Sercan Külcü

Sercan Külcü

Assistant Professor, Computer Engineering, Giresun University

Posts by Collection

fun

Saving Private Ryan

2 minute read

Published:

I watched Saving Private Ryan on television expecting a war film and discovered, during the opening battle, that I had confused war films with war. Read more

Braveheart

3 minute read

Published:

I first saw Braveheart on television on an evening that seemed to grow longer with the film. Dinner ended, tea arrived, somebody left the room and returned, the windows turned black, and still the story continued across hills, castles and battlefields. By the final scenes, the room had the peculiar silence produced when several people have watched the same thing for so long that talking would feel like breaking a spell. Read more

The Lord of the Rings

2 minute read

Published:

I first watched The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring on a winter evening with friends. We had food on the table and enough conversation during the opening minutes to suggest that nobody expected to become solemn about hobbits. Read more

American Beauty

3 minute read

Published:

I watched American Beauty at an age when adulthood still seemed to be a destination rather than a condition. From far away, the route looked conventional enough: finish school, find work, earn money, build a home, perhaps raise a family, and eventually arrive at that stable country called being grown up. Read more

Memento

3 minute read

Published:

I watched Memento with a notebook beside me. Read more

In July: Sometimes the Destination Is Beside You

11 minute read

Published:

There are films we remember because they are great films, and there are others we remember because they entered our lives at the right moment. In July belongs to the second group for me. I do not remember it mainly because of technique, structure, or cinematic perfection. What remained was a feeling: summer, movement, coincidence, uncertainty, and the strange experience of traveling toward something important without fully understanding what it is. Read more

The Usual Suspects

2 minute read

Published:

I watched The Usual Suspects knowing one thing I would have preferred not to know. Read more

The Green Mile

2 minute read

Published:

I watched The Green Mile on a rainy evening expecting a prison story. Read more

Léon: The Professional

2 minute read

Published:

I watched Léon: The Professional on television during a hot summer night. The windows were open, and in the quiet scenes I could hear traffic below the apartment. That ordinary sound made Léon’s life seem even more sealed. Read more

Fight Club

3 minute read

Published:

I watched Fight Club on a small computer monitor in a student room containing nearly everything a student room is expected to contain: an inexpensive desk, cables in permanent negotiation with one another, books stacked horizontally because the shelf was full, CDs, clothes waiting to become laundry, and several objects I had bought because owning them had briefly seemed like progress. Read more

The Pianist

2 minute read

Published:

I watched The Pianist alone on a Sunday evening and expected music to be the thing I remembered. Read more

GoodFellas

3 minute read

Published:

Someone recommended GoodFellas to me with the fatal phrase “one of those films you have to see,” which usually transforms pleasure into homework. Read more

The Incredibles

2 minute read

Published:

I watched The Incredibles expecting a children’s film and found myself thinking about office work. Read more

Life Is Beautiful

2 minute read

Published:

I watched Life Is Beautiful with several other people, and the room changed with the film. Read more

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

3 minute read

Published:

I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind after a relationship had ended, which was not a neutral condition in which to encounter a film about deleting someone from memory. Read more

Forrest Gump

3 minute read

Published:

I first watched Forrest Gump on an afternoon when I had nowhere to go, which may be the ideal condition for a film that begins with a man sitting on a bench and talking to whoever happens to sit beside him. Read more

Oldboy

2 minute read

Published:

A friend told me to watch Oldboy without reading anything about it. Read more

Age of Empires II

3 minute read

Published:

There was a period when I could sit down to play Age of Empires II after dinner, promise myself that I would stop after one match, and discover that the room had gone quiet and the clock had moved far beyond what I had intended. The game was never especially mysterious about what it wanted from me. Gather food, wood, gold, and stone. Build. Scout. Defend. Attack. The difficulty came from the fact that every sensible decision damaged another sensible possibility. Read more

Hamurabi

3 minute read

Published:

Long before anyone thought of a computer game, Hammurabi ruled Babylon. His name survived through one of history’s best-known law codes, a record of a society trying to make trade, property, debt, agriculture, family and punishment legible through rules. Read more

Pulp Fiction

2 minute read

Published:

I watched Pulp Fiction on a night when I was too tired for a complicated film. Read more

V for Vendetta

2 minute read

Published:

I watched V for Vendetta during a period when I was reading far too much news online. Read more

Kill Bill, Revisited

2 minute read

Published:

The second time I watched Kill Bill, I paid much less attention to who was going to die. Read more

The Prestige

2 minute read

Published:

I watched The Prestige because I thought I was going to see a film about magicians. Read more

Denize Doğru: Before Winter Comes

5 minute read

Published:

Some songs remind me of a person. Others remind me of a period of life. Denize Doğru does something slightly different: it reminds me of the desire to leave. Read more

Denge: Please Do Not Disturb My Beautiful Disorder

4 minute read

Published:

There are songs about finding balance. Denge makes me think that perhaps balance is not something we find at all. Perhaps it is the small private arrangement we build inside ourselves and then spend half our lives protecting from other people. Read more

Kalbim Yaralı: When Someone Takes Tomorrow with Them

4 minute read

Published:

There are love songs about separation, and then there are songs about what remains after separation. Murat Göğebakan’s Yaralı belongs to the second kind. Its pain does not come only from the fact that someone has left. The deeper wound is that the person who leaves takes a part of the future with them. Read more

Revolution OS

3 minute read

Published:

I watched Revolution OS during a period when I was reinstalling operating systems more often than any stable adult should. Read more

The Dark Knight

2 minute read

Published:

I watched The Dark Knight in a crowded cinema a few weeks after it opened. Before the film, the room behaved like any summer blockbuster audience: popcorn, conversation, people searching for seats, someone arriving after the lights had dimmed. Read more

Brief Encounter

3 minute read

Published:

There are sentences we regret saying and sentences we regret withholding. Brief Encounter belongs almost entirely to the second category. Read more

When FarmVille Made Loneliness Visible

3 minute read

Published:

There was a particular kind of loneliness in the early social-web years: you could be connected to almost everyone you had ever known and still spend the evening entirely alone. Read more

How to Listen to Space-Dye Vest

3 minute read

Published:

Some songs tolerate almost any kind of listening. They survive kitchens, traffic, conversation, cheap speakers and the distracted half-attention we now give to enormous amounts of music. Read more

Unforgiven

3 minute read

Published:

At the entrance of our apartment building, someone had written one word on the wall in red paint: Read more

Inception

3 minute read

Published:

I watched Inception in a cinema and spent the walk home explaining it to myself. Read more

The Intouchables

2 minute read

Published:

I watched The Intouchables on an evening when I wanted something light. Read more

Indie Game: The Movie

3 minute read

Published:

I watched Indie Game: The Movie on a Sunday afternoon when I was supposed to be doing something productive. Read more

Experience: Suddenly My Walk Has a Soundtrack

9 minute read

Published:

There are songs you listen to while doing something, and then there is Ludovico Einaudi’s Experience, which immediately convinces you that whatever you are doing must be extremely important. You may only be walking to the supermarket, but once the piano begins and the strings slowly enter, you are no longer a person going to buy yogurt. You are a man carrying the emotional history of Europe through the streets. A plastic bag may be waiting for you ten minutes later, but for now you clearly have a destiny. Read more

Interstellar

3 minute read

Published:

I watched Interstellar in a cinema large enough to make the blackness around the spacecraft feel physical. The sound had weight. Space was not picturesque; it seemed capable of swallowing the screen and the audience together. Read more

The Imitation Game

2 minute read

Published:

I watched The Imitation Game on a cold Saturday evening in a cinema that was nearly empty by the time the credits appeared. Read more

Summer Wine

2 minute read

Published:

Lana Del Rey’s Summer Wine does not remind me of summer. It reminds me of the moment when summer is already ending. Read more

Hidden Figures

3 minute read

Published:

I watched Hidden Figures at a kitchen table late at night. I had intended to watch twenty minutes and go to bed, but somewhere in the middle I made tea and accepted that the next morning would be less efficient. Read more

Parasite

3 minute read

Published:

I watched Parasite in a cinema without reading a review, which is increasingly difficult to achieve with a film everyone is discussing. Read more

Unutulacak Dünler: There Are Still Days to Live

4 minute read

Published:

Some songs stay with me because of their melody. Others stay because they say something I have felt but never managed to explain clearly. Gazapizm’s Unutulacak Dünler belongs to the second group. Read more

Gülpembe: Some People Stay After They Are Gone

3 minute read

Published:

Some people make a house feel warmer just by being there. The table is the same, the tea is the same, and the rooms are the same, but everything feels different when that person is around. Then one day they are gone, and you understand that a home is not made only of walls and furniture. Read more

Moonlight Sonata: What the Night Keeps for Us

8 minute read

Published:

Some music seems to change the room before we fully notice it. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata has this effect on me. It begins quietly, almost without asking for attention, yet after a short time everything around it feels slower. The room is still the same, but somehow the silence has become deeper. Read more

Ay Tenli Kadın

2 minute read

Published:

Late at night, certain things become easier to feel than to explain. Read more

Beni Hatırla

2 minute read

Published:

There are people we miss quietly, and there are people we want to suffer a little because they miss us too. Read more

El Adamı

4 minute read

Published:

Some people leave your life quietly. Others have to be cut out. Read more

Fırtınam

4 minute read

Published:

There are songs I like, songs I remember, and songs that somehow become part of me. Fırtınam belongs to the last group. Read more

Herkes Gibisin

2 minute read

Published:

There is a moment, after some relationships end, when you discover that your body has stopped answering first. Read more

Kırmış Kalbini

4 minute read

Published:

Some songs speak about heartbreak. Kırmış Kalbini speaks about what happens after the heartbreak, when somebody still decides to stay beside you. Read more

Nereye Böyle

2 minute read

Published:

Some words become heavy when they have nowhere to go. Read more

Sevmemeliyiz

2 minute read

Published:

Being loved is not always the same as being seen. Read more

Sonuna Kadar

2 minute read

Published:

There is a particular kind of waiting that stops being about the person. Read more

Üzgünüm

3 minute read

Published:

Some goodbyes are not born from anger. They come after anger is already gone. Read more

Yeniden Sev

3 minute read

Published:

There are relationships we want to leave behind, and there are others we secretly wish we could begin again. Read more

Eyşan Unutamıyorum

3 minute read

Published:

There is a soundtrack from Ezel called “Eyşan – Unutamıyorum.” The title is already dramatic enough on its own. It feels like the kind of music you listen to late at night and then suddenly wonder why your life feels more complicated than it actually is. Read more

humanity

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

5 minute read

Published:

Before humanity had a history, before Earth had oceans, before there were stars to look at, there was already a question waiting for minds capable of asking it: why is there something rather than nothing? Read more

The Birth of the Universe

4 minute read

Published:

The universe did not begin with stars, planets, or empty black space. It began in a state so hot and dense that the structures we now take for granted could not yet exist. Read more

How Earth Became Habitable

4 minute read

Published:

Earth is often described as a habitable planet, as though habitability were a property it possessed from the beginning. Read more

The Great Extinctions

5 minute read

Published:

Life on Earth has never advanced along a smooth upward path. It has expanded, diversified, collapsed, recovered, and changed direction repeatedly. Entire ecosystems that once seemed permanent disappeared. Species that dominated the planet for millions of years vanished. New groups inherited ecological opportunities created by destruction. Read more

The End of the Dinosaurs and the Rise of Mammals

4 minute read

Published:

For more than 150 million years, dinosaurs dominated many terrestrial ecosystems. Then, in geological terms, everything changed quickly. About 66 million years ago, an asteroid struck Earth near what is now the Yucatán Peninsula. The impact released enormous energy, triggered fires and tsunamis, injected dust and aerosols into the atmosphere, and disrupted climate and photosynthesis. Read more

Why Primates Became Different

4 minute read

Published:

Primates did not evolve in order to produce humans. They evolved because particular traits helped their ancestors live in particular environments. That simple statement protects us from one of the most persistent errors in human evolutionary thinking: the belief that earlier primates were incomplete versions of us. They were not. Read more

The First Hominins

4 minute read

Published:

There was no morning on which an ape gave birth to a human. Evolution does not work in jumps between the categories we use today. Populations change gradually. Lineages diverge. Traits accumulate at different rates. Only much later do scientists look backward and draw names around parts of the branching tree. Read more

Why Our Ancestors Stood Upright

4 minute read

Published:

Walking on two legs seems so ordinary that we rarely notice how strange it is. Among mammals, habitual upright bipedalism is unusual. Humans balance a large body on two relatively small points of contact, repeatedly falling forward and catching ourselves with each step. Our skeleton has been reshaped around this mode of movement. Read more

The Growing Human Brain

5 minute read

Published:

The human brain is expensive. It consumes a large share of the body’s energy despite representing only a small fraction of total body mass. It develops slowly. It requires years of care before reaching adult competence. Its large size contributes to difficult childbirth. From a purely mechanical perspective, it is a costly organ. Read more

Fire: Humanity’s First Great Technology

4 minute read

Published:

Fire existed long before humans. Lightning ignited forests. Volcanoes released heat. Wildfires reshaped ecosystems. The human innovation was not creating fire from nothing. It was learning to control, preserve, transport, and eventually produce it deliberately. That changed our relationship with nature. Read more

The First Stone Tools

4 minute read

Published:

A broken stone can be sharp. An intentionally broken stone is something more. It contains evidence of a mind acting on material. The earliest known stone-tool traditions are millions of years old, and some predate the genus Homo. This fact immediately weakens a simple equation between tools and humanity. Read more

The Rise of Homo Sapiens

4 minute read

Published:

Homo sapiens is young. Our species emerged in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago, although the process was not a single event occurring in one isolated population at one precise moment. Human origins increasingly appear to involve populations distributed across parts of Africa, interacting and changing over time. Read more

Neanderthals Were Not Primitive

3 minute read

Published:

For a long time, Neanderthals were used as an insult. The word became shorthand for stupidity, brutality, and evolutionary failure. That image tells us more about modern human arrogance than about Neanderthals. Read more

Why Homo Sapiens Survived

4 minute read

Published:

Homo sapiens survived. That is obvious only because we are here. It is also one of the most dangerous facts to interpret. Survival tempts the survivor to invent a flattering explanation. Read more

The Cognitive Revolution

5 minute read

Published:

At some point, humans became capable of living inside realities that did not exist physically. A tribe. A god. A debt. A law. A future marriage. A border. A promise. A shared ancestor. None of these can be held like a stone. Yet they can organize behavior more powerfully than stone. Read more

When Humans Learned to Speak

4 minute read

Published:

No one knows the first sentence ever spoken. There may never have been one. Language probably emerged gradually from earlier forms of vocal and gestural communication. That makes its origin difficult to date. Read more

Why Language Changed Everything

4 minute read

Published:

Language did not merely help humans communicate better. It changed what a human group could be. Without language, cooperation is bounded by what can be demonstrated, signaled, or remembered individually. With language, knowledge becomes portable. One person can explain what another person has not seen. A group can coordinate around a future that does not yet exist. A generation can inherit the experiences of people who are already dead. This is the beginning of cultural acceleration. Read more

The Birth of Imagination

4 minute read

Published:

Imagination is the ability to experience what is not currently present. That sounds simple. It is not. Read more

Why Humans Tell Stories

4 minute read

Published:

Humans do not merely remember events. We arrange them. Beginning. Conflict. Cause. Choice. Consequence. Ending. That arrangement is a story. Read more

The First Art

4 minute read

Published:

A hand pressed against a cave wall can survive longer than a civilization. The person disappears. The language disappears. The group disappears. The hand remains as pigment around an absence. Read more

The First Music

4 minute read

Published:

Music disappears faster than almost anything humans make. A stone tool can survive for millions of years. A song can vanish in seconds. This makes the origins of music unusually difficult to study. Read more

When Humans First Buried Their Dead

4 minute read

Published:

Death is biological. Burial is cultural. Every organism dies. Only some species respond to death in ways that suggest prolonged social attention. Humans transformed death into one of the central problems of culture. Read more

What Is Consciousness?

4 minute read

Published:

Consciousness is the most familiar thing we possess and one of the hardest things to explain. We know what pain feels like because we experience it. We know what red looks like because we see it. We know what fear feels like because it changes the entire texture of a moment. Read more

When Did Humans Become Self-Aware?

4 minute read

Published:

At what point did an animal look inward and recognize itself as a self? The question sounds as though there must have been a first moment. There probably was not. Read more

Why Do We Know That We Will Die?

4 minute read

Published:

Every living organism dies. Very few appear capable of turning that biological fact into an abstract personal future. Humans can. Read more

The Human Fear of Death

4 minute read

Published:

Fear of death is not one fear. It contains several. Fear of pain. Fear of losing control. Fear of leaving people behind. Fear of what happens after death. Fear that nothing happens. Fear of an unfinished life. Fear of being forgotten. Fear of no longer being a self. Read more

Why Humans Search for Meaning

4 minute read

Published:

Humans do not seem satisfied with survival. Food, safety, and reproduction matter. Yet people who possess all three can still ask: Read more

Why Humans Create Myths

4 minute read

Published:

A myth is not simply a false story. That modern use of the word hides its older cultural function. Myths are narratives that organize reality. Read more

The Birth of the Sacred

4 minute read

Published:

At some point, humans began treating certain places, objects, times, and actions as fundamentally different from ordinary life. A stone could become sacred. A mountain. A grave. A tree. A season. A word. Read more

Why Humans Need Rituals

4 minute read

Published:

A ritual is an action that means more than the action itself. Lighting a candle. Standing for a song. Shaking hands. Wearing black at a funeral. Blowing out birthday candles. Graduating in a robe. Repeating a prayer. Read more

Are Humans Really Different from Other Animals?

4 minute read

Published:

Humans are animals. Biologically, there is no serious ambiguity. We are mammals. Primates. Great apes. Our anatomy, genes, development, and evolutionary history place us inside the animal kingdom. Read more

Life as a Hunter-Gatherer

3 minute read

Published:

For most of human history, there were no farms. No cities. No governments in the modern sense. No written laws. No supermarkets. No permanent office hours. Read more

How Humans Conquered the Planet

3 minute read

Published:

Humans are tropical primates. Yet we live in deserts, mountains, rainforests, islands, tundra, and cities near the polar regions. Read more

The First Migration Out of Africa

4 minute read

Published:

Humanity is African in origin. This is not metaphor. Our species evolved in Africa. The deepest branches of modern human genetic diversity are found there. Every population outside Africa descends largely from ancestors who left the continent relatively recently in the history of Homo sapiens. Read more

Humans Reach the Americas

3 minute read

Published:

The settlement of the Americas was one of humanity’s last great continental expansions. For much of the Ice Age, lower sea levels exposed Beringia, a broad region connecting northeastern Asia and northwestern North America. Read more

Why Megafauna Disappeared

3 minute read

Published:

Imagine walking through a landscape where giant ground sloths, mammoths, mastodons, enormous marsupials, and other large animals are ordinary. For much of human prehistory, such worlds existed. Read more

How Cooperation Made Us Powerful

3 minute read

Published:

A single human is physically unimpressive. We are not especially fast. We have no claws. Our teeth are weak compared with large predators. Our skin offers little protection. Read more

Why Humans Started Farming

3 minute read

Published:

For most of human history, people did not farm. Then, in several parts of the world, agriculture emerged independently. Read more

The Birth of Property

3 minute read

Published:

Ownership seems natural because modern life is saturated with it. My house. My phone. My land. My account. My idea. Read more

The Invention of Wealth

3 minute read

Published:

Wealth is stored possibility. Food in a granary. Animals in a herd. Land that produces crops. Metal that can be exchanged. Money in an account. Read more

The Beginning of Social Classes

3 minute read

Published:

A difference becomes a class when it persists. One person may be temporarily richer than another. A class system appears when social position becomes durable, inherited, or institutionally reinforced. Read more

Ancient Egypt and the Dream of Eternity

3 minute read

Published:

Ancient Egypt turned mortality into architecture. The Nile created agricultural abundance, the state organized labor, religion connected kingship to cosmic order, and the dead became part of political life. Read more

Ancient China and the Birth of a Continuous Civilization

3 minute read

Published:

China presents one of history’s most remarkable examples of civilizational continuity. Dynasties rose and fell, borders changed, languages evolved, and wars shattered political unity. Yet institutions, writing traditions, cultural memory, and ideas of political order repeatedly reassembled into recognizable forms. Read more

The Invention of Writing

3 minute read

Published:

Writing is memory that no longer needs a living brain. That makes it one of humanity’s most important inventions. Read more

Why Humans Invented Money

3 minute read

Published:

Money is one of humanity’s most successful shared beliefs. A coin has material value, but usually less than its purchasing power. A banknote is paper, and a digital balance may have no physical form at all. Yet people exchange labor, food, houses, and years of life for numbers in accounts. Read more

The Birth of Law

3 minute read

Published:

Small groups can regulate behavior through reputation, but large societies need something more formal. Read more

The Birth of the State

3 minute read

Published:

A state is an organization that claims authority over people and territory. That sounds abstract, but in practice it means officials, taxes, rules, military force, records, boundaries, and infrastructure. Read more

Why Did Humans Create Gods?

3 minute read

Published:

Humans did not invent one idea of God. They created, inherited, transformed, rejected, and defended thousands of different ideas about invisible agents, ancestors, spirits, divine powers, and ultimate reality. Read more

The First Organized Religions

3 minute read

Published:

Belief becomes organized religion when it acquires institutions: priests, temples, calendars, ritual roles, sacred texts, property, rules, and hierarchy. Read more

Why Humans Made Sacrifices

3 minute read

Published:

Sacrifice is one of the strangest recurring human practices: food destroyed instead of eaten, animals killed for ritual, valuable objects buried, possessions burned, and, in some societies, humans killed. Read more

The Idea of an Afterlife

3 minute read

Published:

Death creates a problem imagination cannot leave alone. A person was here, and then they are not. The body remains for a time, while the social relationship remains in memory. Read more

The Birth of Monotheism

3 minute read

Published:

Many ancient societies imagined divine worlds populated by multiple gods, with different gods governing storms, fertility, war, rivers, cities, or households. Read more

Judaism and the One God

3 minute read

Published:

Judaism is one of the most historically influential religious traditions in human history, and its importance cannot be reduced simply to being “the religion before Christianity.” It developed its own rich traditions of law, interpretation, worship, identity, philosophy, and communal life. Read more

Christianity and the Transformation of the Ancient World

3 minute read

Published:

Christianity began as a small movement in the eastern Roman world, but it became one of the largest religions in history. That transformation changed politics, morality, art, philosophy, law, and concepts of personhood across enormous regions. Read more

The Rise of Islam

3 minute read

Published:

Islam emerged in seventh-century Arabia and transformed a vast region within a remarkably short period. Its central claim was uncompromising monotheism: there is one God, and Muhammad is his messenger. Read more

Why Religions Survive

3 minute read

Published:

Religions survive because they are rarely only beliefs. They are communities, calendars, families, stories, rituals, moral systems, music, architecture, food rules, names, funerals, festivals, and identity. Read more

Buddha and the Problem of Suffering

3 minute read

Published:

The Buddha began with a problem almost everyone recognizes: life contains suffering. Pain, loss, aging, illness, death, and disappointment are unavoidable, and even pleasure becomes unstable because it passes. Read more

Why Humans Build Empires

3 minute read

Published:

An empire is a political system that rules over different peoples, territories, and communities from a center of power. Read more

Alexander and the First Cosmopolitan World

3 minute read

Published:

Alexander the Great conquered astonishing territory in a short life. From Macedonia, his armies moved through the Persian Empire and reached as far as parts of the Indian subcontinent. Read more

Rome and the Architecture of Power

3 minute read

Published:

Rome was not powerful because of one emperor. It was powerful because it built systems: roads, law, taxation, citizenship, military organization, urban infrastructure, provincial administration, and political symbolism. Read more

The Silk Road: The First Global Network

3 minute read

Published:

The Silk Road was not one road. It was a network of caravan routes, cities, ports, mountain passes, desert crossings, markets, political agreements, and local intermediaries. Read more

India and the Exchange of Ideas

3 minute read

Published:

India has never been one simple civilization. Its history contains multiple languages, kingdoms, religions, philosophical schools, trade networks, and social systems. Read more

China and the Imperial Model

3 minute read

Published:

The Chinese imperial model achieved something politically remarkable: it repeatedly rebuilt centralized rule after fragmentation. Read more

The Islamic Golden Age

3 minute read

Published:

Civilizations become intellectually powerful when they create places where knowledge can meet. The Islamic Golden Age was one such period. Read more

The Middle Ages Were Not Dark

3 minute read

Published:

The phrase “Dark Ages” is useful if the goal is to simplify history, but it is misleading if the goal is to understand it. Read more

The Black Death and the World It Changed

3 minute read

Published:

The Black Death killed on a scale difficult to imagine. In the fourteenth century, plague devastated populations across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia, and in some regions enormous fractions of the population died within a few years. Read more

The Age of Exploration

2 minute read

Published:

The phrase “Age of Exploration” reflects a European viewpoint. The lands Europeans reached were already inhabited, and many were connected through existing trade networks. They were not waiting to be discovered. Read more

The Scientific Revolution

3 minute read

Published:

The Scientific Revolution changed what counted as trustworthy knowledge. Tradition and authority remained important, but observation, experiment, mathematics, and reproducibility gained new status. Read more

The Enlightenment

3 minute read

Published:

The Enlightenment was not one movement with one doctrine. It was a family of arguments about reason, liberty, authority, religion, science, and human improvement. Read more

The Birth of the Modern Individual

3 minute read

Published:

The individual did not suddenly appear in modern Europe. Humans always had personal desires, conflicts, identities, and inner lives. What changed was the social importance given to individual autonomy. Read more

The Idea of Human Rights

3 minute read

Published:

Human rights are strange. You cannot see a right; it has no mass, no color, and no biological organ produces it. Yet rights can stop governments, invalidate laws, protect speech, free prisoners, and reshape institutions. Read more

The American Revolution

3 minute read

Published:

The American Revolution turned Enlightenment language into political rebellion. Taxation, representation, natural rights, and consent of the governed became more than colonial grievances; they became a broader claim that government requires legitimacy from the people. Read more

The French Revolution

2 minute read

Published:

The French Revolution began by attacking privilege. It ended by teaching humanity how terrifying political purification can become. Read more

The Industrial Revolution

3 minute read

Published:

For most of human history, economic production depended on human and animal muscle, along with wind and water. Fire provided heat, but not large-scale mechanical power in the modern sense. Read more

When Time Became Money

3 minute read

Published:

Humans always understood time through day and night, season and age, birth and death. But industrial society changed what time meant economically. Read more

Nietzsche and the Death of God

3 minute read

Published:

“God is dead” is one of philosophy’s most misunderstood statements. Nietzsche was not reporting a biological event; he was diagnosing a cultural one. Read more

Why Modern Humans Became Individuals

3 minute read

Published:

Modern societies tell people to become themselves. The instruction sounds liberating, but it would have sounded strange in many earlier social worlds. Read more

The First World War and the Death of Optimism

2 minute read

Published:

Before 1914, parts of Europe had reasons for confidence. Science advanced, industry expanded, railways connected cities, telegraphy accelerated communication, medicine improved, and trade grew. Many intellectuals believed civilization was becoming more rational. Read more

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

3 minute read

Published:

In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The document begins from a radical premise: human dignity does not depend on government permission. Read more

The Birth of the Internet

3 minute read

Published:

The internet turned computers into a civilization-scale nervous system. A computer alone processes information; a networked computer exchanges it. Read more

The Smartphone and the End of Solitude

3 minute read

Published:

The smartphone is one of the most intimate machines humans have ever built. It sleeps beside us, wakes us, guides us, remembers for us, entertains us, photographs us, connects us, and tracks us. Read more

Does Life Need a Purpose at All?

3 minute read

Published:

We ask what life is for because tools are for things. A knife is for cutting, a bridge is for crossing, and a clock is for measuring time. Read more

Can We Defeat Aging and Death?

3 minute read

Published:

Humanity has always wanted more time. Medicine has already delivered it through sanitation, vaccination, antibiotics, surgery, public health, and better nutrition. Read more

How Could Humanity End?

3 minute read

Published:

Every species eventually disappears or changes beyond recognition. Homo sapiens is unlikely to be an exception. Read more

memory

One More Link

1 minute read

Published:

After midnight, the computer became a different machine. Read more

1,500

1 minute read

Published:

When I started university, I heard that a newly graduated engineer earned about 1,500 lira. University still looked enormous from where I stood: years of courses, projects, exams, and technical subjects I had not yet encountered. It seemed obvious that by the time I finished, the number would have changed. Read more

The Pack in My Pocket

3 minute read

Published:

One winter night, I discovered that I had no cigarettes. It was late, snow had covered the streets, and the nearest place where I might find an open shop was not close. A reasonable person could have looked outside, looked at the hour, and decided to sleep. I put on my coat and walked through the snow for almost half an hour to buy a pack. Read more

Four Dirty Plates

2 minute read

Published:

Dinner was over, and four dirty plates remained on the table. Under normal circumstances, this would have been the least interesting moment of the evening. Instead, someone took out a phone and told everyone not to move anything. Read more

291 Names

1 minute read

Published:

One evening, a small argument about my first name sent me to Facebook. I had always heard the name as unmistakably male, but apparently not everyone did. The disagreement was too minor to matter and just irritating enough to investigate. Read more

The Minibus Would Not Move

1 minute read

Published:

Our hiking trips usually followed a familiar order. We left Ankara, ate something in the morning, walked for hours, reached the end of the route, and sometimes stopped at a local market before heading home. By late afternoon, everyone knew roughly what remained in the day. Read more

One More Mussel

1 minute read

Published:

During my student years, I had eaten enough questionable food to develop an unreasonable confidence in my stomach. Read more

Annual Procurement

2 minute read

Published:

I had a problem with buying toilet paper. Not using it—carrying it home. The package was too large to hide in a bag, and walking through the street with it made me strangely self-conscious. Everyone needed toilet paper, and everyone knew everyone else needed toilet paper. None of this helped. Read more

Mechanical Thinking

1 minute read

Published:

I became interested in the phrase “mechanical thinking” because it gave a respectable name to something much simpler. Read more

A Face From Another Life

2 minute read

Published:

I was in Montreal for only a short visit, so the city still felt temporary to me. I had no routine there, no familiar streets, and no place that truly belonged to my daily life. Every door led into a world I would probably never see again. Read more

The Man Who Invented the Balcony Break

1 minute read

Published:

About once an hour, he would get up and take us to the balcony. The strange part was that he did not smoke. Smokers already had a recognized reason to leave the desk for five minutes, but he seemed to understand that the break mattered even without the cigarette. Read more

Tea and Engineering

1 minute read

Published:

My old theory about scientists and engineers was simple: the scientist drinks tea while the engineer works. There was another version too. The scientist discovers something, and the engineer turns it into money. These were not serious definitions; they were professional jokes produced by someone who was already tired enough to believe that engineering had received the harder part of the bargain. Read more

Twenty Good Minutes

1 minute read

Published:

People were complaining that a sitcom they watched was no longer giving them what they expected. I remember wondering what, exactly, a twenty-minute television comedy was supposed to provide. Read more

Sold Yesterday

1 minute read

Published:

During one month, I found four used cars I genuinely wanted to see. Read more

Still Running

2 minute read

Published:

The traffic light turned red on a hill, and I stopped. A car pulled up behind me, much closer than I would have preferred. I looked in the mirror, then at the gear, and prepared for the kind of moment in which my driving skills usually became public entertainment. Read more

After Three and a Half Years

2 minute read

Published:

We had known each other for three and a half years before I told her that I wanted something more than friendship. Read more

Among the Players

1 minute read

Published:

My brother’s university team won an American football game in Eskişehir, and the celebration lasted well beyond the final whistle. I was not certain enough about the exact score to record it like a journalist. What mattered to me was that his team had won and that he was among the players. Read more

For Ninety Minutes

1 minute read

Published:

We were in Eskişehir for work when our manager produced football tickets and announced what we were doing that evening. There had been no discussion. He had already bought them, so the plan arrived complete. Read more

170

1 minute read

Published:

The first time I played bowling, I scored 170. Read more

Downstairs

2 minute read

Published:

The bar was full when we arrived. It was Thursday, a local band was playing, and the downstairs room was small enough to feel crowded before the night had properly started. There was nowhere sensible to sit, so we stayed outside and waited. Read more

Too Clean

1 minute read

Published:

The first thing I noticed was that the food places were on the entrance floor. At the time, this seemed unusual enough to mention. Shopping malls had already created their own grammar in my head, and this one had moved one part of the sentence. Read more

The House Before Memory

2 minute read

Published:

I found the photograph in an old family album. A small child was standing in front of a building, and the child was me. I knew this because everyone said so, not because anything in the picture felt familiar. Read more

Move Over

1 minute read

Published:

There was a kind of driver on a major Ankara road who could make me angry before I saw the face behind the wheel. Read more

The Older Brother Pays

2 minute read

Published:

My younger brother had discovered an economic system that worked with remarkable consistency. Whenever we planned something together, money somehow came out of my pocket. At first the process was simple: he needed something, he asked, I complained, and then I paid. Over time, however, the method seemed to become more advanced, as if he were quietly improving the system after every successful transaction. Read more

The Plate

1 minute read

Published:

When I stayed with my family again after living away, my mother seemed to move through the house with a plate in her hand. Cake, fruit, pastry, something small to eat — there was always another offer. My father had his own quiet habits. If I was lying on the couch, he brought the remote. If I fell asleep with my glasses on, he removed them and covered me. Read more

Cooked

1 minute read

Published:

The assignment was a programming version of Pişti, the Turkish card game. Read more

The Quietest Roommate

1 minute read

Published:

Living alone was peaceful in a way that sometimes felt suspicious. The toothpaste stayed where I left it, the refrigerator remained full, and no one made noise in the next room. At first, I enjoyed that order. After a while, though, the apartment began to feel too still. Read more

A Name from the Stage

1 minute read

Published:

At a university spring festival, the singer on stage encouraged people in the crowd to confess their feelings before the night ended. Notes began traveling toward the stage, and she read some of them aloud between songs. Read more

I Was Already Going Somewhere Else

2 minute read

Published:

I asked a friend if he wanted to come somewhere with me one evening. He said he was going home, so I made other plans and thought nothing more about it. Later I learned that he had called a woman I liked, someone he knew I liked, and arranged to see her. Read more

Two Wrong Questions

2 minute read

Published:

By the time I took that Calculus final, the course already felt less like a subject and more like unfinished business. I had repeated enough mathematics courses with the same professor to know the classrooms, the books, and the familiar feeling of seeing material I had once failed to understand. This time I decided there would be no excuse. I worked through every problem in the red-covered book until I no longer wanted to see the book again. Read more

Velvet

1 minute read

Published:

When I was tense and could not sleep, I used to put on the same singer. Read more

The Hidden Sentence

1 minute read

Published:

She suggested going for a walk, and I agreed even though I did not really feel like going. Read more

Friday at Noon

2 minute read

Published:

The first thing that stayed with me was not the software. It was the workday. Read more

The Building

3 minute read

Published:

For the first few days, I could not find anything without thinking about the route. Read more

Shoulder Height

1 minute read

Published:

There was a wall from my childhood that I remembered as enormous. On the other side stood a mulberry tree, and reaching the fruit required planning. We gathered stones, stacked them carefully, tested the pile, and took turns climbing while somebody held the base. Read more

Minus Two

1 minute read

Published:

My mathematics teacher cost me two points on my school achievement score. Read more

Whatever Was Left

1 minute read

Published:

Someone once described a student breakfast with sesame bread, cheese, cherry tomatoes, roasted peppers, and tea. Read more

One Word Too Many

1 minute read

Published:

There was a rule on an online community I used: if a title was written as a question, you were not supposed to write an entry that merely answered it. Read more

Half Eskişehirli

1 minute read

Published:

On one of our early work trips to Eskişehir, somebody handed us local bottled water and told us it was famous. We drank it, and they laughed. Read more

No Photograph

2 minute read

Published:

My mother wanted one photograph: me in a graduation gown. That should have been easy because I had finished university. I had passed the courses, completed the paperwork, and received the document that said I was a graduate. Read more

Another Famous Sweet

2 minute read

Published:

When I was younger, my hometown had one famous sweet. At least that was how I understood the situation. One famous sweet seemed reasonable for a city. Read more

Can I Pass?

2 minute read

Published:

I was walking through a television building when a familiar face appeared in front of me. Read more

What Else Do You Want?

2 minute read

Published:

A large engineering company announced that it was moving to flexible working hours. I read the news and immediately ignored the important part. I did not think about productivity, policy, or company culture. I thought, very simply: please hire me. Read more

The Heavy Document

1 minute read

Published:

A document arrived, and before anyone understood what was inside it, its size had already made an impression. Read more

Terms and Conditions

2 minute read

Published:

By 2010, my laptop no longer behaved like a machine that could simply be switched on and used. It had conditions. Read more

Who Is That?

1 minute read

Published:

My father and I were watching television when an old clip of Sezen Aksu appeared. She was young enough in the footage that I did not recognize her immediately, so I asked the room, “Who is that?” Read more

Before Lunch

1 minute read

Published:

I left home at about half past eight with several tasks that normally had enough power to destroy an entire day. There was military paperwork, a telephone and internet account to close, water to cancel, electricity to cancel, and a friend to reach afterward. Read more

Obarey

1 minute read

Published:

I had a system for celebrating success. Read more

Come Here, Man

2 minute read

Published:

We were sitting together after dinner when I noticed that something had changed between us. I cannot remember what we were talking about, and that is probably important. The subject was ordinary enough to disappear, but the feeling stayed. Read more

One Poğaça

1 minute read

Published:

Near the end of July, an announcement appeared in the office: starting in August, breakfast would no longer be allowed. I read it twice because the word “breakfast” sounded much larger than what actually happened every morning. On my desk there was a paper bag, and inside it was one poğaça. Read more

Come On

1 minute read

Published:

After three months in Canada, I should have been able to invite someone into a room. Read more

Entry 1000

1 minute read

Published:

When my thousandth entry arrived, I could have written about the number. Read more

The Bang

1 minute read

Published:

I was driving on a straight road when the passenger airbag exploded. Read more

Number 285

1 minute read

Published:

At 5:55 in the morning, I was already number 285. Read more

Friday

1 minute read

Published:

On Tuesday, the service center gave me an appointment for Friday. Read more

I Have Change

1 minute read

Published:

Three people were in a car leaving a parking lot. The driver had one hand on the wheel and the other in a pocket, searching for coins. Read more

Sixty-Two

1 minute read

Published:

The night was cold and very quiet outside. Inside the room, large fans kept turning with the same heavy sound. Music came faintly from somewhere nearby, but no one else was awake with me. Read more

Turn the Other Way

1 minute read

Published:

The place felt almost like a house, which made the objects inside it more suspicious. Read more

Seven Functions

2 minute read

Published:

I opened the documentation for an audio library expecting the usual ceremony. Read more

The Cafeteria

1 minute read

Published:

I asked an intern if she wanted to eat lunch, and she agreed. When I suggested the cafeteria, however, she looked surprised. “The cafeteria? The tray meals? Like the workers?” That was the sentence I remembered. Read more

Ten Minutes

2 minute read

Published:

I opened an anonymous-chat website and decided to see what would happen. Read more

He Knew Chess

2 minute read

Published:

My friend liked to say that he did not know how to play chess. Read more

Before the Offer

1 minute read

Published:

The interview went so well that I left the building thinking about how I would resign from my current job. Read more

Nice Car

1 minute read

Published:

I had built a very good argument against a certain car. Read more

Ten Meters of Freedom

1 minute read

Published:

My headphones had a cable so long that I could leave the computer and continue walking through the house. Read more

Six Hours

1 minute read

Published:

I decided I was getting older when I noticed that six hours of sleep had become enough to wake me up. Read more

The Blisters

1 minute read

Published:

Fitness gloves looked ridiculous to me at first. They seemed like the gym version of wearing sunglasses at night: an accessory designed to make an ordinary activity look more serious than it was. Read more

Trust Me

1 minute read

Published:

A friend was certain that Italy would win. Read more

Closing Doors

1 minute read

Published:

The warning sound had already started when I reached the platform. Read more

Four Places in a Row

1 minute read

Published:

When I thought of Eskişehir, I did not first think of anything a travel guide would have chosen. Read more

The Lawn

1 minute read

Published:

I came to the campus for registration and saw couples sitting on the grass. Read more

His Voice in the Film

2 minute read

Published:

I was watching a film when the father character began speaking to his son, and for a few seconds I stopped hearing the actor. Read more

The Wrong Cup

1 minute read

Published:

I woke in the middle of the night because the baby needed feeding. I went to the kitchen, prepared something with the confidence of a person who had repeated the same movement many times, and returned carrying a cup of coffee. Read more

629 - 579

2 minute read

Published:

The watch was advertised at 579 lira. Read more

Ticket Open

2 minute read

Published:

The task should have taken a few minutes. I wanted a domain name to point somewhere else. The site was ready, the destination was ready, and only the address needed to be told where to go. Read more

The Bottle

1 minute read

Published:

By 2020, I was no longer new. I knew the corridors, the rooms, the habits, and some of the people well enough to speak without measuring every sentence. Read more

Please Come In to Sign

1 minute read

Published:

Classes had moved online. Meetings had moved online. Documents traveled by email, and electronic signatures already existed. Read more

Hair Grows Back

1 minute read

Published:

During the pandemic, my wife learned how to cut my hair, and the training material was me. The first attempts were not especially successful. I described the results at the time by saying she had repeatedly turned me into a monkey, which was unfair to monkeys but accurate enough about my confidence when I looked in the mirror. Read more

One Week Before

1 minute read

Published:

My middle-school crush added me on Facebook about a week before getting married. Read more

Second Coffee

1 minute read

Published:

During the quarantine months, the coffee machine became part of the clock. Read more

What Stayed From the Year

2 minute read

Published:

At the end of 2025, I tried to remember the year and discovered that the important parts did not return in order. There were things that could have gone on a list—work completed, pages made, small tools finished, problems solved. I could have arranged them by month and made the year look organized. That would have been accurate, but it would not have been how the year felt. Read more

A Folder from Another Time

2 minute read

Published:

I opened an old folder and found a small piece of code I had written many years earlier. The file had not aged visibly. Its letters were as sharp as anything created that morning, and for a second that made the date beside it look like a mistake. Read more

The Dido DVD

3 minute read

Published:

I once bought the Dido: Live at Brixton Academy DVD as a gift for someone I had met through Ekşi Sözlük. I paid good money for it too. At the time, buying a DVD still felt like buying something real. You did not send a link and say, “Watch this when you have time.” You went somewhere, found the edition you wanted, paid for it, carried it home, and imagined the other person opening it. Read more

nature

What Is Nature?

11 minute read

Published:

Nature seems like one of the easiest words to understand until we try to say exactly what it includes. Read more

What Is Reality?

15 minute read

Published:

Reality is one of those words that becomes less obvious the more seriously we take it. Read more

The Atomists and the Discovery of the Void

3 minute read

Published:

Parmenides had made the void almost impossible. If non-being cannot be, then empty space cannot exist; if empty space cannot exist, motion and plurality become difficult to explain. Read more

The Big Bang

9 minute read

Published:

The Big Bang is one of the most famous ideas in science. Read more

Cosmic Inflation

7 minute read

Published:

Cosmic inflation is one of the most influential ideas in modern cosmology. Read more

Experiment

9 minute read

Published:

An experiment asks nature a question by changing something. Read more

Prediction

9 minute read

Published:

A scientific theory becomes powerful when it tells us what we should observe before we look. Read more

Chaos

7 minute read

Published:

Chaos does not mean disorder without rules. Read more

What Is Logic?

6 minute read

Published:

Logic is often described as the study of correct reasoning. Read more

Contradictions

7 minute read

Published:

A contradiction occurs when a claim and its negation are both accepted. Read more

Fallacies

8 minute read

Published:

A fallacy is a pattern of reasoning that appears stronger than it really is. Read more

Paradoxes

8 minute read

Published:

A paradox is a puzzle in which apparently reasonable assumptions or reasoning lead to a surprising, impossible, or contradictory result. Read more

Identity

6 minute read

Published:

What makes a thing the same thing over time? Read more

Modal Logic

6 minute read

Published:

Classical propositional logic asks whether propositions are: Read more

Temporal Logic

5 minute read

Published:

Ordinary logic treats propositions as if their truth does not change with time. Read more

Consistency

7 minute read

Published:

A formal system is useful only if its conclusions do not collapse into chaos. Read more

Decidability

7 minute read

Published:

A mathematical problem may have a correct answer for every input. Read more

Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem

6 minute read

Published:

Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem says that a sufficiently strong, effectively axiomatized, consistent formal theory cannot decide every arithmetic statement. Read more

The Halting Problem

7 minute read

Published:

One of the most important questions in computer science sounds almost trivial: Read more

Memory

8 minute read

Published:

Memory connects the present to the past. Read more

Emotion

8 minute read

Published:

Emotion is often treated as the opposite of reason. Read more

Reasoning

8 minute read

Published:

Reasoning connects what we know to what we conclude. Read more

Context

8 minute read

Published:

Nothing is interpreted in isolation. Read more

Frames

9 minute read

Published:

Context tells us how to interpret a situation. Read more

Expert Systems

7 minute read

Published:

What if intelligence is not mainly about general reasoning? Read more

Machine Learning

9 minute read

Published:

Traditional programming tells a machine exactly what procedure to follow. Read more

Qualia

10 minute read

Published:

What does coffee taste like? Read more

Dennett and Chalmers

8 minute read

Published:

Few disagreements in contemporary philosophy of mind are as revealing as the contrast between: Read more

Panpsychism

9 minute read

Published:

If consciousness cannot be derived from completely nonconscious matter, perhaps the starting assumption is wrong. Read more

Determinism

10 minute read

Published:

If the complete state of the universe were known at one moment, would the future already be fixed? Read more

nejat-isler

Beden İblisleri

13 minute read

Published:

Originally published in Picus — exact date unknown
Archived by Egoist Okur — 13 January 2016
Interview by Tolga Meriç Read more

Sorumlu Bir Herifim

11 minute read

Published:

L’Officiel Hommes Türkiye — January 2017
Habertürk reproduction — 17 January 2017 Read more

pencils

The Smell of a Freshly Sharpened Pencil

9 minute read

Published:

Smell is one of the least discussed parts of the wooden-pencil experience, yet it is often the part people remember most clearly. A newly sharpened pencil does more than reveal graphite and wood. It exposes fresh material that has been sealed beneath lacquer, paint, and the outer surface of the barrel, allowing volatile compounds from the wood to reach the air. Read more

How I Test a New Pencil

11 minute read

Published:

When a new pencil enters my collection, I try not to judge it from a single scribble. A first impression is useful, but it is also easy to distort. A freshly sharpened point feels different from a worn point, smooth paper can hide weaknesses that rough paper exposes, and one unusually good sample can make an inconsistent product look better than it really is. Read more

The No. 2 Pencil

9 minute read

Published:

In the United States, the phrase “No. 2 pencil” became so familiar that it sounds less like a technical grade and more like the default definition of a pencil. It appears on school-supply lists, standardized-test instructions, office-store shelves, and boxes of inexpensive yellow pencils. The designation is simple, but the history behind it connects grading systems, education, machine-readable forms, manufacturing conventions, and one of the strongest visual stereotypes in stationery. Read more

Faber-Castell Castell 9000

10 minute read

Published:

The dark green Castell 9000 is one of the easiest pencils to recognize from across a desk. Its appearance is restrained, but the model carries more than a century of history and remains one of the clearest examples of a pencil designed as a graded technical system rather than a single writing tool. Read more

Eraser-Tipped vs Untipped Pencils

10 minute read

Published:

One of the clearest divisions in wooden-pencil design is whether the back end carries an eraser. The difference looks simple, but it affects manufacturing, balance, price, regional identity, aging, and even the way a pencil is used. An eraser-tipped pencil is a small composite object made from wood, graphite, metal, and rubber or synthetic eraser material. An untipped pencil removes two of those components and presents a more mechanically simple design. Read more

How to Start a Pencil Collection

13 minute read

Published:

A pencil collection does not need to begin with rare or expensive pieces. In fact, the best beginning is usually a small group of ordinary pencils that are different enough to teach you what to notice. Read more

Cheap Pencils Can Be Fascinating

7 minute read

Published:

Collectors often begin by looking for premium pencils, famous models, or discontinued brands with strong reputations. That makes sense, but it can create a blind spot. Some of the most revealing pencils are ordinary school and office pencils that were produced in enormous quantities, sold cheaply, used hard, and discarded without ceremony. Their low price does not make them historically uninteresting. In many cases, it makes them better evidence of everyday manufacturing and use. Read more

Reading the Imprint on an Old Pencil

12 minute read

Published:

The printed line on an old pencil barrel can be the most information-dense part of the object. A few centimeters of foil or paint may contain manufacturer, model, grade, country, trademark status, corporate identity, and clues to when the pencil was made. Read more

Foil Stamping and Pencil Typography

7 minute read

Published:

A pencil gives a manufacturer almost no room to communicate. The usable printing area is long but extremely narrow, and the barrel is often only a few millimeters across each face. Brand name, model, hardness grade, country of manufacture, trademark, certification mark, and sometimes a slogan or product claim must fit into a space that is smaller than the label on most everyday objects. Pencil typography is therefore not decoration added at the end of production; it is a design problem shaped by severe geometric limits. Read more

Colored Pencils Are Not Graphite Pencils

12 minute read

Published:

Colored pencils share the wooden form of graphite pencils, but the resemblance can be misleading. A graphite pencil and a colored pencil may use similar slats, similar lacquer, and similar sharpening geometry, yet the material inside is solving a different problem. Read more

What HB, B and H Really Mean

11 minute read

Published:

The letters printed near the end of a pencil look simple, but they describe one of the most useful classification systems in drawing and writing. H marks the harder side of a graphite range. B marks the softer and generally darker side. HB sits near the practical middle. F is another middle grade found in many traditional ranges. Read more

Why Core Centering Matters

7 minute read

Published:

Cut across a well-made wooden pencil and the graphite core should sit close to the geometric center of the barrel. That sounds like a minor visual detail, but centering is one of the clearest signs that several manufacturing stages worked together correctly. The grooves in the wooden slats must be milled consistently, the core must be placed accurately, the two slats must align when they are glued, and the finished sandwich must then be shaped without shifting the core relative to the outer barrel. Read more

The Case for Writing in 2B

7 minute read

Published:

HB is treated as the default writing grade in many places, but 2B deserves to be considered as a serious everyday writing option rather than simply a drawing pencil. The attraction is easy to understand: a good 2B produces a dark, readable line with less pressure than a typical HB, and that changes the physical experience of handwriting. Read more

School Pencils From Different Countries

9 minute read

Published:

School pencils are one of the easiest ways to see how a supposedly standardized object changes from country to country. The basic technology is similar almost everywhere: a graphite core inside a wooden barrel, sharpened to a point and used for writing or drawing. Yet the details around that core—grade, eraser, color, shape, packaging, branding, and even how children are taught to use the pencil—can vary noticeably between markets. Read more

How to Photograph a Pencil Collection

11 minute read

Published:

Good photographs turn a pencil collection into a searchable visual archive. Once a collection grows beyond a few dozen pieces, memory becomes unreliable. Images begin to serve as identification records, condition reports, variant references, and evidence of how an object looked at a particular moment in time. Read more

Building a Pencil Catalog

13 minute read

Published:

A pencil collection becomes much more useful when it is cataloged. Without a catalog, a drawer full of pencils is still enjoyable, but comparison depends on memory. Once the collection reaches dozens or hundreds of objects, memory becomes unreliable. Small differences in ferrules, imprints, grade marks, packaging, and country statements begin to blur together. Read more

Why Graphite Shines

7 minute read

Published:

Graphite has a visual behavior that surprises anyone who first notices it closely: a dark pencil line can suddenly flash silver or gray when the paper is tilted toward a light source. The mark has not changed color, but its surface is reflecting light in a different way. This “graphite shine” is not a defect in the pencil. It comes from the physical structure of graphite and from the way microscopic particles become arranged on paper during writing or drawing. Read more

Why 4B Feels Like a Different Tool

8 minute read

Published:

Moving from HB to 4B does more than make a line darker. The pencil begins to behave differently in the hand because the core is formulated for a different balance of graphite, clay, binders, and lubricants. A softer grade releases material more readily, wears faster, responds more dramatically to pressure, and changes point geometry sooner. The result is a tool that can feel less like a precise writing instrument and more like a compact drawing stick. Read more

Why Pencil Lacquer Matters

7 minute read

Published:

The colored surface of a wooden pencil is easy to dismiss as decoration, but lacquer is part of the pencil’s construction. It changes how the barrel feels in the hand, how easily the wood absorbs moisture and dirt, how well printed markings adhere, how the pencil survives repeated handling, and how the object ages in a collection. Two pencils made from similar wood and graphite can feel surprisingly different because their finishes were built in different ways. Read more

When Is a Pencil Vintage?

12 minute read

Published:

Collectors use the word “vintage” constantly, but it is not a precise technical category. A seller may apply it to a pencil from the 1960s, another may use it for something made in the 1990s, and a third may call a ten-year-old discontinued model vintage simply because it is no longer available. The word is useful as a broad signal of age, but serious collecting requires more exact language. Read more

Staedtler Mars Lumograph

10 minute read

Published:

The blue barrel of the STAEDTLER Mars Lumograph has become one of the most recognizable forms in professional graphite drawing. It is not simply a blue pencil available in many grades. It belongs to a product line that helped make graded drawing pencils into a systematic professional tool. Read more

Knife Sharpening a Pencil

11 minute read

Published:

Sharpening a pencil with a knife looks old-fashioned, but it offers control that a conventional sharpener cannot match. A standard sharpener gives the pencil a predetermined cone. A knife lets the user decide how much wood to remove, how much core to expose, and what final geometry the point should have. Read more

Tombow MONO 100: Precision in Black and Gold

3 minute read

Published:

Some pencils are remembered because they changed shape, introduced a new mechanism, or became inexpensive enough to appear everywhere. The Tombow MONO 100 is interesting for a different reason: it represents an attempt to perfect a familiar object without changing what that object fundamentally is. Read more

Paper Changes How a Pencil Feels

10 minute read

Published:

A pencil review that ignores paper is incomplete. The same pencil can feel smooth, dry, dark, pale, fast-wearing, or unusually controlled depending on the sheet beneath it. Graphite performance is never produced by the pencil alone. It is the result of contact between a moving core and a surface made from fibers, fillers, sizing agents, coatings, and microscopic irregularities. Read more

Ferrules: The Tiny Metal Part Collectors Notice

9 minute read

Published:

The ferrule is one of the smallest parts of a wooden pencil and one of the easiest to underestimate. It is usually treated as a simple metal sleeve that holds an eraser, but its shape, finish, crimp pattern, proportions, and aging behavior can reveal a surprising amount about how a pencil was designed and when it was made. For collectors, the ferrule often becomes useful only after the obvious features—the imprint, lacquer, and grade marking—have already been examined. Read more

Why Hexagonal Pencils Became a Classic

11 minute read

Published:

The hexagonal pencil is so familiar that its shape rarely receives attention. Yet six flat sides solve several practical problems at once: the pencil resists rolling, presents printable surfaces, can be shaped efficiently from glued wooden slats, and gives the hand a stable tool without forcing a highly specialized grip. Read more

American School Pencils as Design Objects

9 minute read

Published:

The ordinary American school pencil is easy to dismiss because it is so familiar: yellow barrel, pink eraser, metal ferrule, No. 2 marking. But familiarity is exactly what makes it culturally interesting. The design became so stable that it stopped looking designed at all. Read more

Why Pencil Leads Are Bonded to Wood

7 minute read

Published:

A graphite core is fragile. Enclosing it in wood protects it from direct impact, but modern pencil construction usually goes further by bonding the core to the wooden casing along its length. This hidden adhesive connection is one of the reasons a well-made pencil can survive drops, sharpen repeatedly, and continue writing even after the barrel has taken significant abuse. Read more

Inside a Pencil: Graphite, Clay and Wax

12 minute read

Published:

A wooden pencil looks like a piece of painted wood with a dark center, but the core is a carefully engineered ceramic-like composite. Calling it “lead” is traditional shorthand; ordinary graphite pencils do not use metallic lead in the writing core. Read more

Graphite vs Charcoal

12 minute read

Published:

Graphite and charcoal are both carbon-based drawing materials, but they behave very differently on paper. They can both make black marks, both can be sold in wooden pencils, and both can be blended or erased to some degree. Yet their internal structure, particle behavior, sheen, value range, and interaction with paper make them distinct tools rather than interchangeable versions of the same medium. Read more

Why Pencil Wood Matters

11 minute read

Published:

The wood around a pencil core is easy to overlook until sharpening goes badly. Then grain direction, density, machining, moisture, glue, and centering become impossible to ignore. Read more

German Pencil Making Tradition

11 minute read

Published:

Germany occupies a central place in pencil history, especially the area around Nuremberg and nearby Stein. The importance of the region is not simply that several famous brands happened to begin there. It developed a durable industrial ecosystem around pencil making: woodworking, graphite processing, pigments, machinery, printing, trade, and skilled labor reinforced one another over centuries. Read more

Advertising Pencils: Tiny Corporate Archives

10 minute read

Published:

Advertising pencils were made to be ordinary. They were handed across bank counters, left beside hotel telephones, packed into trade-show bags, given to schoolchildren, mailed by insurance agents, and distributed by thousands of local businesses that expected the recipient to sharpen them, use them, and eventually throw them away. That disposable purpose is exactly what makes surviving examples so useful to collectors. A pencil carrying the name of a hardware store, radio station, restaurant, political campaign, baseball team, or regional manufacturer can preserve a fragment of commercial history that is difficult to find anywhere else. Read more

Pencil Point Retention Explained

12 minute read

Published:

Darkness is easy to notice in a pencil test, but point retention often matters more during real writing. It describes how well a sharpened point keeps a useful geometry as graphite is transferred to paper. Read more

A Pencil Is a Consumable Measuring Stick

6 minute read

Published:

A wooden pencil records use in a way that most writing tools do not. Every sharpening removes part of the object itself, so the pencil gradually becomes a physical measure of the work done with it. The change is visible: the barrel gets shorter, the imprint moves closer to the fingers, the balance shifts, and eventually the pencil reaches a length at which it is no longer comfortable to hold. A mechanical pencil can consume many leads while its body remains almost unchanged. A wood-cased pencil cannot hide its history so easily. Read more

The Quiet Precision of H Pencils

9 minute read

Published:

Soft graphite gets most of the attention because dark marks are visually dramatic, but hard grades solve a different problem. An H pencil is not trying to produce the richest black. Its strengths are point retention, controlled deposition, narrow lines, and the ability to build structure without immediately filling the page with graphite. Those qualities made hard pencils important in drafting rooms, map work, technical illustration, and any task where precision mattered more than expressive darkness. Read more

The Anatomy of a Wooden Pencil

11 minute read

Published:

A wooden pencil can be read almost like a small machine. Start at the point and move backward: core, wood, adhesive, lacquer, imprint, barrel geometry, end treatment, ferrule, and eraser. Each part has a job, and each part gives a collector something different to inspect. Read more

Sharpeners Change the Pencil

13 minute read

Published:

A wooden pencil does not have one fixed writing geometry. Every sharpening changes the ratio of exposed wood to exposed core, the length of the graphite point, the angle at which the core meets the paper, and the amount of support the wood provides behind it. Change the sharpener and the same pencil can behave like a different instrument. Read more

Mitsubishi Hi-Uni: The Pencil That Tried to Be Perfect

2 minute read

Published:

Some pencils become classics because they are inexpensive and everywhere. The Mitsubishi Hi-Uni followed almost the opposite path. It was created as a premium pencil, with the ambition of pushing an ordinary wooden pencil as far as manufacturing could reasonably take it. Read more

Why Pencils Break When Sharpening

10 minute read

Published:

Few pencil problems are more frustrating than a point that breaks every time it emerges from the sharpener. The visible break happens at the tip, but the actual cause may be somewhere else: inside the core, in the wood, at the glue line, in the sharpener, or in the user’s technique. Read more

Why Vintage Pencil Boxes Matter

13 minute read

Published:

A single vintage pencil can be beautiful, but an original box can explain the pencil in ways the barrel cannot. Packaging preserves the commercial context around the object: how it was named, graded, priced, grouped, exported, advertised, and presented to the buyer. Read more

A Short History of the Modern Pencil

14 minute read

Published:

The modern pencil is the result of several technologies meeting over centuries: graphite mining, wood working, ceramic-like core manufacture, precision cutting, adhesives, coatings, printing, and mass production. Its familiar form looks inevitable only because it has been refined for so long. Read more

Round, Hexagonal or Triangular?

11 minute read

Published:

Barrel shape changes a pencil more than photographs suggest. The core may be identical, the wood may come from the same slats, and the lacquer may use the same chemistry, yet a round, hexagonal, and triangular pencil can feel like three different tools. Read more

Discontinued Pencils and Collector Psychology

8 minute read

Published:

A perfectly ordinary pencil can become psychologically different the moment production stops. Before discontinuation, sharpening is routine because another dozen can be bought. After discontinuation, the same action begins to feel like consumption of a finite resource. Nothing about the graphite has changed, yet the user’s relationship with the object has. Read more

Why Pencils Still Matter

13 minute read

Published:

A pencil is one of the simplest tools on a desk, yet it offers something that many modern writing instruments do not: visible change. The point becomes shorter, the paint acquires scratches, the lettering slowly disappears under the fingers, and every page removes a little more of the object. Read more

Using Pencils Without Destroying a Collection

12 minute read

Published:

Collectors face a contradiction built into the object itself: pencils are designed to disappear through use, while a collection is designed to preserve them. Every sharpening removes wood, lacquer, imprint length, and graphite. Every written page shortens the artifact. Read more

How to Store Vintage Pencils

11 minute read

Published:

Vintage pencils are relatively robust objects, but careless storage can slowly damage the details that make them historically useful. A pencil may survive decades in a drawer, yet lacquer can fade, ferrules can corrode, erasers can harden, boxes can crush, and adhesives can fail. Preservation is mostly about slowing those changes. Read more

What Makes a Pencil ‘Premium’?

11 minute read

Published:

“Premium” is one of the vaguest words in stationery. It can describe materials, manufacturing precision, brand position, packaging, scarcity, or simply price. A pencil in an elegant box may still have an off-center core and mediocre wood, while an inexpensive school pencil may sharpen cleanly and write with excellent consistency. The label becomes useful only when it is broken into measurable qualities. Read more

Japanese Pencils and the Pursuit of Finish

12 minute read

Published:

Japanese pencils attract collectors for reasons that go beyond writing darkness. The appeal often comes from the complete object: core formulation, lacquer, typography, barrel geometry, end treatment, packaging, and the consistency with which those details are executed. Read more

Smoothness Is Not the Same as Quality

11 minute read

Published:

Pencil reviews often treat smoothness as the final score. A pencil that feels “buttery,” “creamy,” or “glassy” is praised immediately, while a pencil with noticeable feedback is often judged as inferior. That shortcut misses much of what makes a pencil useful. Read more

The End Cap Is Not an Afterthought

6 minute read

Published:

Turn an untipped pencil around and the last few millimeters often reveal more design work than expected. The writing end receives most of the attention because it changes with every sharpening, yet the opposite end is usually the most stable visual element on the barrel. It may carry a flat paint finish, a contrasting dip, a ring, a colored band, a metal cap, exposed wood, or a multi-step decorative treatment. On some models, the end is one of the easiest ways to identify the pencil from a distance. Read more

What a Pencil Eraser Is Actually Made Of

5 minute read

Published:

A pencil eraser looks like a single piece of soft material, but its job depends on a carefully balanced mixture of elasticity, friction, filler, and controlled wear. Read more

The Crank Pencil Sharpener: How Spiral Cutters Took Over the Desk

4 minute read

Published:

Before the familiar desk-mounted crank sharpener became ordinary, sharpening was still a manual skill. Knives and simple handheld sharpeners worked, but the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned sharpening into a machine problem: cut wood and graphite evenly, center the point, avoid breakage, collect shavings, and repeat the result consistently. Read more

Dong-A Pencil: The Company That Opened Korea’s Stationery Industry

5 minute read

Published:

South Korea is famous for electronics, automobiles, and modern design, but its stationery industry has a much older industrial story than many collectors realize. Dong-A Pencil sits near the beginning of that story. Founded in 1946, the company is described by the Korean government as the country’s first stationery company, and pencil manufacturing was its starting point. Read more

Nataraj 621: India’s School Pencil at Industrial Scale

6 minute read

Published:

A pencil collection can become geographically distorted very quickly. Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and the United States have famous models that are easy to document and easy to buy. India deserves a place beside them, and the Nataraj 621 is a good point of entry. Read more

Viking Pencil Factory: Denmark’s National Pencil

5 minute read

Published:

Denmark is not usually the first country named in histories of pencil manufacturing. Germany, the Czech lands, Switzerland, Britain, Japan, and the United States tend to dominate the story. Yet Copenhagen once had its own large pencil factory, and its history is unusually tied to national identity. Read more

Adel Kalemcilik: Turkey’s Modern Pencil Manufacturer

4 minute read

Published:

A pencil collection can become international while still circling the same familiar countries. Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and the United States dominate many collections. Turkey deserves a place on that map as well, and Adel Kalemcilik provides the clearest entry point. Read more

From Prata to São Carlos: Brazil’s Two-Billion-Pencil Supply Chain

4 minute read

Published:

A pencil can look like a local object even when its production depends on a landscape hundreds of kilometers away. Faber-Castell’s Brazilian operation makes that relationship unusually visible. Its wood begins in managed forests near Prata, Minas Gerais, while large-scale pencil production takes place in São Carlos, São Paulo. Read more

Pencil Slats: The Hidden Wooden Component Between Forest and Pencil

5 minute read

Published:

A wooden pencil does not normally arrive at the pencil factory as a log. In modern production, the wood often arrives as a slat: a thin, accurately machined board that will be grooved, filled with cores, glued to a matching slat, and cut into individual pencils. The slat disappears inside the finished barrel, so collectors rarely think about it as a separate object, yet it is one of the most important standardized intermediate products in the pencil industry. Read more

Tomsk Pencil Factory: Siberian Cedar and Soviet Pencil Production

5 minute read

Published:

Most histories of pencil making move quickly from Germany to the United States and Japan. Tomsk adds a very different route: a Siberian factory built around access to local timber, expanded under Soviet industrial planning, damaged during the Second World War, rebuilt, and eventually capable of producing hundreds of millions of pencils a year. Read more

The Pencil Clip: Turning a Wooden Pencil Into a Pocket Tool

5 minute read

Published:

A wooden pencil is easy to carry until it is placed in a shirt pocket. It can slide downward or fall out when the wearer bends over. Fountain pens solved that problem with built-in clips, but most wooden pencils did not. Instead, removable metal clips turned an ordinary pencil into a pocket tool. Read more

Borrowdale Graphite: The Deposit That Made Keswick a Pencil Town

5 minute read

Published:

Long before graphite was mixed with clay and fired into engineered cores, one English valley had access to unusually pure natural graphite that could be cut and used almost directly as a marking material. The deposit lay at Seathwaite in Borrowdale, in the Lake District of north-west England, and eventually helped turn nearby Keswick into a major pencil-making center. Read more

poems

Akrep gibisin kardeşim

less than 1 minute read

Published:

akrep gibisin kardeşim,
korkak bir karanlık içindesin akrep gibi.
serçe gibisin kardeşim,
serçenin telaşı içindesin.
midye gibisin kardeşim,
midye gibi kapalı, rahat.
ve sönmüş bir yanardağ ağzı gibi korkunçsun, kardeşim.
bir değil,
beş değil,
yüz milyonlarlasın maalesef.
koyun gibisin kardeşim,
gocuklu celep kaldırınca sopasını
sürüye katılıverirsin hemen
ve âdeta mağrur, koşarsın salhaneye.
dünyanın en tuhaf mahlukusun yani,
hani şu derya içre olup
deryayı bilmiyen balıktan da tuhaf.
ve bu dünyada, bu zulüm
senin sayende.
ve açsak, yorgunsak, alkan içindeysek eğer
ve hâlâ şarabımızı vermek için üzüm gibi eziliyorsak
kabahat senin,
demeğe de dilim varmıyor ama
kabahatın çoğu senin, canım kardeşim! Read more

Anlayamadım

less than 1 minute read

Published:

ben mi anlayamadım, sonbahar mı götürdü
yıldırım mı düşmüş bahçeme
tomurcuk güllerim mi yanmış
önce yapraklar mı tutuşmuş
anlayamadım
saçlarım mı ağarmış, düşüyor muyum
öl diyorsunuz, ölmüyor muyum
beni anladınız mı
anlayamadım Read more

Aşk

less than 1 minute read

Published:

içerimde üç kişi,
ben, asker ve bir çocuk. Read more

Ben içeri düştüğümden beri

1 minute read

Published:

Ben içeri düştüğümden beri, güneşin etrafında on kere döndü dünya
Ona sorarsanız, lâfı bile edilmez, mikroskobik bir zaman
Bana sorarsanız, on senesi ömrümün
Bir kurşun kalemim vardı, ben içeri düştüğüm sene
Bir haftada yaza yaza tükeniverdi
Ona sorarsanız, bütün bir hayat
Bana sorarsanız, adam sen de, biriki hafta
Katillikten yatan Osman
Ben içeri düştüğümden beri, yedi buçuğu doldurup çıktı
Dolaştı dışarda bir vakit
Sonra kaçakçılıktan düştü içeri, altı ayı doldurup çıktı tekrar
Dün mektup geldi, evlenmiş, bir çocuğu doğacakmış baharda
Şimdi on yaşına bastı
Ben içeri düştüğüm sene ana rahmine düşen çocuklar
Ve o yılın titrek, ince, uzun bacaklı tayları
Rahat, geniş sağrılı birer kısrak oldular çoktan
Fakat zeytin fidanları hâlâ fidan, hâlâ çocuktur
Yeni yeni meydanlar açılmış uzaktaki şehrimde
Ben içeri düştüğümden beri
Ve bizim hane halkı
Bilmediğim bir sokakta, görmediğim bir evde oturuyor
Pamuk gibiydi, bembeyazdı ekmek, ben içeri düştüğüm sene
Sonra vesikaya bindi, bizim burada içeride
Birbirini vurdu millet yumruk kadar, simsiyah bir tayın için
Şimdi serbestledi yine, fakat esmer ve tatsız
Ben içeri düştüğüm sene, ikincisi başlamamıştı henüz
Daha kampında fırınlar yakılmamış
Atom bombası atılmamıştı Hiroşima’ya
Boğazlanan bir çocuğun kanı gibi aktı zaman
Sonra kapandı resmen o fasıl
Şimdi üçüncüden bahsediyor Amerikan doları
Fakat gün ışıdı her şeye rağmen, ben içeri düştüğümden beri
Ve karanlığın kenarından onlar
Ağır ellerini toprağa basıp doğruldular yarı yarıya
Ben içeri düştüğümden beri, güneşin etrafında on kere döndü dünya
Ve aynı ihtirasla ediyorum yine
Ben içeri düştüğüm sene onlar için yazdığımı
Onlar ki toprakta karınca
Suda balık
Havada kuş kadar çokturlar
Korkak, cesur, cahil, hakim ve çocukturlar
Ve kahreden yaratan ki onlardır
Destanımızda yalnız onların mâceraları vardır
Ve gayrısı
Mesela, benim on sene yatmam
Laf’ı güzaf Read more

Bence Şimdi Sen De Herkes Gibisin

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Gözlerim gözünde aşkı seçmiyor
Onlardan kalbime sevda geçmiyor
Ben yordum ruhumu biraz da sen yor
Çünkü bence şimdi herkes gibisin Read more

Böyle bir sevmek

less than 1 minute read

Published:

ne kadınlar sevdim zaten yoktular
yağmur giyerlerdi sonbaharla bir
azıcık okşasam sanki çocuktular
bıraksam korkudan gözleri sislenir Read more

Güzel Havalar

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Beni bu güzel havalar mahvetti,
Böyle havada istifa ettim
Evkaftaki memuriyetimden.
Tütüne böyle havada alıştım,
Böyle havada aşık oldum;
Eve ekmekle tuz götürmeyi
Böyle havalarda unuttum;
Şiir yazma hastalığım
Hep böyle havalarda nüksetti;
Beni bu güzel havalar mahvetti. Read more

Hüzzam

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Mehtab, ruhumla meşk diler belli.
Makamı bir garib Hüzzam… Read more

Japon Balıkçısı

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Denizde bir bulutun öldürdüğü
Japon balıkçısı genç bir adamdı.
Dostlarından dinledim bu türküyü
Pasifik’te sapsarı bir akşamdı. Read more

Dumanlar Arasında Sensiz

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Kalmadı avuntu geceden hiç
Ve sessizlik sabaha kadar
Sızı var dumanında sigaramın
Ve yalnızlık odamın duvarlarında Read more

Seni Düşünmek

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Seni düşünmek güzel şey,
ümitli şey,
dünyanın en güzel sesinden
en güzel şarkıyı dinlemek gibi birşey…
Fakat artık ümit yetmiyor bana,
ben artık şarkı dinlemek değil,
şarkı söylemek istiyorum… Read more

Sevgi Duvarı

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Sen miydin o, yalnızlığın mıydı yoksa
Kör karanlıkta açardık paslı gözlerimizi
Dilimizde akşamdan kalma bir küfür
Salonlar piyasalar sanat-sevicileri
Derdim günüm insan arasına çıkarmaktı seni
Yakanda bir amonyak çiçeği
Yalnızlığım benim sidikli kontesim
Ne kadar rezil olursak o kadar iyi Read more

publications

teaching

Microprocessors

Undergraduate, Giresun University, Electrical Electronics Engineering, 2024

microprocessor Microprocessors execute instructions, process data, and coordinate the operations of modern computing systems. The 8086 architecture provides a useful foundation for studying processor organization, registers, memory access, instruction execution, and low-level programming. The 8086 is an early member of the x86 family. Although modern x86-64 processors are substantially more complex, the 8086 remains useful for introducing registers, segmentation, instruction execution, addressing modes, interrupts, and assembly programming. Read more

Programming with C

Undergraduate, Giresun University, Computer Engineering, 2024

procedural programming with c C is a general-purpose programming language widely used in systems programming, embedded software, operating systems, compilers, and performance-sensitive applications. It combines portable high-level constructs with low-level access to memory and hardware-related operations. C gives programmers substantial control over data representation, memory allocation, and program execution. This control can enable efficient software, but it also requires careful handling of memory, types, and undefined behavior. Read more

Data Structures and Algorithms with C

Undergraduate, Giresun University, Computer Engineering, 2025

data structures and algorithms with c This course studies data structures and algorithms through their memory representation and their implementation in C. Each topic is developed from the abstract data type to a working C99/C11 implementation with pointers, dynamic memory, and structures, together with its complexity analysis. The course covers arrays and structures, linked lists, stacks, queues, lists, trees, priority queues and heaps, hash tables, search trees, graphs, sets and union-find, as well as recursion, backtracking, spanning trees, shortest paths, and sorting algorithms. Read more

Object Oriented Programming with Java

Undergraduate, Giresun University, Electrical Electronics Engineering, 2026

object oriented programming Java is one of the most popular programming languages, extensively used in various fields such as web development, mobile app development, and game development. It encompasses key concepts like classes, objects, inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation, and abstraction, which form the foundation of its Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) paradigm. These principles enable developers to create modular, reusable, and efficient code, fostering better software design and maintainability. Java’s platform independence, achieved through the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), allows applications to run on any device equipped with a JVM, making it a versatile choice for cross-platform development. Additionally, Java’s extensive standard library provides a wide range of tools and functionalities, simplifying many common programming tasks and enhancing productivity. Read more

Operating Systems

Undergraduate, Giresun University, Computer Engineering, 2026

operating systems Operating systems are a fundamental part of modern computing. Operating systems manage hardware resources and provide abstractions and services for application software. They coordinate processor time, memory, storage, devices, and communication while supporting protection, isolation, and controlled resource sharing. An operating system provides a platform for programs to run. It acts as a bridge between hardware and software applications. This ensures that applications can interact with hardware using a standardized interface. The operating system handles tasks like memory management, process scheduling, and input/output operations. Without it, a computer is just a collection of hardware components. Read more

Algorithms

Undergraduate, Giresun University, Computer Engineering, 2026

algorithms An algorithm is a finite and well-defined sequence of steps for solving a problem or performing a computation. Algorithms form the foundation of software systems and are used in tasks ranging from sorting and searching to graph processing, optimization, text analysis, and scientific computing. This course examines fundamental algorithm-design techniques, correctness, time and space complexity, and the practical trade-offs between alternative solutions. Read more

Algorithmic Game Theory

Undergraduate, Giresun University, Computer Engineering, 2026

algorithmic game theory Algorithmic game theory studies strategic interaction through the lens of computation. It combines game-theoretic models with algorithms and complexity analysis to examine equilibria, auctions, market mechanisms, routing, online platforms, fairness, and the behavior of self-interested agents. Read more

Computer Fundamentals and Introduction to Programming

Undergraduate, Giresun University, Electrical Electronics Engineering, 2026

computer and programming Modern computing encompasses a vast ecosystem of interconnected technologies and tools that have become integral to our daily lives. Computers are sophisticated electronic devices managed by operating systems, which serve as the interface between hardware and software. The Internet has transformed these individual machines into a global network, enabling instantaneous communication and access to unlimited information and services. In our professional lives, we regularly interact with office programs such as word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation software, which have digitized and streamlined workplace tasks. Behind all these tools lies the art of programming - the fundamental skill of creating software by writing instructions in various programming languages. Read more

Data Structures

Undergraduate, Giresun University, Computer Engineering, 2026

data structure Data structures provide systematic ways to organize, store, and access data. Choosing an appropriate structure directly affects the efficiency of operations such as searching, insertion, deletion, and traversal. This course examines arrays, linked lists, stacks, queues, lists, trees, priority queues and heaps, hash tables, search trees, graphs, and sets, with an emphasis on their implementations, complexity, and practical applications. Read more

teoman

thoughts

Manuals Teach the Questions I Did Not Know to Ask

2 minute read

Published:

When I start using a new program or programming language, my first instinct is usually to search for the exact thing I need. The method is efficient: find an example, adapt it, make the immediate problem disappear. It is also a good way to remain unaware of everything I did not know to search for. Read more

Sometimes Distance Is Not Bitterness, It Is Structure

5 minute read

Published:

People often say it is mature to stay friends with an ex. Maybe sometimes it is. Maybe sometimes it works perfectly. But there is a version of this arrangement that looks much better in theory than it feels in real life. Read more

When ‘I’m Not Ready for a Relationship’ Means ‘Not with You’

5 minute read

Published:

There are sentences that sound more complicated than they really are. One of them is: “I’m not looking for a serious relationship right now.” At first, it sounds reasonable. Maybe the timing is bad. Maybe work is difficult. Maybe life is complicated. Maybe the person genuinely needs space. Read more

Replacement Is Not Neutral

5 minute read

Published:

As a child, an old school bag could feel like a problem. Your friends had replaced theirs. Yours was worn, and every scratch seemed visible. You wanted the new one so that you could stop being the person carrying last year’s version. Read more

A Feeling Does Not Require a Category

5 minute read

Published:

In April 2010, I wrote about a woman whose place in my life I could not quite name. She had a boyfriend. We had become close, she trusted me, and I felt that she gave me more attention than she gave many of the other men around us. Read more

Silence Collects Its Own Evidence

5 minute read

Published:

Some problems begin with something that was never said. Others begin with something that was said and understood completely differently. I think the second kind can sometimes be worse, especially when two people cannot talk face to face. Read more

You Do Not Choose to Forget

4 minute read

Published:

Years ago, I wrote a single sentence about forgetting: Forgetting is not something a person can do. It is something that happens to a person. I still think there is truth in that. Read more

Waiting for Company Can Become Waiting for Permission

6 minute read

Published:

There was a time when going to the cinema alone felt like something that needed an explanation. Not a legal explanation, a social one. Why are you here alone? Could you not find anyone? Are you all right? Nobody necessarily asked these questions aloud, which was almost worse because you could imagine them. Read more

Why I Finally Understood Gym Gloves

7 minute read

Published:

Some things look ridiculous until the exact moment you need them. Gym gloves were one of those things for me. At first they seemed unnecessary, almost theatrical, like wearing sunglasses at night. You are in a gym, you lift weights, your hands touch metal. Surely hands are already designed for holding things. Read more

Patience Is Not Waiting

1 minute read

Published:

Some work has a delay built into it. A skill needs practice before the movement becomes familiar. Trust needs repeated behavior after an apology. A draft sometimes needs distance before its weak argument becomes visible. Read more

Discipline Is Mostly Removing Decisions

1 minute read

Published:

Starting work can involve more decisions than the work itself seems to require. When should I begin? Which task first? Where is the file? Should I answer that message before settling down? Read more

Convenience Can Narrow a Life

2 minute read

Published:

A recommendation that saves me ten minutes seems harmless. Most of the time, it is. The interesting question begins when thousands of small conveniences start choosing the shape of a life. Read more

Distraction Is Often a Way of Avoiding Ourselves

1 minute read

Published:

Sometimes I reach for a distraction at a very precise moment: a task has become uncertain, a difficult conversation has come to mind, or the room has gone quiet enough for an uncomfortable question to return. Read more

Discomfort Is Not a Verdict

2 minute read

Published:

I have noticed that difficult things often make their strongest argument for quitting at exactly the wrong moment. Read more

Curiosity Has Room to Grow Older

1 minute read

Published:

Age arrives gradually, but awareness of it can arrive in flashes. A photograph looks older than expected. Someone remembered as a child is an adult. A familiar task takes longer to recover from. A birthday number begins to feel less abstract. Read more

Giving Ordinary Days Some Attention

1 minute read

Published:

A month can be full and still be difficult to remember. Work was done, messages were answered, meals were cooked. Asked what happened, I can sometimes produce only a deadline and the impression of being busy. Read more

Small Projects Close the Loop

2 minute read

Published:

I used to think a project had to be large to deserve attention. Large projects looked serious. Small ones looked temporary, almost like exercises. Over time, I began to suspect that scale and seriousness are not the same thing. Read more

A Personal Blog Lets Ideas Stay

3 minute read

Published:

Writing on the internet now feels increasingly temporary. Most platforms are built around movement: a post appears, receives attention for a short time, and is pushed downward by newer material. The system rewards arrival more than permanence. Read more