Shorts

Turkey has an active conscription. Which means Turkish guys between ages 21 and 41 are required to go to the military for 6 months, and that time has finally come for me too. I didn't just turn 21. I postponed it at age 20, and since I'm no longer in school, I'm now required to attend. Massive bummer.

I'm going down the paid military service route to get a reduced sentence at just 1 month as opposed to the standard 6 months, by paying a mind-boggling $6000. If you've been living and working abroad, you get to pay that amount and not attend at all. But I only started working full time after coming back to Turkey, so that's not an option for me unfortunately. Once you're in the military, you're not allowed any electronics other than a non-smart phone for making phone calls and texting during off-hours. SMS YUCK! So this will be the longest time I'll have spent without a computer, or without constantly being plugged in.

There's little to no information about what this process is like in English, so I'll document my time there with pen and paper or on my blackberry and share it here when I'm out. I'll be leaving on April 5th and returning on the 30th. 👋 See you then.

Back when AI generated images were the hot new thing in 2023, I got a midjourney subscription and figured it would be cool to add images to my articles. I thought it was nice at first, but it's been feeling more and more unsettling to look at, knowing that it's built entirely on top of stolen work. I'm no longer going to use AI images.

I had the unfortunate experience of running into this obviously AI generated framed picture of a Porsche with four deformed speedometers while browsing a furniture store with my girlfriend and her parents today. I didn't want to annoy them too much with a rant there, but seriously, what value does this image provide? It's low resolution af because they probably just upscaled a generic image from dall-e or midjourney. It looks like shit. And it's literally not even a real car. In a normal sale of an art piece there's a person getting something they probably think is an impressive work of art, and a person facilitating that sale. In this instance, there's only a person who's getting screwed over like someone who didn't read the fine print of a contract they signed, and another person laughing.

My current avatar is AI generated, but I like the style enough to not toss it in the garbage immediately. If you're an artist or know someone with an art style similar to what I've got on the homepage, feel free to hit me up for a commission so I can replace it with human art.

I realized I've been slacking on writing new blog posts because I feel pressured to make high quality articles, then get lazy and not do em. I'll try to update this more than once a year.