the fisherman of halicarnassus

it's not a scandal. the officials carried out the instructions they were given. it wouldn't matter if this were messi or just some regular guy. besides, since messi too is a being in the category of human, whatever the procedure is there, that's what gets applied. if you want to call it an illogical, unnecessary practice, maybe that's up for debate. but it's not a scandal. also, there were referees and iraqi footballers who were denied visas, and nobody batted an eye. there's no scandal bigger than that.

they say death is the greatest pain in the world, but the most unbearable kind of it is the loss of a child. what you want for a living being who's a part of you, whom you gave birth to, whom you love and have devoted your life to, is always a long and healthy life, but sadly not every mother gets to live out that wish. the best-known example of this is michelangelo's pieta, which means "mercy" in italian; that scene where mary carries her child in her arms with an endless grief. image

michelangelo made this sculpture at the age of 24 on commission, and jean bilheres de lagraulas, who served as a cardinal at st. peter's basilica for many years, wanted the sculpture as a tomb monument so he'd continue to be remembered after his death. the sculpture's reference source isn't the bible but the scenes of lamentation following the death of christ that were depicted in 14th-century german art. the sculpture was made by carving a single block of marble, and the terms of the commission were extremely demanding for such a young sculptor. the first of the terms was that the figure of christ be life-sized, and the other was that the sculpture be "more beautiful than any marble work to be seen in rome at the time, and that no master of the era could produce a better one." these ambitious conditions were asked for despite michelangelo's youth, and the sculpture was given as a commission to this little-known sculptor.

to realize the idea of a life-sized christ, which was one of the terms of the commission, michelangelo created the sculpture by carving a single block of carrara marble. we see the difference between mother and son through contrasts. horizontal and vertical, living and dead, nude and clothed. in order to create a life-sized christ and achieve balance in the composition, mary's shoulders were widened and an effort was made to create a proportional composition with an abundance of fabric. in the work, mary carries her son with a pained, resigned expression. even though it's an extremely striking and beautiful composition visually, there are criticized points too. one of them is that mary, who should be in her 50s at her son's death, looks far too young, but michelangelo explained this criticism as "the effect of mary being pure and a virgin having left her unspoiled." the other detail that makes the sculpture special is that michelangelo carved the latin sentence "michaelangelvs bonarotvs florentinvs faciebat" (michelangelo buonarroti, the florentine, made this) onto the sash mary wears. the pieta is the only work the artist signed in his entire career. image

in my opinion some shows have a feature more important than whether they're good or not: being watched at the right age. person of interest is one of those. when i watched it in my early twenties it was a nice show, exciting. when i rewatched it a few years later, though, i realized it was actually a story built on technology, surveillance, artificial intelligence, ethics, and human nature. the same show doesn't change, but the person watching it does. i suppose the value of some productions emerges right here too. if it widens the window you look at life through a little, rather than just entertaining you, it sticks with you even years later. that's why the netflix show the blacklist is actually like a follow-up show that people who liked person of interest should watch. when it comes to opening a new window every episode, nothing beats it. i recommend it.

that emptiness that comes when you reach the summit: hedonic adaptation. you succeeded. you got that job you wanted, you finished that big project, you pulled that car of your dreams up to your front door. for months you focused on that moment, you went sleepless, you took risks. and the moment came. so why did it only last 15 minutes? why, the day after that big success, did your mind immediately start searching for the next "deprivation" target, as if nothing had happened?

the answer is simple but unsettling: your brain is fooling you. in psychology this is called hedonic adaptation. the human mind has evolved to accept every new level it reaches as the "new normal" in record time. you finish a construction, and that building is now just a pile of concrete to you. you earn a fortune, and a week later it's now your "ordinary" balance.

the eye-opening truth here is this: as long as you index happiness to "acquiring," you're doomed to run on a hamster wheel. no matter how fast you run, the wheel will keep turning at the same speed. most people try to solve this trap with "more ambition"; they work more, earn more, want more. but this is just turning the wheel faster.

real mastery (and real peace) begins here:

– change the finish line: index your goal not to a "result" (money, property, title) but to a "level of mastery." results undergo adaptation, but deepening in something, that is, the "learning process," is resistant to adaptation.
– architect the process: that emptiness you feel when you reach the goal isn't actually a failure; it's the system's signal to "look for a new challenge." if you use this signal not to buy a new "toy" but to gain a new "skill," you become the architect of the system rather than its slave.

in short: if the thing you desired suddenly loses its meaning once you reach it, it means you're targeting the wrong thing. it's not what you have but who you become that nourishes you. next time you reach a goal, don't ask "what did i gain?" ask "who did i become on this path?" this is the only way to get off the wheel.

since it's the easiest star to observe in the sky (a star, for the people of antiquity), it's the first subject of humans interacting with planets outside their own world. of course, since it's observed from our world in a pretty random manner, some ancient civilizations also treated venus from time to time as a different star.

probably because they lost the trip to the moon to the americans, the soviets got seriously hung up on this planet. while america was investing in the moon, these guys invested in venus. but of course, once again the usa surpassed the ussr on the venus matter too. even though the soviets came to have quite a bit of knowledge about venus thanks to the robots they sent, it was again the americans who mapped venus in detail. since landing on it and roaming its surface is pretty difficult (the average temperature on its surface is 465c), most states said "ah, forget venus for now" and focused on mars. for instance, the soviets' venera 13 is the craft most resistant to the venus environment, and it was able to operate for 127 minutes.

by the way, here's something interesting. it's thought that the planet actually ended up in this state because of the greenhouse effect. meaning our world too will maybe end up like this one day...

the cup whose two biggest surprises so far are uruguay being knocked out by cape verde and ecuador, while down 1-0 against germany, coming back to win 2-1 and advancing. there's also south korea, who beat czechia in the first match, losing to south africa in the final match and getting knocked out. turkey getting knocked out is the 4th biggest surprise.

normally he was expected to play in this match and pad his stats against jordan, but he chose to rest. after all, the man has nothing left to prove. if it were mbappe or cristiano ronaldo, there'd be a particular wish to play them in this match.

a very fast-paced first half played out. we don't know norway's plans for the next round exactly, but they have an air of having accepted second place in the group. so much so that they put 10 players into rotation all at once. and this inevitably reflects on the play. despite issues like the errors in defense, the inability to multiply in attack, and the failure to hold onto the ball, finding a goal still counts as an achievement... there's nothing to say about france anyway. i mean, if a team has dembele, mbappe, and olise playing together, that team losing is almost a miracle. it would take a heavy complacency for that. olise's deep, technical passes, mbappe holding up and distributing the ball like a pivot, and dembele's finishing technique reflected directly on the scoreboard. honestly, even if through naturalized players, the french national team has always kept its squads rich. it's been this way for years. and it's never short of stars, of characters who create domination. it doesn't make you say "like belgium" of one bygone era, they're always there, they can always put forth a consistency. i expect norway to start the second half with 4 substitutions. they'll be advised to be more careful in defense.

spacex buyers are about to be wiped out

here's what nobody's telling you!

right now, only 4% of spacex shares are actually being traded. the other 96% is locked.

this changes on august 6th!

the q2 earnings report will be released, and instantly 20% of insider shares will unlock. then every 2 weeks another chunk will be released onto the market.

by september, insiders will be able to offload 44% of all shares. the circulation rate will jump from 4% to almost 10 times that overnight.

think about what this means: for every 1 share being traded today = 10 more will appear.

facebook did this in 2012. the ipo was $38. the lockups ended. six months later: $18. half the value flew away.
not because facebook was a bad company. but because the supply showed up and the buyers ran dry.

$spcx is the same movie. just on a much bigger screen.

my target: $80-90 by year's end.

the world's largest cybersecurity company, founded in july 2009 by matthew prince, michelle zatlyn, and lee holloway. matthew prince still serves as ceo at the company, while michelle zatlyn serves as president and coo. lee holloway, who initially built and coded cloudflare's entire architecture by himself, had to leave the company in 2016 because of illness.

people think cloudflare is just a simple thing that provides ddos protection, but it's actually not like that. apart from ddos protection and dns routing, they offer hundreds of services. as was written in the entry earlier, cloudflare has no competition. 25-30% of all the sites on the internet use cloudflare. there's an incredible monopolization going on. but honestly, i haven't seen cloudflare abuse this enormous monopoly power so far. for instance, they provide their ddos protection and bot blocking services completely free. there are very few sites on the internet that do this completely free. i'm someone who's been using cloudflare for years, i use it on all my sites, but i haven't paid a single penny so far. they also do the caching of your static files (css, js, images) on a global cdn network and the ssl certificate completely free. on top of that they offer a completely free email forwarding service too.

this situation seems surprising to me. like i said above, a firm this monopolized offering free services like this and being user-friendly seems interesting to me. these days every website forces you to take out a monthly subscription even for the tiniest task.

if you say "doesn't cloudflare charge anything at all, brother?", of course they have paid plans, but these are more for large-scale websites rather than individual users.

in my opinion the worst part of their monopolization is that if something happens to them one day, half the internet will straight-up disappear. it already crashes from time to time and we see what happens.

linkin park is releasing a documentary.

from what we've heard, chester will only be mentioned briefly, mostly in passing and through a few photos. that's because the documentary's main focus is the band's new era: how they started over, how emily joined the group, and how they've moved forward since then.

for years, we've been told over and over that nobody is trying to replace chester. but with this documentary, the band's lack of sincerity is becoming harder to ignore, at least from my perspective. sure, nobody is trying to replace chester, but every time they talk about the future while mentioning him less and less, they seem determined to remind us that that chapter is over and that the band was never just about chester.

what's even more frustrating is that, according to reports, this documentary concept was originally planned while chester was still alive.

this shouldn't have been handled this way. chester's loss was a shared trauma for millions of fans, and watching him be gradually pushed into the background feels disrespectful to the people who supported this band through every era.

the truth is, most of us don't really care about emily. if they had started with the band's early journey, then covered chester's death and the difficult road to recovery afterward, they would have earned even more respect from longtime fans.

instead, they once again chose to minimize chester's presence.

because they no longer want to be defined by chester.

because, in their view, this was never chester's band.

shame on you.

star wars

this is a dark enlightenment that suddenly dawned on me one sunday afternoon while i was lying on the couch in a gothic languor. (dark enlightenment and all, i’ve gone full dervish here, but hold on, the amount of right i’ve got on my side is high enough to fray my nerves.) i came face to face with the fact that the bearded rascal named george lucas, who for years sold us this thing as a laser-pistol space western, had actually packed straight-up zoroastrianism and gnostic philosophy into spaceships and unleashed it on us. the thing is, my friends, it’s playing out somewhere miles away from that “oh, dudes are clashing swords, there are robots going beep boop” surface-level stuff.

let’s go straight to the tibetans, the hindus; these folks have a chant, a mantra, that goes “om mani padme hum.” the “padme” in there, the lotus flower. the myth of a pure light shooting up spotless and snow-white out of dark, muddy waters. the vibration of enlightenment, compassion, goodness. well, doesn’t our queen padme amidala vibrate at exactly this frequency? the woman is a monument to morality from head to toe, a sparkling lotus flower blooming amid the rotten, slimy bureaucracy of the republic. (even looking at the woman makes you want to light incense, sit cross-legged, and moan “o lord,” that’s the kind of spirituality we’re talking about.)

at this point our zoroastrian brothers’ ahura mazda and ahriman dilemma, or the gnostics’ bleak but exceedingly correct dualism, comes into the picture, the universe doesn’t run one-sided, my dear friend. the moment you put this pure light, this padme, on one pan of the scale, a pitch-black weight like tar is obligated to descend onto the other pan purely so balance is maintained. well, anakin skywalker is the tar itself. the dark side isn’t simple irritability or a teenage mood; it’s a necessary, esoteric, and tragic reflex that the cosmic scale gives in response to padme’s brightness. in accordance with the maxim that if the light shines too brightly, its shadow becomes equally dark and ferocious, anakin fills the system’s evil quota gladly, drawing his sword with a vwoosh. the guy is literally a walking ahriman, a breathing demiurge.

and now we come to the finale of the film, pardon me, of this magnificent hindu-gnostic rite… after anakin spends years on end bringing the universe to its knees while having asthma attacks in his sith lord costume, do you think what happens the second he hurls that stunted, sneaky emperor headlong into the reactor shaft is purely a fatherly instinct? not a chance. the move we’re talking about is the ancient light that padme represents, namely om mani padme hum, coming from way beyond and grabbing the darkness by the throat. the moment anakin acts, he isn’t just saving his son; he’s collapsing cosmic dualism and declaring light’s final, crushing victory over darkness. the fire zoroaster lit thousands of years ago starts burning away busily on a space station with return of the jedi.

star wars is, well and truly, an esoteric epic of existence. the moment i fully grasped this i threw off the fleece blanket on me and ran to the window, wanting to shout at the top of my lungs to the ordinary people passing by on the street, “heed me, o heedless ones, these folks are saying padme, they’re saying dualism!” but i didn’t do it. i sat down, heated some water in the kettle, and poured myself a tea. because enlightenment, you see, is a solitary affair that curls inward rather than outward.

that phone really did have a "character." it feels strange looking back now, but the nokia 6600 wasn't just a device, when you held it in your hand it was as if it had a little technological personality. now phones are fast, powerful, everything's ready to go. but back then even loading something onto it was an event. you'd transfer an mp3, open a video (if it opened), change the theme... everything felt like a little accomplishment. even while writing an sms there was room to think; when you hit the wrong key, even "deleting" carried a weight to it. the strangest thing about the nokia 6600 was this: the thing you carried in your pocket wasn't just a communication tool, it was a bit of a "toy + tool + status object" mix too. it was enough for someone who picked it up to say "ooh, this is a good phone," no explanation needed. now phones are flawless but a little soulless. those old phones were flawed but they were memorable. maybe what we call "character" was exactly this.

a supplier whose world cup jerseys have terrible cuts. the shoulder sections of the jerseys don't sit quite right, and they have named this problem shoulder gate. it can be seen in the brazil-morocco match i'm watching right now too, in fact i even spotted it on the spectators in the stands.

let's quickly recap what went down. while the scottish general macbeth is returning victorious from battle, he runs into three witches. the witches tell this bloody hero with the sword that any day now he'll rise to great heights, that his fortune shows door after door opening for him, that he should wash his little cup and set it aside good and proper. macbeth, with butterflies fluttering in his stomach, goes skipping across the meadow. and what do you know, before long word comes and one of the doors the witches pointed to by reading the coffee grounds swings open, the door of government, and our man mako becomes a lord. once the first prophecy comes true, lord macbeth gets in the mood and is certain the next prophecy will come true as well, that history is crying out his name, keeping the beat with mac beth lord, mac beth lord.

lady macbeth, one of the greatest manipulators the world has ever seen, learns of the situation and works lord macbeth over but good. in the end macbeth lays king duncan down and slaughters him like a sacrificial offering. they pin the crime on others and slip away clean, and macbeth becomes king. but, oh boy, from this moment on fate starts weaving its webs with fine thessaloniki craftsmanship, and the road to macbeth's tragic end is paved with these webs.

macbeth proved himself on the battlefield and became a great commander with the sharpness of his sword. but here's the thing, there's also a peacetime side to this. (a duality also found in king richard.) in peacetime he's always hesitant, always pensive, and open to influence (especially his wife's influence). macbeth is a man of action, and while he's at ease when face to face with death, in civilian life, meaning in the period where thoughts take the place of action, when he has the time to listen to his inner voice, he falters. in this respect he reminds me a bit of hamlet, if you ask me. because of this duality he's generally struck me as a character somewhere between richard and hamlet.

hamlet's weakness of not being able to move from thinking to action is seen in peacetime macbeth too. the guilt he feels after killing the king brings macbeth down from his invincible-hero position and weakens him, blinds him. he gets scared. because of his troubled conscience he starts seeing ghosts. he wants to be sure he's invincible. he goes to the witches and confirms he's invincible, but he's actually fallen into an ironic situation. meanwhile, since he's reached the point of being able to fill a pool with the blood of the people he's had killed, a great coalition has formed against him. in the end he's killed in an ironic way, in keeping with the very prophecy that declared his invincibility. macduff, who kills macbeth, is unlike macbeth someone who never strays from virtue, someone who figures he'd have nightmares not because he killed but because he failed to kill. since he carries the sword of justice, the slaughter he's about to commit will be justified (the verdict is the viewer's now).

macbeth, and even lady macbeth, who goes mad and dies, are straightforwardly bad people. openly evil, that is. but they underline a nice point. while being a death machine in wartime is normal, in peacetime it isn't. with intrigues, assassinations, massacres and so on coming one after another, the heroic warrior of old becomes a vile murderer in an instant. the transition from good to evil is an interesting subject. everything about good and evil is expressed through morality and conscience. this is one of the interesting sides of the play. evil knows it's evil, and while this troubles it, it becomes even more evil.

macbeth is one of the products of shakespeare's pessimistic period. even though order is restored and justice is served at the end of the play by paragons of virtue, when you think about everything that happened, seeing the level evil can reach out of the good-evil pair inside a person must have really changed the man's view of humanity.