I do not like posting my status on social media, but this page gives me a place to check in, like I would when catching up with a friend.

Updated: October 2026

AI: The AI FOMO has settled into a routine. Claude with Obsidian now runs most of my days. At work we’ve moved from learning to building: meeting notes that write themselves, a forklift app, and a health-and-safety app I vibe-coded on Replit. Next comes the clean-up: eliminating, simplifying and consolidating our processes before we start automating.

Reading: Over the summer I reread Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita after eight years, this time as moderator for the TAC 92 book club. I liked it as much as the first time, if not more. Koroviev and Behemoth wreaking havoc are still the funniest scenes. The saddest part is how much more commonplace the people and organisations the devil picks on have become. Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act is unlike my usual stuff; it taught me to read slowly, think, and try not to do too much. Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent, a novel told in letters, gave me at least one life goal: to be a good friend is to sometimes be open and confrontational. Now I’m deep in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, also with the book club, and reading Ashlee Vance’s biography of Elon Musk alongside it. My resolution for the autumn: less news, more deep reading.

Writing: I published a piece on Christopher Nolan’s new Odyssey film and my regular piece on our yearly trip to Akyaka with school friends. The biography grew quite a bit over the summer through interviews with family and friends, old newspaper archives and Ottoman-era documents. Alongside them I read books about my great-grandfather’s business partners, Hacı Ömer Sabancı and Nuh Naci Yazgan, as well as Ausländer by Michael Moritz, Şerafettin Mağmumi’s book about Turkey at the turn of the 20th century, and Damar Arıkoğlu’s memoirs about Adana and Turkey from 1900 to the 1930s. The goal now is to have some parts of it ready to print for the family by the new year.

Music: Piano is going well. I feel more confident, but my chord changes are still slow. The goal is one or two pieces by heart by the end of the year. Detuned Radio is working on It’s a Sin and Yellow.

Movement: Back to boxing, plus runs, indoor cycling and the outdoor gym. The summer cost me a few kilos, and I’m working them off.

Want to see what I was doing then?

Previously: Then — an archive of this page.