Özgür Ozan Çakmak - A Personal Journal

Laptop Burnination

On 20/02/2019

I like laptops. I always had a fascination with them when I was a little kid. The laptops of our age beats the crap out of those metal monstrosities needless to say. I mean we have gaming laptops now, tailored specifically to play games in addition to mobile computing.

I have a machine like this. It is my second laptop from Monster, a brand that sells performance laptop computers over here. It is 5 years old as of now and it grumbles and gives me weird problems now. But I like the old bastard. Spec wise it is not that backward, an i7 cpu, 16 gigs of ram and a gpu sporting a GTX 700 in its core… it runs STALKER and other games so I’m fine. Also nobody thinks to build a small gaming laptop (13 inch) any more. All I’m seeing is huge gargantuan monstrosities which requires good back muscles from what I gather.

The thing is, it sometimes thinks itself on fire. I mean what do you do, dear reader, if you see the thermal sensor reporting 99 degrees celcius for your cpu? Well, I shut down whatever game I was playing; took a deep breath, and called a techie friend of mine.

External Brain

By ozgurcakmak

On 15/02/2019

In Journal

What?

An “External Brain” is a searchable data store for various subjects. This is not a novel concept. Wikis, Evernote, Onenote and other tools are implementations of this idea.

Why?

While struggling with a problem, we generate knowledge from information. This knowledge is often forgotten when the problem we solve the problem or with time. If we could access to this knowledge when a similar problem occured we would solve it easier and in less time.

What’s The Deal With… Plato

By ozgurcakmak

On 05/02/2019

In Journal

When you look at the history of philosophy you’ll see that everybody agrees that it starts with Thales. But if we are talking about meaningful philosophy it starts with Plato. His predecessors concerned with ontology. It was important because they thought it would mean knowing the first principles. Knowing the first principles would give them the ability to affect the outcomes. But why I say meaningful philosophy starts with him? Because our dude Plato, and his mentor Socrates, dabbled not only in ontology. They discussed ethics,values and created a freaking utopia.
So let’s begin by who was he?

Spinnortality

By ozgurcakmak

On 03/02/2019

In Journal

I became aware of SPINNORTALITY with ALEXIS KENNEDY’s mailing list. I like his creative output and his definition of interesting often matches mine so I checked it out. As far as I know this is the first game of their “free mentorship scheme”. After I read the steam page description I felt sorry for not knowing it before. Its creator is JAMES PATTON and he developed it in three years. Amazing!

This game lets us play as a founder of a company, create horrific products and take over the world by our influence. That is one of the possible endings by the way. We can also make the world a better place but that seems hard. Because game enforces any good corporation’s bottom line: Making profits. To do that we can manipulate politics, deregulate industries, launch black ops and so on. What I like most is that we are not playing as an eternal person. We can die from old age. There are ways to extend this of course. An inconvenient thing like death should not stop us from making profits, no?

Saturday Shenanigans

By ozgurcakmak

On 02/02/2019

In Journal

I wrote about:

Time Travel
Spinnortality – Cyberpunk Management Sim

Game Analysis – Universal Warrior

By ozgurcakmak

On 01/02/2019

In Game Analysis

In these articles I aim to analyze a game from an analytical perspective. I’ll discuss the setting, themes; do a screen based analysis and what would I do if I was remaking this game. To begin I want to analyze Zeppelin Games’s Universal Warrior [1]. It is a shoot-em up released in 1993 with innovative additions.

Friday Failures

By ozgurcakmak

On 01/02/2019

In Journal

I wrote about:

Scrivener Meltdown in Linux
Public Windows Failure Screens
Sunless Skies

New Post on New Host

By ozgurcakmak

On 31/01/2019

In Journal

After 7 hours I think I’ve carried everything from wordpress.com to here.

I didn’t expect it to take this long. The initial setup was fast. I, more or less, knew which plugins to install and theme I’m going to use. The reason why?

Thanks to YOAST SEO I realized my articles were hard to read stuff. Using passive voice, long – overly long – sentences like I was Immanuel Kant and I was trying to do ontology. So I said “Eh, it’s only 19 articles. What could happen?”

Nintendo Clones and Playstation – Console time in Turkey

By ozgurcakmak

On 30/01/2019

In Journal

Pneumonia. It was an annual bane of my childhood times. 6 consecutive years I was a bedridden creature for a month. Fever dreams, broken only with incessant coughs trying their best to push my lungs out of my mouth and injector delivered antibiotics – a sharp stabbing followed by a receding pain in my muscles, leaving me on the shores of sleep – wasted and sweaty, like I tried to manhandle a rabid bear fresh out of a nonexistent Siberian atomic wasteland.

One of these years I think we got a Sony Playstation. It wasn’t my Playstation initially – but it became mine after a while.. I think my father bought it when he decided to step up from selling 8-bit Nintendo clones to PSX games. As Bob Dylan said, the times were a-changing. In those days the tide for 8-bit consoles were ebbing away, leaving the console gaming in their wake.

Wednesday Wonders

By ozgurcakmak

On 30/01/2019

In Journal

As Louis Althusser said media is just another Ideological State Apparatus; just another method to make the populace compliant with the state interests. So I expect some sort of dissonance between the reality I experience and the news portray but nowadays it is so different from each other I sometimes wonder whether we are getting cable from a parallel universe?

RE: EURO TRUCK SIMULATOR 2

That’s not a game but a narcotic. As I told you I like to turn on a blues album (or a podcast) and drive in the wide highways of Europe. I also find myself writing things like this:

A Personal Journal

What?

Why?

RE: EURO TRUCK SIMULATOR 2

Books I’m Reading