göktuğ's blog

Hello, 2026!

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 23:49:57 GMT

Just after it turned 00:00, perhaps 10 minutes into the new year's first night, it started snowing. It's quarter to three, I'm up tonight doing some last minute-ish work on an essay for one of my classes, and it's still snowing. Ankle deep outside, so quiet now after the fireworks across Bosporus and then the marvel of neighbours at the snow (last few winters of Istanbul have lacked snow mostly).

Made some soup to sip on while looking for papers and chapters on witchcraft and printing press. Some stuff out there making a causal link, making my job easier with the term paper essay, which will now need to be something that explains the history, and discusses these sources I found and anything else potentially relevant, and then makes a conclusion. I've until 23:59 of 2nd of January, but I've an exam on that day and another appointment, so I'd rather be done with it tomorrow midnight.

Pleasant way to begin the new year all things considered. Bit procrastinatey, but well, isn't that the case always. Absolutely chuffed that it began snowing, that's a beautiful gift.

Be a nice year, 2026!

Here's my new year's night's cup of ezogelin soup.

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Starting my PhD, again

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:43:39 GMT

Sooo... I started my PhD, again. Earlier this year I had started doing a PhD in late modern history in Istanbul University. For a variety of reasons it was not a great fit for me to do my doctoral studies at, so by the middle of the spring term I was considering applying elsewhere and see if I could migrate to greener grass, so to speak. So, in the rest of that term I focused on PhD applications again, which was made easier by the fact that the department at İÜ was, let's say, not very strict when it came to doing the PhD classes. I applied to history departments at three institutions, Boğaziçi University, Koç University, and Sabancı University. The first of these is basically the best public university in Turkey, and the other two are top ranking private [1] universities. So quite sensibly I was ready to receive three rejections, considering I lack a background in history.

Applications were quite busy and tense, still. Three statements of purpose, two research proposals, two to three recommendation letters for each of those universities which I had to divide between four past professors who were very generously willing to write for each of my applications regardless of number (yes, I've so far been mostly lucky when it comes to encountering lovely faculty), open days, scholarship and tuition waiver regulation to figure out for the private unis (as whether or not I could study there at all depended on whether they had that option, and these two unis by default waive the tuition for graduate students), expectations of the programmes, et cetera...

I was lucky enough to get to interview at three out of three unis. At Boğaziçi they picked candidates to interview based on a written exam that was quite well executed (as it allowed you to pick 2 out of 10 questions based on your interests and answer those, I've took much, much worse), the others did not have that step. The interviews were pretty nice, with the sole exception being the very hot rooms in Boğaziçi in June actually leading to me performing kinda worse than what I'm capable of due to the fact that I was actively liquefying into a cartoon pool of disgusting sweat. In amongst three I'd rank Koç the lowest on the basis of interviews, by the way, as it was online and Zoom based. It went well but online is always worse than offline, and it goes from meh to weird when the uni is in my very city and I'm one bus ride away from it... but such is life in 2020s. And oh, I also almost had a heatstroke coming back from very remote Sabancı campus, which is nice, but also at the eastern border of the province, I believe, quite literally took me four whole hours to get there alone, and on the way back the route included a 20 station long metro ride.

Either way, these are just random whoopsies and facts of life, nothing to be too bothered about.

Two acceptances and one rejection I got: Sabancı was the one that rejected. I was a bit sad about it, I mean it wasn't surprising, wouldn't be so if I was rejected by any of these institutions where the bar is quite high, but I liked the department there and also the institution seemed fairly generous in supporting its graduate students monetarily for conferences etc, and I had come across more positive experiences than negative. I would most likely still have opted for Boğaziçi if I was accepted there, I replied otherwise when asked at the interview there, but I actually hadn't really made my mind as much as I was feeling at that point, lured by both potential financial advantages and the prospects of moving out. The choice between Koç and Boğaziçi was easy: I was accepted to Koç with a tuition waiver and a few benefits but no "scholarship". Now, scare quotes, because they have a troublesome setup: besides normal classes, you've 20hr of "classes" each week which is essentially RA/TAships, but construed as a course you take each semester, and hence unpaid per se. The payment technically would come in the form of a quite substantial monthly cash scholarship that is more than half of what an actual RA/TA in a public university makes full time, nothing to scoff at, but of course, it being a scholarship, they can decide to not allocate you it. And, they didn't allocate me any, and that sealed the decision by itself. Boğaziçi, being a public university, does not pay it's graduate students, but it also doesn't expect free labour, so they're free to work a job.

There are a couple scholars at the Koç department that I was interested in, but the Boğaziçi department is considerably larger and there are more professors that match my own research interests who I can pick as my thesis advisor, multiple of whom are scholars whose work I had come across and liked. So the decision was obvious. But also, I would be required to undergo a remedial year (alternatively termed "scientific preparation" year) at Boğaziçi, which on the face of it may appear to be a disadvantage, but actually, it's very much a positive, because, lacking training in the field, it would've been vitally helpful to me, despite the problem of a busy class schedule and financial issues that busy year was set to (and has, until last month) challenge me with.

So, I made my decision, and the process of preparation for registration and classes began. Unenrolling myself from Istanbul was stressful, as exmatriculation makes you eligible for military duty, and issues there could lead to me losing my chance to study at my dream uni, so I ended up spending a decent chunk of the summer making phone calls, figuring out the procedures, and the best moment to deregister at Istanbul so that I wouldn't have to worry about conscription. Thankfully, it went to plan and I registered, got my military duty deferred again (until the end of 2028), and was set to begin my classes come late September.

Now I'm near the end of the eleventh week, out of thirteen, of classes for the term of autumn, and, knock on wood, it's great! As it's the remedial year, I've five courses a semester this academic year, it's a bit busy, so it doesn't allow me to work, but thankfully I've earned the national scholarship from the Ministry of Youth and Sports, and at the doctoral level it's enough money to live off of if you don't pay rent or for a dorm room and are thrifty. Come June I'll be able to work, hopefully I'll land an RAship, but I can only dawdle until the late summer searching a comfy job. The scholarship does permit me to have a choice, tho, and I'm quite happy about that.

The one stressful thing is, I need to successfully complete *all* my courses successfully (i.e., not FF, don't fail them) and maintain a GPA above 2.5/4 (62.5/100). I've done the midterms in the recent weeks, and the grades are encouraging. I don't worry too much about the GPA requirement, but I am somewhat ill at ease about the no FFs requirement. You know, shit happens, things may go wrong, accidents happen. I've been assured that it's very rare that a scientific prep student should fail, but I'm on my metaphorical toes about it, because failure leads to exmatriculation, you don't get to try and retake that class. That's not the case for normal classes, only for the remedial year. But, as I say, grades so far are encouraging, and hopefully I'll be safely ashore come June.

But that's only a background nag, overall I'm quite happy and pleased, and am enjoying my time. The remedial year is also giving me ample time to better figure out my niche in history, participate in academic events (so far mostly attending talks, but I do plan to present at one or two thingies this spring, and attend some other thing abroad in September if I can fund it), and not so ample time (partly due to laziness and procrastination on my part) to write a journal article based on my master's thesis with my master's advisor. It's a bit of a hassle that last one, but I really want a publication out of my thesis, and it helps my advisor too, so I'm trying to get it done. I'm glad I tried my luck, I think with a busy spring and stressful summer, I've considerably improved my prospects in the coming years as a grad student, now in an institution that matches my dispositions and interests, with professors that I have much overlaps of research areas with, and what more could I ask!?

Knock on wood! 🧿 😆

Footnotes:

[1] Technically, there are no "private" universities here, but "foundation" universities: higher education institutions ran by non-profit entities that are usually tied to a wealthy family (e.g. the two universities above, connected to wealthy families with the same names) or to some institution. They do charge substantial tuition fees, unlike public universities, where within the presumed "normal" duration of a programme is free, but if you go beyond that time frame (or fall within the purview of a few other exceptional cases), you pay a small fee each semester during re-registration.

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Thinking aloud: throughlines common to orientalism and "AI" slop

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 21:51:01 GMT

This post is based on an idea that I randomly had, which I first thought to merely share with friends through a private social media account, but then it exceeded the sensible length for a social media post a bit, and this time round I was sensible enough to turn it into a blog post instead of a long ranty thread that clogs up my mutuals' timelines. This is raw thought: I haven't spent a long time considering this idea, it's potentially flaky, I haven't done any research. It's merely an interesting idea I wanted to put into more words than a pithy social media "take". Enjoy responsibly.

Thinking a thought:

There are throughlines common to orientalism and "AI" slop generators.

In its essence orientalism is about reductionism and about obscuring the "oriental" interlocutor: first create the "Orient" as a monolithic, homogenous Other, and then ascribe words, stories, culture to them that has nothing to do with their reality, saturating the venues through which people of different cultures can get to learn about each other.

Thus, ascribed untruths about the Orient displace actual knowledge of the peoples melded into that chimera.

Now when we look at "AI" bullshit, there, instead of Asia, North Africa, and Eastern Europe, reductionism targets the phenomena of communication and perception in whole. They are all reduced into a computerising model of the mind, that entails a seemingly-but-not-really-oxymoronic positivist metaphysics.

This obscuration then intends to saturate all channels of human communication, detaching the perceived from the perceiver, and the receiver from the sender, in the Jakobsonian sense; in simple English, it displaces and obscures our conversation partners. We no longer talk to someone, or appreciate someone's art, but instead, fabricated, adulterated, "palatable" misrepresentations thereof.

In either case there's not only a common structural pattern in how the abuse and displacement formulates, materialises, and operates itself; but also there is the common thread of dehumanisation: on the "AI" side, the humanity of the interlocutor, the author, the artist, the creator, the performer, are converted into a nondescript and inorganic end product: the Slop. Much like the end product orientalism generates: the pseudo-Orient. A marred, distinct replacement of the original (which is scarcely genuine in itself, as there's neither a coherent and singular Orient nor a computable model human thought and communication can be reduced to), a replacement that's meant to appease the receiver, the listener, the spectator, at all costs, without ever inconveniencing them, turning reality into merely an irrelevant detail, an optional ingredient in a high-sugar, high-salt, high-calorie recipe, much like those crisps that you cannot stop eating once you begin snacking on them.

The most basic, the initial one of these "costs" for enticing the audience of both the Slop and the pseudo-Orient is, to forego knowledge. Interacting with the Slop, much like interacting with the pseudo-Orient, replaces interacting with the people that are trying to communicate with us from behind this false image of themselves. And given that, to send people "AI" Slop of course means forcing them into that position, forcing them to interact with a plastic nonrepresentation of ourselves. In a sense it is like the tourist trap cafés found along the touristy streets and avenues of Sirkeci and Sultanahmet in İstanbul. Nought but a mirage, and not even a misrepresentation.

In either case, these mirages that result from these fraudulent means of interaction of course then affect actions people take. Misrepresentations, misjudgements, mistruths feed into discriminatory outcomes, into bitter interactions when the cushion wall of the swindling intermediary fails to be present to mediate, when the defrauded needs to interact with the Otherised on the basis of the Ersatz-Other they were furnished with in its stead.

As generators of misrepresentation and "prejudice"—so to speak, as a feeble shorthand—, both orientalism and "AI" create easily "consumable", inaccurate, but convenient and—for the consumer, prepared to be—comfortable caricature of the Other, which monopolises its perception by the "user/consumer". Who then acts on the basis of such a caricature, and in the right circumstances, such actions can lead to disaster.

I am thinking of examples, some of which feel like too hyperbolic to just say out loud without thinking about it (I fear trivialising one side of the comparison), but suffice it to say there are active venues in which both orientalism and "AI" come together to do inscrutable harm to humanity. An encounter that is perhaps not coincidental, but instead maybe a sad fruit of the comparison here outlined.

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I think I am becoming an historian

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 13:59:08 GMT

About ten months ago now I wrote a post about wanting to become an historian. It was not... I mean.. well, if I am gonna talk in past tense like that, the news is evident isn't it, so let me lead with that: I've been accepted to a programme! Specifically, I'll be doing a PhD in Late Modern history at the University of Istanbul. Next week, I'll register at the institution definitively. It's exciting, and after so much mess and drama throughout the last year and a half of my life, which I won't bother to summarise beyond the phrase «end of graduate school shenanigans», the news is very calming. Knock on wood!

It was, to go back to the past tense, a challenge. It's not easy to switch disciplines, it's a rewarding but difficult challenge at the best of times, but I had to try doing it in amongst tumult, amidst anxiety, stress, and pressure. Not for the fun of it, but I hadn't a choice for it to happen otherwise. The usual stressor of military duty was there, and it gave me no chance to take a year or two off, which I would've preferred, most likely, and which would also give me a chance to prepare well. But it was impossible. I was way too busy to rest after my graduation from my master's last June, and when that lightened up, the deferment period of my military duty was dangerously close. It ran out in June 2025, and while it was possible that registering after that was theoretically possible due to how the system works, it was also uncertain. It would've made for a very tense summer.

So I had little time to prepare, and little choice on when to apply. I had to try my luck for Spring 2025 intake, so I did. Since roughly November 2024 I've been preparing for these applications. I was initially planning a variety of things to work on once I got into a program, and thus to mention in the interview beforehand. I was interested in some aspects of middle ages, I was interested in travel and cities, I was also rediscovering my leanings. I was also interested in Late Modern, especially in emigration towards cities was catching my attention. All stuff I'd always been interested in, but had kinda casted away because of linguistics. Interests wasn't all the work of course, not even most of the work, I was mostly finding information about where to apply, when to apply, how to apply, what documents to find, what exams to do, what loose ends to tie. In the mean time I was also trying to do some basic readings in history, and also looking for work at universities. Besides planning and scheduling for the exams and applications, I was failing miserably at all of these. I was sure that I wouldn't have progressed enough in my readings to apply confidently (which did end up being the case) and that I had no chance of beginning to develop a project for my PhD to talk about my SoPs and interviews. That last one I was worried about, because I thought, probably correctly, that it was a big big factor, and it might've changed the outcomes of my applications back in Summer 2024, had I had a concrete project that had legs to stand on.

About a month ago, I struck gold. I had been trying to find keywords to be able to talk about my research interests. I had it all written on a whiteboard: Late Modern, housing, mobility (travel & migration), identity, public space. They all had some ground in some part of my life and some part of my research and learning endeavours. I was weighing which I cared more or less about, and I was thinking about what these meant for me. Then I had this thought: exiles! Exile! Exile connected all these things, and more! I could study exiles! So I began developing a project (which I won't detail yet, but perhaps talk about it later when it begins to crystallise properly). It was pretty «undercooked» when I presented it a few days ago at the two universities I presented it at, but I had done a key thing: in the meantime, I had discovered that indeed, quite firmly, the project had legs to stand on. There was prior literature, there was prior research, and there was a lot of people that could be looked into.

By then, I had also moved on from my infatuation with the Middle Ages. I was really intrigued by the idea of being a medievalist and studying travel in the Middle Ages. But after a few months of that, I applied a valued advice about figuring out what to do for research: think of the practical aspect, think of, beyond the infatuation, what skills you have, and what true interests, not infatuations, you have, that can sustainably drive you throughout your research. So I thought long and hard in order to be able to separate ephemeral infatuation from persistent interest. 19th and 20th centuries are where my interests lied, where they had been years ago and had kept coming back to. The topics I listed above, they were persistent across the switches between disciplines and along the passage of years.

So, in the two interviews I had, I presented a coherent project, and a coherent argument for my interest in the said project as well as in the Late Modern, and for the claim that my academic adventure so far does indeed lead me there, to those very interviews, that it makes sense, that I am ready, at least mentally, to undertake this challenge and this endeavour. In one of the departments, these things were met by a critical indifference, whereas, in the other one, my enthusiasm was met by enthusiasm, and my sincerity was rewarded with warmth. Unsurprisingly, the latter department admitted me to their doctoral programme. Next week, I am to register formally. By the end of this month, the year of lectures begins.

The tumult and hardships of the time since the onset of the pandemic have instilled some rather unwelcome but involuntary superstition in me, so I knock on wood to not jinx things.

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I think I want to become an historian

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 23:50:41 GMT

Na véspera de não partir nunca,
Ao menos não há que arrumar malas

These lines from a poem by Álvaro de Campos (who's in turn a "heteronym" of Fernando Pessoa) constitute one of a few couplets of poetry that I have somehow memorised, "somehow" because I rarely do well at memorising, save for some involuntary exceptions like these, that i just cannot seem to forget. Anyways, with these lines, and Pessoa's (and his pessoas's) poetry in general, I have a weird relationship. See, as indicated by these lines, which roughly translate as "on the eve of never-departing, at least there is no packing to be done", reflexive of Pessoa's biography, there's this peace that is found in being stationary, in not upsetting one's orderly and plain life with adventures, infatuations, wanderlust. Pessoa, the Portuguese poet, at some point in his life decided to never travel, never leave Lisbon. On the other hand there is I, who, since childhood, both yearned for travel and relocation, and was surrounded by immigration, of various kinds. On top, this silly me has never accepted that, just because I spent years on something, I should for some reason stick with it, even if I don't like it anymore and I have found a new curiosity to chase. If it were not for economic circumstances and for political nonsense hindered my dreams and plans, I would've spent most of my 30 years of life so far travelling, switching academic interests, and just casting my childish interest onto anything i can manage to. And yet, I also love Pessoa's poetry, I love "Na véspera de não partir nunca", and not merely aesthetically, but also as a peaceful place.

That's to say, I don't know how to start this post. I find myself at a junction in life; it is reminiscent of those complex roundabouts that have smaller roundabouts in them, and I have this feeling of slowly approaching this round-a-round-a-bout-a-bout, being terrified by it, while also pressured by other cars I "share" the road with to just take it on and preferably take the easiest exit, but also wanting to deal with it on my own terms, and head out only from the exit I desire to use. As this poor analogy I just abused must indicate, I feel confused, restrained, distressed, and determined all at the same time. I am wanting to pick a course, a risky and for-me-uncharted one, but I am struggling under duress because the world doesn't want to wait for me, the world wants me to rush it and take the path of least resistance, it wants me to get out of its way as soon as possible, even if that would mean for me to end up in a place I don't want to go. It's telling me, on the eve of never-leaving, at least there's no packing to do.

As I once told an old friend, what I love in the above couplet is the "negative space", the what's-left-out. Those lines, and the rest of the poem, describe a pleasant, peaceful stagnance. What I love is embracing the tumultuous but unfettering disarray that's found in the blank spaces around its letters, the joy of disobedience on the face of bridling expectations, in order to boldly pursue who one really is. And once again in my life, I find myself feeling like I am about to upend my future plans and redo them, and wanting to sail into an unknown, rather than to settle with an incomplete realisation of myself.

I don't know if I am expressing myself well, but emotions, especially confusing and confused ones, are difficult to communicate, and emotions, dear reader, matter more than the concrete facts, because they are never adequate at completely explaining why things happen, why decisions are made, why things change. The refusal of which has for centuries bred people who are unable to communicate. Anyways. Perhaps I must do what all "competent" writers do, and just leave this part up in the air and jump to the next thing.

That next thing being, I am near the end of my master's in linguistics. In summer 2018 I graduated as an Italianist, that is, someone who is ostensibly trained in Italian language and literature. I was planning to do a master's in comparative literature, and pursue a career in comparatistics and imagology. I was fairly fascinated by the work of Joep Leerssen, and I wanted to apply that to the origins, development, and maturity of Turkish national identity. But then my interests shifted, and I worried I couldn't find academic positions to do such work, and after a brief crisis I ended up on the path that lead me to starting my master's in linguistics in fall 2019. The study of literature hadn't satisfied me, same was the case with comparatistics, and same ended up being the case for linguistics, as I began to discover in the recent months. All for different reasons, reasons which are relevant details here but I will not dwell on much, at least right now as I type these words up (it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out that I hardly re-read these posts before publishing, let alone planning and/or editing; this is mostly a therapeutic stream of [quasi-]consciousness). I tried a lot with linguistics, I tried to create a niche that would satisfy me, satisfy my desire to do work that is both socially relevant and also "linguistics" enough to be acceptable in linguistics departments, I dabbled in statistics (which in retrospect was so awful it could be considered self-harm; even though I appreciate knowing the behind-the-scenes of this crooked phenomenon of statistics-ification of all social science), but it didn't work out. My thesis, which tried to be everything at once, was rejected. Currently, I am slogging through the process of decimating it into an ordinary, uninteresting, but normal and acceptable nothingness (which is a process that is sucking my soul out of me).

In which context, I had a moment of... recollection? brilliance? realisation? Something, some spark, some scintilla of Mnemosyne. And I realised what I left out in the above story. Not in this text of this blog post, but in my self-narrative: my brief encounter with history at university.

I began the Italianistics course of Istanbul University in 2014. But my first foray into higher education was in 2012, in the year I graduated from the hell that was high school. That year, in the fall semester, I was an undergrad student in the history programme of the same university. I quit it pretty early on, after being intimidated by the prospects of learning Ottoman Turkish, which was also a highly current, and ideologically and politically charged topic back in that day. Besides, I was worried about my future and had found the solution in trying to get into a computer science programme instead. Which was a pursuit that would thankfully fail, both for the lack of desire and of funds and peace of mind, and I would end up in Italianistics, through some hilarious series of events that lead to me rediscovering a love for literature, and dreaming up some plans that were mildly outlandish, when observed with the benefit of hindsight. Anyways.

Anyways. That little foray into an history undergrad was not as accidental and fortuitous as it seems. In high school I was... well, beginning in middle school and all throughout high school I was a very depressed, troubled, bullied, lonely teenager. I had turned from a "gifted" kid into an adolescent that cared nothing for school. I would skip as many classes as I could, I wouldn't bring my backpack, books, notebook, anything to school, and whenever I could I would slip away from the school and tour the city using public transport. But, the situation was different when it came to the history classes. In high school, except for first grade that was at a different school, I loved my history classes, and my history teacher was a very nice person (❤️ Beyhan hocam ❤️). So, I liked history, and I did well in that class, because I was not skipping it as often and when in class, I was listening attentively. Furthermore, the nerdy little me that was too young to go to school had grown up fascinated with history found in the encyclopaedias of my mum's, what she had acquired by collecting the fascicules given out by newspapers in her youth, and also I had absorbed my grand dad's curiosity for the topic, which unfortunately he was too much of a poor and uneducated 1950s emigrant to pursue. In that light, perhaps it was much more befuddling that I quit history after a couple weeks' classes, but well, life was rough, and I had many worries, perhaps too many worries for such an emotionally and psychologically tortured 18 year old as younger me.

And I must say, I don't regret it. I don't regret exploring myself intellectually, and pursuing my interests and my own economic and psychological salvation. Moreover, I believe that I am much more equipped to become a worthwhile scholar of history today, due to all that academic and emotional wanderlust. In refusing the peaceful appeal of never-leaving, I believe, this odyssey of mine made a much more sound learner, researcher and scholar out of me. At length, the fox is brought to the... Ithaca, Well, that is another analogy that won't work, so let me sneakily abandon it, but without deleting, so it might occupy your mind for the rest of this logorrhoea.

At a moment it dawned on me that I would never get out of linguistics the things that I wanted, not without too much struggle, not without subjecting myself to clueless people who could suggest me that my involvement of the notion of neocolonialism in my thesis somehow requires a dialogue with the work of Sartre, for example. It all clicked into place: I was interested in urban matters, urban identities, i was interested in houses, types of houses, housing that served people like travellers, students, bachelors. Separately, I was interested in history, I loved history. Separately, I desired to be a critical scholar, with a mind for justice, especially in issues where I found myself as the precarious side. I noticed that I was trying to materialise all these as a scholarly quest in linguistics. A discipline which currently, and in its recent history, is unfortunately under the violent influence of a variety of positivistic, anti-humanistic persuasions. With every passing day I became more and more aware of the fact that I too was persuaded by some of these tendencies and cliques, and they were guilty in straying me from my path. The desire to move on from linguistics grew in me, gradually, then suddenly.

It was not immediately clear where I could go from there. I was already planning to move onto a part of language studies that was less bothered by microlinguistics, and even macrolinguistics. Disciplines of rhetoric or communication studies were intriguing, critical cultural studies were intriguing. But the combination of some media I listened to, and the above realisations lead me to my old favourite, history. Along with the realisation that, with a base in the discipline of history, I could re-adopt the study of discourse, of identity, of literature, in new, more fruitive, less positivistically-constrained settings.

So, today, I am three weeks away from defending a thesis where I do a rudimentary genre analysis, while I also browse and make notes to help applying to PhD's in history. On the eve of upsetting an unpleasant stay, at worst there's a costly freedom to be enjoyed!

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Update about this blog

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 02:34:00 GMT

Every few years I end up wanting to change up how I blog and get rid of most of the stuff I have posted so far. It might have many reasons of course but usually it's the simple feeling of disconnect and clutter. Once again, it's such a moment for me.

But this time round, I wanted to try something different: because this is a Dreamwidth (DW) blog, I thought I could easily just set all my posts as private, and then make some posts I still like public, and just keep using it as is.

Turns out, this isn't as straightforward with DW as I imagined. Initially I couldn't find a tool to mass-private all my posts; so, I explored some other options like having a WordPress blog or setting up a static blog with Jekyll. I learned that, in more than a decade since I last used it, WP had become a borderline unusable weird mess; and that I don't really find it in me to set up a static blog and relearn Jekyll just now (I like Jekyll, and I had had custom scripts for a static blog at times too; trouble is, either way bothering with it all isn't compelling to me anymore, or at least, for now).

So I tried to look into it a bit more, and finally figured that DW did have a tool to mass-modify privacy levels of one's posts. Trouble: it's only available to paid accounts. Just like with changing your username, once again, a very sensitive, fundamental, and important DW feature is behind a paywall...

Anyways, I did purchase a month's pass for $3 and used the tool (see this FAQ entry for more information, if you're interested). I am very unamused because of this, I believe that if something as vital as this will be behind a paywall, then better the whole thing be paid for and never offered for free.

But whatever, fact of the matter is, TL;DR: all posts on this blog are private now (or are in the process of becoming so); this means that they are only visible to people who are on my access list on DW, somewhat like followers-only social media posts; in the following days I will un-private some of these posts that I don't mind remaining public. Newer posts will mostly be public. I might decide to continue blogging on another account or somewhere else than DW, in which case, I will post an update about it here.

If there's a particular post from before now (i.e., at the time of posting this entry) that you'd wish become public again, and we know each other somehow, you can contact me. See my website, if you don't have a DW account, you can email me about it. I won't guarantee to make it public, but in that case, if it's a text I don't mind others having, and if you somehow need it, I might send you the text. Again, no promises.

UPDATE (15 Feb 2024): I did go thru the posts yesterday and un-privated some of them.

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Introducing the Wakefield test for metascientific bullshit

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 15:56:42 GMT

As has become a tradition, I am reproducing a social media thread I posted that I think is worthy of preserving, as a lightly edited blog post. This post has a somewhat authoritative tone, which is self-evident on social media but perhaps not in a blog post, so I want to explicitly say that this is a satirical and humorous post, and not a serious suggestion and/or the product of any philosophical or empirical process. That's not to say it's just a joke and/or invalid, but simply, the points made are my personal observations from following and studying metascientific issues.

Introducing: the Wakefield test.

It's simple. When you see a new research publication, evaluation, or accountability buzzword, you stop to think, would this have prevented the infamous, deadly, and shameful work of Wakefield being published on the Lancet. Prevent is the operative word, cos we've seen how futile the attempts to put the genie back in the bottle is, once bollocks as Wakefield's is given any modicum of scientific endorsement.

The main conclusion of the applications of Wakefield test I "did" so far is very clear:

Any proposed measure is nil unless it deals with social problems of academia in a concrete manner. Most bad research is caused by endemic malincentives and malignant power structures of academia. Publish or perish, white supremacy, extractive labour practices, economical disparities, publishing companies who are some of the closest institutions we have in real life to cartoon villain organisations.

But there's another key observation, that interacts with the above:

Any proposed measure that has no effect in the above finding is bound to repeat the said problems of academic research, while also failing to improve any matters and most importantly, offloading even more of the burden of academic bullshit onto disenfranchised members of the institution, including the research subjects, and the public itself.

So, stuff that fails the Wakefield test have a very concrete cost.

Now you might criticise me for saying stuff off the top of my head with an academic language, pretending its some sort of truth, but I must disagree. See, even tho I've just thought these things up right now, they are no less well-studied than all the wank quantitative supremacists and lovers of academic status quo spout like as if it was a cinnamon gobbling challenge and create policy on the basis of.

And jokes aside, anybody who follows any metascience knows they're true...

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Update on LingBuzz and Hacettepe RSS feeds

Sun, 02 Jul 2023 21:12:20 GMT

In case anybody out there was using my RSS feeds generated from some Hacettepe University announcements pages and from the updates of LingBuzz, they've become offline, because I have deleted my Gitlab account. The reason is simple, Gitlab is a terrible website and it's a hassle to deal with it, so I deleted my account, having run out of patience.

In case you want to take over, this is the source code for the LingBuzz scraper. Note that the readme is out of date, the repo is a fork and the readme pertains only to the original code. My fork applies a couple fixes to the JavaScript, and I used to run it on Gitlab CI, generating RSS inside a Gitlab Pages website. The Hacettepe scrapers worked similarly but their source code isn't public for now, and honestly you don't want it anyways, it's a few lines of Ruby and Nokogiri, and you are better off just periodically looking at the pages. Assuming there were any users of the scripts besides me, of course. But life is full of surprises, isn't it :D

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Fixing Pilot Metropolitan «leaky» grip issue

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 21:03:09 GMT

Edit: Sadly, the solution described here worked for me for ten days, but then stopped working, and I got leaks again.

I have a green Pilot Metropolitan Retro Pop which is a beautiful beautiful fountain pen (which I have fitted with an extra fine nib yoinked from a Pilot Kakuno, which if you like you a good EF nib, a worthwhile hack in my opinion). It is beautiful enough that for the longest time I tolerated it's one annoying issue: an inky grip.

Yesterday I found a fix. So first, the fix, and then the reason I think it leaks and the solution works.

If your grip gets ink drops near where the nib is and there are no cracks, look at the grip closely. At two sides of it, you will notice lines which you can also feel with touch: they are probably an artefact of the manufacturing process, the seams of the two halves of the grip. Check if they coincide with any part of the nib and feed assembly that gets inky, for example the right and left edges of the nib's root. If yes, gently but firmly rotate the nib and feed assembly so that those seams no longer coincide with any part of the nib and feed assembly that gets inky in normal operation. With my pen, I've rotated it such that, one of the seams rest at something like 20 degrees of angle relative to the nib's surface. In that configuration, the other seam coincides with the opposite back side of the feed in a similar angle, which part of the feed does not get inky.

Now, rub the grip, and the exposed part of the feed and nib with a paper towel, thoroughly to make sure no part of the grip in particular has any ink. Use Q-tips then to thoroly dry the inside of the cap, which likely has accrued some ink from the leakiness. Then cap and uncap the pen a few times, and each time check for ink sizzling out on to the grip like before. If with luck, I explained the fix well and you repeated it accurately, and if there was no other problem causing a leak, like a crack, the issue must be fixed, the grip should cease getting inky.

* * *

So, why does this work, what does it fix? Well, I have no definitive answer, but what I imagine is this: the seams, which are each tiny straight bumps, provide a structure which provokes a weak instance of capillary action—the same process by means of which the fountain pen itself works, tangentially—by means of which a tiny amount of ink travels along the seams, after finding them at the point they (almost?) contact the exposed sides of the feed. Capillary action does not really need an external force to provoke it; it depends surface tension and adhesive forces, as the Wikipedia article says, but I imagine the capping/uncapping action may be contributing to the movement of the ink as well. By rotating the nib and feed assembly, we break the contact of the ink with the seams, so the capillary action cannot start, even assuming the (un)capping catalyse it.

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An attempt at establishing a morning routine and keep my shit together as an unemployed grad student

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 04:56:26 GMT

I did a little thing in Loop Habits and I put some thought into it so maybe it’s helpful to someone else, so I’m blogging about it.

First, what is Loop Habits? quoting from its homepage,

Loop is a mobile app that helps you create and maintain good habits, allowing you to achieve your long-term goals. Detailed graphs and statistics show you how your habits improved over time.

( What is Loop Habits and what does it do? )

The problem I wanted to fix was to reinstate some sort of morning routine, which I have mostly lost due to the pandemic and the way I am having to work on my thesis, in this limbo in my life when I can’t be employed. Due to ADHD and sleep drifting around, I have come to lose all my routines, which then affects mental health negatively, as well. I wanted to have something that is ADHD friendly and something that doesn’t assume that my sleep schedule will be fixed somehow, magically.

I have been thinking of making a mobile app or using some Android automation apps to help with this, but it’s no easy task and it takes a lot of time. Finally, I think I figured out a way to do this with a nice tool I already had, tho: Loop Habits, which I already use every day.

So, what I did. Made a habit in Loop that is titled starting the day, and it’s question is my morning routine summarised visually with emoji: «🙌🚾🪥 / 🍳☕📔 / 🚿🧖 ?»

The name is important because it doesn’t assume it’s morning, it’s merely the “starting the day”, the period right after I wake up. Whether it’s 6am, midday, 6pm, or midnight; none of which is unlikely these days.

The series of emoji is helpful because it serves visual memory. To me it’s meant to communicate: “get up, stretch at least elementarily, go to the loo, brush teeth; make some sort of breakfast, even a slice of break, and coffee, and look at the bujo; consider taking a shower”

You may notice a pattern to the way emoji are grouped, and you’d be spot on. It’s something that happened unintentionally but turned out to be helpful: the groupings are such that that a reminder is entangled with a need: my body will tell me to go to the loo, but seldom to stretch or to brush teeth. It will feel hungry in the morning, but not automatically want my morning coffee or the bullet journal (yes, I never experience caffeine withdrawal, so I’ll sometimes forget my morning coffee, which is actually integral to me starting out my day). And those two groups are entangled with showering, which I tend to forget a lot when a lot of my days are spent home, which does happen often when I’m unemployed and my sleep is drifting around the clock, throughout the weeks. Which, not ideal of course, but it is an issue of it’s own, and one that I will not be able to solve by avoiding trying to fix other problems in my life until that is resolved.

Using emoji is helpful because having separate habits like brush teeth or shower feels self-infantilising, at least for me. I feel embarrassed about it even tho nobody will ever see it but me. It feels bad, which means it will harm my mental health, even if it helped some with habit building. But a silly little emoji summary of the morning routine I wanna build is merely that, a summary. It’s not chiding me or reminding me that i’m shit at these things these days.

( Aside: how not being too strict with my agenda and habit tracking actually helps more with being more “productive” and building and sticking to the habits. (Not essential but I do suggest you come back to this after reading the rest of the post.) )

I cannot really use notification based reminders with any of my habits because they assume you have a somewhat regular sleep cycle. So, in my experience, reminder notifications for habits pile up, after popping up usually in times I can’t do them, at least straight away, and I forget about them. I have recently come up with a solution to this tho, thankfully: not having too many habits in Loop, and using widgets.

( TL;DR: having too many habits is overwhelming. )

As for widgets, I use them as a replacement for notifications for reminders, that do not need to fire on a given time of day. On my phone’s home screen, the top row is dedicated to a row of checkmark widgets that Loop Habits provides. These widgets display the state of the habit for the current day, and they also contain the title. When you tap them, the habit is marked as done. They are always in the home screen of my phone, which I almost always unlock as I wake up, and of course many times throughout the day, and as I see these buttons, I am reminded of the tasks/habits they entail.

This is another place where having an emoji summary instead of a laundry list of what to do in my morning routine helps: because I can’t rely on notifications, which show you your habit question which you can use to remind yourself of what to do as part of that habit, I would have to consult some morning routine to-do list to remember things. But instead, with the emoji summary, I have the whole string of emoji in my visual memory, so I don’t need to look at anything. It is surprising that this works and frankly at this stage I don’t know if it will keep working, so I have a plan in case it ends up not working: making the emoji string the title of the habit itself. I don’t do it right now because it looks a bit ugly and hard to parse, and for some reason the toothbrush emoji shows up as an empty box on the widget, for which I will make a bug report. For now, I do use a notification for starting the day only, just so that the emoji string is in my notification list on the phone, just in case I forget. But I haven’t needed it so far.

As shown in the screenshot, I make the widget for starting the day habit bigger than others, giving it emphasis. Because, usually, being able to check it out means I am likelier to also do the other stuff that day. I also organise them right to left, because I am right handed and that puts this habit’s widget right under my thumb to start the day out with. Using whatever cues to direct me towards it, basically.

And so that’s it, that’s the experiment, and it’s working for me for the last couple of days. Hopefully this helps someone else too, if not as is, as food for thought when you come up with your own system.

Lastly, if you skipped the cut about non-strictness, I do suggest you give it a read. Maybe this whole starting the day shenanigans is useless to you, but I bet you might find that bit interesting regardless of what your planning and habit building needs are.

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Organising my studies with two notebooks: a bullet journal and a project book

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 21:26:41 GMT

For a while I had wanted to write about my bullet journaling as a grad student but never really bothered because what I did was not really all that interesting. Mostly just vanilla bullet journaling with a few little modifications and novelties, like a failed attempt at using a Gantt chart to organise long stretches of thesis work.

But during the last fall, more like since june, I have been developing a way to organise stuff that actually stuck and is still enjoyable to use for me. Simple yet sufficient, so doesn’t get in my way, and doesn’t require nor encourage too much meticulous micro-planning.

It is nothing too interesting regardless, and it boils down to two notebooks and two referencing schemes. In this blog post I want to record this method in order to share it and as a reference for its reuse in my future projects.

So, one of the notebooks is my bullet journal, and the other is what I refer to as the Thesis book or Project book, TB for short. For both notebooks I use Rhodia A5 dotpads with 48 sheets, so 96 pages. Project book is the more generic name I plan to use for future iterations of this style of notebook, with Thesis book being the specific name for the project book I use to help with my thesis.

First, why use pen and paper for this? Well, there’s no reason to, other than if it works for you. Bullet journalling works for me, because I tend to overcomplicate planning with computers, and I don’t want to depend on the computer for planning because that has proved to encourage procrastination on the web or fiddling with the puter. The thesis notebook is simply an extension of this, I want to be able to work on my thesis task list without having to open the computer, even if most tasks involve the computer. I want to open the computer with an intent. Doesn’t work every time, nothing is a silver bullet, but it is better than the alternative for me, and a pleasant part of my daily life.

So let’s start with the bullet journal itself. My bullet journals are fairly vanilla with a few interesting novelties. I use one 96 page dotpad of A5 size per quarter, i.e. per three months. One notebook from january to march, another from april to june, another from july to september, and another from october up to december. This is an optimal way to do it for me because the smaller notebooks are easier to carry, I can fit two notebooks this way into my notebook sleeve I like, and more importantly, starting a new notebook every three months specifically has two main advantages: firstly, I can review my plans more often, given the requirement to move and evaluate them all four times a year; and secondly, I like to scan my notebooks to store them digitally and have them easily accessible in case I need to reference them, on my laptop. Scanning 60-80 pages (which is usually what I use up) is tedious, but much less so compared to scanning double that or more for an entire semester, which is what I used to do for a few years, up until the last quarter of 2021.

I number my bullet journal pages using small roman numerals for the front matter, that is from the front page where I put contact information up to the first month spread, and the rest of the pages are numbered with arabic numerals. It’s mostly an aesthetic choice but has a wee little effect on the referencing scheme.

Let’s talk about the bullet journal referencing scheme. First, a recap: I have four journals per year, one per quarter, I use lowercase roman numerals and arabic numerals for page numbers. I developed this scheme a long time before I even had the idea of a thesis book, simply to be able to refer to pages in past bullet journals from my current one in a consistent manner.

My reference scheme is as follows: YYYYQXX:pp, that is, the four digit year, the capital letter ‘Q’ standing for quarter, the quarter number in uppercase roman numerals, a colon, and a page number, lowercase if it’s a roman numeral. Let’s explain what this means based on two examples: (1) 2022QI:8 and (2) 2022QIV:vi.

Example (1) refers to the first journal of the year 2022, because QI is «quarter I». After the colon there’s the number 8, and that indexes a page number. With the way I number my pages and set up my spreads, it should probably coincide with a spread the middle of january 2022.

Example (2) refers to the last (i.e. fourth) journal of 2022, because QIV is «quarter IV», fourth quarter. The number after the colon is vi, i.e. 6, so the sixth page of the front matter, probably the page right before the first month’s monthly spread for that quarter.

Having smaller, quarterly journals means that this referencing scheme comes in handy pretty often, and I can use it almost whenever because the scans of the older journals are on my laptop’s hard drive. They take up about 20 megabytes in 150 DPI, so not much to worry about.

Another relevant part of the bullet journal is my week spreads. I divide the spread into a 2x4 grid, with days of the week assigned to each left to right. But I reserve the bottom left square for a section titled Current week. The current week box usually looks like a to-do list for the current week, but it functions more like the theme of the week: I never require myself to complete everything there in a given week, nor are the list items in there are simple to-do items to be added to days’ boxes later. Usually it is something more general like PhD shopping to remind me to do some work about my search for PhD opportunities. Seeing this I may add some more specific task for a day, like read this vacancy in UiO or figure out requirements at YTÜ. Where this becomes relevant is, this section is where I add a similar, general reference to the thesis notebook, the details of which we will talk about later.

Here is a representation of what my weekly spreads look like:

Page 1 Column 1	Page 1 Column 2	Page 2 Column 1	Page 2 Column 2
1 Monday	2 Tuesday	3 Wednesday	4 Thursday

Current week	5 Friday	6 Saturday	7 Sunday

I have a very similar spread right in between the weekly agendas and the month planner: the Weekly routine. I had used various designs for this, as the older blog post linked above can attest to, but I have come to prefer repeating the weekly agenda layout with little modifications. This spread is for distributing routine tasks and interests across the week. Interests is the key word because not everything is a to-do item here, and they are not meant to represent a perfect blue print for the week. Instead, it’s a suggestion as to what a healthy week could look like. Below is an example. Notice the lack of day numbers, and how the area/box for Current week has become the space for a decorative title for the spread:

Page 1 Column 1	Page 1 Column 2	Page 2 Column 1	Page 2 Column 2
Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday
* thesis	* thesis	* day off	* thesis
* news	* tabdequeue		* laundry

Weekly	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
Routine	* thesis	* thesis	* day off
			* update computers

Notice how instead of any particular, explicit task relating to the thesis, the list item merely reads thesis. This is indeed how it is in my book: it simply suggests that a given day is a day where I expect to work on my thesis. In order to know what to do, I need to refer to the Thesis book, which we will now talk about. But also notice simpler items in these lists like laundry or update computers, these do indeed become simple to-do items in the weekly agendas. I do not force myself tho. They are merely reminders, suggestions. Because every week is ultimately unique, one can’t go about it like a theoretical robot in a vacuum, repeating oneself, having no ups and downs. So I try to never set myself up to fail, to keep morale and affection for whatever I’m doing up.

Now ’bout the Thesis book! The Thesis book is again a Rhodia notebook, A5 sized, 48 sheets and thus 96 pages, a dotpad. I don’t think a dotpad is necessary, but I like dotpads and I had a spare, so I just went with that. The added benefit is, I have a fancy leather notebook sleeve I use to keep my bullet journal and my regular pens and triangular ruler together, and I can fit both the bullet journal and the thesis book into that sleeve. (Side note but one can’t overestimate how useful a sturdy, safe notebook sleeve is. So if you work with notebooks and would rather not they die at the first accident, do acquire or make a good notebook sleeve, if you can.)

Unlike my bullet journal, which is inspired obviously by the original Bullet Journalling Method, my thesis book is more influenced by a lesser known DIY planner thing, Strikethru. The basic principle of Strikethru is that, you have a page dedicated to live tasks, i.e. stuff that you want to get down now, and you have other lists or pages with diagrams or prose planning future stuff, and you have the past stuff to refer to. It gets more complicated, but that portion is what I have roughly based my Thesis book on.

The thesis book is simple: first, there’s a cover page with contact details, in case it’s lost and then found by a benevolent person who would wish to return it, hopefully. Then, there is an Index page, that is pretty similar to a bullet journal index page, or any other simple table of contents: a flat list of what’s where.

After that, there is the first to-do list page. The title of a to-do list page is the date that to-do list was created. My most recent to-do list was created on 23rd of November, 2022, so that is the title.

From the first to-do list page on, pages are numbered with arabic numerals, and before that they are numbered with lowercase roman numerals, just like with the bullet journal.

The to-do list page is an outline of active tasks that summarise what I am trying to do right now, at the current phase of the project. They are not minutiae or implementation details, and not everything is necessarily a task. Some are notes and ideas jotted down in a few words.

It is meant to be a single page long and brief and abstract.

When most of the items in a to-do list page get checked out, I start a new one on the first available empty page, migrate incomplete tasks if I am still interested in them, and add new stuff as necessary.

Now some extra information about my workflow that will help clarify examples, but you don’t really need to remember after reading. Detailed notes are on the computer, in an outline that divides up the whole project into Phases. So far I have completed phases titled preparation, bureaucracy, and readings, and I am currently at the analysis phase where I collect data and do my analyses. Subsequent phases are writing, defence, conferment, publications based on thesis. The structure of each of these documents is unique, but roughly, it is a mix of notes, tasks, ideas, questions, and so on that I can refer to. Thus, I create my to-do lists for the Thesis book by consulting the notes for the current phase, and essentially summarising it in an outline that resembles a to-do list.

For the current phase of analysis, based on my methodology and theory, I have decided to apply my analytical device in a repeated manner, such that each application revises and enhances the previous, and applies the improved methodology to new data. I call each repetition a round, and I am now at the first such round. This isn’t really grounded in any theory (pun intended!), it simply felt like a nice way to represent how my methodology, genre analysis, is usually applied: early pilot applications that generate an analytical method that’s then more widely applied in a repeated fashion until some metric represents a good enough final analysis (usually inter-rater agreement: one or more other researcher(s) analysing the same text coming up with a similar enough structure). The relevant part is, because of this structure, for the analysis phase, my active to-do list page represents the active round (round 1) of the active phase (analysis). Here is what it looks like:

23 november 2022

a) review page 4--8

b) analysis: round 1
   i)   collect data ✓
   ii)  visit locations
   iii) finalise theory
   iv)  pilot analyses

c) notes from meeting with advisor
   i)   revise bureaucratic documents
   ii)  revise research questions
   iii) use this particular theoretical construct
   iv)  a task I gave up on ❌

d) learn about the software I will use ✓

e) after round 1: ...

(Page number: 11)

Let’s observe this some before we move on to how this is referred to from the bullet journal. It is first and foremost an outline made up of two levels. For the toplevel I use lowercase letters of the latin alphabet, a--b. For the second level, I use lowercase roman numerals. And each page is numbered, with this page being the 11th page of the Thesis book.

With these facts, how is the Thesis book referenced? As visible, in the thesis book itself, I simply use the bare page numbers. I do not expect this to be a problem because I do not expect to use more than one notebook for the project. This notebook is an helper for the bullet journal, and while in between to-do lists I have some pages dedicated to random notes, most of the notetaking happens on the computer. This is a planner.

So, the reference looks like: TBppaxx. That is, TB which stands for Thesis book, page number represented by pp (and it is always arabic numerals because the front matter of this book has nothing interesting), a which represents the letter of alphabet that indexes the toplevel of the outline, and the roman numeral that indexes the second level of the hierarchy, xx. It is important to note that this is based on the peculiar structure of the current phase: at the reading phase, I merely had a flat to-do list, with no hierarchy, so I used arabic numerals for those lists. I also allow myself to refer to any level of this hierarchy, so a reference can be made merely to the page, or to a toplevel item, or to a sub-item.

A couple examples then: (1) TB11, (2) TB11a, (3) TB11biv, (4) TB2:3.

Example (1) is the simplest useful reference: it refers to the page 11 of the Thesis book.

Example (2) refers to the toplevel list item a in the to-do list found on the 11th page of the Thesis book.

Example (3) refers to the second level list item iv found under the toplevel item b on the page 11 of our notebook.

Example (4), finally, is a referencing style I used during the reading phase. Notice the colon character that separates the page number (2) from the index of the referenced list item (3).

How are these references used in the bullet journal then? Well, there is no real limitation, but the pattern that’s been useful for me is as follows: I will refer to the active to-do list’s page from the Current week box of weekly spreads, indicating that that todo list represents the current state and short-term plan of the work. Every day, when making that day’s agenda, if that day is one of the days which my Weekly routine suggests I do thesis work on, I will add current tasks from the active to-do list in the Thesis book using references. Usually I simply refer to an earlier thesis work day to determine which tasks are current: if a task was recently scheduled, and not striked out on the Thesis book to indicate it is done, it means it’s current. So it’s a candidate for the current day I am making the agenda for. It is of course also a matter of thinking what I want to get done that day, reasoning about what can be get done, and I determine tasks to work on for the day.

If I did any work on a task in a given day, I mark it as done in the Bullet journal. That merely indicates that some work was done. Whether a task itself is completed or not is indicated by whether or not it’s striked out in the Thesis book: I strike out completed tasks, add a checkmark near them if I did do them, or a cross mark if I decided to not do them or failed them. At times also I take small notes near these tasks in the Thesis book using a differently coloured, finer-tipped pen; these are comments on the task and often relate to why they failed or how to modify them when I move them to or repeat them in the next to-do list.

As a result of this, a week spread in the bullet journal may end up looking like this:

Page 1 Column 1	Page 1 Column 2	Page 2 Column 1	Page 2 Column 2
1 Monday	2 Tuesday	3 Wednesday	4 Thursday
* TB11biv
* TB11ciii [add to
this round’s notes]
* TB11a
* news

Current week	5 Friday	6 Saturday	7 Sunday
* TB11

Notice how the Current week area merely refers to the page 11 in the Thesis book, and how the plan for monday has detailed references as to what tasks to work on that day, and even a little comment on in what manner to complete that task near one of them.

This is basically how it all works. It is complicated to explain because it requires some context to show how everything works, but the principle is simple: A bullet journal, and a project book with to-do lists that can be indexed into using a system that is simple enough that it isn’t a hassle to use. And I think the most important part is how most of these supposed to-do lists aren’t made up of references to particular small tasks but are instead representations of a plan, or a routine, or a state/portion of the whole project. It provides me with a flexibility without which I get overwhelmed, and fail to be fruitive.

Ultimately this is what works for me, what I developed to help me. It may or may not work for you. So this is more of a record for myself and a suggestion for the reader, rather than a getting things done tutorial. That is the nice thing here, it can be your personal thing that is specialised to work for you. It can inform your fully digital task management setup, or an example for your fully pen and paper workflow, and anything in between. I hope it helps the reader in that, inspirational way.

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments.

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Genealogical linguistics: a mistake

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 04:26:30 GMT

Looking at "languages" as they are spoken today, some observations are obvious enough to be trivial: they vary, they change, and they are abstract concepts that refer to some largely arbitrary collection of varieties that vary and change simultaneously.

What we call a language is essentially made up of mutually intelligible idiolects and social conventions and philosophies. Even mutual intelligibility is socially defined at every level of varieties and various "-lects" we talk about. For example, a speaker of a Northern American English dialect is likely to fail to understand Kenyan or Indian Englishes, while speakers of Portuguese and Spanish and Italian are likely to understand each other alright, when non-border varieties of these languages are much more significantly different from each other than the mentioned Englishes. The difference is easily explained when you consider that speakers of the second group of languages are often exposed to the use of each others languages, when a Northern American English speaker will rarely interact with a speaker of Kenyan or Indian Englishes. The why of this difference is beyond the scope of this post but suffice it to say that it has to do with power relations and histories of subjugation, and thus social matters.

So, the term "language" is essentially intractable in a coherent manner when referring to the actual linguistic material they use to communicate with each other. It is a political term, fit for use in that context, but in linguistics we can only accurately use it when we speak about that very politics, "language ideologies". Of course in this light, and "dialect" and "accent" existing in very similar situations, in linguistics we've taken to using terms like "variety", "code", "speech", "sociolect", and some other terms with the "-lect" root.

On the ground, speakers command a whole array of "varieties", which they use, sometimes discretely, sometimes mixing and matching-ly. In the study of language, we often consider individuals to have at least one variety, and we consider these situational variation as rule based divergences, or as multilingualism, in which each variety a speaker has also has these situational variants, e.g. formal and informal registers, written versus spoken variants, and so on.

Maybe a better way to put this is that speakers command multiple, changing, interacting idiolects, each affected by a (slightly or largely) different social context.

Let's consider me. I command three "languages" "well": Turkish, my first language, English, a lifelong second language, and Italian, my third language which I learned at university as a student of Italianistics. In each of these languages, tho with different competence, I am able to communicate formally and informally, and I have some knowledge of some "non-standard varieties", or "dialects", and such.

This means that, according to the above model, I have for example a set of idiolects that are influenced by what's conventionally considered to be Turkish. I have a formal idiolect that is influenced by prestige varieties and written language, I have an informal idiolect that is influenced by standard language, by common varieties that I am exposed to thru localised interactions as well as mediatised ones, by multiple other varieties be it dialectal or sociolectal, and then I have a "sincere" informal idiolect that is influenced, along with all of the above, by varieties classified under Turkish that are spoken at home, including urban Istanbulite Turkish that my parents speak, Urfa/Birecik varieties that my maternal grandparents spoke which also affected my mother's idiolects of course, and a similar situation with my father and his relatives who are from the Hınıs area of Erzurum province. Just within Turkish, I am, like everyone else who can speak at least one "language", able to code switch between all these idiolects, often in a self-aware and semantically-contentful fashion. With many other people like me, wilfully or not, I participate in the collaborative, political co-creation of the "Turkish language" as a complex social construct that encompasses varieties and ideologies around them, and all the speakers' social realities as well as judgements about who is and who is not a speaker.

Through these building blocks, and sociopolitical interactions, with the effect of physical and digital/mediatised geographies, languages and dialects as sociopolitical constructs are born.

These varieties, based on their sociopolitical interactions, coexist, influence each other, or exist in antagonistic and/or assimilationistic conflicts, and as outward expressions of identity. They change, merge, split, whether unconsciously or by political action.

Here, because all these ad hoc and vague terms are way too confusing, and because there's not enough overlapping-but-not-quite-the-same jargon in language studies, I will create a term to refer to "any form of language that can be defined in some coherent, useful manner", and it will be "code". For example, "Turkish" is a code because I can define it as "a standardised language maintained by the government of the Republic of Turkey". Further, because it is an instance of a standardised national language, maintained by a government, I'll call it a "rectiocode", from Latin "rectio, rectionis" for government. "Turkish" is also a code at a separate plane as the language associated mainly with the Turkish ethnicity, and in this context what it entails is different from what the rectiocodic use of Turkish does, so in this context I will say I am talking about an ethnocode that can be referred to as Turkish.

"Birecik Turkish" is a code that mainly pertains to the Birecik town found between the Antep and Urfa provinces of Turkey, which means I can refer to it as a "regiocode". The Birecik Turkish regiocode is connected to Turkish the rectiocode and to Turkish the ethnocode in complex ways, as well as to ethnocodes Kurdish and Arabic, and their relevant regiocodes. Further codes like Quranic Arabic, Armenian, Syriac are relevant as well. Every "code" is a nexus: it is influenced by other codes at all levels, from standardised national languages to small neighbouring regional varieties, and in turn influences them, based on the complex societal entanglements of their speakers.

In this fashion we can talk of religiocodes, raciocodes, sociocodes, idiocodes, and even pseudocodes which would be those codes that only exist in abstract fashion. For example, Proto-Indo-European would be a pseudocode because it does not refer to a code that was spoken by anybody, but a reconstructed, model code that represents a pool of codes that have diachronically changed into another pool of codes.

And therein lies the major problem with genealogical/historical linguistics: as a relic of a time when linguistics was chiefly dedicated to much more sinister undertakings, namely the construction and practice of nationalism, colonialism, and racism (which we've nowhere near cleaned our hands from, e.g. SIL, e.g. white supremacist structures and research practices, e.g. Anglocentrism, e.g., e.g., e.g., e.g.), based on an ideologically charged methodology, namely comparative method, the model of language development that we have developed is not only inadequate at representing the above complexity, but actively hinders our comprehension and explanation thereof. Armed with my fancy new terms, let me try to explain this.

We said that codes coexist, covary, codevelop, in timespace. They influence each other, and who influences and to what degree and whom is also variable. And yet our historical linguistic model suggests a tree model, a phylogenetic model, that privileges either a constructed anachronistic code or an imposingly influential historical code. This means that the entropy associated with the life of a group of codes—dare I call it, a codeme—is obscured, and we're confined to thinking and/or expressing that variation lessens as we travel backwards in time.

This conception is inherently tied to the approach to language that considers "language" and "dialect" as concepts that are tractable on a non-political plane—as realities definable, confinable, describable, without reference to language ideologies. About any linguist worth their salt would know to say this is impossible. They'd know to say that a "language is a dialect with a navy and an army". If we consider that, and if we consider the complexities of inter-code interaction, we couldn't but say that this conception is flawed, and that a better model would be primarily aereal and interactional. We could still talk about genealogical connection between codes, perhaps talking about geneacode(me)s, phylocode(me)s. But instead of fronting this diachronical, phylogenetic, and often abstract relation as the main model through which we explain distribution and variation of codes, we would have created a model that's much more adept at expressing the entire gamut of ways in which codes coexist and (co)develop throughout timespace (always with an eye for abstract spaces, such as literary languages, digital spaces, lingua francas, and so on; language is never solely tied to physical space, even in history).

I believe this distinction matters because the current, chiefly genealogical model not only makes it hard to communicate or conceptualise that diachronical pseudocodes/geneacodes are abstract groupings that represent a large collection of codes that are grouped based on a whole variety of factors that range from sociopolitical to ideological to scientific, but it also promotes an understanding of ethnolinguistic history that is dangerously simplistic, suggesting a tree-like history, when the reality is much more complex, much more richer, and much less viable as a building block for injustice and oppression. Genealogical linguistics and comparative method are inextricably entangled with nationalism and nation-building, and relevant ideologies; they are not neutral, scientific methodologies that produce ideologically neutral results.

In that light, I believe that, for ideological and scholarly reasons, it is about time that we advance on from this limited model with a tragic history, and seek more up-to-par and open minded, egalitarian approaches. I have at times seen linguists work in this direction, but my scholarly interests have changed in ways that shifts this concern outside my focus, so instead of taking up this project academically, I approach it here on my blog, philosophically.

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Fruitivity 🍒 📚

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 05:43:59 GMT

Productivity is a concept that is inherently tied to a capitalistic understanding of self and of labour. And yet it has also filled a conceptual space that is pretty relevant for a lot of people, me included. But, as ever, for me at least this is in conflict with a desire to reject the imposed capitalistic conception, perception and existence as self-realisation.

Whatever «productivity» is in my life, it is not about goals set for me by higher ups, it is not about the judgements of people, it's not about whether there is some concrete result of effort spent that is valuable in a market. It is about fulfilment, it is about living a joyful life—as a radical act, in the face of imposed turmoil and unhappiness—, and it is about an existential sense of engagement with the world.

So I just came up with an idea to materialise this disregard, to follow this desire to visibly dissociate from a social construct that is infested by such destructive things as wage labour, gig work, hustle culture, self-help, and all the other ways we are made to ostensibly-willingly spend our (free) time¹ along with labour hours for the benefit of the surplus-parasites, all the while trying to protect and appropriate the positive aspects of «productivity» as a current cultural phenomenon.

From now on, I will try to use the concept of «fruitivity» instead of «productivity». This is not just a pure word swap. Because, of course, when I used the word productivity, I did so to refer to my conception of it. As with all words and every person uttering them. The reason then to coin this word (and a set of accompanying words which I'll expose soon) is to detach a non/anti-capitalistic, personal conception of productivity from the semantic baggage of capitalistic productivity. I want to have words to talk about what I have so far referred to using productivity, or its sibling terms.

Fruitivity thus is an existential/epicurean conception that refers to the kinetic pleasure gained from spending a satisfactory amount of voluntary effort on self-determined personal goals or momentary, fleeting interests. Its goal is to maintain a state of aponia and ataraxia that stems from self-realisation. But it does not concern the false dichotomy of individualism and collectivism either. Neither a moment of fruition nor the conception of self-realisation it relates to needs necessarily to concern the individual only. One can make their communities, their collaboration with others, a major, or even a central part of their self-realisation.

I explicitly do not wish to bring any etymology into this write-up. For me, it is not the etymology of productivity that is the problem, but the set of connotations associated with that name-concept. The main reason for using a word like fruitivity here is, (i) it is different from productivity and does not share in common parlance the capitalistic connotations of the latter, and (ii) I like the word.

A (potentially) completed episode of fruitivity can be referred to as fruition. When I check off a to-do list item, it is a moment of fruition. The effort, or the kind of effort, that lead to such an outcome might be described as fruitive, just like a time-period or space that is associated with fruitivity. Library is a fruitive space for me, I can engage fruitively with self-realising effort in the realm of academic/intellectual pursuit there.

From this seed vocabulary, one can replace an entire realm of capitalistic/ablist jargon that infests our lives and dirties our discourses when attempting to talk about how we attach meaning to our lives. Occasio praeceps, vita brevis, we have no time to share with the capitalists. And yet they demand, and they enforce. In the face of that, the words, concepts, ideas we use are a frontier. We must push back. This is one of my attempts.

¹ «free time», of course, itself is a capitalistic concept as it necessitates the existence of time dedicated to labouring for the extractor classes.

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«tabqueue, tabdequeue»: my method for dealing with and avoiding an excess of browser of tabs

Sun, 03 Jul 2022 05:32:27 GMT

This post used to be titled «tabocide», but since then I've grown a dislike to that name, and also modified my process a bit, so I renamed the post and edited it a bit to reflect how I do it now. The main difference is I don't keep tabs open anymore, but instead keep them in a bookmarks folder.

Something I do with some regularity is «tabqueueing and tabdequeueing»

Basically, instead of keeping tabs open in my browser, I shove them regularly as they accumulate into a folder called tabqueue, and close them. After, when I have the time, I schedule a tabdequeue session where I process these bookmarks one by one, after opening them all in a fresh new window and deleting the tabqueue folder, and moving the tabs open on my phone there also (for this purpose I use KDEConnect). Of course I don't just throw them away, but they get reviewed, and they have a few fates available to them:

new papers / books / other publications accumulate from reading RSS feeds mostly, they get shoved into my reference manager (Zotero these days) or dismissed;

news or opinion articles, blog posts, and similar, that accumulate over time, get read and/or bookmarked on the spot, otherwise dismissed or shoved into Instapaper;

fediverse posts, mostly my own, which get dismissed or get copied to my digital notebooks;

I'll often have web searches open, usually on DuckDuckGo or Google Scholar&emdash;these usually get turned into to do items if can't be processed on the spot;

and finally a random assortment of stuff that gets treated ad hoc, often Github repositories or other software=y stuff, temporary tabs that got forgotten, etc.

The aim is to do this once every week, but usually it's once or twice every month. As tabs near and surpass a hundred-ish, I get nervous (because even tho I have pretty good backups these days, I don't ever trust Firefox to not bork my session and get me in trouble, something which it has done a lot). Also for this purpose and for keeping the browser performant, I've modified the process to queue the bookmarks in a bookmarks folder, instead of just keeping them open in a browser window.

This way I can keep on top of many tabs.

A question that probably comes to your mind is, why not use a reading list / bookmarks / ... for this purpose. Well, that is probably a better way to do it (not to mention lighter on my computer), but fact of the matter is, something that goes into a list, in my case, tends to stay there, unattended, unless I set up a separate workflow for each list. As in, if I was shoving abstracts into a "check these abstracts later" list, they'd never get looked at. That will lead to all my reading lists overflowing with random stuff I found interesting and gave no proper consideration as to whether I need it or not.

This way, I can keep my reading lists fairly cleaner and I don't end up with thousands of stuff in my Zotero database with a reading list longer than a few bibles worth of pages. That's what tab(de)queueing is about for me: looking at things, judging whether I want to come back to them later, as opposed to just mopping things up as I encounter them.

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About a podcast I had recommended before being very naughty

Sat, 02 Apr 2022 05:38:47 GMT

You may have encountered me endorsing the "Philosophize This!" podcast before, saying something along the lines of "it's a very white podcast but a good intro to the canon of philosophy as it would be taught in universities, thus useful to go thru".

I retract that endorsement because for the second time I notice the host talking about a philosopher who has deeply fascist and Nazi roots, without mentioning these facts. First it was Heidegger, who he talked about in multiple episodes and only ever mentioned the Naziness in the end. Recently I noticed the same repeated with the episodes on Emil Cioran, whose interactions with fascists and Nazis was never mentioned. I only learned about it when I decided to read the wiki page on the guy.

The most important fact about a nazi-fascist philospher is that he's a nazi-fascist philosopher. No amount of contributions to anything neutralises, overshadows, or excuses that. I thus can't recommend a podcast which is aimed at people who don't know much about these people's lives, especially lesser known ones like Cioran, talking about them without mentioning their ties to these "movements".

If you know about 20th century European history, you probably can tell from the ideas and historical clues that, oh, this guy probably was a Nazi, but that relies on the listener looking for it (and I've been looking for it since the Heidegger episode), and is knowledgeable enough, as the host doesn't mention when these philosophers were born, which years they were active in, or when they died.

I don't know if the host has sympathies or if he has bought into some very nonsensical and harmful interpretation of separating the art from the artist, so to speak, but honestly I don't really care, it's irresponsible either way to not mention this.

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Thoughts on "A Personal Computer for Children of All Cultures", and programming multilingually

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 07:50:53 GMT

Just listened to @nasser@merveilles.town's talk on multilingual programming, titled "A Personal Computer for Children of All Cultures" again.

As a (for now) linguistics student I really like this talk and highly recommend it. But also as a linguistics person coming from a programming background, it has me thinking and I have some questions and ideas I want to voice, with the belief that asking these questions early on in a project like Ramsey's will help us design these solutions such that in departing from the domination of English in programming languages and communities, we don't involuntarily find ourselves in another form of inequity's dominion: that of monolingualism, which itself comes from the exact same source as English's global dominance and destructive status.

First of all, I think the next step / next big question here is how to enable bilingual programming, code switching in code.

Code switching is extremely common, and in ways we don't often think it exists. E.g. languages have registers and styles, and we go between these pretty frequently (e.g. formal to informal, programmer jargon to kitchen jargon to just small talk [hehe] vocabulary), besides switching between more major linguistic varieties, like what we call languages and dialects (which are political terms and not linguistically sound, but I'll avoid that discussion here).

Could that happen in code within this framework?

So my languages are Turkish, English, and Italian. With Ramsey's ideas, I can write modules that are in one language or another, and my whole program can be multilingual. But could it be possible for a declaration, say the body of a function to be code switching between Turkish and English? I could of course do that with "local identifiers", using Ramsey's terminology, but could I also do it with keywords and external identifiers? Because it's very common for a bilingual community to do code switching not only at conversation or whole text level, not only between sentences, but even mid-sentence.

So imagine:

int main (void) {
    const char* w = "world";
    puts(sprintf("hello, %s", w));
    return 0;
}

How could we allow, then:

sayma_s baş (boş) {
    sabit harf* m = "il mondo";
    puts(sprintf("ciao, %s", m)); 
    ritorna 0;
}

which starts out with Turkish but outputs and ends with Italian, and has some English identifiers in the middle. (There's also the %s in there which is a complicating factor, as it definitely comes from the English string, but that can be completely replaced with something like string interpolation probably.)

This is a toy example of course, but there can be real-world situations where this becomes a cultural question. Imagine me collaborating with an Arabic/Armenian/Greek/Kurdish-speaking programmer on a given module as a speaker of Turkish. There's a cultural domination/injustice relationship there, and every time we decide on a module's language, that'll come into play as I'm relative to them, privileged. And it's not only a me-question, as it's likely that this decision takes place in Turkish-dominated spaces in Turkish-dominated conurbations and political settings.

And then a related question is of course what linguistic varieties get access to being a "language" versus a "dialect" versus an "argot/jargon/style/slang" and similar. None of these categories are scientifically sound, they are all political. Which is why we invent terms like "variety", "register" and similar in linguistics, because the structural properties are seldom what political properties capture.

This of course leads us on to the question of how we encode linguistic varieties, how do we decide which linguistic variety is active for a given snippet of code at each level, and how do we do this without making it difficult so that the devised solutions don't lead English or some other lingua franca to take over all other practical uses of the solution. Yes we have international codes for languages, but they are also centrally gatekept by institutions of the Western world, and they carry the same (de)politicising linguistic ideologies that today govern the statuses and the status quo regarding which varieties get to be called languages and which dialects, which get representation and which are devalued, which are kept around and which are left to wither.

⁂

Another question is how this maps to existing ways of combining multiple programming languages, because it poses both opportunities and challenges.

E.g. we readily use the ironically named FFI's to communicate across programming-linguistic boundaries, so using extern "C" or it's analogue in many programming languages, you can combine them at some level. And there are other facilities, like RPy, Pymacs, and similar. I think reworking these a little bit should actually really help with going beyond human-linguistic boundaries in programming too.

For example new ABIs can be developed for existing libraries that do not use the English names, but some other identifiers, hashes or otherwise. I believe (as a fairly inexperienced programmer when it comes to anything beyond small stuff and scripting, but still) that there should be ways to incorporate the existing codebase the world has developed into an emergent multi-human-lingual paradigm of programming without simply having to rewrite it all.

But also we have other ways of multi-programming-lingual combination, or code switching, if you will. These manifest themselves in the likes of Knuth's literate programming or Emacs' Org Mode's and Rmarkdown's similar-but-not-exactly-the-same mechanisms. Could we exploit these systems' ideas in developing programming environments that can combine multiple human languages and multiple programming languages? Why shouldn't that be possible?

Because in Org mode, which is the system I'm most familiar with at this point, the programming languages bit is at least possible, practical, and also highly useful. For example consider this setup script I have for my Raspberry PI which combines Emacs Lisp and Bourne Shell programming languages liberally, using Org Mode's mechanisms for doing so. (You can search for begin_src in the file to explore how the two very different languages are used and combined in the literate script.)

These literate programming environments could easily be used for any compiler for a multi-human-lingual programming language/environment, that's pretty straight-forward, but what's food for thought is how such a sytem can take advantage of the ideas and tools developed by the said literate environments over the last ~50 years, despite relative obscurity among especially professional programmers.

⁂

This is all I have for now. I am really excited for a future where programming becomes customarily multilingual in both human and programming language dimensions, because as someone who is advancing towards a career in academic scholarship and as a long-time hobbyist programmer, and as a non-native speaker of English, I have personally experienced how limiting it can be when programming tools are exclusively targeted at English-speaking professionals, and what sort of things become possible once we start breaking those barriers.

I believe Ramsey's doing god's work in breaking some of these barriers with thinking about how to make programming work for all human linguistic varieties, and hope that this text here contributes some questions/ideas to consider in such efforts. Really, thank you Ramsey!

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My email setup with Emacs, Rmail, msmtp/mpop, mairix, and then some more

Sat, 12 Dec 2020 13:58:08 GMT

Introduction

A lot of "my email setup" posts start with telling how the author deals with thousands or millions of messages with probably tens or hundreds of interactions each day.

This blog post instead is about how I deal with a humane level of email messaging, with a local-first approach, using a smallish variety of software, which you can just set up and forget about.

Let me start with a list of software, then go on with describe the setup.

Of this list, the following can easily be factored out if you want: Python 3, mairix, pass, procmail, gnupg, and K-9 Mail. Furthermore, it should actually be possible to replicate this whole setup with only ever using GNU Emacs and Rmail (which comes with Emacs itself), if your system has movemail handy, or if your Emacs includes it (which was common up until recently, but is a workflow deprecated by Emacs developers). Then, you might ask, why do you bother? The answer is simple: if I use external programs to fetch and send mail, then I can use multiple email clients with the same setup. E.g., I sometimes use the mutt email client with this setup with no modifications or fragile repetitions. I'll in fact talk a bit about how you can use mutt and another tool to just totally factor Emacs out of this setup while retaining a similar workflow.

With that unrefined intro done, let's get to talking about what, why and how. ( Read more... )

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Hello World!

Fri, 05 Jan 2018 17:12:49 GMT

This is one small step for man, and an even smaller one for mankind.

This is also a test.

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