“Is it still an adventure if you find the treasure and to lose it or is it just a sad fucking life?!” “I’ll do whatever it takes.” —“it’s going to take a lot of us feeling that same way.” “I was going to repay all that was given, by giving you your brother back” “If you want someone to come for you, I will be that person for you”

20 - The Vanishing

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If somebody says they’re drawn to you for reasons they don’t know, that’s a signal to kiss.

Why are they playing straight with this ghost?

I’d like to see a cold open where they roll initiative.

Who wears 6XL?

Elodie daBaby mama How has baby Mommers everywhere?

how hard can it be to pick some interns at random? Not WHU, à la poubelle

Bolaire gigoloing Blix Anything that has an effect on reality is real, especially illusions.

Blix is Brennan

“I wonder how many friends you have that you do not know about.”

The guy in prison Will they be able to really care for a NPC Murray: “This is why intelligence and wisdom are two separate stats.”

21 - King of Cards

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“the law in its majestic equality forbids the rich and the poor alike from stealing bread”

“It doesn’t swing back on its own… Someone somewhere picks up a rock.”

22 -

#

16 - Visions of Shadow & Stone

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A lot of memorable quotes in this setup episode. Particularly interesting are the interpersonal dynamics between the party where each member is becoming increasingly more at odds with the others. None of these characters like each other and it’s all they can do to not be constantly bickering and at each others’ throats.

“This is the eighth prophecy they’ve brought. At least this one mentions the sun.”

“I don’t think the past is gonna save us.” —Thaisha

“We’re traveling under the authority of revenge.” -Julien

“I have lost much, in truth I don’t know how much I’ve lost. So I don’t care for your platitudes. I appreciate the candor. I appreciate the assistance but I’m going into the darkness.” —Julien “We lose everything in the end. We lose it all. It’s an honor to have ever had. It’s only ever a time.”

“Whatever enchantment has been placed to bring together those you travel with, my Lord, who seem moments away from tearing at each other’s throats, rightfully so, the pillars of a shattered world who stand tall only in and of themselves and not in relation to each other, then let me add myself to the mix. My loyalty is as confounding as the devotion of your companions. The world is mad. Let us be madder still.” —Seremai

17 - The Place of Wings

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“No one should have to walk into the dark alone”

There was a bunch of combat in this episode with skeletons which is boring and entirely interchangeable.

18 - Vindicta & Vale

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“when you’re trying to break the world to build a new one, there can be no clean instructions to follow”

“You look down at your cousin and realize you are both failed experiments.”

Let’s say the end of the Seekers arc is widely considered to be a letdown. The final monster combat was fair despite some grumbling around the exact mechanisms. Mythologically it was a bit of a lore dump which we have to see how it’ll pay off later.

What’s most annoying about it is the party’s inexplicable return to Dol-Makjar purely for planned story reasons. A player driven campaign would probably have them go off in a totally different direction (for instance to the Golden Orchard or off to sea).

Back to amazing cold opens in this episode with the story of how Azune got sold off as a child soldier by his starving parents.

In the funhouse Taliesin as the Bohemian peasant Bořivoj Dalebro from 1403 (for Kingdom Come: Deliverance II) is absolutely hilarious.

Otherwise this episode is funny with the eagle but otherwise very much a transition episode.

“You cannot guarantee that your mind would stay friendly to your values.” (to Occtis)

“You always had to make a choice and the world was always chaos. It’s just touching you now.”

This cold open with Teor and Thimble didn’t really do anything to for me.

“Flower Doll” as a slur is a nice addition to the mythology of the world.

“The one that walks besides you is a mindless follower of a dead tyrant!”

”You are a beautiful gemstone tumbling at top speed down the mountainside. Gorgeous and off balance.” (YouTube)

“My good bitch who are you talking about?”

Finally a good fight to add some action and tempo to this arc. Tyranny definitely is the most serious of her sisters.

Woodwalkers 2 is an entertaining enough kids movie. The conceit of beastwalkers (human/animal shapeshifters) is worth exploring despite the disbelief around diet and clothing logistics it requires. The special effects are very weak but not to the point that it makes the movie unwatchable.

The movie pretends to have representation but both the black supporting characters are done dirty. The black girl Lou seems to be the Carag’s girlfriend in the beginning but then disappears for half the movie while he gets it on with a wolf girl Tikaani. The black boy Brandon is relegated to such a passive role that another character remarks that buffalos do nothing but eat and shit.

From a theory of change point of view I would say the movie is commendable. It teaches kids that standing in a field with only the power of your convictions against men with machines and guns does not achieve very much. The main antagonist Andrew Milling demonstrates that it’s preferable to acquire political power by any means and then use that power to drive through your will.

Not that many big notable set pieces this episode except for the opening. The play within a flashback within a cold open within a play is a strong story beat for Bolaire. Most of the detail we already knew except for one: How the masks and the play ended the Trickster Goddess.

• “Stages are for murder, stages are for truth”
• “Why is a lie so much better than the truth?”
• “You will leave a booed and living man.”

Notable this episode:

• The cold open with the encounter between Thjazi and Hal is a lovely little vignette. Brothers are very familiar and they also never listen to one another.
• The encounter with the Lux was comedic in the faux-naïveté of both sides.
• Occtis’s developing horror as to his new unliving body was interesting but got snowed under a bit with everything else he was doing (Disguise Self as Erlich Kerzingblad, undead vulture).
• The point where Occtis’s body got mended in an act of magical Kintsugi by Taisha’s Mend Object was lovely.
• House Einfasen and the area of ‘Riesengürtle’ are read by Americans as “German” but to me it feels much more autistic than that. I’d put it more as Nordic/Finnish.
• The handmaid getting her brain splattered on the floor was a nice shocker but definitely also somewhat suspect.

I noticed this on my watch through and thought it would be good to go back and capture it.

This phrase is it:

“It’s a good for nothing battle, that’s true. But even so, there’s no point in losing.”

Here’s the complete sequence from season 1 episode 21:

　司令官のヤン・ウェンリー

　間も無く戦いが始まる 　碌でもない戦いだが

　それだけに勝たなくては意味がない

　勝つための算段はしてあるから、無理せず気楽にやってくれ

　かかっているのは、たかだか国家の存亡だ

　個人の自由と権利に比べれば、大した価値のあるものじゃあない。

　それではみんな。 　そろそろ始めるとしようか？

Let me take note of some highlights for each episode. We’re already pretty far in and it’s easy to forget all the things that happened since the episodes are long and the cast of characters continuously rotates.

There’s too many good bits that I can barely remember as it is.

So in this episode we have every table present.

Seekers

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The prelude seems like a standard bit of traveling through the country but it is given a ton of additional depth by this one episode. They have to take a detour and stumble on a dwarven village where people pray for the return of their shaper, the goddess of the forge, with lanterns at the site of scattered sculptures which in turn were set there to deface a site of a titan of the old path. Taisha does not take this very well.

A very brief fragment that efficiently delivers a big dollop of history, humanity and two competing pantheons.

On Instagram there’s a teaser where Aranessa recounts her situation which provides a good introduction in our upcoming foray with the seeker party.

Schemers

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The hostile takeoever of every institution in Dol-Makjar being called a ‘coup’ should drive home for good the parallels with what the Trump administrations is doing. It did for me at least.

After the schemers’ council we get to see a side of Hal we didn’t get to see yet. Instead of his usual somber and caring persona, in his interactions with the gentry he delivers fully as a thespian who plays his role in the most transactional way¹.

Soldiers

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I wouldn’t say the soldiers had much in the way of memorable moments other than their encounter with the hounds. Hounds are always a crowd pleaser.

The part where everybody is resting and reflecting at the fire would have to be the highlight especially the full interaction between Kattigan and Tyranny.

“Every little motion of the knife is a prayer, hoping that a thing she loves more than life itself will take a little morsel of food, and get a little stronger, a little bigger, a little more ready for a world she can’t predict.”

Sports and Health

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It was a year where I didn’t seriously injure myself and could continuously practice sports. That’s already a huge improvement.

I started going to the gym regularly in the evenings after the kids are sleeping. After some initial hesitance I started doing barbell exercises. The goal is to squat and deadlift at least my bodyweight of 75kg. I’m inching this up very slowly and am currently at 40kg.

Going to the gym is made possible by my Fitbod subscription. Exercising regularly is much easier, if I don’t have to think or plan what I’m going to do. That means either a human or an app should tell me what I need to do. Given that the gym is paid for by my work, I can justify the steep monthly cost of Fitbod (here’s a 14-day guest pass).

I’m doing winter cycling on the trainers at the gym while I debate whether I should get one for at home. That makes me one of those crazy people who wears a chamois to the gym.

It was a great year for cycling. I bought a proper road bike, the Bianchi 2024 Sprint ICR and I managed to join group rides (mostly those of the MAAP LAB Berlin) more or less weekly without having a single mechanical or crash. knocks on wood

But then during a solo ride in the last week of the year I managed to slip and fall over. More than the minor damage to my knee and my carbon frame, it was my ego that was bruised.

Studies

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I read a bunch of papers (one write-up) around LLMs and found the field to be overhyped. I don’t think that single percentage point increases in performance and conversions of BFS algorithms into LLM prompts are worth writing up. Things are moving so quickly that you can’t sit around waiting for breakthroughs to make their way into the literature.

Learning Japanese continues and I’m now at Wanikani level 22. I’m not sure what my next goal is going to be. After my trip to Japan my motivation is somewhat on the rocks.

The main problem is that once you start studying Japanese, you cannot stop. I’m not stopping, but I’m dialing it down to maintenance mode.

Books

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I already posted about how bad of a year 2025 was for reading. Not sure whether I’ll find the time to do better next year.

Movies and TV

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I’ve moved the tracking of everything that I watch over to Trakt saying goodbye to Letterboxd.

Just like with fitness, I need an app that will tell me exactly what I need to do right now. Without it, I’ll very easily lose track of this. Trakt is excellent at this and offers it in the free version. I pay for premium to get some of the more advanced list management versions.

The movies I watched in 2025:

• Wicked
• Moana 2
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• Lilo & Stitch
• KPop Demon Hunters
• Encanto
• The Greatest Showman

Trakt tells me that’s 901 minutes spent on movies.

Wicked was lovely on the big screen. Of the kids movies I watched: KPop Demon Hunters is impeccable, Moana 2 was unnecessary, Encanto was strangely forgettable, Lilo & Stitch not as bad as I would expect. The Greatest Showman may be flawed but it is full of bangers.

The tv series I watched in 2025:

• Bluey S3
• The Wheel of Time S2
• The Bear S1+S2+S3+S4
• Neon Genesis Evangelion
• Dennou Coil
• Asura
• Cyberpunk Edge Runners
• Legend of the Galactic Heroes S1
• Heated Rivalry S1
• Kaiju No.8 S1

All of these were spectacular and interesting in their own way. The Bear really meshes with so many things I like and like to do. Asura is effectively just a very long Kore-eda movie. LotGH is peak.

Trakt tells me that this is 4567 minutes spent on episodes. It’s clear who’s the winner here.

Games

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I don’t really track this anymore, but what I can note are the following.

Expedition 33 was a highlight. I saw it on Tiktok and immediately knew I had to experience it. Not having a console I played it via cloud gaming on my Macbook.

Playing a parry/dodge game over a cloud setup is pure masochism, but with difficulty set to easy, it was kind of doable. The gameplay loop is satisfying but after a while the level design formula gets a bit tedious. What stood out were the music¹, the writing and the major set pieces in the boss battles and in the environment.

Critical Role started their campaign 4 and having followed the online RPG scene through Tiktok clips for a while now, I decided to see what the fuss was about. The first episode together with the rest of the ouverture is spectacular. It’s a narrative victory of setup, emotions, reveals and backstabbing. I’m not sure if they’ll stick the landing, but for now I’m very much bought in.

I’ll have to delve into what makes this worthwhile. For now I can point to two things. There is an element of let’s play parasociality that you have with any game stream or impro podcast. Add to that a very meticulously brewed high fantasy setting that’s better than what we get on television: open ended runtime, infinite production values, no cancellation after one or two seasons.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was discounted and became the game we played during the Christmas break. I led exploring the city on Mount Qaf with my kids on a lower difficulty following right on my heels.

It’s a great game where the platform mechanics continue to layer on top of each other together with some very nasty puzzles bordering on the outright sadistic. I’m super proud to see the grit and skill my kids have shown because easy only affects combat, not the platforming.

Persia provides a vast and mostly unknown to us landscape of culture, artifacts and mythology to serve as backdrop for this game. A lot of it is undoubtedly historically not accurate, but that does not make it any less nice to look at.

Podcasts

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The two podcasts I listen to most consistently are Ones and Tooze and Past Present Future. Those are both remnants of my Talking Politics period². Maybe I should add Helen Thompson’s podcast as well and have a full lid?

Other than that I semi-regularly listen to:

• The Adam Friedland show
• The Catskills Podcast
• Cortex
• Developer Voices
• Escape Collective (only during the Tour)
• Feminist Shelf Control
• KALT’ın Podacst’ı
• Oxide and Friends
• Podcast Filosofie
• De Shitshow
• Stavy’s World
• Vergecast

I more or less stopped listening to Trashfuture finding the jokes and the commentary repetitive and boring.

Travel

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It was a much better year for travel than most years before this.

London was a work trip in spring and it was one of my best London trips ever. I stayed in Chelsea, I cycled everywhere, drank lots of great coffee, ate a ton of great food, went to a club, went to a play on the West End. I did so much and there’s so much left to do. I don’t know what took me so long to appreciate London like this.

Iceland was the first trip we took our kids on a plane and then round tripped the island on our way to the family horse farm. Iceland is lovely but empty. Not sure what would make me go back there other than to visit family or if I could do some hard hiking/cycling/riding.

Japan drove me crazy with reports from everybody and their mother visiting so I had to go. After missing the summer window, I booked for November not knowing that that’s one of the best months to visit Japan. I walked the Ise-ji for a large chunk and then I ran around Tokyo for a couple of days. It was even better than all the social media.

Iceland and Japan in the same year is low-key ridiculous but this was also the year at work where I get 20 consecutive extra holidays.

End

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Lots more things to cover that happened in 2025 but for now this will have to be it. Despite some marked down periods, all in all it was a good year. On to a much better 2026.

(This update has been delayed for a week because I fell quite ill just as the new year came around.)

Health

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I got on the neurodiversity bandwagon this year.

First I got myself a self-paid diagnosis for ADHD. This result should not surprise anybody who knows me. I’ve forced myself to be very high functioning throughout my life but it can’t be denied that there were always some underlying issues. I’m on medication from the end of the year and have gone off caffeine.

I also got myself tested for giftedness and got a positive result there as well.

Both of these results were validating if nothing else and put a lot of things that happened in my life in a different perspective.

For anybody who’s not sure whether they should pursue this, my recommendation would be: You will only know how differently you can feel if you do.

I got a mole cut out of my skin. It’s a nice scar to have.

I’m fully vaxxed against FSME and got a booster for COVID in November. That brings me to six jabs in total.

Sports and Injuries

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It could have been a great year for sports. After having a great time on our yearly trip to the Alps, I came back to Berlin and badly sprained my ankle after falling off some stairs. I didn’t need any surgery, thankfully, but it did set me back some 8 weeks of physical therapy and having to build up to walking again.

That notwithstanding, I managed to participate in three road cycling group rides this year. MAAP opening up a store here and organising open weekly rides has been really cool. The cycling and the coffee were lit. 🔥

I cycled up the Brocken for my first ever mountain and clocked 4201km in 2024 on Strava.

It’s my goal to weigh 75kgs and I’m still as far away from that as I ever was.

Movies

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Letterbox does a good job tracking this and it was a pretty good year for movies. I review all of them over there in detail but I can say the non-Potter kids movies we watched were nice and the Japanese cinema on the whole was excellent. I saw Evil Does Not Exist two times with the second time in the local theatre live scored by its composer Eiko Ishibashi.

• Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
• Dune: Part Two
• Curious Tobi and the Treasure Hunt to the Flying Rivers
• Glass Onion
• Frozen
• Tangled
• Raya and the Last Dragon
• Shoplifters
• Luca
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
• Yojimbo
• Drive My Car
• Perfect Days
• John Wick: Chapter 4
• Evil Does Not Exist
• How to Blow Up a Pipeline
• Harakiri
• Evil Does Not Exist
• Die Hard

Television

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Trakt is doing a great job keeping track of which episodes of which television series I need to watch. It’s the only way I can possibly stay on top of this.

• The Last of Us
• Spy x Family S2
• Death Note
• Frieren
• Tour de France: Unchained S2
• Vigil
• The Peripheral
• Kaiju No 8
• Bluey
• Arcane S2

Looks like I’m turning into a weeb just like everybody else in the culture. I watch anime in part as light entertainment and in part as Japanese immersion. It’s very hard to find anime that has any kind of thematic depth. Frieren comes closest because of how it twists the standard fantasy trope into a story about loss and reminiscence.

Books

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It was a fair though not great year for reading.

• Sheaf Theory through Examples, Daniel Rosiak
• Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel
• Min kamp 2, Knausgård, Karl Ove
• Maria Stuart, Friedrich Schiller
• Arkada Yaylılar Çalıyor, Melikşah Altuntaş
• My Tender Matador, Pedro Lemebel
• Kafka Connect: Build and Run Data Pipelines, Mickail Maison
• Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, Forugh Farrokzhad
• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault
• The Kubernetes Book: 2024 Edition, Nigel Poulton
• Kafka Troubleshooting in Production: Stabilizing Kafka Clusters in the Cloud and On-premises, Elad Eldor
• Conversational Capacity: The Secret to Building Successful Teams That Perform When the Pressure Is on, Craig Weber

I’m continuing my trend of reading one Knausgård and one Mantel book each year. No reason not to do that again this year.

I picked up some poetry at Perdu during my visit to Amsterdam and have been enjoying reading that.

Every time I see Maria Stuart (which I got put on to by Past Present Future’s fantastic Great Political Fictions series) in the list, I think: “I need to read more Schiller.” but then I keep forgetting to get the files off Gutenberg. Germans sure knew how to write back in the day.

Trips

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Besides the trip to the Alps, I went to the Netherlands once in 2024 for Kars’s viva and we took a trip to idyllic Hiddensee after my foot was healed. Much more travel is slated for next year!

Other Culture

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I don’t go to exhibitions for lack of time. Besides seeing Evil Does Not Exist in the theatre I managed to burn a ticket to the opera and one to a dance show due to conflicting commitments and forgetfulness. I’m not sure whether I’m going to retry this.

I took the kids to see Ronja at an open air show which was fun.

Miscellaneous

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I was a member of the Greens but I cancelled that because even if they’re the least bad political party in Germany, they have been doing a lot of things that I do not wish to support from the inside. I wrote about that here.

I continued to learn and maintain my Japanese level in preparation for my trip in 2025.

I learned a bunch around Kubernetes and Kafka but would have liked to do more programming. I refreshed my algorithms a bit and picked up Factor to play with.

This has a shorter runtime than the movie because a lot of fluff is cut out and we are only left with a very summary story. That is a good choice and I can’t say the movie suffers from it very much even though this is version is very much its own thing (i.e. not a narrative movie).

Ishibashi-san is on stage and directs the musical soundtrack while occasionally accompanying the movie on her flute. From the distance it was very hard to tell what she was doing or even what sounds she was producing on top of the soundtrack.

Musically it’s a lot of the soundscapes with the main theme interspersed at various key junctures. We don’t get to learn anything more about the ending.

Review at Letterbox

I was somewhat excited to watch this anime series. It’s only 12 episodes for its first season so it was over pretty quickly.

It was fun and well done but too short to be satisfying or really have an impact. I may need to skip unfinished anime adaptations ¹ entirely given there’s so much old catalog I could be watching instead. Also now I understand how people get into reading the manga’s while they wait for the adaptations to catch up.

The Kaiju No 8 story is—how could it be any different with such a name—a standard monster beat ’em up. The characters are a bunch of young kids. Things escalate steadily with increasingly powerful and shadowy monsters attacking them. The suits and the group dynamics are somewhat reminiscent of Attack on Titan. As a standard shonen monster beat ’em up anime, it’s fine.

It’s just that there’s nothing in the story that sets it apart, there are no deeper themes that are explored, no interesting motivations, no moral or emotional payoffs worth talking about and no standout characters with staying power. I don’t think I’ll remember much about this show six months from now.

Jujutsu Kaisen

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I couldn’t help but compare it to JJK which knocks every one of those dimensions out of the park. I never got around to writing a proper review for its S2 other than this:

The long awaited Hidden Inventory and Shibuya Incident arcs turned into a treat to watch despite the continuously escalating power levels and its sprawling cast of characters and villains. — 2023 year in review

S2 was such a phase shift for JJK moving from low stakes happy go-lucky teen show to massively hard bouts of apocalyptic fighting and loss (Nanami…). So many of the characters (“My Brother!”) in JJK have depth and huge fan popularity (Panda-kun, the guy who speaks in Onigiri). Just go on TikTok and see all the Shibuya incident foreshadowing, the Satoru Gojo montages and the number of ships that are doing the rounds.

Season 2 goes on with the story arc and some filler segments thrown in between. Of these, in the third episode (S02E03) they pull off a stunning take on “Das Leben der Anderen”. I was watching it and by the time it was over I couldn’t believe they’d done this.

To connect it to the main plot, the listener who works at the secret police is Yor’s overly jealous brother Yuri, an apt Stasi name if ever there was one. The episode also features some more set pieces which firmly establish Ostania—the city where they live—as Cold War East Berlin.

What adds to the delight is that most people watching the anime will never have an idea about this. It’s like an in-joke for movie people.

Just compare these two stills with each other:

But not to worry. This is probably just one shit year in a sequence of many more shit years to come. No sign of anything getting better in our near future and lots of trends pointing downward. Does it have to be like this? Not in any way but the majority of people are stupid and we all suffer together.

ACL

I had messed up my knee in late summer of 2022 during a climbing accident and after a bit of stalling figured out that having my ACL reconstructed would be a good idea.

The surgery was scheduled for February 23rd of 2023. That made a lot of the beginning of the year waiting to go into surgery which was followed by getting the surgery (a supremely weird experience), then recuperating from it at home for a couple of weeks and going back to work while doing physical therapy.

The chronology as far as I could piece it together:

• Feb 23rd, surgery
• Feb 25th, dismissed from the Charité
• Feb 27th, first outing
• March 9th, half weight bearing
• March 12th, 90 degree flexion
• April 10th, walking without crutches
• April 15th, cycled on the Christiania to get coffee
• June 16th, hospital check-up and cleared for cycling
• June 18th, first time road cycling

I got around mostly using ride shares during the first part which was fine. Turns out that I spent €474,55 on cab rides. A fair bit of that was thankfully reimbursed by my saved up mobility budget. I stopped taking cabs and started cycling on the electric Christiania on April 15th and then had my first outing on the road bike on June 18th.

During one of my final check-ups I told my physician at the hospital that if I didn’t rationally knew I had knee surgery, a lot of the time I couldn’t remember it. There was no noticeable difference anymore.

Of course there are still lots of situations where I notice it. The difference in strength between the two legs is still there and catching up very slowly. But that things are more or less back to normal is exactly what was promised.

I’m cleared to boulder again from around Easter if I choose to ever practice that sport again.

Kids

School

The kids started their school year with the German event they call the Einschülung, something that I disagree but I have no shortage of things that I disagree with about the German school ‘system’. That’s for another blog post.

The concept of the school and how classes are setup is very cool and the teachers are young and engaged. If everything worked the way it should, things would be amazing. The only issue is that most of the time there are staff shortages that fully destabilize whatever plans or schedules had been drafted. Those shortages stem from the deep dysfunction of the Berlin civil service and mostly because of a lack of funding for the schools that need it the most.

I’m not sure what we’re going to do there but for now we’re going to see if things look up in the second half of the year.

Let it be clear that Germany is a country that in no way values kids and their education.

Father

Related to our kids going to school, on their first school day morning my dad passed away suddenly in Amsterdam. We knew he was sick but we had no idea that things would progress this quickly.

The funeral was of course in Turkey so I took a flight to Amsterdam to be with my family and see him off and then flew to Turkey with my mother to do the burial in our village. It was the first time I was back in Turkey since 2015.

That was a difficult thing to do and after that everything is different.

Holidays

I heard the news about my dad’s illness on our holiday in the Alps this year. Our first family holiday in a long time and otherwise a resounding success.

After all the affairs were wrapped up we went to Amsterdam for a week during the fall break to keep my mother company and to have the kids experience a bit of the Netherlands again. It was good to be back and to see people we hadn’t seen in a long time.

Studies

I’ve continued the trend of unapologetically self-studying things that I fancy. I can recommend it.

Abstract Algebra

To continue to study category theory I diagnosed a gap I had on basic abstract algebra and tried to close it. I didn’t finish either of the textbooks (Fraleigh and Galian) because it seems that text books are bad for self-studying people.

I worked through a couple of YouTube lecture series on the topic which gave me much more value.

Sheaf Theory

Then I continued on and off in Sheaf Theory Through Examples which is a very mixed book. It’s nowhere near as good as Fong and Spivak’s book and now nearing the end it is getting very obtuse and inaccessible. I’ll finish this and then move on to Bartosz Milewski.

Japanese

I kept studying Japanese for most of the year and on a whim I registered for the December JLPT. During registration I had a choice where I could either go for the safe but relatively irrelevant N5 level or stretch myself and go for N4.

I picked N4 and that turned out to be a lot tougher than expected. I had to push very hard on both vocabulary and grammar to get to a point where I even felt it was worth going to Düsseldorf to take the test. The 1-2 months before the test I was cramming flash cards throughout the day and studying most evenings.

The test itself in Düsseldorf was even harder than I expected and I think that it’s unlikely that I passed it, but who knows… Results are due end of January.

Even if I don’t get the certificate, stretching myself to N4 has made me study much much harder than I would ever have otherwise and I’ve advanced quite a bit. Also I got a quick trip to Düsseldorf out of it where I could eat Asian food at a level and authenticity that’s impossible to get in Berlin.

Cultural

With everything else that was going on, I didn’t have anything significant happen here. No time, no energy, no relevance.

I don’t really know how other people manage to binge dozens of crappy Netflix shows. I can’t really imagine spending entire evenings watching television. Do people do this still?

There are lots of good shows still that I would like to watch (The Last of Us, The Bear, Succession, etc.) but there’s just no time.

Books

I only read 15 books this year with Galian, Genki and the sheaf theory book—none of which are listed below—sucking up most of my reading time.

Cold Enough for Snow was a nice book and it also happened to be the only piece of fiction I read this year. The rest of the books above are all highly situational and none of them are particularly interesting or made a lasting impact.

Video

I watched six movies this year. The only notable one was Heat which I first saw as a teenager in the City cinema in Amsterdam.

When it comes to television things look slightly better:

• The Sandman: We did not finish it but enjoyed the episodes that we watched.
• Spy x Family S1: Exactly the light-hearted fun anime that I needed to watch. Nothing serious here but a fun conceit well executed.
• Tour de France Unchained: An epic dramatization of the world’s biggest cycling event that is a must watch if you’re even slightly interested in the sport.
• The Witcher S3: Nothing of note happened in this season but it was still kinda fun to watch I guess.
• Attack of Titan S4P2: It was good to watch the ending of this epic series but after such a long wait it was kinda hard to pick up the relatively complex storyline.
• Death Note: An anime classic that I started which is well executed but tough as nails and not at all compelling.
• Jujutsu Kaisen S2: The long awaited Hidden Inventory and Shibuya Incident arcs turned into a treat to watch despite the continuously escalating power levels and its sprawling cast of characters and villains.

Games

During my recovery from surgery I started and finished Breath of the Wild. The irony of having had a climbing accident and making Link free-climb epic cliffs on Hyrule was not lost on me.

That was the year. Let’s see what the new one does.

How dark? Let’s look at the next bit from an episode (S01E10 @ 16:30) where Yılmaz and İlkkan are accused of having caused the death of an old man. They are getting ready to host the deceased’s relatives at a restaurant and participate in the wake.

https://youtu.be/AfEVBhn-mqY

Yilmaz and Ilkkan having a conversation

Did you hear anything from Ethem?

Ethem?

Lately never…

Man, look, they wrote something in fact. Hold on. Somehow we weren’t able to call the guy. (Sigh. Wails.)

Don’t.

His aunt has killed herself. Ethem’s. It was written this morning. I just saw it.

Which aunt?

His older aunt.

I don’t know many other situational comedy shows that do something like this. It has no relation to the story and serves only to set the mood. Interspersing another death that’s just brushed off in an episode that’s already about death demonstrates how little a human life is worth. People die randomly and it’s received with a wail and a shrug.

They will most likely go to the funeral just like they did in a previous episode (S01E04) where Ersoy’s grandmother was eaten by an Erasmus cannibal.

Overarching Theme

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Zooming out a bit, the real theme of this first season of Gibi has been pressure, pressure of all kinds: peer pressure, family obligations, social and societal pressure.

• Kokariç: Press ganging into opening a kebab shop and invest in all kinds of goods
• Wadding: Pressure from friends and the environment to conform to current fashion norms
• Nu Model: Pressure from the extended family not to pose nude at the art academy enforced by force of violence
• The Cannibal Coming with Erasmus: Pressure from friends to mourn and be visibly sad
• Wrong Mentor: Pressure by a spiritual guide to follow a very strict regimen
• Dark Force: Collective hysteria around bad things happening
• Second Way: Pressure of belonging
• Whitewash: Pressure by the house painter to go all the way
• Renewal of Break Up: Pressure generated by magician
• Blood Money: Pressure to make amends for somebody unrelated dying
• Bathroom: Pressure to bathe and spend time with a couple of seniors
• Discovery of the Horse: Proto-societal pressure between members of an outcast paleolithic group

Anybody who’s ever been to Turkey knows that the entire country is built on this kind of pressure, also known as genuine interest, shame, concern or emotional blackmail. It’s omnipresent and the only way to escape it is to exit.

To me this gives off a very Seinfeld-like feeling with nasty people living in a nasty city talking about nasty things with each other. Not the touchy feely stuff that you see in normal sitcoms. You don’t really quite get why these people hang out with each other but they do.

Below is the first episode in its entirety on YouTube where both main characters find themselves pressured to open a kebab shop. The rest of the series on Exxen has passable English subs for anybody who would be interested.

https://youtu.be/OwwMrpW1m5g

I’m always a sucker for performances where people argue/fight with each other. The more fierce and physical the better. Carnage is an old favourite of mine and the fight scene I witnessed in ‘Langs de Grote Weg’ remains with me as one of the highlights of visiting Frascati.

I’ve watched a couple more episodes and I think I can say that the theme of the show is the weird social conformities that people in Turkey impose on each other. Hell is other people, especially over there.

Exxen

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To be able to watch the full series I took a month’s subscription to Exxen. This seems to be one of a bunch of bespoke streaming platforms. Another one I was aware of through social media has been Gain (a self-described ’next generation content platform’).

The Exxen website is kinda broken and the boss of the site has been quoted saying ’they are competing with Netflix.’ That may be right, but Netflix is probably not competing with them. Still, with the 80M people living in Turkey, the substantial diaspora as well as people from other countries who consider Turkish culture and media to be aspirational (a lot more of those out there than you would think living in Europe), they probably can get by.

One weird déja-vu has been seeing many of the Turkish social media stars that I used to listen to on Clubhouse (Chaby, Enis, Zeynep) make an appearance in weird and zany television formats exclusive to the platform. Most amazingly, those formats are also pretty professionally executed with high production values.

The character relations turned into a bit of a tangle so I fired up Miro and quickly charted them out. In the end it wasn’t that complicated but the worlds of Meryem and Peri are very clearly separate.

There are lots of movies where a cast of characters roams a town and occasionally intersects in a couple of dramatic moments. What comes to mind for me most immediately is Amores Perros. Of course a Netflix serial doesn’t hit the cinematic height or dramatic depth of that movie despite having more runtime to play with. What it does manage is to set a mood for the weird tangled up modern Turkey.

The most interesting and dramatic events in Bir Başkadır happen on the road (Mesude’s death under the bridge, the family dance off on the way to the village). Along with some of the commuting sequences and the continuous questions of what bus stops where and how to get somewhere in time, that is an essential part of Istanbul. The city is so vast and spread out that people are always underway, an apt metaphor for character development—interrupted or otherwise—if ever there was one.