my ‘real’ side hustle which is pushing out my new paper for the International Medieval Congress currently titled “Saintly Defense and Local Solidarity in Beleaguered Bithynia, Paphlagonia and Phrygia, ca. 640-863.” This is yet another attempt I’m making at clawing an inroad into the bloated subspace of European academia, and it’s a costly one too. Unlike all the other delegates who will be milling around semi-aloof, I’m paying the conference fee, travel and accommodation costs out of my increasingly aerated pocket since I presently lack an academic post. These have amounted to just over 850 euros thus far, thanks to exorbitant British costs, quite ridiculous really. But, alas, I’m on a timer. The merry-go-round of shit-weavers that represent the lords of academia do not wait for long; unless one has secured an academic appointment within a few years of one’s doctoral defense, it’s all but over. So, I’ve decided to try my best, so to speak, to allay any future regrets I may otherwise have should my scholarly enterprises not pan out as desired. At Leeds, my aim is to take maximum advantage of the four-day congress and try to exercise my pathetically insufficient social battery to “network” – even typing this word makes me cringe and shudder. Anyway, fear is useless, but of course I must first actually articulate my idea in presentable format, since it’s currently merely synapse-fluid in this osseous cage that sits atop my rotting body, somewhere within which I lurk.
May 7, 2024:
Today I woke up and began to reminisce about my school years, out of the blue. I’ve decided to pen some of the most poignant or amusing memories I have from those days.
I remember waking up one morning in 2001, a few days before my eleventh birthday, to find my mother in the sitting room watching the news with a frantic expression on her face. All the Turkish news channels, for that is all we received on the network, were showing these two large towers with massive smoke columns billowing out of them like furnaces on the verge of collapse. There had been an attack on American soil by someone or some entity, which I remember thinking at the time must have been very sophisticated and impressive. That was a school morning, much to my dismay, and without really realizing the magnitude of things I was forced to leave for school, which I hated. At the age of eleven we are basically semi-human, semi-beast; the brain is barely developed, and everything is filtered through an idiotic and primal lens. I remember, in those days, sitting in doing something else, god knows what, maybe playing with Lego or something, while the news was on. It was always George f*cking Bush raving on about the war on terror that the collapse of those towers had allegedly precipitated. But even everyone my age knew that ulterior motives guided this alleged dismantling of terror and supposed “weapons of mass destruction.” Every kid knew it was for the oil, it was a sort of nonchalant common talking point at school. It would be Bush’s oil-war and other random assortments of phrases and concepts that people had picked up from their parents and the news that would be thrown about as we ran aimlessly after a bouncy sphere on a carpet of creepy green tentacles. Whoever first reached the idiotic ball kicked it away for others to begin running after it anew, on and on the cycle went ad infinitum – it’s good exercise of course though.
The carpet-bombing of civilians from the safety of a helicopter that was called “The War on Terror” was indeed interesting to witness as a child in the formative stages of cognitive development. This was what the ‘good guys’ did, clearly, since that’s what every figure of authority was saying. The juvenile logic behind this façade is best explained by Mark Fisher: “[What makes Terrorists terrorists is not their supposed lack of legitimate authority but their Inherent Evil. We are ontologically Good; Good by our very nature, no matter what we do. We belong to an ‘alliance of moderation’ against the Axis of Evil. So when ‘we’ ‘accidentally’ level an apartment block full of children with our moderate bombs, we do not cease to be moderate. The difference between They, the Evil and We, the Good is, of course, intent; the Terrorists deliberately target civilians. This is their only aim, because they are Evil. Although we kill vastly more civilians, we do not intend to it, so we remain Good.]” (from K-punk: 02.08.2006).
2002 was still the early days of the unhinged internet, the pure experience. And I remember after all the 9-11 crap, there were so many supremely violent, racist and insensitive games that we didn’t view like that (we were 12 years old after all) and that we played with great excitement on the PC’s in the library at school [I did not even have internet at home until 2005]. Websites such as Newgrounds had these flash games consisting of shooting random ‘green stick figures’ who represented muslims and just annihilating them all; they’d explode into chunks of gore and brains and blood trails. You’d also have to blow up mosques and other random ‘objectives’ including anything that remotely resembled the Middle Eastern geography and its cultural or biological artefacts. There we were in Turkey having a great time mowing down bearded green stick figures holding flags with Arabic on them. Some levels were set in Guantanamo-bay type places, supremely vile settings where you’d have to shoot or violate bound and helpless prisoners… America’s “war on terror” meets the un-policed early internet; what an exquisite formative experience for a bunch of primary school children. That being said, I doubt it did any long-term harm, except psyche me out a bit with the violence and torture crap, thankfully stick figures aren’t too realistic, but the ‘idea’ itself was a bit intense. The amount of coddling and shit these days is fucking ridiculous though. Of course this level of shit is beyond acceptable but these days its far too shelter-ville, kids don’t ever see anything remotely unsettling. After all, the shit we were doing in the game in places like Guantanamo bay pales in comparison with what was actually happening there…
In November of 2002, my twelve-year-old self witnessed AKP’s sweeping victory in Turkey’s general elections. This was sort of funny at the time, for I of course had no cognizance of the political nuances of either side at that age. All I knew was that my father kept saying that AKP and its supporters were “the enemy” and we were staunch CHP supporters. (I remember once my aunt, my father’s sister, wound down the car’s window as we drove past a group of women in the full Islamic veil, and just shouted at them, “cockroaches, we don’t want you here, go back to Arabia.”) To my mind, this election was akin to supporting a football team. One usually ended up just going with whatever one’s father was supporting. Meanwhile, my mother spoke less vehemently and deployed less charged rhetoric for or against the AKP, but I do remember seeing her disappointed and a bit worried when watching the results on live television on that November’s evening. These were of course still the days when Erdogan was banned from politics, and thus Gül was “winning” the election, although everyone, including twelve-year-old kids, knew that it was Erdogan who was winning. Of course no one knew this would last 23 years and counting…
In November of 2003, I remember the HSBC bombings occurred while I was at school. Large car-bombs exploded at around 9:30 AM at HSBC in the business district of Istanbul and also near a large Synagogue, killing about 60 people and injuring hundreds. The interesting thing was, 9:30 was just the time of our morning break, and I remember being outside and hearing a distant booming sound. At the time me and a few others concluded that it must be the janitor slamming down the lid of the massive metal container bins down the lane – for of course a bomb was not immediately on our minds. I then remember going inside and informing my class-mates that “it’s just the bin lids.” When it turned out it was a bomb that killed many people, including the mother of one our classmates, I remember being very embarrassed about my premature conclusion. In fact, I was harassed and actually beaten up for even daring to suggest that it may have been the lid of the bin, despite the fact that at that point none of us had known the true cause. It was only a few minutes after the event and the news had not broken yet – this was of course before widespread internet and phone usage. Children are just so stupid though, there is no logical interface or circuit-board in their minds, just a completely barren wasteland. So, of course, I was labelled as “supremely insensitive” despite it logically making no sense whatsoever.
The only good thing that came of being reclusive at school was that I frequented the library a lot and it is there that I remember randomly picking up a massive book on the Second World War (John Keegan’s to be precise) and reading it. This got me hooked on history, and I was particularly obsessed with WWII for some reason. I even remember, rather naively, at the age of twelve, drawing a massive swastika and a hammer-and-sickle diametrically opposite each other on my desk. For these were the two main teams in the war in my mind (I was most obsessed with the Eastern front). I then populated the area in between them with missiles and bullets by drawing random lines with a pencil, basically nonsensical scribblings. I remember it was a class of English with Mr. Lovely who was an American. He did not find it amusing that I had drawn politically unsavory symbology, despite me having no idea about their magnitude. I remember him shouting at me in front of the whole class, which really scared me, for I thought it a gross over-reaction. I did not know why he was so angry. He then made me go to the bathroom and get tissue-paper and soap and scrub the desk clean in front of everyone. I felt so upset because I normally liked that class. Of course, I do believe it was an idiotic American over-reaction. He probably did not even see the hammer-and-sickle or the bullets or realize that I was just trying to depict a WWII to scene, instead he just saw a large swastika and his American-ness got activated. I was completely naive, merely interested in history, which I was immersing myself in at my own discretion at the school library. How is a child in Turkey to know that some symbols are inappropriate for Westerners. I still get angry thinking about how I was shouted at for nothing. Goddamn shit.
Another amusing – but somewhat less savory – story was the whole saga that revolved around Mr. Fortin, my primary school French teacher. I took two years of French from him, when I was twelve and thirteen. He was super lively and would teach us the French alphabet with a lively song that he sang while making a mock-guitar out of a large ruler and pretending to strum it. People generally liked him, students and parents. Also, he would hand us what he called bonbons, or little suck-able sweets before and after class. We loved this of course. We’d receive these little sweets, and the entire classroom would be filled with this semi-gross wet suctioning sound and the occasional rattle as someone tossed the bonbon around their mouths and it hit their teeth. It was free sweets though, so we were very happy. Anyway, years later, while in High School, I saw in the news that Mr. Fortin had been deported to Canada (he was from Quebec) because he had been caught engaged in pedophilic activities, and a police raid on his house in Istanbul had subsequently found several hard-drives worth of child porn. This caused a massive scandal at the school, for he was still employed when this incident occurred. I guess perhaps him handing out bonbons and watching us suck on them was not so innocent after all. Of course, me and my old friends just laughed at this like crazy hyenas, for by now we were in High School and could not care less, but also because we were indeed rabid from getting drilled by lukewarm bullshit all day at school.
May 22, 2024:
Absolutely zero ‘progress’ on any metric whatsoever these last few weeks. I’m barely scraping together the willpower needed to (very slowly) progress on the IMC paper, and likewise, the idea of combing through pages and pages of job postings for a sliver of a chance to possibly be considered for a barely-related postdoctoral position is not the most inspiring activity. Exercise, healthy habits and all self-improving acts also just seem so irritating and pointless. The only thing I wish to do is just sit and play video-games or read certain highly specific stuff, namely literature and research surrounding the accursed Franklin Expedition – my current obsession. Through dusty nineteenth-century field notes, and later forensic reports, one can slowly envision the nightmarish saga that unfolded in search of the god-forsaken Northwestern Passage. The fate of most of those sailors is still unknown, save for a few whose remains have been reliably recovered. A maddening enigma of utmost suggestive potential indeed, recently extrapolated by novelist Dan Simmons in The Terror. Even the names of the vessels – H.M.Ships Erebus and Terror – foreshadow the fate that eventually befell them. I’ve been taking notes in order to create an RP/Puzzle game set during the recovery efforts of the 1850-70s. But while my mind occupies these hallowed corridors, my finances continue to wither, my body rots and decays, and Death slowly slithers closer, as it always does. Humans are so empty. It’s a paradox that something already emptycan get even emptier. For we are, when all is said and done, yawning abysses in soft anthropomorphic outlines, desperately trying to mimic something, anything, lest our inner maw unveil itself like it did, no doubt, for the poor souls of the Franklin expedition as they sucked marrow from the femur of a fallen comrade, who was, once upon a time, supposedly something more than they had become. When and where mankind eventually succumbs to the primal urge of his shortcomings, such as the long road to cannibalism, is a sure sign of this inner emptiness that shatters any illusions conjured by religion or similar coping mechanisms where one buries one’s head into a child’s sandbox and desperately tries to ignore the absolute void.
The Franklin Expedition is curious in that only two pieces of written evidence pertaining to it have ever been recovered, both by F. L. McClintock during his 1857-59 expedition, and they are both maddeningly enigmatic. The first, commonly referred to as the Victory Point Note, is a small note signed by Captain Crozier and James Fitzjames found stuffed in a cairn on King William Island. It contains several unexplained problems. Why was the crew’s wintering date on Beechey Island given wrong (1846-47 instead of the correct 1845-46)? This is such an elementary mistake for such an important and short note, which otherwise records much more detailed stuff accurately. Secondly, the note mentions that Lt. John Irving was marching south, so why was his body later found at a place called Ross’s Cairn, in the opposite direction? What transpired? Thirdly, the note reports some casualty numbers: at its time of composition on April 25th, 1848, 15 men and 9 officers were reportedly dead, out of a total of 105 men and 24 officers. Why were the casualty numbers so skewed towards officers? Two theories exist: either something that the officers ate/drank that the regular men did not was causing harm, or perhaps some officer-heavy event, such as a burial procession, got lost and perished all at once. Fourthly and finally, the note ends with the simple line: “start tomorrow the 26th for the Backs Fish River.” It is unclear who is marching to Back River; was it all the men, or a smaller party? It is also interesting to note that the Back River was over 600 miles south across the frozen Canadian tundra – a seemingly impossible target by all estimations. Were the crew aware of this? Oral evidence collected from the Inuit indeed report “white men dragging whaleboats on sledges.” A chilling premise indeed.
The only other piece of written evidence ever found relating to the Franklin Expedition is a diary-esque notebook belonging to what is thought to be Henry Peglar, a petty officer on HMS Terror. These so-called Peglar Papers are even more enigmatic though; they raise more questions than they answer. Firstly, large sections of the notebook are written backwards (the sentence order remains forward, but each word is spelled backwards). This is thought to be because much of it consisted of a commentary on onboard conditions (e.g., complaints about the rations). The sentence “we have got some very hard ground to heave” has raised much speculation. Was this the act of heaving sledges over snow, as the Inuit indeed would observe the crew do, or was it the act of digging graves in the frozen landscape for their already fallen comrades, as has been archaeologically discovered? Secondly, there is mention of something important transpiring on the 21st, but neither the month nor the year is clear. What was this referring to? It is haunting to imagine what became of these sailors, and how they all eventually perished, either before cannibalising each other or after. Such an exquisite tale of the human condition that is perhaps best crystallized in the frozen face of John Torrington, lead stoker of HMS Terror. His body had been preserved in the ice for 150 years, essentially mummified, and a photograph taken in 1998 during his exhumation allows us to forever gaze into the blue abyss that extends beyond his still open eyes. The image is as evocative as it is haunting. What did this 21-year-old sailor experience in those final days?
Beyond all this ‘fun’ stuff, we’ve just recently returned from Scotland, which was a marvellous escapade where me and Selin both bled more than half a month’s wage each. Despite that, I think it was well worth it. We first went to Inverness, the capital of the Highlands, and an absolute beauty of a town. We listened to endless Highland myths and legends from Liall McKenzie (himself born in Wick) and then did a 45km cycle around the rim of the Loch Ness on a surprisingly warm and sunny day. Our visit to the Island of Skye was also the stuff of legends. The fog slowly descended and covered everything in a web-like mist that weaved around all objects like gossamer. At one point, Selin entered a little store while I sat atop a low wall awaiting her and suddenly a small 10-year-old girl appeared out of the fog. She had wrapped her arm in some type of white material (likely rolls and rolls of wet tissue paper) in order to fake an “arm break” for her mother. A wicked plan that I was much impressed by, but I was simultaneously saddened by her entombed life in that little fishing outpost facing the Atlantic shelf all alone. This was not even Portree, the biggest ‘town’ of 2300 people on Skye, but a smaller satellite village further north. She was probably the only child that lived in the vicinity. Anyway, we clambered into a large bus and drove off into the mist, leaving the girl staring blankly after the receding rumble of an accelerating engine. God only knows what became of her, I sometimes wonder. The Highlands are indeed mystifying.
One of the most interesting folkloric practices of the region is the concept of dà-shealladh, or “second-sight.” This is the sort of practice outlined in King James’ infamous Daemonologie (1597) and in the Newes from Scotland (1591) detailing the North Berwick witch trials. This practice continued well into the twentieth century, as documented by J.G. Campbell’s Witchcraft and Second Sight (1901). Many Highland seers saw omens of death, such as glimpsing an empty seat where a person was actually sitting (a sure sign they were going to die), hearing the cry of a wraith, observing blue quivering lights in peripheral vision, or seeing oneself in the distance, turned away. There are truly expressive tales, such as the case of a child who was haunted by her own doppelgänger that she would glimpse at sundown every day, always turned away and always drenched, indicating death at sea – which eventually befell her. Aside from seers who could foretell the future, there were also witches, who could alter it, usually in nefarious ways. Most famous perhaps was the Witch of Laggan who haunted the forests around Badenoch, multiple tales spanning centuries exist of her murderous deeds, including shape-shifting into a black cat and a raven. Another infamous witch was the Barra Witch, who terrorized sailors. Witches reportedly utilized crop craedha or “wax-effigies” to inflict harm on other people and they also exploited the malicious practices of threading and bowl-stirring. The Highlands are indeed steeped in magic, which is exhilarating to read about. One can only imagine how a beanshith (“banshee”) or a caoineag (“little weeping one”) may have haunted the glens and moors of Scotland in the past centuries, before empiric reasoning dismantled all magic and imagination from our minds. Now we walk this earth as dull husks enslaved by knowledge, which is all but useless for our merriment. And what do we even know anyway, likely nothing of note.
June 5, 2024:
Yesterday, as I was walking towards the tram, silently contemplating the darkness that nibbled away at the remnants of cloud-light that poured forth from the sky, I noticed a mild scuffle outside a bar near the central train station. This sight stirred up an old memory of mine from around 2007, likely due to the convergence of a set of phenomena too specific and complex to retrace. I remember being in one of the back alleys of Istiklal Street in Istanbul, watching a petty bar fight spill out onto the street a few meters in front of me. Two men were wrestling and punching each other to no avail like a pair of giant squids locked in some macabre love-making ritual, each hoping to find an opening to destroy the other’s life. This did not take long. One of them grabbed a nearby 50cl glass-bottle of beer, his eyes twitching with rage, and whacked the other right in the skull. The sound was quite disturbing, you could hear something give way, or crack. The victim immediately crumpled onto the floor near the edge of the pavement, stripped of all dignity, completely unconscious, and bleeding profusely from the head. A mixture of blood, other liquified organics and that guy’s hopes and dreams gently ran along the gutter, gradually coagulating into a viscous, dark red plasma around the drain cover. This amalgam will eventually scab over the drain, causing the airtight interior to rot and, over time, spawn grotesque new lifeforms that will, in turn, writhe and pulsate like tormented cephalopods themselves. The primordial cycle of life will thus continue. The guy who was now likely a murderer immediately fled the scene, while us observers began to hastily disperse for fear of getting tangled up in the affair. I have no idea what happened to that guy, whether he survived or not. Of course, I do not want to paint a dark image; this was a singular incident. Back in those days the entire Taksim region was a joyous hub of nightlife and of juvenile energy where high school and university students congregated after school. Bars lined the streets and plumes of alcohol caressed everyone’s throat with little societal pressure.
June 20, 2024:
Geçen gün buraya neden Türkçe yazmadığım üzerine düşünüyordum ve önemli bir sebebinin TR klavye tasarımı ile ilgili olduğunu fark ettim; ne ek karakterlere alışığım ne de normalde ezberden kullandığım noktalama işaretlerinin yerlerine. Parantez aç-kapa tuşlarının bile yerleri değişiyormuş klavyenin dilini değiştirince… Ama madem Türkçe başladım bu sefer, öyle devam edeyim. Türkçe yazamıyorum nedense, daha doğrusu yazdığım şeyleri beğenmiyorum. O yüzden kendi sözlerim yerine Deniz Gezmiş’in sözlerinden bir kesit vermek istiyorum. 1971’de Sivas açıklarında yakalanışını anlattığı, cezaevinde Erdal Öz’e verdiği röportajdan bir kaç cümle. A hauntingly beautiful perspective…
“Son düştüğüm pusu. Yakalandığım tarlanın içinde. Çukurda. Tarla vıcık vıcık çamur. Her yan çamur. Bir yandan da aralıksız yağmur yağıyor, sulusepken. Parkamın başlığını başıma geçiriyorum. Ellerim üşüyor. Eldivenlerimi, silahı daha rahat kullanayım diye daha önce bir yerlerde fırlatıp atmıştım. Hava buz gibi. Bir çukurun içindeyim. Çepeçevre sarmışlar. Bütün arabaların farları üzerimde. İçine girdiğim çukur, işte bu hücre kadar bir yer. Sağıma soluma yağmur gibi mermi yağıyor. Mermiler, düştüğü yerden çamurları savuruyorlar havaya. Farların aydınlığında yağan sulusepkeni renklendiriyor havaya sıçrayan çamurlar. Ben çukurun dibine, çukurun biçimine uyarak U harfi gibi uzanmışım. Çukurun dibinde kar var. Yattığım yerden yukarıyı gözlüyorum, çukurun üstünü. Sanki donanma fişekleri atılıyor üstümde. Korkunç güzel bir renk cümbüşü tepemde. ‘Cıvv ‘ diye giriyor çukurun yanındaki çamurlara mermiler, çamuru savuruyorlar tepeden inen farların aydınlattığı sulusepkenin içine, üstüme renk renk koca bir dünya yağıyor. Korkunç güzel, anlatılmaz bir görünüş. Yarım saat, bir saat sürüyor bu.
Bilimi düşünüyorsun orada. İki yüz yıl, üç yüz yıl sonrasını düşünüyorsun. Ve bilimin insanlığa getireceklerini. Ve birden içinde bulunduğun o durum anlamsız geliyor sana. Ionesco’nun oyunları gibi bir şey. Saçma geliyor kimi şeyler sana o anda. Yaşaman gerektiğini kavrıyorsun. Bilim almış başını yürürken, karşındaki bir sürü insanın ne kadar küçük şeylerle uğraştıklarını düşünüp acınıyorsun. İçerliyorsun. “Lanetli adamlar” diye geçiriyorsun kafandan. İnsanlığın geleceğini, ve senin o günleri göremeyeceğini düşünüyorsun; insanı hüzünlendiriyor bu. Bir yanda güzel, eşsiz bir gelecek, bir yanda o güzelim günleri ·göremeyeceğin duygusu. “Nasılsa öleceğim” diye düşünmeye başlıyorsun. Mermi vardı oysa yanımda. Birazdan bir bomba sallayacaklar üzerime diyordum. Ölüp gideceksin. İlk anda ölmemeyi düşünüyordum; yaralanmayı, yaralı ve rahat bir ölümü. Ama bir süre sonra, dünyanın dört bir yanında ölen bir sürü devrimciyi düşünüyorsun ve bir an nasılsa rahat bir ölümü düşünmüş olduğun için korkunç bir utanç duyuyorsun kendi kendine. Bir devrimci nasıl ölmesi gerekiyorsa öyle ölmeli.
Ve daha önce hiç aklıma gelmeyen birtakım anılar geçiyor gözümün önünden. Bir film gibi ve çok hızlı geçiyor bunlar. Örneğin çocukluk günlerim gelip geçti gözümün önünden nedense. Çocukluğum: Bahçeli bir evimiz vardı. Çiçekler doluydu bahçemizde. Onların, o çiçeklerin arasında koşup oynayışımı. Sonra gözümün önünden gelip geçen şeyler arasında ansızın, bir sevgili. Çok buruk bir duygu bu. Kızın gülüşü, oturuşu, düşünüşü. Kesin ve çok net görüntüler bunlar. Değişik durumlarda ve öylesine canlı ki. Dipdiri. Karşımda sanki. Renkli bir film gibi. Sen o durumdayken, o anda, onun evinde oluşu, sıcacık bir odada oluşu, belki de neşeli oluşu, gülüyor oluşu… Bütün bu anımsanan şeylere, kişilere karşı, bütün yaşayanlara karşı o anda içinde küçücük bir kıskançlık duygusu. Ve birden, ansızın çok gülünç, matrak bir şey de geliveriyor aklıma, gülüyorum. Daha bir sürü görüntü. Üniversite günleri. Beyazıt alanı. Beyazıt’ın ara sokakları. Sonra, ölen arkadaşlarım geliyor aklıma. Daha çok Taylan’ı anımsadım orada. Sonra Filistin’deki çocukları…
Elli altmış metre ötedeler. Tam bir çemberin ortasındasın. Arada silah sesleri kesiliyor ve, “Teslim ol,” sesi duyuluyor. Başımı yavaşça çukurdan çıkarıp sesin geldiği yere, birazcık havaya doğru bir kurşun sıkıyorum. Yine siniyorum çukurun dibine. Bu hücre büyüklüğünde bu çukur. Ayağa kalkınca yüksekliği göğsüme geliyor. Sırtımı çukurun duvarına vermişim, arkaüstü yatıyorum çukurda. Dipte, altımda kar var. Daha erimemiş. Çukurun yanlarında çalılar. Bir iki mermi kalmış. Son mermiyi kendine saklamak istiyorsun. Gerekirse vuracaksın kendini, karşı devrimin eline düşmemek için. Bunu düşünürken ölüm korkusu yok. En küçük bir çekinme yok. Namluyu şakağına dayayacaksın. Basacaksın tetiğe; tamam. Oh rahat. Kurşunu yüreğine sıkmaya için elvermiyor, kıyamıyorsun yüreğine. Yürek garip bir değer kazanıyor orada. Kendi kendime, orada, namluyu şakağıma dayayıp öleceğimi, acı duymayacağımı, kurtulacağımı falan da düşünüyordum. Ama, bir de bunun, işin kolayına kaçmak olduğu geliyor insanın aklına. Vazgeçiyorsun.
İki mermim kalmıştı. Mermiler tükenince çukurdan çıkmayı düşündüm. Başım dik çıkacağım. Vururlarsa vuracaklar. Başım dik gideceğim ölüme. Ya vurmazlarsa? O zaman yakalayıp işkence edecekler. İşkence kolay. Bir gün boyunca da sürse işkence, dayanılır, onun acısı nasıl olsa geçer. Zaman nasıl olsa akıp geçecek ve işkencenin acısı da bir süre sonra nasıl olsa kalmayacak diye düşünüyorsun. On beş gün önce işkence görseydim şimdiye çoktan etkileri geçmiş olacaktı, unutmuş olacaktım. Böyle düşündüm orada. Kararlıyım. Dayanacağım işkenceye. Konuşturamayacaklar. Çözülmeyeceğim. Kesin kararlıyım. Silahımı attım birden. Bir ara ateş de kesilmişti. “Çıkıyorum!” diye bağırdım. Çıktım. Bekledim, ama ateş eden olmadı. Parkamın başlığını geriye attım. Başım dik. Bir elim cebimde, boş tabancamda. Gerekli olabilir. Boş ama, olsun. Umursamaz bir hava takındım. Her an bir mermi bekliyorum. Her an bir mermi bir yerime saplanacak. Ha geldi ha gelecek.
“Dur,” falan diyorlar. Bir yığın şey söylüyorlar. Artık söylenenleri duymuyorum. Söylenen sözlerin bir tekini bile anlamıyorum. Biliyorum, görüyorum: bütün namlular üzerime çevrili. Her namlunun ucunda ben varım. Çevrede kum gibi asker kaynıyor. Yola çıkıyorum. Gemerek’e giden yol bu. Ve Gemerek yönünde yürümeye başlıyorum. Ama hep, her an bir kurşun bekliyorum. Etimle kemiğimle bunu bekliyorum. “Kayseri Emniyet Amiriyim. Seni teslim alıyorum,” diyor bir ses. Tepkim büyük oluyor. önceden hiç tasarlamadığım bir tepki bu, hiç düşünmediğim bir şey. Beklenmedik, olağanüstü bir tepki oluyor bende: “Siktir be. Sen kimsin ulan beni teslim alacak!” diyorum.Elimi cebimden çıkarır gibi yapıyorum. Uzaklaşıveriyor. Yine yürüyorum. Bir albay çıkıyor yolumun üstüne. Ve bir arabaya binip gidiyoruz.
Yakalandığımda saat gecenin 02.30’u falandı. Beni alıp doğruca Kayseri’ye götürdüler. Ellerim kelepçeliydi. İki yanımdan iki iri adama kelepçelemişlerdi. Yolda durmadan soruyorlar. Ara vermeden soruyorlar. Hiç konuşmuyorum. Kayseri’ye varıyoruz. Vakit gecenin yarısı. Vali’nin karşısına çıkarılıyorum. Vali, “Yakalandın mı sonunda?” dedi küçümsemeye çalışarak. “Sen bir köpeksin. Köpek kalacaksın,” dedim. Hiç ummuyordu böyle bir şey söyleyeceğimi. Apışıp kaldı karşımda. Sözümün altından kalkamadı. Bastı gitti. Oturdum. Çay getirdiler. Polisler dönüp duruyor çevremde. Hiçbir kaba söz, kaba davranış yok. “Ağabey, ne istersin?” “Bir istediğin var mı Deniz ağabey?”
Bir de şunu gördüm: Çok duygulanıyorlar. Hele yakalandığımda, Kayseri’ye götürülürken, iki koluma kelepçeyle bağlı o iki iri polis vardı ya, ben Ankara’ya getirilirken, ikisi yine beni getirdikleri arabadaydı. Yolda ağladılar. İsteyerek yapmadıklarını söylediler, üzüntülerini belirttiler. Ankara’ya candarma pikabıyla ve uzun bir konvoy halinde girdik. Saat sabahın 8’i falandı. Yollar tıklım tıklım insanla doluydu. Ankara, yeni bir güne başlıyordu. İşlerine giden memurlar. Okullarına giden öğrenciler. Yağmur yağıyor. lslak bir Ankara sabahı. Sevdiğim sabahlardan biri. İndiriyorlar.
Evet, idama gidiyor bu işin sonu. Bunu biliyorsun. Yakalandığın andan sonra bunu hep biliyorsun. Sonu idama gidiyor bu işin. Hele hücreye kapatılıp da, düşünme rahatlığına erince. Bildiğin tek şey var: İdam, ölüm. Ama biliyor musun, pek de korkunç gelmiyor bu sana. O sahneyi çok iyi somutladım. Asılma günü gelip çatınca, o sevdiğim giysilerimi giyeceğim. Postallarımı, parkamı. Beyaz ölüm gömleğimi giydirmek isteyecekler, giymeyeceğim. Kesin direneceğim ve giymeyeceğim. Oyle her zamanki gibi, eyleme gidiş tavrımla gideceğim darağacına. Yok, traş falan da olmayacağım. Önce gidip orada oturacak, bir sigara yakacağım. Sonra demli güzel bir çay içeceğim.
Ha, bak, Rodrigo’nun o ünlü gitar konçertosunu dinlemek isterim orada. Bak bunu çok isterim. Sanırım, asılacak bir insanın son isteklerini geri çevirmezler. Bunları isteyeceğim. Bir de avukatlarımın asılma sırasında orada bulunma hakları var. Onların orada olmalarını isteyeceğim. Bunu kesin isteyeceğim. Gelecekler. Gelmeleri gerek. Orada bulunmaları gerek. Olaya tanıklık etmeleri için bu kaçınılmaz bir şey. Bu işler olup biterken, bizim ölümümüze tanıklar gerek. Çünkü bizden sonrakilere umut verecek bu sahne. Asılışımız gürültüye gelmemeli. İpe nasıl gittiğimizi gelecek kuşaklara anlatacak doğru dürüst, güvenilir görgü tanıkları bulunmalı orada.
Bir de kendim çıkıp urganı kendim geçireceğim boynuma. Bunu çok istiyorurn. Cellat falan sokmayacağım yanıma. İğrenç bir şey. Ve dönüp orada beni asan heriflere, asılmamı seyreden heriflere, diyeceğim ki: “Burada ölen yalnızca bedenimdir; ki zaten ölümlüydü, ölecekti. Ama düşüncemi öldüremeyeceksiniz. Düşüncem yaşayacak,” diyeceğim. Sonra avukatlarıma döneceğim. “Sizler de, bizler için gelecek kuşaklara. Tanıklık edin,” diyeceğim. “Bir devrimci ölüme böyle gider işte. Bayram yerine gider gibi.” Ve şunu da söyleyeceğim: “Herhangi bir trafik kazasında ölmekten falan da güzeldir bu bizim ölümümüz. Hele böyle olursa.” İmam falan gelirse dua mua etmek için, siktir edeceğim. Ve soracaklar bana. O zaman vasiyetim şu olacak: “Cesedim yakılsın,” diyeceğim. Cesedim yakılsın, küllerim de belirsiz bir yere savrulsun. Böylece hem benim isteğimin dışında imam, mezar, dua gibi şeyler olmayacak, hem de asıl, düşüncenin önemli olduğunu kanıtlamış olacağım. Aslolan düşüncedir. Önemli olan düşüncedir.”
July 12, 2024:
Even though I’ve been reading through Ligotti’s Teatro Grottesco, which is absolutely excellent (of course), the scariest thing I have read in recent times has got to be the r/nosleep post titled: “My wife has been peeking at me from around corners.” A bone-chilling story presented as a real anecdote, which I hope it was not, for the sake of all things lucid. It reminded me of the simplicity of horror presented in the old-but-gold story on the same forum titled: “My sugar daddy asks me for weird favors.” I think these two are must-reads for any horror fan. Anyway, I went to Leeds last week to eviscerate my monthly pay-check for a semblance of ‘networking’. Was it a successful endeavour? Who knows… time will tell, I suppose. I also presented my latest research on Dark Age hagiographies of Anatolia. Some of the feedback I received may help propel this towards a published paper, one day, sometime in the far future… maybe. Let’s see. Beyond all that gabble, the best experience of recent times has probably been playing through Stasis: Bone Totem. What an incredible successor to the Statis series. The horror is visceral, the sci-fi/dystopia is enrapturing, the philosophical exodus is provoking, the art-style is perfect, and the prose… I mean whoever authored this masterpiece deserves to be recognized right up there with Robert Kurvitz and co. Stasis: Bone Totem is now officially one of my all-time favorite games, it’s definitely firmly within the top ten. I also quite enjoyed Killer Frequency, if for nothing else than its 80s/retro/neon atmosphere that is so organically presented. It’s my favorite decade, after all. In fact, it is my love of the 1980s that first introduced me to the word anemoia, meaning “ nostalgia for a time or place that one has never known.” Two global superpowers on the verge of nuclear annihilation, the birth of pixels and consoles and gaming, the tail-end of a space race steeped in wonder and mystery, the maturing of SETI initiatives, hair metal, neon lights, Sandra Ann Lauer, plastic cemeteries, Lucas Arts, William Gibson’s literary peak, etc., and Lynch’s Twin Peaks was just around the corner. Need I say more? Meanwhile what did the 90s have? Fuck all. Anyway, this last month I have also worked my way through several other adventure games. I’ve reviewed them at length on my Steam profile: https://steamcommunity.com/id/cahitmetez/
Meanwhile my grant applications are not going so well. MSCA: rejected; SNSF: rejected; SHOC: rejected… the list goes on. The ‘really high but just barely below the cut off’ scores I keep getting remain completely useless of course. I’ve lost count of how many postdocs and grants I’ve applied to. The competition is sky high, and it’s not a fair competition either. The starry-eyed youngster who completed his doctoral degree over a year ago is no more. He’s dead. Well, perhaps he was never that starry-eyed, but still, somewhere deep within him he was fanning an ember of hope that whispered of days to come when he’d grace the hallowed halls of academia. [As Thales wisely said: Τὶ κοινότατον; Ἐλπίς. Καὶ γὰρ οἷς ἄλλο μηδέν, αὔτη παρέστη.] That ember is what died, leaving behind cold indignation seasoned with cynicism, desperation, and a receding hairline… The promised land is dead. It suffocated somewhere… somewhere far, far away, beneath centrists and moderates and neoliberals and all the other useless noise generators. While the ideology of silence is deafening at the theoretical level, the opposite is true in the global political arena: an absolute cacophony of useless, same-flavored noise bulldozes over all reason. Nothing can get close to this noise-sphere; it is truly deafening. It projects a gravitational Roche Radius around it; any counter-argument or sensible viewpoint getting too close will be unable to overcome the tidal forces exerted on it by batshit takes and bullshit logic and be crushed to dust. Nothing can survive the weight of this noise, which disintegrates all that approach it. This is why expending any effort to better the planet or our pitiful species is a total waste of time. We’re a bubble of pointless noise suspended in deep silence, curving through the void of space, crawling along the Orion-Cygnus Arm of the Milky Way – but to what avail? Hopefully before we complete our galactic year something will trigger the Shiva Hypothesis. Maybe some weird warp in the fabric of space-time, like a wormhole or something yet undiscovered, will accelerate the timeline and beam us into a glorious Holocene extinction. Or perhaps thermo-nuclear annihilation or something of that sorts will be our salvation. We might all die, but at least it would be amusing. Anyway, until then, I must… compete… in… the… RAT RACE.
August 9, 2024:
It’s been over a year, but I’m finally back in the ashlands of Khazad-dūm, otherwise known as Istanbul, that delectable and equally detestable stretch of real estate extending from the horn of gold to the black lake; that slice of haunting turmoil nested between the tectonic plates that barricade away Asiatic chaos; the silenced orphan of Western civilization, the bastard doorman of Europe, the circus freak of the Middle East, receding away, disintegrating, bleeding… yet somehow alive. I must remember not to drink the tap water, something I did on my first day last summer; autopilot dies hard. The economic crisis beams through all lifeforms here at the moment. Everything is ridiculously expensive, even when converted to euros. Something is bound to snap. In more local news, there’s a strange crackling cell-antenna type thing right outside my window, god knows what the hell it is, but the insufferable noise it makes 24/7 is draining my sanity. It was not there last summer… what an annoyance indeed. On August 9th, I logged a complaint with the local municipality – but I doubt it gets resolved any time soon. (August 13th Update: Well, it got way worse, bordering on unliveable, so the neighbouring houses and I decided to complain together. We were directed from the municipality to the BTK, which administers the cellular network in the country, but then, in a further twist of events, it turned out the structure belongs to the military [perhaps the intelligence agency, MIT]. Eventually the police came and did something to silence it. What a saga indeed…)
Well, I’ve crawled back into the academic womb again, into that amniotic slime from which I’ve still not rid myself since my defense in May 2023. I’m re-calibrating and editing my MSCA and SNSF grant applications, all over again, much like last year, to take a second swing at academic birth – god knows how many more pushes I need. What a detestable hassle… I’d much rather work on my monograph: Cambridge relayed some hefty edits that I’m eager to work on. But there’s the insurmountable and gnawing annoyance of other things to do all the time, including my day job, which I’m home-officing from Istanbul this week. My horror tale is also developing, but not on paper sadly, no time for that. It currently consists of a few scribbles and some thematic ideas: I wish to somehow involve Piri Reis’ accurate nautical map of the Antarctic shelf dating from 1513 that remains unexplained to this day. A ripe mystery indeed. These days there’s also some hot fuss surrounding the Voynich, likely to lead nowhere, yet I’m following along in a semi-sceptical manner. It smells of bullshit but is associated with a credible institution so we shall see.
I was recently thinking about the gibbous void that yawns across space from beyond the Heliopause, where interstellar winds carry stories from the vortices of Oort clouds to the Hydrogen Wall. I wonder what those tales say. Then I started inadvertently thinking of the simulation, as one often does. What if we all had perfect, fully-sensed memories? I wonder if there would ever be a point after which we would say “okay I’ve done accruing new ones, I’ll just live within these ones now.” In reality – dreams of interstellar space aside – this inquiry occurred to me while cataloguing old letters and sorting through ancient VHS cassettes from bygone times. Some of those long-forgotten incidents and memories seem so radiant on inspection that I’m unsure if given perfect memory capabilities I’d ever be driven to diversify or replace them. I’d probably choose a few great slices of time, ranging from childhood to the current timeline and just ‘imagine’ them on repeat, effectively replaying them ad infinitum. Given the ability to re-play them perfectly in one’s mind (which we sadly do not have), there would not really be any reason to acquire new ones. But then, thinking further: Do these memories even need to be authentic? Some poor souls likely lack nice memories, why should they lose out? Isn’t the fairer thing to insert synthetic memories into one’s cerebrum, inundate it with a cursory timeline and then ‘start the tape’. Makes sense to me, hook me up. Plus, this is the future. Plug us in, Lord. This logic sort of ties into the thought experiment Roko’s Basilisk: a more relevant version of Pascal’s Wager, essentially condemning anyone who knows about the possibility of super-intelligence but who does not work towards it (or, worse still, opposes it) with torment in a punishment simulation if/when the singularity eventually occurs. The Digital Reckoning.
August 20, 2024:
Ummm, BY THE WAY, where are the aliens? Let’s just think about this for a second please. I feel like we ordinary people don’t think about this enough. Why have we not noticed anything yet? This seemingly innocuous conundrum first formulated by Enrico Fermi drives me mad whenever I stop to think about it. I’m sad that space is so VAST. But it’s exciting to see the search for habitable, liquid containing exoplanets going well. A star named TRAPPIST-1, 41 light years away, was once upon a time seen as a prime candidate due to the numerous exoplanets in its goldilocks zone. But now we have much more promising candidates in Gliese 667CC (~22ly), Kepler 22-B (~600ly), Kepler 186f (~500ly), Kepler 442B (~1200ly), and my personal favorite: Proxima Centauri B (~4ly). The last one is very close and orbits the closest known star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, which is a part of the Alpha Centauri triple-star system also including Rigil Kentaurus and Toliman. We are bound to find something incredibly exciting in the very near future. Hopefully I’ll be around to witness it. Oh, also, I have hunch for Kepler 186f, let’s call it a weak spot or some form of psyker energy. I feel like there’s something there. Where are the hunch investigators? Come on, harness the world’s collective resources and telescopes and whatnot and focus it all on Kepler 186f. You may thank me later.
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways
Wouldn’t it be such a shame to live right on the cusp of such a religion-shattering discovery but perish before seeing it? I mean the Queen-Moon and her starry kin may well be just round the corner, for Keats’ sake! All we need to do is stare deep, deep into her peerless eyes. Of course, such a marvelous discovery may not even be light years away, it could be mere light hours away. We have potential organic traces to be found in our very own solar system. Shudders. Shivers. Particular exciting is what we will find lurking beneath the crust of Europa, Titan, Enceladus or Mars, or the potential for aerosol lifeforms in the Venusian cloud cover. Imagine a world where the annual US defense expenditure was instead poured into NASA and the SETI program. We’d probably find something in a fortnight. An über-cliché lump of slime once upon a time probably said something along the lines of: “If only we did not fight each other, then we could pool our collective resources for science.” Funny stuff indeed. It’s so funny that it’s not even possible to entertain in one’s hippocampus for anything more than a few second, since it feels like envisioning a pink sky or something else absurd and hyperbolic, such is its unreality coefficient. Anyway, in the meantime I’ll just keep gazing at Polaris, my little celestial love interest. 430 light years cannot cleave our bond.
Anyway, things have indeed been abuzz in the me-centric universe that these pages typically unfold. I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time playing pixelated, retro, adventure games, which offer portals into the 1980s and 1990s, a time of space-faring dreams, neon realities, low-budget slashers, analog vaporware, and the birth of cyber-culture; critical cultural milestones that may yet launch us into the interstellar hyperloop. The recent title, An English Haunting, has been an exquisite experience, containing a good blend of 1900s London, esotericism, and cosmic horror. I then retrograded back to the same studio’s earlier title, Nightmare Frames, recommended by my online P&C accomplice Pia, set in early-1980s LA and revolving around a deadbeat director’s search for the “scariest horror movie ever created.” Of course, the supernatural and otherworldly invade the script in the best possible places. Both games just go to show that all you need is passion and drive to create a good story and game, for both are largely the works of a single developer. We are lucky to have Adventure Game Studio, which has provided the software frame behind many of these indie projects, including some of the GOATs such as Kathy Rain and Resonance. We are definitely living through the second bloom. I have so many highly-rated retro titles awaiting, I think my evening plans are cut-out, especially since my other (more modern) game lobbies have sort of fizzled out. That’s a winter activity it would seem… Anyway, I’ve now been working through the Black Mirror horror-adventure trilogy that has absolutely nothing to do with the television show and predates it by over a decade. Haunted castles, hereditary curses, underground chambers, eldritch happenings… yeah, this is the shit. In the future I’d like to be plugged into a transformer relay that just generates this type of media and feeds it directly into my brain.
August 29, 2024:
One thing that makes me lose faith in humanity is the mental gymnastics that many people in the West are forced to do when justifying and glorifying warfare – especially when it concerns imperialist, invasive conflicts. There’s no moral justification for e.g., American deployment to Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. But films and media love to glorify ‘veterans’. For what? For going overseas and killing brown people? For going and killing children? Veterans are human trash – because the West has not been in a non-imperialist, non-invasive conflict with obligatory conscription in living memory (since WWII). Only the vilest person would willingly join a one-sided conflict (i.e., invasion) halfway across the globe in the name of god-knows-what and dispense virtue via bullets and missiles. Only a deeply problematic person would willingly become part of a ‘military culture’ that laughs about killing children from the safety of an Apache helicopter while on live feed. When Wikileaks released information about the 2007 Baghdad Helicopter Massacre, several documentaries quickly popped up. They went and interviewed this American veteran who was there and took part in the annihilation of civilians. He’s sad and all, feels bad, and “wishes to die” etc. due to his guilt. His remorse is meant to be moving. It sort of is because you see him crying. Because we viewers have some fucking empathy, we feel bad for him. But when you stop and think for a second it’s kind of ridiculous. Would you have deployed to Afghanistan? Did anyone with half a brain have any justification for what they were really doing there? Did anyone deploying there think they wouldn’t be killing civilians? I mean that’s the definition of the invader-defender dichotomy. It’s been like this throughout history. An invader enters a territory where, by definition and by necessity, an embedded resistance fights for survival, where the line between combatant and non-combatant is blurred and hard to delineate. Anyone willingly on the ‘invader’ side of this dynamic is an expansionist piece of trash who has willingly signed up for murder. That’s just the definition. Crying in a documentary does not really cut it. And then you have the average American film or TV-production where there’s this burly male lead character who’s “a Nam-vet” or “was deployed to Afghanistan” or some other pathetic shit, supposedly there to elevate the character’s goodness and strength. Funny stuff. Mental gymnastics of the highest order.
September 3, 2024:
We were recently in Cunda for a week. It’s a small, beach-scattered island lurking just off the coast from the Aegean settlement of Ayvalik, opposite Lesvos. The social atmosphere is the best to be found in the country: secular, relaxed, and food/alcohol-loving. We had a terrace on the roof of our Airbnb where midnight stargazing was possible thanks to the cooling Cunda breeze bringing the temperature down and dissipating the mosquitos that roam around less breezy areas. Particularly the so-called summer triangle (Vega-Deneb-Altair) is very prominent this time of year. And Saturn was present too, peaking over the Western horizon like a shy little kid. During the day we sampled the sea in all four directions thanks to our rental car that enabled this otherwise impossible undertaking, for the island really is quite undeveloped, especially concerning road conditions and transportation. The sea was beautiful; soft and clean. Our daytime swimming was mirrored by Cygnus the Swan in the celestial apex, lending some cosmic resonance to our pitiful existence. I made sure to salute her with respect before going to bed each night. But perhaps most importantly, we washed down fish and meze dishes with Raki every night together with our Italian friend and Diocane the Great. I now firmly believe that four is the perfect number for such activities; the conversation neither splinters off nor fades away. I’m worried I may have gained substantial weight in just a week though; such was the ongoing hedonism.
The other day on public transportation in Istanbul I was musing over how fucking stupid everyone is, you know the old adage: Imagine how stupid the average person is, then realize that half of humanity is stupider than that. So, I was really deep into this line of reasoning, observing the sheer unimaginable idiocy of the average moron producing entropy around me, when I realized, once again, that I was falling into the classic mental trap. Maybe I was the idiot? Because that actually explains everything wrong with the world, Occam’s razor etc. No, okay, the real trap is not that, it’s that intelligence or whatever we think is the opposite of stupidity is not very important as an attribute. In fact, it may even be meaningless. I think decades from now, when we are in the next stage of techno-digital existence, intelligence will be a metric similar to what physical strength is today, largely unimportant. Mental strength is the next barrier to be dismantled in the uniformity that we represent as a species. For when all is said and done the idiot and the genius are separated by a tiny gap compared to the vast fissures that cleave other species from us or that will eventually separate artificial or bio-augmented intelligence from Human version 1.0. So, me raging at illogic or any other mishap in our pathetic, current spectra of intelligence is funny and pointless.
Continued in: 2024 (Part 2)
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Cover Image: Rime of the Ancient Mariner Illustration by Gustave Dore
Mete's Personal Blog 
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